Journal
When I was a child, my father encouraged me to watch a television series called The Prisoner. As a young child, I really don't think I understood it. At the time, it seemed strange, abstract and, at times, almost surreal.
It was only decades later, when I began looking back at my own experiences and exploring spirituality, consciousness and the nature of existence, that I started to appreciate just how profound some of the ideas within it actually were.
The series starred Patrick McGoohan as a man who resigns from his position as a high-ranking government official, only to find himself mysteriously abducted and taken to a strange, isolated community known simply as “The Village”.
There, he is no longer known by his name; he is simply given a number.
Number Six.
And whilst he is there, he is determined to find out who is responsible for imprisoning him.
He wants to escape from The Village, yet every time he tries, he is caught. Every time he thinks he has found a way out, he is returned to The Village. And throughout the series, he repeatedly encounters another mysterious character known simply as Number Two – a person charged with extracting what he knows from his mind.
But there is one question that drives him above all others: Who is Number One?
That question hangs over the entire series. Who is the person ultimately responsible for keeping him there? Who is pulling the strings? Who is controlling The Village? And just who is keeping Number Six prisoner against his will?
Towards the end of the series, comes the great – and some would say twisted - revelation.
Number Six eventually finds and confronts Number One. He chases him down, before finally catching him and leans in to remove the mask Number One is wearing.
The first mask beneath the original mask, is that of a monkey – some might say symbolic of man’s evolution from the ape. Number Six removes the monkey mask to finally reveal his captor – yet the face staring back at him is his own.
Number One is Number Six.
He is himself. For the uninitiated, it is a wonderfully surreal moment, which as a child, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It seemed exceptionally odd to see two Number Sixes in that moment of chaos. Years later as I watched the scene again, the questions poured into my mind:
Why would a man imprison himself?
Why would he create a world in which he was constantly fighting to escape?
Why would he impose these experiences upon himself?
Why would he simultaneously be the prisoner and the person responsible for the prison?
It seemed completely absurd, until I started to think about it differently.
The questions I was left with were:
What if the prison isn't actually somewhere else?
What if we create some of the walls ourselves?
What if the person we’re constantly trying to escape from is, in some sense, ourselves?
This is where The Prisoner became much more interesting to me and appeared to be hugely ahead of its time. Now, I am not suggesting this was definitively Patrick McGoohan's spiritual interpretation at the time of filming the series.
But I later came across several interviews in which he discussed the significance of Number One being Number Six. His explanation resonated strongly with the way I’ve begun to understand my own life. The idea he shared was that we are, at least to some degree, the creators of our own experience.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we consciously choose every event that happens to us. It also doesn't mean that somebody who experiences tragedy somehow “asked for it”. And this explanation certainly shouldn't be used to blame people for the terrible things that happen to them – far from it.
But perhaps there is another level of consciousness at which our experiences are not quite as random as they appear. Perhaps we’ve all come here just to experience, learn and grow. And perhaps in order to do so, at some level beyond our everyday human awareness, we choose the circumstances that will give us the experiences we need.
If you believe in that idea, this is where it becomes a little uncomfortable. It’s relatively easy to accept that we might choose the good stuff, like abundance, love, friendship, a happy family, material success, natural health and an overall beautiful life.
If somebody told you that, before you were born, you had the opportunity to design a wonderful human experience, you might be quite happy with that idea.
But what about the other side of the coin? What about experiencing deep loss? Failure? Rejection – perhaps on multiple occasions? Loneliness? Intense fear? Overwhelming grief? Poverty? Prolonged illness? Betrayal by someone you deeply love? Trauma?
And what about the experiences that are so horrific that we struggle even to comprehend them? Could anybody possibly choose those?
I genuinely don't have an answer and its something I’ve wrestled with for years. But I do think it’s a question worth contemplating, because perhaps there is a difference between choosing an experience and choosing to suffer.
Perhaps our soul, might choose circumstances because of precisely what they offer in terms of growth, without the human being who experiences them consciously understanding why they are happening.
That’s a very difficult concept for the human mind to grasp, especially when we’re in pain.
Looking back at my own life, I can see experiences that I would never have consciously chosen. The collapse of things I’ve spent years building. Living in fear. The uncertainty I’ve experienced. The financial losses I’ve suffered. The deep betrayal I’ve felt. And the periods when I questioned what any of it was for.
At the time, I wanted those, sometimes deeply unpleasant experiences to stop. I wanted the circumstances to change or I wanted somebody else to fix them for me. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can also see that they changed me. They forced me to question things I had previously taken for granted.
The challenges I experienced stripped away assumptions. Some challenged my identity. Others made me confront what I actually valued. All eventually led me towards a completely different understanding of what I wanted my life to be about.
That doesn't mean I would volunteer to go through it all again. It simply means that I can now see that something valuable emerged from each negative experience.
Perhaps that is what growth actually looks like – not necessarily enjoying the experience or pretending the pain isn't painful - but discovering that something meaningful can emerge from it.
