What is metaphor? Is this movie The Shack about anything? What does it point to? Lets pull the cotton ball apart.

When you look at a movie as objective truth, it’s going to run up against your truth and create a rub. But a movie as Art is a metaphor. The truth of the movie is not in its form but in it’s ability to realize the viewer from. some trauma. In other words, the movie walks you through a grief process from anger to letting go. That’s all it is. It is not about God or the Bible. It’s about grief and the steps through it. But the movie also creates “buzz” by being unpredictable. The movie is not your sugar sweet image of God that is in our Sunday school stories. So, in generating fake outrage the movie gets traction and viewers and money.

Outrage has its wisdom. Why am I outraged? Why am I bothered by…a. movie? What am I holding onto? What am I not letting go? What am I afraid of? Which is what the movie was about…holding onto the past.

To me the Shack is a portal through the objective world of form and experience, what we call reality, into an interior world where one meets and deals with the forces of one’s own psyche. This is that myth is all about: maps of the interior undiscovered land where the forces of one’s own psyche take forms. We can only communicate and share (that’s what communication is) these formless interior adventures through objective forms. Unless we can enter the metaphor, we mistake the interior forms make objective as objective forms that we. an disagree with and take offense with. Truth is only truth when it liberates you from being held hostage to the past. If the movie doesn’t liberate you from grief, then it has no truth for you. But that is okay.

However, if you think the movie is about indoctrination into a belief in some Biblical forms or story, then that is not liberation but imprisonment in the past.

The Shack is the age-old question of why a good god can allow bad things to happen to innocent people. This is really a Sunday school question that is created by our mythic assumptions of God and the world. If the Boss is so good, why does he allow bad things to happen to me? When bad things happen, I then blame the Boss. But who is the Boss but ME. If I create the idea of the Boss and them blame the boss for my pain….am I not missing the point here? Is this not a self tied knot? This is the Knot of Ego. The purpose of wisdom teachings is to help. you untie this knot.

The Eastern teachings shift the perspective. God is an awakening, a revelation, and you can’t wake up unless you have sleep. So sleep, the dream is necessary in order that you can awake.. Evil is not absolute, which is where the Shake is kind of fuzzy. There is no good and evil in nature, in the cosmos. The dance between good and evil is the drama of human consciousness and the creation of history.