The movie “Luce” was released in 2019. I saw it at a San Diego film festival event. I wrote this article right after I saw it. I do have some spoilers throughout the article. So if you want to be surprised, see the movie before you read my article. On the other hand, my review will give you a different perspective regarding the characters’ minds; so if you read the article first, you’ll probably see things that you’d have otherwise overlooked.
As I edited this article, I realized that this movie was a great review of the illusion, letting go, clone characters, and initiation…all the things that I write about. The movie is based on the biggest roadblock that we have on the path to freedom. Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? The last line of the trailer sums up the whole movie. “We never really know what’s going on with people.” That’s how it is for most people. But I show you that you can know what’s going on for anyone once you understand the way the human mind was designed and the way it was reprogrammed. Then you’re able to have true compassion for anyone.
“Luce” was a film festival favorite at the Sundance and the Tribeca film festivals. The advertisement for the film festival event that I attended said that the film was about the stories that we tell ourselves and the beliefs that we need to let go. I thought, “Wow, this film has my name on it.”
In addition, the screenwriter, J.C. Lee, was holding a Q&A session after the film. I love getting the perspective of screenwriters. I love hearing about their writing process and learning where they got their ideas. Lee was introduced as the most innovative and up-and-coming screenwriter today. Clearly my expectations for this film event were very high.
Here’s the plot. A black child from Africa named Luce was trained to kill as a child terrorist. Luce was adopted by a wealthy, white American couple (the Edgars) when he was about seven or eight years old. He grew up in a home where he had everything he wanted and needed, and he became a very intelligent and successful teenager. The movie was only about Luce’s senior year in high school.
The film opened with Luce giving a well-crafted speech to his senior class. Luce was decent looking, a great athlete, popular, and an excellent speaker. He was also a star on the debate team, so he clearly knew how to win an argument. Lawyers, i.e., people who debate for a living, make really good liars. They can lie without showing any emotion. Debating is about winning an argument not getting to the win-win point of view or finding the truth. So I’m not fond of debating; it doesn’t take us toward freedom. But debating served Luce’s character in the film.
In his speech, Luce talked of loving the American Dream. He talked of freedom and especially of loving the American holiday, Independence Day. Luce was considered a school hero because of his amazing transformation from terrorist fighter in Africa to successful American teenager.
After the speech, Luce introduced his parents to his history teacher, Harriet Wilson, who was a black woman; her character was played by Octavia Spencer. Luce gushed over how much he loved this particular teacher. His comments were clearly over-the-top. It was all for show.
On the way home from the speech, Luce admitted to his parents that he actually hated Ms. Wilson; he referred to her as a bitch. So we learned that Luce had a nice, middle class public persona covering a private false self that was full of anger and rage. That isn’t uncommon. Most people hide what they’re really thinking in public, or so I’m told. As you can probably tell, I say what I’m thinking in public and in private. Luce was interesting mostly because he was so extreme.
The students in the “bitch” teacher’s class were given an assignment to write about an inspiring leader. Luce wrote about an African philosopher, Frantz Fanon, who believed in the necessity for revolutionary violence. Fanon was an anti-colonialist and a Marxist. Luce was a child soldier who lived by Fanon’s philosophy before he came to live with the Edgars. So he had a very rough start in life.
Luce was a walking contradiction. On the one hand, he loved Independence Day, the day when we celebrate freedom in America. He was clearly benefitting by American capitalism. He had a very nice life. On the other hand, Luce just wrote about a Marxist who would love to destroy American freedom and turn America into a communist country. So for Luce, physical freedom (constitutional republic) and lack of physical freedom (communism) would be a strong triangle bottom. Bear in mind, that Luce’s perspective of freedom is very different from the triangle top that I write about. In initiation, mental freedom is the top of the triangle.
Physical reality is always the effect of our mind. So initiates didn’t fix effects. They fixed their minds by letting go (not positive thinking or affirmations), and the effects changed. When people are wired backwards, and most people are, they think that their thoughts come from whatever happened. So they remain stuck in the illusion. They’ve blocked the exit ramp.
