There’s been almost a glut of good movies this summer. I really haven’t had time to comment on most of them yet, and probably won’t get to some of them. I was actually going to pass on making any mention of The Day after Tomorrow?it was a fun way to kill a couple of hours, a blend of sci-fi and disaster movie. It suffered from poor marketing and poor timing?being released against major blockbusters like Harry Potter III and Spider-Man 2; as well undeservedly negative criticism, much of which was ranting about possible political motives rather than simple critiques of a Sunday afternoon escape.
It has a suprisingly strong emphasis on the small-scale human perspective?a fairly good story for the disaster genre. Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal play a father and son, separated by a terrifying new kind of storm, unlike anything witnessed by modern humanity. The storm is powered by global warming and wreaks an ice age upon Earth within a couple of weeks, as melting polar ice shifts the warm ocean currents out of the temperate zone. Effects are excellent, and well-worth the price of a ticket. My assessment was that it was pretty good sci-fi. I really didn’t think much more of it.
At least not until last night, when I read this in a interview with Ervin Laszlo:
“Right now, for example, with the melting of the ice deflecting the Gulf Stream, it’s entirely possible that in three years England will have the frigid climate of Labrador,which is at the same latitude. Spring and summer just won’t come. (What is Enlightenment? Issue 26, p.22 “will spring and summer no longer come?” )
Dr. Laszlo is not just any scientist, but the pioneer of systems theory, which has revolutionized all science. He doesn’t know everything, but he’s one of sharpest minds on the planet. Dramatic climate change in northwestern Europe possibly within three years? While the heather turning into tundra does not an ice age make, it sure doesn’t appeal to me. I happen to like spring and summer, and I can well imagine the Brits prefer their four temperate seasons to climatological catastrophe. Laszlo, BTW, is hardly alone in his concern: there seem to be a number of European scientists quite concerned about the declining health of the Gulf Stream.
Let’s pray it’s neither the day after tomorrow nor three years down the road, but that we can still prevent it.
Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream.
An exploration of the meaning of life
Waking Life is one of those rare movies which you tend to appreciate more as time goes by. It’s an indie film, well outside of the mainstream audience since there’s not a single car chase, explosion, or space ship. Waking Life is a completely different kind of movie—a beautiful, imaginative, exploration of the meaning of the nature of reality, seen as a real-time dream in the mind of a nameless protagonist played by Wiley Wiggins. This is an indie film by the director of the cult hit, Slacker, and it follows the same stream-of-consciousness style, though with a tone of earnestness markedly different from Slacker.
Waking Life has a visual style unlike any other animated film ever produced. For the most part, faces and shapes are painted without outlines, which makes almost every frame look like an impressionistic painting. There’s a persistent, fluid unsettledness in every scene; rooms bob and ripple, like coaches on a train, or a group of houseboats packed together. Lines, shapes, colors and shadows are in constant motion, sometimes slight, giving a faint feeling of relative stability before they morph into things completely different. Characters turn into clouds or machinery according to their thoughts, and our hero finds himself flying away helplessly to other scenes. All of this accentuates the dreamlike feeling of the story.
The young man’s dream is a meandering stream-of-consciousness through dozens of conversations, speculations, diatribes and dialogues on the meaning of life, and the nature of reality as expounded by a vast array of characters expressing nearly every philosophy conceivable. Even though I sometimes wish the world was a bit more like Waking Life, and that breakrooms were filled with conversations of this sort, hearing every person (no matter how ignorant) proclaim him/herself an expert on the nature of the universe sometimes became tiresome.
And yet, the film is compelling. There simply has never been a movie made like this before, one which asks, relentlessly, with the earnestness of a true seeker, what is it all about? What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of reality?
Awakening from the dream-world
Over the course of the movie, the young man gradually realizes he’s in a dream. Although he seems to wake up and go to sleep, he realizes that he is only dreaming that he does so. and tries to wake up. Unfortunately, he can’t, and he continues to wander from one philosophical conversation to another, occasionally meeting someone who’s interested in something more than spouting off their views.
For millennia, mystics around the world have said that life is a dream, and that our spiritual goal is to awaken. (See sidebar.)
