On September 10, 2017, we released an article sharing a controversial interview with Jim Carrey during New York fashion week. In the interview, Jim said a number of things that either had people thinking he was crazy, or recognizing that he was trying to share a deeper message.
To be fair, Jim could have been clearer in the message he was trying to convey. As an avid explorer into consciousness, I understood what he was getting at, but not everyone will. Some also felt he was being rude, which might be true, but at the same time he’s a comedian and was clearly playing some sort of character during the interview.
One thing is clear, however: He created a stir and it’s a stir around a subject that, if embraced by society, would radically change our world for the better.
His controversial interview contained statements like:
“There’s no meaning to any of this. I wanted to find the most meaningless thing that I could come to and join, and here I am. I mean, you’ve got to admit, it’s completely meaningless.”
“There is no me. There is just things happening… Here’s the thing: It’s not our world. That’s the key. We don’t matter. We don’t matter. There’s the good news.”
Jim’s Response
He was asked to respond to questions about the interview, as the internet had gone wild reading about it.
In his response he draws upon a number of important reflection points we have been covering here at CE for many years and are glad to see are making their way into mainstream conversation a little more.
“As an actor you play characters, and if you go deep enough into those characters, you realize your own character is pretty thin to begin with. You suddenly have this separation and go, ‘Who’s Jim Carrey? Oh, he doesn’t exist actually,’ ” Carrey said. “There’s just a relative manifestation of consciousness appearing, and someone gave him a name, a religion, a nationality, and he clustered those together into something that’s supposed to be a personality, and it doesn’t actually exist. None of that stuff, if you drill down, is real.”
“I believe I got famous so I could let go of fame, and it’s still happening, but not with me,” he continued. “I’m not a part of it anymore. Dressing happens, doing hair happens, interviewing happens, but it happens without me, without the idea of a ‘me.’ You know what I’m saying? It’s a weird little semantic jump, and it’s not that far, but it’s a universe apart from where most people are.”
We’re a bunch of ideas cobbled together to look like a form. There’s a body and there’s a mind, but the body is part of the field of consciousness, just dancing for itself and it’s no different than a plant or a chair or your phone—it’s all one thing. Because we are sentient, there’s a consciousness, and we have to deal with this thing we create, like a fortress of ideas around it. So we say, ‘This is my name and this is my heritage and this is my nationality and here’s my hockey team and these are all of the things that I am.’ That’s the mistake.
When asked how we avoid this mistake, he had this to say:
The only way to it is to step into the river of tears and the sorrows of your life. The things that everyone is avoiding with everything from drugs to drink to sex and gadgets and whatever else you can distract yourself with, all of it is designed for you to never stop going and moving and, for god sakes, not feel the abyss. Don’t allow yourself to feel the abandonment and pain that you’ve suffered. And I’ve done it; I’m through it. I’m sure there will be things that happen again, but I realized that by letting myself fall into it completely, that it’s not to be feared. Death is not to be feared.
I suspected this was going to be a serving thing for Jim to be able to do as it seemed when he was prompted with the initial interview he wasn’t exactly thinking about it going the direction he did. Having a longer more specific platform to share his thoughts in a clearer and more relatable way helps people to understand what he is truly touching on.
We see themes of thinking about who WE truly are, and looking at the difference between our egoic identity and the recognition of self as consciousness. He also touches on the interconnectedness of us all and that we in essence don’t exist as our individual egoic ideas of “I”.
Why This Is Important
Jim has started a conversation around something that is critical for all of us: creating more self awareness and self discovery. The very fact that so many mainstream outlets are covering this from the standpoint of how ‘weird’ his latest statements are shows us how little thought we put into asking big questions in life in the mainstream. Instead we are asked to play into the many distractions and trivial bits of content that don’t challenge us to think deeper, understand who we are, or move beyond suffering — all of which Jim’s latest interviews explore.
I have always said that what you surround yourself with, and thus what we as a society surround ourselves with, will affect our day-to-day state of being and project how we live our lives. When we are not challenged to grow or move beyond fear, pain, worry, and anxiety, and instead are fed coping mechanisms to simply quiet our challenges but not move beyond them, we end up with a society that is constantly suffering.
I do the work I do because I believe we are being pushed to make a BIG CHANGE on this planet, and it starts within ourselves. I believe people are waking up to things that are monumental in how they will change us as individuals and how that will change our world — things like how our world really works, who we really are, and perhaps even why we are here or whether we’re alone in the universe. We’re going through a shift in consciousness and our world will not be the same as we continue to embrace it. I believe we have a choice to either resist the truths our external world is trying to show us or embrace them and start shifting. We each have that choice.
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