To make matters worse, Luce’s leader violated my precision of language rule. If you want freedom, you can’t relabel ugly things like terrorism with pretty words. You have to let the ugly things go. Fanon used the term revolutionary combined with the word violence. Of course, that sounds a lot better than terrorist. However, it’s deceptive; violence is never revolutionary; it’s always primitive because it’s always win-lose, not win-win.
Luce’s paper was rooted in his African past, so it was very convincing; he knew his subject matter well. It was grounded by his early years of life in a warzone. Ms. Wilson felt that Luce idolized Fanon, and Fanon wasn’t a good role model for him. That was on the surface. However under the surface, Ms. Wilson was picking up the incongruence in Luce.
Incongruence is what we feel around people who are living at the triangle bottom on any subject. They’re always in two minds. It doesn’t mean they’re bad or evil; it just means that they don’t actually believe what they’re saying. They believe something else that would NOT sound good, kind, or socially correct. How can Luce be for freedom and idolize this man at the same time? He has to be in two minds to do that.
We have to step into Ms. Wilson’s shoes to understand her predicament. On the one hand, she’s black. She clearly loves Luce’s rags-to-riches story and wants him to do well. She also doesn’t want to fall prey to any black stereotypes because she’s been down that road herself. On the other hand, she’s holding pretty convincing evidence that Luce could be dangerous to the other students. She has to be responsible as a teacher. It’s odd to be in such a quandary. You wonder if you’re reading too much into the situation; but at the same time, you realize that the old adage, “it’s better to be safe than sorry,” might be the right way to go.
Ms. Wilson felt that Luce could be a potential school bomber. So she searched his locker and found some illegal fireworks. For her, that sealed the deal. She met with Luce’s mother, who took the fireworks home and hid them. She didn’t deal with Luce. She was in a quandary too; without letting go, we tend to end up in these rock-and-a-hard-place predicaments.
Now we have another triangle bottom. Luce’s teacher, Ms. Wilson, was on the suspicious, responsible, overly-cautious side. Luce’s mother was making excuses for Luce, and she was in denial. As you know, the two sides of any triangle bottom will play tug of war; and this was clearly demonstrated in the film. We also have a fake top of the triangle with Luce; he was by no means a True Self. But when he turned on the charm, he was definitely pretending to be a True Self. People were easily conned by his act. People are a lot like diamonds. It’s very hard to tell the difference between a real one and a fake one.
Many people today have very well-developed personas like Luce. In fact, their personas are so well-crafted that people do think they’re coming from their True Self. I call such people clone characters. They like to steal the top of the triangle from the True Self. I joke that they like to sit on their clone throne. A persona can never be a True Self; it will always be fake. The True Self comes from deep within a person’s mind. A persona/clone rests on the surface of a person’s mind. Such people won’t ever let us into their world because they have a lot to hide.
We all have such clone characters in our mind, in our life, or both. These characters want us to think that their mind is unified and true, and they want to be seen as good, loving, and kind. But under that perfect persona, they’re no such thing; clones always have long shadows that are very well hidden.
Clones work harder than a True Self to look polished. The persona becomes automatic; and that’s why people think it’s natural. A True Self is not polished; in fact, the True Self often looks more like a rough-cut diamond simply because we compare such a person to the well-polished clone. It’s easy to be confused. We are like moths to the flame…we go for the bright light even if it burns us. So we vote for clones, we go to work for clones, we study with clones, and we even love and marry clones. Then we wonder why our life isn’t making sense anymore, and we can’t seem to remember who we are.
In the Gold Circle, we work on the topic of clones a whole lot. I can only give you a taste here. People in the program are shocked by the clones that they believed in the past; they were sure that they were True Selves. So they put their beliefs into their mind. I show them the cracks. Once you know how the mind works, clones are easier to detect. They often sound good or even true, but they have divided minds. They speak a nice sounding overt message along with a harmful or unwanted covert message. They appear to shine so brightly ONLY because we’re trained to never see their darkness. Sadly, if you believe that a clone character is a True Self, you’ll see any True Self as fake or imaginary (including your own True Self).
For Luce, Frantz Fanon was still stuck in his mind. Luce idolized this man as a child, and that’s largely why he held on to the voice. If people in the film had known how to let go, they would have viewed Luce’s homework paper as a cry for help. But without letting go, it became the awakening of the beast below the beauty.