There is another scene from The Prisoner that has stayed with me over the years. Eventually, Number Six escapes. He gets out of The Village and returns to London.
The audience looks on in celebration that he has apparently succeeded in his mission. The prison, that was once a nightmare daily experience, is finally behind him. He is a free man. Or so he thinks.
In the last episode, what unfolds is an extraordinary sequence. One of the characters approaches a police officer to ask for directions. The scene unfolds in an exaggerated, almost dreamlike slow motion and continues for longer than it ought to.
Yet suddenly, whilst gazing at this scene, the alert viewer is confronted with an uncomfortable realisation. He may have left The Village and the physical prison that once contained him is long gone. But he’s exchanged one small, self-contained prison for a much larger open-air one. The experience of being controlled remains.
I think there’s something profound thinking that’s gone into the creation of that scene. How often do we escape one prison only to construct another? We leave a job we hate and immediately replace it with another. We leave one relationship and repeat the same patterns in the next. We escape one financial problem and recreate another.
We tell ourselves we want freedom while continuing to behave in ways that keep us trapped. We blame the world for our circumstances while refusing to examine the part we may have played along the way in creating them.
Perhaps the prison The Village created isn't always about the circumstances. Perhaps sometimes it’s the relationship we have with ourselves that creates the permanent entrapment.
This brings me back to Number One. Perhaps the genius of The Prisoner is that it doesn't simply ask: “Who is controlling you?”
It asks something far more uncomfortable: “What if you are?”
What if the person we believe is keeping us trapped is actually ourselves? What if our beliefs create our limitations? What if our fears create our boundaries? What if our identity creates our prison? And what if the experiences we keep attracting into our lives are, at least partly, reflections of what we believe we deserve?
I know that last question is uncomfortable and often times we’ll skip over it just so we can avoid the unsettling feelings we get when trying to examine the causes of our own self-destruction. It’s also uncomfortable because it suggests that changing our external circumstances may not always be enough. Perhaps we have to change ourselves.
There is something else within this idea that I find particularly powerful. Perhaps we don't simply create the experiences we want. Perhaps we create the experiences we are ready for. Or, perhaps more accurately, we continue to encounter experiences that reveal where we are in our own development.
If I believe I am unworthy, I may tolerate things that confirm that belief. If I believe the world is dangerous, I may constantly look for evidence that it is. If I believe people cannot be trusted, I may behave in ways that make genuine trust almost impossible. If I believe I am powerless, I may continually surrender my power to somebody else.
However, change the underlying belief and something extraordinary can happen.
The world may not have changed. But our experience of the world can alter in that precise moment. And maybe that is where personal responsibility begins. Not with blaming ourselves for everything that happens, but with recognising the things that are within our control.
My own spiritual interpretation goes one step further. Perhaps before we came here, we were not simply given a blank canvas. Perhaps we came with experiences we intended to explore. Perhaps our souls knew that life would contain both extraordinary beauty and extraordinary pain.
Perhaps we understood that we would forget, because that forgetting was part of the process in achieving a new experience, because if we arrived knowing everything, there would be no need personal discovery!
If we knew that we were all one, there would be no experience of separation. If we knew that everything would ultimately be okay, perhaps courage would have no meaning.
If we knew exactly how every experience would unfold, free will would become little more than an illusion. So, maybe the point of coming here is precisely to forget who we are and then spend our lives remembering.
Coming full circle in our analysis, this brings us back to Number One. Maybe the great revelation isn't that Number Six discovers that he is Number One. Maybe it’s that he discovers the person he has been fighting all along is himself.
Simultaneously, he is the creator of the experience, the prisoner, the jailer, the person demanding freedom and the person capable of providing it. All are contained within the same being. And that’s extremely powerful if you think about it.
That idea has stayed with me because I think when you analyse it, there’s a sense of freedom contained within it, because there are moments in life when we are desperately looking for somebody else to come along and unlock the door to free us from our pain, but perhaps the key has been in our own hands all along?
I don't know for certain whether we chose our lives before we arrived here and I don't know whether The Prisoner was intended to communicate precisely the spiritual message that I now see within it.
But I do know that the questions we’ve raised here have significant value if we choose to sit with them for a long enough period. I genuinely think there’s a lot of freedom within them:
What if we are more powerful creators of our experience than we realise?
What if our lives are not simply something that are happens to us?
What if some of our most difficult experiences are invitations to grow?
What if the people who challenge us most are, in some strange way, our teachers?
What if the darkness we encounter gives us the opportunity to discover our own light?
And what if, before we came here, we somehow agreed to experience all of it?
If all of this is a possibility, perhaps we shouldn't necessarily ask: “Why is this happening to me?”
A better question to ask is: “What am I here to learn from this?”
And beyond that, an even bigger question is: “What if I chose this experience because there is something inside me that I came here to discover?”
Subconsciously, its possible that is what Number One was trying to tell Number Six. That maybe the prison was never entirely outside him and neither was the freedom he so desperately sought.
