The movie Avatar has demonstrated its popularity by its grand income. Thus many have discussed it. Some praise its point of view, some warn against its philosophy. I have not yet seen the most important point to me, which is not content. "The medium is the message." Beyond whether or not pantheism is a good idea, or whether an indigenous society has been properly portrayed, or whether this is an attack on the US military or on all military thinking, or how the term Avatar has been inappropriately taken from something quite wonderful (a person who has come from heaven in full consciousness to assist humanity's evolution), or whether the biology is accurate -- beyond all of these, I have to note how this film has, more than any other, stuck with me. Hands of technology have entered into me more deeply than before (large screen, High Definition, 3-D, surround sound, subliminal input both through vision and sound) and it has been more difficult to reawaken into this world.
The "Avatar Depression" has been described, with many people expressing despair that "this world" is not as good as "that world," and that they wish to be in "that world," even to the point of suicidal thoughts to disconnect from "this world."
I too feel a lingering ache in my body for "that world," as if I had seen Spirit-Land and long to return there. Even in the movie, at the end the "takers" (they are us) are banished back to their dying world where they have "killed the mother." Deep down, they and we long to return....
The worthy themes of the content -- the beauty, the message of the existence and activity of the divine feminine, the loyalty to each other, to community, to the divine feminine... -- are actually secondary to the medium which has worked its way down into me very deeply. (Even the previews of the next HD, 3-D movie, an intrusive fantasy of the perverse and disturbed experiences of Alice in Wonderland, with no justification of redeeming qualities in its content, have stayed with me.)
Discussions of points in the content of this film are interesting -- whether it has done more work than the Copenhagen climate gathering to alert people to the environment, etc. -- but those concerns are the sugar-coating of a bitter pill of technological intrusion into our psyches. As long as I remain in the fantasy of the film, I remain drugged and unable to connect with the values apparently portrayed there -- relationship with another human being, with community, with the earth, and with the beauty and power of Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom underlying all of creation -- values that are portrayed but paradoxically made more remote by the medium of the film itself.
It has required more attention than usual for disengaging from fantasy and re-engaging with "this world," finding the inherent magic of "this world." One must quite seriously utilize antidotes to the medium of the film -- time in Nature, and not five minutes but hours. "Time in Nature" while remembering scenes from the movie requires many hours for Nature to have effect. "Time in Nature" where you look closely at the sand, the bark, the petal, the trailing wisp of cloud -- smell everything, taste everything, hear everything. Note the quality of the light (and note how it differs from the light in the movie theatre). Offer yourself to gardening or to a house plant, and tend its living-ness, even ask it to work with your healing. Gaze into the eyes of your beloved, stroke each other's arms, rub each other's back. Again, not just for five minutes with any of this, but with concerted effort to re-orient yourself to the wonders of "this world," "this body," "this lover," "this soul."
I have observed a young man design two seconds of animated movement of a dinosaur in a video game. He said it took him ten hours to get those two seconds right.He showed me the complicated grids hidden beneath the final image. Most importantly I saw his devotion to the computer screen, and observed a flow of his life energy into the screen. Where does that energy go? Does it work as nutrition for some being? Is it expressed into the world every time that video dinosaur makes that particular movement? When I saw the credits for Avatar, the hundreds of technical people who poured their being into their computers, I realized that this is what the anthropologist Leslie White would call an energy-capturing device ... but to what end? When millions of people watch this film, and merge with it, and enter into it, they are pouring their own precious attention energy into it. Where does that go? These are questions that (with Willie Bento and Robert Schiappacasse) I ask in Signs in the Heavens: A Message for Our Time. And the antidote, beyond what I've shared above, comes in the newly released One-Two-ONE: A Guidebook to Conscious Partnerships, Weddings, and Rededication Ceremonies, written with my wonderful real-life "this world" beautiful Lila Sophia.
These issues are not side issues, not something to be heaped over with new content in order to obscure the old images. The message is not in the content, but in the medium -- how someone else's psyche has gotten so deeply into mine. Marshall McLuhan called radio a "warm" medium as it required so much participation on the part of the listener to participate in imagining what the speakers and the scenes described look like. He termed television a "cool" medium because you've been given so much that your imagination is not engaged. This has now come to a new level of "coolness" and you are not warmed by it. If you feel yourself, it may be agitated after such a movie, yet cold.
I highly recommend that you rivet your attention to the real, the growing living warm plant and animal and sky, the beautiful, the good, the here, the now, for these are where your soul speaks to you. Find a piece of earth -- and it need not be glorious, as in a thousand-foot tall tree -- stand there and find the communion that your life offers right now. Find its inherent sacred character and let your heart be filled with the abundance-to-flowing-over of the actual world.
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From Dan Drasin: Sounds as if you've had a more highly charged
ReplyDeletepersonal reaction than most to the technology... or at least are more acutely aware of it than most.
<< those concerns are the sugar-coating of a bitter pill of
technological intrusion into our psyches. As long as I remain in the fantasy of the film, I remain drugged and unable to connect with the values apparently portrayed there -- >>
I think that's a risk for those of us who sense that Pandora may not be an entirely fictional or impossible reality, and who have had a taste of that reality delivered through an unusually powerful medium. In past times a novel or a play (being the most powerful media of their eras) would have had a similarly intrusive effect. I know that certain novels have pulled me out of my physical environment into an imaginary landscape long after I finished reading them. No modern technology required.
With that said, I think one should also be careful not to confuse "our psyches" with one's individual psyche. Each of us has our own sensitivities and sensibilities, and our own set of inner
associations. (My stepmother, for example, panics and runs for cover at the sight of a cat a block away. For her, at such a moment, the whole universe and all of nature disappear behind her bubble of fear.) So I think it behooves us to cut the medium, the message and everything else some slack, because we can know it only through the unique patterns (some say "distortions") of our own consciousness, including those mediated by our unique physiologies, personal experiences, associations, ubringing and undoubtedly tendencies inherited from past lives, between lives, etc., etc., etc...
As for Cameron, I feel fairly certain that his intention was to send a message that transcends technology as we now know it (using the best available means, of course; what else could he possibly have used?), and to charge it with sufficient political, intellectual, spiritual and creative protein that it must be digested over time and not simply filed away in our "recent movies" folder.
Without a strong taste of it, how can most people in the mainstream envision an alternative reality to strive for? The times seem to call for strong measures, do they not?
=Dan=
FROM DAVID in response: Thank you for your calm and reasoned response. Yes, perhaps my reaction was more than the usual, though I continue to struggle with the impacts of this enhanced technology – and yes printed words have their own power, which can quite strongly take one away from present realities. The questions: 1.) is fantasy appropriate? Answer: yes, essential to the development of our thinking-into-the-dreaming. 2.) whose? Answer: very important – it ought to be your own fantasy, though you can learn from that of others, careful not to become dependent on it. It’s the second question and answer that are interesting to me.