Our 'hero' is feeling lost in the world: something isn't quite right, things just aren't making sense. He searches for meaning and truth to find just what is really going on. He explores religion and new age spirituality and experiences first hand that there is something else out there beyond the enclosed world of the materialists. Idealist philosophy gives him a rigorous and rational framework to supercede the prevalent and fervent reductionist materialism of Dawkins, Cox et al.
But the 'mainstream' theories of the new age seem to be as flawed as those of the older more established religions: the same fundamental ideas redressed in a more palatable form.
Then comes the world of conspiracy. Not theory but fact. 911 was a controlled demolition for example, objective science from the experts conclusively demonstrates that beyond all reasonable doubt. But then the rabbit hole gets deeper with evidence of aliens and abductions becoming similarly compelling.
The age old question remained amongst all these theories: why is there so much suffering in the world and how do we end it?
The materialists say it's meaningless and random and conscious experience and free will are an illusion. This is self-evidently nonsense, patently absurd and laughable in its complete dissociation from our experience of reality.
The religions are pathetic in their anachronistic attempts to rationalise away the pain.
The New Age is equally ridiculous in their false hope and intellectually poor relativism and worthless repetition that everything is good.
The only thing that makes sense of everything is that this earth-bound life is a sentence we are serving in a very sophisticated prison, where the nature of our punishment and reformation is entirely the creation of ourselves. There is sorrow and suffering because we are flawed and corrupted people all thrown in to a limited space and left to work things out.
Knowledge and experience of life outside the physical prison is suppressed for the same reason that prisons have walls: we would run away and not face ourselves and the consequences of our limited consciousness.
This world isn't a school to learn, no school would be so cruel and ineffective. This world is a last resort for those who have refused to learn, it is a harsh mirror of all our failings. It is a place where you have to learn to survive and where there appears to be no way out if we choose not to learn, other than misery and death.
This sounds very bleak but actually it is the first step of liberation. There is no hope in leaving prison if you don't even know you are there; there is no hope of reforming your character is you don't accept that as the cause of where you are and the purpose of being here.
This prison is far more sophisticated than any we have known. The inmates have no concept that it is a prison, they have no memory of their life before they entered the prison and so the very idea of escape is far beyond anything they could even begin to conceptualise.
Rampant materialism reinforces the impossibility of thinking anything other than this existence is all that there is. Religion and the New Age promote false hope of sudden release through some form of saviour or transformation that will never come.
So the conspiracies are true, we are kept ignorant and restrained both physically and spiritually by hidden dark forces, the prison guards of this prison that must be kept out of sight to maintain the illusion that this is not a prison.
But we are not to blame anyone or feel hard done by. It is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of us are here for good reason. Realising this is a prison, we should not get angry and try to escape. The right response is to feel utter relief that at last everything makes sense and we finally know why we are here. Our life's purpose becomes crystal clear: accept our sentence and patiently, with quiet determination, work at reforming ourselves, discovering and gradually transforming our many and deep character flaws.
Accept that this world is neutral, it reflects only what we are so that we can directly experience the consequences of our limitations first hand and only escape those consequences by changing ourselves. Accept that the reason the world is such a mess is because this world is for those whose consciousness is a mess.
Don't try and escape the world, for that way lies the endless punishment of an unreformed character. But don't fool yourself that the world is mystically benign or meaningless. Accept everything that happens as your own creation and take full responsibility for all your own sorrow and happiness and know that you have entered a world where the truth of the larger reality has been deliberately wiped from your memory and is continually hidden and obscured from your view by forces beyond your comprehension until such a time as you can emerge as a whole, responsible and benevolent contributor to consciousness.