Our Friday night movie was Inception, a science fiction movie that plants the idea in your mind that you can go deep within and “repeal and replace” ideas locked there that make your waking mind dysfunctional. Science Fiction movies are pure extended metaphor so the can operate on your mind by bypassing the defense mechanism of conscious reality. Oh, since it is science fiction I can entertain this idea because I “know” it isn’t real. Science Fiction is a gateway to Inception.

Even the movie itself points in two opposite directions. The surface finger points to the concrete plot and characters, which at the level we just find captivating. Then we leave the movie rather refreshed for having a vacation from our everyday waking mind. We don’t know if an Idea has been planted or not?

If we, however, go to the next level beneath the everyday world, we begin to do exactly what our fearless team does in the movie; descend into the layers of dreams states, dreams within dreams, switch the ideas in the Hurt Locker, and return to the waking state, with just a vague memory of the dream adventure, if we remember it at all.

What is the “spiritual quest” but an intentional emptying of our mind’s defense mechanism that defend out waking state as the “real world” and invite the “repeal and replace” of the dysfunctional ideas in our Hurt Locker. The Virgin Mind that allows the Inception of the Christ Idea comes to mind. What is the Christ Idea, or the non-dual Idea, if you prefer, that changes everything? This IDEA is not a thought or concept, mind you, but a reality shaping IDEA that is prior to conventional thought and concepts, just as the IDEA as the Ocean precedes the thinking of waves on its surface. This IDEA is not a word “ocean” but the Ocean itself. The Christ Idea (again, use another word if you prefer) is an evolutionary leap in the evolution of consciousness for it involves brain and mind, a transmutation that created the conditions for Atonement, or Unity Consciousness, the integrating mind that creates a world of dynamic unity and then lives in it.

The movie is about creating dream worlds and then living in them, acting in them as if they are real, yet you remember you are playing in a dream. Just like when we go to a movie, we enter the movie and pretend it is reality. But we have a totem, a reminder in our pocket that remembers us that the dream is not real. If we forget the totem or choose to ignore it, then we a locked in the dream forever. Someone must come into the dream, into your Hurt Locker and remind you that you are dreaming. This is the function of the psycho therapist or guru, or spiritual master, or Shaman.

The two Ideas in Inception that had to be “repealed and replace” was in the target person of the. dream team and in one of the dream team. Atonement with the Father and Forgiveness of Guilt were the two Ideas that had to be put in the deep locker in the basement of consciousness. Atonement with the Father is the restoration of unity with the world as one’s self. I am Okay and the world is Okay.

Guilt keeps us from “going home.” Like a shadow guilt contaminates everything we do in the waking state. The movie while explicitly was a fiction, implicitly it was about you and me. This is how metaphor works as a mediator between our waking external reality and our internal reality.Without Atonement and Forgiveness these two realities are separate and in conflict.

Inception is a “spiritual movie” dressed as science fiction. Inception is a liberation if we can go deep enough into the metaphorical layers of dream, into our own psyche. Inception plants an IDEA in your sub-conscious while you are being entrained by the superficial plot, the IDEA that you are always already OKAY and that you are the world and the world is you. The waking world you live in is a dream you are creating, and you can remember…you can remember. You can wake up while you are in the dream.

Inception is your totem. You can stop spinning your world.