I want to tell you something I’ve been turning over in my mind for a while now — not because I need you to believe it, but because it’s changed something in how I carry my own life, and I think it might do the same for you.

It started, as these things often do, with a simple question: what am I, really? Not my name, not my job, not the story I’d tell you if you asked about my life. Underneath all of that — what am I?

The movie and the screen

Think about watching a film. There’s the story on screen — car chases, arguments, love scenes, disasters, quiet conversations in kitchens. All of it constantly moving, constantly changing. But underneath every single scene, there’s something that never changes: the screen itself. It doesn’t get burned in the explosion. It doesn’t laugh or cry. It’s simply what everything appears on, from the opening scene to the credits, without ever once being anything other than itself.

Here’s the claim I want to put to you: you are not, at your core, the character in your own movie. You are the screen.

Everything you’d normally call “you” — your thoughts, your worries, your body, your history, the sound of your own voice in your head — that’s the moving picture. It comes, it goes, it changes by the hour. But the awareness that’s aware of all of it — the simple fact that you’re aware right now, reading this sentence — that hasn’t changed since you were five years old. It watched every version of you arrive and pass, without ever itself being altered by any of it. That’s not a metaphor I’m reaching for to sound clever. A teacher named Rupert Spira has spent decades pointing at exactly this, and when you actually stop and look for the “edge” of your own awareness — try to find where it starts or stops — you can’t. It isn’t a thing among other things. It’s the space every other thing shows up in.

Why the world feels so solid and outside your control

Now, a fair question: if all this is somehow “mental,” why does the world feel so completely indifferent to what I want? Why can’t I just decide the wall is purple and have it become purple?

This is where a philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup adds the other half of the picture. His answer is: it’s not your mind doing this. There is, he argues, one vast, universal field of mind — call it universal mind, or mind-at-large — and what we experience as individual people are not separate substances bolted onto that field from outside. We are the same field, just temporarily organised into a bounded, particular shape. He uses the image of an ocean and a whirlpool. A whirlpool isn’t made of different water from the ocean around it — it’s the ocean, spinning in a particular pattern for a while, with a beginning and an end, before it settles back into the larger body it never actually left.

You are the whirlpool. The ocean is universal mind. And the reason the world feels solid, objective, and stubbornly indifferent to your personal wishes is exactly because it isn’t your private dream — it’s the ocean’s larger movement, which no single whirlpool gets to redirect by wanting hard enough.

Put the two images together and you get something like this: the ocean (universal mind) is having one enormous, shared dream. You — this whirlpool, this particular pattern called by your name — are a character inside that dream, watching your own slice of it appear on the one screen (awareness) that was never actually born and will never actually die, because it was never a character in the story to begin with.

What this doesn’t mean

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear all this and think it means none of it matters — that suffering is fake, that your life is somehow less real for being “mental.” That is not what I’m saying, and it’s not what either Spira or Kastrup are saying.

A hard scene in a film is still a hard scene. If your life has had real loss in it, real fear, real injustice — none of what I’ve just described erases any of that or asks you to pretend it isn’t real. The claim is much narrower and, I think, more honest than that: the awareness in someone living through something terrible isn’t itself damaged by the terribleness, any more than the screen is burned by the explosion in the film. What differs between a hard life and an easy one is the content of the movie — not the screen it’s playing on.

This also isn’t a licence to do nothing and “just let go.” I’ve thought about this one carefully, because it’s the test that decides whether any of this is worth taking seriously outside a comfortable armchair. If you were destitute tomorrow, none of this would tell you to stop looking for work, stop asking for help, stop fighting for what’s fair. The whirlpool still acts within the story — that was never in question. What’s on offer isn’t a reason to stop trying. It’s something quieter: a difference between meeting a crisis in blind panic, fully identified with “I am nothing but this catastrophe,” versus meeting the same crisis with a kind of ground underneath you that isn’t itself in crisis. Same actions, same effort — a different inner floor to stand on while you do them.

And it is emphatically not the Law of Attraction, “you create your own reality,” or any of its cousins. Kastrup is direct about this — he thinks that whole genre gets the metaphysics backwards. The ocean’s currents don’t take instructions from any one whirlpool. Wanting the couch to be purple doesn’t make it purple, and wanting your circumstances to be different doesn’t rewrite them either. If anything, the fact that the world resists your will so completely is part of the evidence that it isn’t a private fantasy you’re generating — it’s something much larger than you, doing its own thing, of which you are one small, temporary, genuinely-swept-along part.

So what can a whirlpool actually do?

This is the question that matters most, and it’s worth being specific, because “no control over the plot” can sound like it leaves nothing behind. It doesn’t.

A whirlpool has full agency inside the story. Every ordinary form of cause and effect still applies — decisions, effort, work, love, negotiation, repair, protection of the people and things you care about. None of that is diminished by any of this; it’s the entire content of what a life actually is. Building a career, raising children, resolving a dispute, writing a will, mending a fence line with a neighbour — all completely real, completely consequential whirlpool-level action, exactly as before.

What a whirlpool doesn’t get is authorship over the story — the fantasy of stepping outside the film to redirect it from a director’s chair. That’s the only thing actually being taken off the table. Everything else stays.

And there is one more thing, quieter than the rest, that I think matters as much as any of it: a whirlpool can choose, again and again, how tightly it grips the story while living it. Not the plot — the grip. That’s the one lever that’s genuinely inward, genuinely available, and — in my experience, for whatever that’s worth — genuinely worth practising. Not because it changes the weather. Because it changes whether the weather can drown you.

Why bother

I’ll end with the question I think is the honest one, because I’ve asked it of myself: if you have no control over the story, why understand any of this at all?

Here’s what I’ve landed on. Most of what makes a hard life unbearable isn’t only the hard thing itself — it’s a second layer stacked on top of it: the belief that you are nothing but the character it’s happening to, alone, with no ground anywhere beneath you. I can’t make the first layer disappear for anyone, and I wouldn’t pretend to. But I’ve come to think the second layer is not fixed. Recognising, even briefly, that you are also the screen this is all appearing on — steady, unharmed, quietly present through every scene of your life so far — doesn’t rewrite your circumstances. It changes how much they can crush you while you go about the very real work of living through them.

That’s the whole of it, as far as I can tell. Not a better story. A steadier place to stand while you write the next scene of your own.