Reality has a backdoor. And a handful of outsiders - a pulp horror writer, a Swiss psychiatrist, a junkie novelist with a pair of scissors, two stoned teenagers in a bowling alley, and a sci-fi writer chasing a beam of pink light - found it decades before the rest of us even knew we were living inside a program.

This episode of Belief is the Battlefield pulls apart the strange, tangled lineage of the ideas now running inside your reality tunnel. It's the story of a fictional forbidden book that occultists started worshipping as real scripture. A psychiatrist who decided that a coincidence could mean more than chance ever should. A number - 23 - that once you start looking for, you cannot stop finding. A hidden word buried in newsprint that was designed to make you afraid and then forget why.

And then there's the twist nobody could have scripted: a satirical religion built entirely to mock conspiracy thinking somehow gets pulled into the middle of the most infamous conspiracy in American history - because one of its founders happened to serve in the Marines next to a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

By the end, you'll be standing in the wreckage of a science fiction writer's eight-thousand-page confession, staring at a pink beam of light he could never fully explain, wondering whether pop culture itself has been quietly broadcasting a hidden script all along - and whether the meme on your screen right now is just noise, or something else entirely.

We won't tell you which. That's the part you have to sit with.

Press play on Episode 6 of Belief is the Battlefield now — and find out exactly how far down the rabbit hole goes.

• ‘Belief is the Battlefield’ is a multimedia, multiplatform, self-explicating conceptual art project to mark 25 years since 9/11.

• It will last for one year.

• You can join in at ⁠⁠beliefisthebattlefield.com⁠⁠ or on our social media platforms.

• You can meet the others in groups that are popping up all over the internet.