Near the end of the trailer, Luce said that people either see him as a monster or a saint. He needs to let go of both of those labels; but if he’s like most people, he’s trying to hold on to saint.
We won’t let go of a clone’s beliefs if we think that they’re telling the truth. For example, Christians have a moral clone; and they think that their moral beliefs are the truth. But those morals are just beliefs. Progressives have a politically-correct clone, and they think that saying the politically correct (PC) thing is good and right. Right and wrong, or good and evil, keep us stuck in the illusion. We escape by using true and false.
Luce was a little boy when he was in Africa. Of course, he thought that his leaders were telling him the truth. We all fall into that trap as young children.
Clones hide their shadow because they don’t like it, and they don’t realize that they can let it go. No one tells us that letting go is possible in the illusion. In this way, we’re all victims of the illusion. You can see the confusion and suffering in this film. It’s actually not that uncommon of a situation.
When people, like Ms. Wilson, expose a clone’s beliefs as false, the clone typically becomes very defensive; they hurl insults or labels at the exposer, and they tell bigger and bigger lies to cover their previous lies. They work very hard to get everyone to believe them and to think that the truth teller is lying.
They think that they can keep their shadow under wraps by fueling their custom-made persona. So they become even more shiny. I call this, putting ice cream on manure. When the ice cream melts, the clone needs to cover the manure with more ice cream. It’s a full-time job that never ends. That’s my definition of hard work.
In psychological terms, experts would label Luce a sociopath; but that ties Luce down. It’s very hard to get free of such a label. That’s why I describe the shadow as the false self. That strips the person of a bad/evil label that could define them for life. Stripping off that label opens the possibility for Luce to exit the illusion. However, for Luce to get free, he would have to let go of his good labels and beliefs. He’d have to lose that shine, and that’s what keeps most people from letting go. The idea of losing their shine terrifies them. They fear judgment, humiliation, banishment, and loneliness. The clone’s goodness (saint) and the false self’s badness (monster) form an inner triangle bottom. We must take out both sides to get free and move to the top of the triangle.
Let’s face it, we all want Luce to become the great guy that he wants to be. But it isn’t win-win for all if he’s incongruent, manipulative, and lies to get what he wants. We all need to mentally earn what we get physically. The one constant law of the initiates was mental cause creates physical effect. That’s congruence, and it’s very rare these days.
After Ms. Wilson saw Luce’s shadow, the dynamic between her and Luce became weird. It makes sense. It’s like she saw him mentally naked. She can’t unsee what she has seen. Luce felt exposed, and clones hate exposure. They see exposure like a vampire views light.
So Luce turned up the volume on his saintly persona; now he looked uber good. He was helping others, buying flowers for Ms. Wilson, and apologizing for anything he’d ever done wrong without actually admitting that he did anything wrong. He was trying to demonstrate that Ms. Wilson was lying. But she was not lying. She was basing everything she said on FACTS.
I’m not going to go through the whole story, but Luce told lie after lie; and like most clones, he was a convincing liar. The filmmaker did a great job of allowing us to see what was going on in each character’s mind, while simultaneously hiding the obvious from the characters themselves so that they look surprised and bewildered.
Along the way, Luce raped a girl, he blew up Ms. Wilson’s desk with fireworks, and he painted hateful words on Ms. Wilson’s house. Of course, others got blamed for what he did.
On the surface, it looked like he was reflecting Ms. Wilson; after all he was her student in a physical feminine role. She was a teacher, which is a physical masculine role. But this is why clones are so tricky. Mentally, the roles are the opposite of the physical when strong clone characters are involved in any relationship. This throws us for a loop. Luce had the mental masculine role even though physically he was in a feminine role.
Later on, we will see that Ms. Wilson was actually feeling the projection of Luce’s shadow. That’s why she knew him so well. I understand Ms. Wilson. It’s how I expose clones. Clones always project long shadows. A True Self, or even someone with false beliefs but no fake persona/clone, doesn’t project. Like real life, most of the people in this story didn’t notice the projections because Luce had such a charming personality.
