> It's your show. It's your universe. There's no one else here, just you, and nothing is being withheld from you. You are completely on your own. Everything is available for direct knowing. No one else has anything you need. No one else can lead you, pull you, push you or carry you. No one else is necessary to your success.
In other words: I Am the Truth.
From 33 Essays #10:
“We don’t really want to go anywhere. We’re fine right where we are, we just like to complain about it. We want to maintain the illusion that we’re prisoners while half-heartedly railing against our captivity. That’s the sweetspot, not actually going anywhere or doing anything, just paying lip service. That was the core takeaway from Cuckoo’s Nest, the thing that flipped R.P. McMurphy’s switch; that all his fellow patients/inmates were there voluntarily. They were free to leave but chose to stay.”
Nurse Ratched is also a great stand-in for Maya, she doesn’t fool around when her subjects’ comfortable “reality” is threatened.
The books state many times that the normal heart/mind ratio of a human being in the dreamstate is 24:1. Did that come from somewhere/someone else or did Jed just come up with those numbers because they feel accurate? Maybe somewhere there’s a mention of what they’re derived from? It seems silly to pick at this particular point, but he suggests that one step either way either reduces humans to livestock or brings the dreamstate crashing down.