Roger said that he didn't know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: "This is all an elaborate hoax." I asked him, "What's a hoax?" And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once. ["Roger Ebert's Wife on His Final Moments" - Esquire]

I find this little story extremely affecting, and Roger Ebert’s quote —“This is all an elaborate hoax” — very powerful. I think he was on to something profound, something that other people have stumbled on, as well.

The more deeply I look into these things, the more apparent it is to me that the physical world is not the whole story. This theme runs through a wide stream of philosophy, going back at least as far as Plato’s allegory of the cave, running through Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, and persisting today in certain interpretations of quantum physics, such as David Bohm’s model of a holographic universe.

It seems to be a common theme of great writers, also. Meville, for instance:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? [Ahab in Moby-Dick]

Or Shakespeare:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. [Prospero in The Tempest]

It strikes me as interesting that many people report the experience, especially when they are growing up, of perceiving their life as a movie or a story. I remember feeling this way myself, at times. I also remember talking to a friend of mine in high school, who confided in me that he often thought of his own life as a novel. This sense of the basic unreality of life — its made-up-ness, so to speak— tends to fade as we grow older, but some people never forget it entirely.

Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout

The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray

And though she feels as if she's in a play

She is anyway. [The Beatles, “Penny Lane”]

Mystics like Eckhart Tolle are probably getting at the same idea when they speak disparagingly of the “drama” of our lives, the Sturm und Drang of our daily existence, which is dominated by ego-directed conflicts and anxieties. To move past the ego is to see the drama from an outsider’s perspective, the vantage point of “the witness,” the still, small voice within us that remains aloof from everyday neurotic worries and fears — the voice, I think, of the higher self.

If physical reality is only a kind of made-up drama, then it would stand to reason that our liberation from the physical – i.e., death – would be experienced as a translation to a higher and “realer” form of reality. And this is precisely how many people who have had near-death experiences do describe it. They say that ordinary physical reality seems mundane and dull compared to the expanded consciousness and hyper-aware perception they remember from their out-of-body adventure. While the afterlife is often compared to a dream, people who have tasted death tell us that it is this life that's the dream.

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream. [campfire song]

Recently I saw a small child in a pizzeria who had just learned how to throw things on the floor. Predictably, he was indulging in this newfound power, joyfully tossing one toy after another off the table, much to the consternation of his mother. This behavior can, of course, be interpreted in terms of developing motor skills, and this interpretation is undoubtedly true as far as it goes. But it occurred to me that it is not too different from the behavior one might expect if one were, say, to take control of an avatar in an unfamiliar computer game. The very first thing one might do in that situation is to try out the character’s moves by learning to operate its limbs and navigate the (virtual) environment. One's first experimental moves would necessarily be clumsy and pointless — merely disjointed attempts to get a sense of how to work the mechanism — not unlike a toddler’s clumsy efforts at controlling the unfamiliar avatar that is his own body. (It also occurred to me that a spirit, having spent some timeless period in a realm of thought-forms and relatively unmediated consciousness, might take a certain pleasure in being able to grab an object and smash it — to make a real impact on its physical environs.)

Naturally, the attempt to figure out exactly how this all works – to come up with a Theory of Everything that will make sense of it all and offer a clearly defined model and mechanism – is intellectually absorbing. But I suspect that the details will be well beyond us for the foreseeable future. The whys and wherefores of the system are probably far too complex to be compacted into a form that our incarnate minds, operating largely within the limits of our neurological systems, can handle.

And maybe the details don’t matter too much, except as a matter of intellectual curiosity, which amounts to little more than intellectual pride. What seems to be important is not knowing all the ins and outs, or being able to model the system in some scientifically compelling way, but rather to grasp what Roger Ebert grasped: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”

Once we know that, we're in on the secret, and perhaps we can start to smile a little at the Big Con.