Luce’s parents kept avoiding the problem. They discussed Luce as they drank several bottles of wine each night. Eventually, the mother was faced with a difficult choice. She must admit that her child was lying, or she must start lying herself to protect him. She chose to lie to protect him. Of course she did that; the movie still had a long way to go. If she told the truth, the story would be over. That’s a good life lesson. When you want to end drama, tell the truth…the whole truth.
Now let’s dive into the psychology of Luce. The screenwriter was basing Luce’s character on a very popular, but false, Jesuit belief that we’re all mentally imprinted from birth to about age seven. The reason they choose the age of seven was partly practical. Most of us are in school by age seven; so we start to use our mind to learn at that age. We start to develop an intellect. That means that we can actually think for ourselves, but we don’t because we’re placed in schools were we learn what others want us to learn.
The other reason for the age of seven is based on occult teachings. The occultists believe that our life is lived in seven-year cycles. Occultists tend to be lunar focused and matriarchal minded; so a seven-day cycle fits almost perfectly into a lunar month. Thus age seven is the end of our first seven-year cycle in the occult way of thinking. It’s all bullshit. Don’t believe it.
What they call the seven-year imprint would be part of our false self in my terminology. The Jesuits believe that you can tone down that seven-year imprint with calming things like meditation, medication, or practices like martial arts or Tai Chi; or you can cover that false self with a nice persona/clone. The Jesuits also believe that this early programming will never go away. In other words, they want us to BELIEVE that we can’t let the imprinting go. This is the reason why religion is introduced at a young age. They want us to hold on to religion for life so that we’ll remain stuck in their illusion. The Jesuits believed that if they can get into our mind before age seven, then they will have us for life.
Of course, I prove them wrong every day. Speaking of clones, Jesuit Pope Francis, i.e., Pope Frankenstein, is the perfect example of a clone with a long shadow. He’s been completely exposed in recent times; and probably won’t be Poping for much longer. But when he first took his clone throne, people adored him. He was so charming, just like Luce. He said and did all the right things. That’s always the signature of a clone. I took a lot of heat for saying that Pope Frank was an actor and wasn’t a good man; I’ve since been redeemed.
Readers of my blogs/programs know that any supposed imprinting is just a bunch of false beliefs that we learned to hold in our minds. We can let go of beliefs by seeing them as false from any age or time period. We can even let go of ancestral beliefs. Early beliefs tend to be harder to let go because we’ve often manifested evidence of those beliefs. Early beliefs are often steeped with psychological reversal. We’ve made the beliefs real, so they look true; but that just proves that we’re good at manifesting shit we don’t actually want. If you let such beliefs go, then you stop creating that unwanted reality.
In my experience, there are no beliefs that we can’t let go. But some beliefs require more persistence and determination to let go especially if those beliefs are collectively accepted as true. Labeling a belief, “the truth,” keeps us from being able to let it go. So the Jesuits are wrong. Their belief serves them and their desire to control our minds and lives. Nevertheless, this movie presumes that this Jesuit belief is true.
The event advertisement for the movie said that the film was about letting go. But that was a statement made with level confusion. I’ve learned that most people think of letting go as physical, not mental. Initiation is, and was, only about mental letting go. The physical becomes the effect of our mind as we let go. Most people think of letting go as divorcing your spouse, running away from home, or quitting your job. Or they think that letting go is picking a nice thought over a crappy one or avoiding a touchy subject all together. None of those things are real letting go. I didn’t see any letting go in this movie. The lack of letting go is what turned the story into a heavy drama or a psychological thriller.
Luce was killing people with African terrorists from his toddler years to age seven. It was presumed that this propensity to kill was still there, and he could not let it go. Psychologists would say that this killer tendency was stuck in Luce’s subconscious. Religious people might say that it was part of his soul. Eastern-minded people would say it was part of his karma. Everybody has a reason for why Luce can’t let go. Their reasons are all false beliefs. They make my job tedious.
Luce could have let go of his killer thinking; it was simply a bunch of beliefs that were not true. He would have had to let go of everything that he learned from Fanon. Luce’s mind would have psychologically reversed to hold on to Fanon’s beliefs and to make them true for him. So he’d have to realize that Fanon’s belief came with emotion, and that emotion meant the beliefs were false. Once he could see his error, then he could slowly take back control of his mental container. Everyone can get free, but they have to want it more than air. They have to be willing to let go of everything that is false, even if they think that it has served them.
