The Portal Story

When I was a kid, I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it. I called it The Portal Story, and it was always the same: somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world, until some sort of magical portal, accidentally or on purpose, enters their life.

And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, a looking glass, platform nine and three quarters, or, you know, Dorothy famously was used to introduce Technicolor, where, in the first part of the film, she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale, black and white. And then she lands in Oz and they open the door and it's Technicolor, and there's this transitional scene where you see Technicolor for the first time.

The question is: Where's The Portal? Like, why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists? It's always the same formula. It's somebody trapped in an ordinary world, they find The Portal, and The Portal becomes the call to adventure. And they spend time in the alternate universe, and then somehow they're able to live.

Very often they return. At the end of the adventure, the tollbooth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it, you know? And so my question was always: Why? Why on earth would you tell the same story over and over and over and over again. It has the same format, and it's always a different context. And I came to believe that this story is actually this unkept promise for most people. That, in their adult lives, they don't find these portals.

So, for example, have you ever been to Barcelona, Spain? There is a church in Barcelona, Spain, called La Sagrada Familia. It is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life. There is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet. And that is a Portal, right?

And so if you think about, psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals. And this concept of, if you look at a wall, how do you know that the wall doesn't have a door? How do you know that there isn't a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book?

We learn to stop looking for The Portal, and I think what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits, that there are other worlds, and they're real! That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole in the matrix is a metaphor for very real things.

- Eric Weinstein on JRE

On X

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