The Strings of the Puppet Show

Once upon a time, everything was solid. The mind was your ally, whispering strategies and shaping your identity. The world was your land of opportunity, a grand stage where you could carve out meaning, success, and security.

This show played before your eyes every day—dancing, vibrant, and real. It told you who you were, what you should want, and how you should feel about everything. You lived inside the performance, moving through the script, trusting that the roles were true and the stakes were high.

And then, one day…

You saw the strings.

Maybe it happened in a moment of deep stillness, a meditation, a crisis, or a sudden flash of insight. Maybe you weren’t even looking for it. But there it was—the entire mechanism laid bare. The movements, the thoughts, the emotions, the identity you once took so seriously, suddenly revealed as puppets suspended by unseen forces.

Maybe you were brave enough to take 5-MeO-DMT, a heroic dose of psilocybin, or commit to a week-long ayahuasca ceremony, only to find that reality itself unraveled before your eyes. Maybe you simply watched a film like The Matrix, and for a brief moment, the thought arose: What if this is all an illusion?

Or perhaps you took a more intellectual path—maybe you read Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality and saw how the very structure of perception hides the truth from you. Maybe you watched Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk and realized, as she did during her stroke, that the self is nothing more than a construct, an ephemeral process that can vanish in an instant.

No matter how it happened, the glimpse can never be unseen. Once you have seen the strings, even for an instant, the game is forever changed. You may try to forget, try to reinvest in the world as you once did, but something in you knows. The show is no longer airtight. The illusion has been punctured.

The Ego’s Expert Delay Tactics

Now the ego begins its real work—not to disprove what you saw, but to delay the inevitable.

It whispers, “Not yet. This isn’t practical. You have responsibilities. You’re not ready.” It drags its feet, convinces you that enlightenment is a luxury, that maybe, one day, after enough suffering, enough practice, enough lifetimes, you’ll finally be worthy of truth. The Buddhists knew this—hence the notion that perhaps in the next life, you’ll be ready.

But you don’t have infinite time. You don’t even have the luxury of mathematical certainty. You won’t live long enough for statistics to force the truth upon you. If you don’t leap in this life, in this moment, there’s no guarantee the opportunity will come again.

And deep down, you know this. That’s why the fear exists. Because the part of you that glimpsed the truth—the part that is beyond the ego—knows that if you surrender now, if you fully let go, the illusion will dissolve completely. And the ego doesn’t survive that.

It will fight, stall, resist, throw up distractions, fabricate new desires and problems. But the truth remains:

You have seen the strings. And nothing the ego does can change that.

Conclusion

So now you stand at the cliff’s edge.

The ego insists that without it, you will be lost. That you will fade away, become nothing, unravel into meaninglessness. It tells you that if you stop playing the game, you will be smelly and unlovable. That if you don’t prop up the illusion, you will fall into oblivion.

But those of us who have stood here before you—who have leapt—can tell you the truth:

It’s not death. It’s flight.

Trust what you saw. The moment of insight wasn’t a hallucination, wasn’t a trick, wasn’t a mistake. It was the realest thing that ever happened to you.

Let go of the idea that you need more time. Let go of the mind’s arguments, its need for certainty, its endless stalling.

Call to Action

Stop.

Look beyond the senses.

Feel with your heart.

You know there is something more.

Follow that feeling—with courage and earnestness.

“When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other, doesn’t make any sense.”
— Rumi