The film portrayed this terrorist aspect of Luce’s mind as who Luce really was; that’s why Ms. Wilson and others believed that he was inherently dangerous. That’s reality in the illusion. In initiation, we’re pushed to ask a bigger question. Is that true for Luce? Of course not. We have to be very careful when people say that some personality trait, or mental thought pattern (like transgenderism), is who a person really is. We’re not our beliefs or our thoughts. If such people let go of everything in their mind, they would see that they’re not those qualities; they were holding on to a persistent false belief.
Because of this belief, Luce looked progressively more dangerous as the movie rolled on. This is how people mentally devolve over time. Their friends and family don’t help them escape this fake, mentally-created illusion because they start to expect the worst from the person.
Letting go reverses this even when we have no support from others. I’ve done it. But it requires letting go from the feminine. We have to trust our emotions to get free of such a predicament. However, most people hate their emotions; they want to get rid of them. So they stay stuck.
Ms. Wilson was telling the truth. But people thought that Ms. Wilson was lying because Luce looked so damn good. Ms. Wilson cared for a sister who was insane, and she contributed to making Ms. Wilson look bad. Ms. Wilson also displayed appropriate emotions. By that, I mean that when she was lied to, she let the person know that they were lying; and she was noticeably uncomfortable doing that. Exposing lies isn’t in our nature; it’s hard to do it in a calm matter. In such situations, we often trust the liar because they’re the calm one. But they are calm because they think their lies are the truth…not because they’re not lying.
Ms. Wilson was reading Luce’s shadow. She was spot on. If others could do what Ms. Wilson was doing, they would have all supported her. She was the hero of this story, not Luce and certainly not Luce’s parents.
The story seemed to be loosely based on Barack Obama’s persona. At one point, Luce likened himself to Barack Obama; he took the words right out of my mind. Like Obama, Luce was a good looking, popular, lawyer-like athlete who came from a rough start. Both were anti-colonialists and Marxists at the core. Obama had a mentor as a young child, Frank Marshall Davis, who was similar to Fanon in some ways.
Obama had a great clone, and he was very convincing. He still acts like he never had any scandals in his White House. That just isn’t true. But his scandals were hidden by the fake news media. Clones help other clones; and you end up with webs of clones in governments and other large organizations. Such lies don’t stay hidden forever. What’s hidden will become known because more and more people are whistleblowing and exposing just like Ms. Wilson. In Obama’s story, Ms. Wilson was played by Loretta Fuddy, who knew the truth about Obama’s fake birth certificate. She died in a strange plane accident. At times, I did fear that Ms. Wilson would not make it out of this movie alive. But she did.
In the Q&A, I realized that the screenwriter, J.C. Lee, didn’t see, or he didn’t admit, that the movie was a little too familiar. I wondered if he was like Ms. Wilson, and he had picked up Obama’s shadow without realizing it. It’s easy to do. I used to do that all the time before I came to understand clones and projection. I’d hear the projected covert part of the clone’s message in my mind. I’d think that their thoughts were my thoughts. After I learned to discriminate, I realized that the beliefs/thoughts that I was hearing weren’t true. I was hearing the opposite of what the person said; so it was their shadow. It wasn’t my thought so it was easy to let go as false. I experienced this every time President Obama spoke. He always had an overt and a covert message.
I suspect that’s what the screenwriter experienced. But he thought the projected thinking was his own thinking; he was not alone. Most people don’t watch their mind all the time like I do. So J.C. thought he had a great movie idea. He said that he invented the character of Luce about five years ago…uh that was when Barack Obama was president. Coincidence? It’s just another interesting aspect to this film. It makes it even more fascinating to me.
The screenwriter said that he believed that someone telling the truth would be a heroic act, but no one does that. That was probably why there wasn’t much truth telling in this movie. Wow! That’s quite an admission.
The truth is what sets us free in initiation. The clone-free person is relieved to know the truth. Fear of clones is why people accept things like political correctness or social justice warriorism. Fear of clones is why people try to fit in and refuse to think independently. It’s why they ignore their emotions around others. They’re afraid of rocking the boat. In earlier times, if you exposed the clones in power, you were burned at the stake, tortured, banished from society, or beheaded. Today, we just get our accounts removed on social media.
J.C. said that humans are liars at the core. So Luce was normal in his mindset. That’s just NOT true. It’s not normal to lie; it’s learned behavior. No one is a liar at the core. The further we get from our True Self, however, the more we lie.
J.C. said that he personally faces the type of choices that Luce, Ms. Wilson, and Luce’s parents were making all the time. J.C. was speaking truthfully about the illusion, but that would be false for someone who can let go.
J.C. said that he’s often in a situation where he either has to tell the truth and have a hard conversation, or he must lie and have a smooth conversation. He did admit that this was a short-sighted point of view. I’d agree with him on that. It’s also a false point of view. He said that he picks the smooth conversation 99% of the time. So he has a strong fear of clones…most people do.
Many would call such a lie a white lie. I despise that term. If you want freedom, you must stop lying…ditch all that political and social correctness too. It’s never win-win…never. When you hide what you think from others, you start hiding it from yourself too. Then you just make a mess of your mind. If you let go of your judgments and beliefs, you eventually get to the place where what you think is not offensive or judgmental. It’s helpful and constructive. It’s win-win. At that point, you always say what you think.
J.C. did admit that this personal issue destroyed his relationships. Well dah! But he said that he could not change. That’s sad, but I understand why he felt that way. His teenage years were during the Obama era. He thought Obama was telling the truth, so he became like him. J.C. is Luce in many ways. He admitted that. It’s a common pattern. Someone has a trusted teacher, philosopher, leader, idol, or guru; and they don’t realize that the person they idolized was giving them more beliefs. Then they get really stuck in that person’s shadow; and they can’t see any exit from their illusion. J.C. is not alone; but he’s living in an illusory bubble. That bubble will pop one day; and he’ll have one hell of a wake-up call. It happens to everyone; and it’s a hard moment, but it is the day that the potential for freedom returns.
Telling the truth, going for win-win, even when it’s hard is what sets us free. No one in this film got free. There was no full-circle ending. That’s how you know the movie was based on beliefs. We can’t get to a happily-ever-after ending with beliefs and lies. That’s impossible.
This film was nothing like it was presented to be, at least from my point of view. They said that the film was about the stories that we tell about ourselves. It was actually about the stories, secrets, and lies we make up to cover our asses or to get attention or sympathy.
Then they said the film was about beliefs we need to let go. But no one let go of any beliefs in the film. They just lied to cover up the effects of their beliefs. Or they ignored their beliefs. Saying we need to let a belief go isn’t letting go. Luce’s world was exhausting. He had to manage appearances all the time.
Here’s the weird thing about this film. I really liked it. Everyone did. It was a good film. I was letting go a lot, so I left without any baggage. It looked like cool fiction to me. But others were noticeably triggered. I never saw so many people get up and walk around during a movie. They were flooded with emotions, so they were walking them off. Clearly they had believed clones like Luce; and that was what they were feeling. So I like that J.C. was a bit of an exposer without even knowing it.
Here’s the potential for the happy, full-circle ending. It’s in Luce’s true desire, which we hear in his speech at the beginning of the movie. Luce said that he loved Independence Day. He said the freedom of America meant everything to him. There was his pull to initiation. I call that our North Star. It’s what takes us outside of the illusion.
Luce wanted freedom, but he had this horrible false self. That’s very normal. That’s where we all are when we begin initiation. None of that was Luce’s fault; but it was his responsibility. Luce could heal his mind. I know that. J.C. could too. Barack Obama could too. We all start out wanting freedom but not having it. At some point, if we don’t turn toward freedom, we develop apathy; then we just exist until we die.
Luce thought he could get freedom by creating a pleasing clone. That’s pretty normal too. Luce certainly wasn’t the first to think that. Sadly, most experts believe that lie. Too often people think that they can’t be themselves. They believe that they can’t have their true desires. They can, but they have to let go to get them.
As initiation takes us closer and closer to the core of our mind, we actually stop creating false desires (good and bad ones); it’s then that we start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We start remembering who we are and what we’ve always wanted from life; our life starts to make sense again. The world around us also starts to make sense. Clones look like clones, and the illusion looks like an illusion. Beliefs sound like beliefs. That’s mental freedom.