The reward of virtue is to see Your face, and on waking, to gaze my fill on Your likeness.—Psalm 17:5
Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. —St. Paul, Eph. 5:14, NIV
When asked if he was a man, an angel, or a god, the Buddha answered no to all of these, and then said, “I am awake.”—Anguttara Nikaya 4:36
From the unreal, lead me to the Real, from darkness, lead me to light, from death, lead me to immortality. —Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
The saying that “life is a dream” doesn’t mean the physical universe is an illusion, but that spiritual reality, Ultimate Reality, is much more substantial, although it seems less so here in “Dreamland.” The dream is that we are completely separate beings, mortal and detached from God, and in our inability to realize we are dreaming, we are unable to see that God is in all things, and all things are in God. Our true nature is spirit and our true source is God, and until we find him we are lost in an unconscious, unreal state. God—Ultimate Reality—is far deeper, truer, and more “real” than our experiential reality—just as waking life is from dreams. So in our sleepwalking, we take the world we see to be the way things are, and, even though we “believe” in God as the Ultimate Reality, the dream of this world keeps us from union with Him.
The young man in Waking Life who has learned that he is dreaming has become somewhat unnerved by the realization that the world he knows is not real; waking up is now his quest. This is a very accurate depiction of the frustration most mystics encounter at the beginning of spiritual awakening. It is unsettling and frustrating to find that one no longer “believes” in the world, and that everyone seems to be sleepwalking. Jesus is recorded as saying:
The one who seeks should not cease seeking until he finds. And when he finds, he will be dismayed. And when he is dismayed, he will be astonished. And he will be king over the All.
—Gospel of Thomas, 2
The young man does follow this path—he keeps seeking until he finds. Now and then he catches a conversation where someone actually has some insight into what’s going on, and a few people who can actually see him and talk to him directly. In the same way, in our lives, generally very few people can recognize and speak to our beings, seeing us for who we truly are. His final encounter sets him free. At an arcade, another young man suggests to him that every moment is presented by God as an invitation to join him, to become part of infinity and eternity,and we say “Whoa, not yet!”
The young man’s spirit is taken up to heaven, symbolizing the soul’s union with God, although most will probably understand this as death. Yet divine union is a kind of death, it is the death of “the self”. St. Paul said, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20) It is the death that brings us into eternal life, the Kingdom of heaven, here and now.
Waking Life is both a beautiful objet d’art and a brilliant mystical essay. For anyone interested in the big questions at all, it’s a must-see.
Okay, I’ll be honest. I really didn’t like the Matrix movies that much. I tend to prefer my science-fiction a tad more coherent, and I really like to see more colors than just black, gray and brown, and more than three hours’ worth of plot and character in seven hours of screen time. But here I’m not concerned with whether it’s good sci-fi, but if it’s good spi-fi, and yes, the Matrix trilogy is very good spiritual fiction.
The Matrix story stands apart from the mass of other virtual-reality movies like The Thirteenth Floor, Existenz, Vanilla Sky, and others by consciously making spiritual connections. Its spiritual symbolism is so evident in fact, that even a pubescent vid-kid entranced by the techno-dazzle might give a few thoughts to what it means.
The Matrix of delusion
This saga, whatever its weaknesses may be, is a profound analogy for spiritual awakening. Enlightenment teachers such as Vernon Kitabu Turner and David Oshana sometimes use it in their teachings. “The Matrix” is the world that all but a few humans are experiencing—the world that we all know, with its ups, downs, distractions and rewards. It’s not perfect, but that’s life—the world simply is the way it is, right?
Not quite. Neo Anderson, our hero, learns that this world he’s known and accepted all of his life is a façade, a massive virtual reality program designed to control humanity. The deception of the Matrix shelters people from the terrible truth of their real existence, which is horrible beyond words. People are kept caged from birth in pods, grown by machines for the purpose of powering the machines that really rule the world—an unending hell in which there simply is no human intelligence in control at all.
Good thing it’s just fiction. Right?
Or could it be that we do live in a façade? That we are not in control, but from birth, we’ve been programmed relentlessly by our culture to do what the culture wants, to be persons not in God’s image, but in society’s? Could it be that our defense mechanisms, mechanical reactions, and institutional machinery is what really runs our lives? Is the product of our personal fears and collective ego a machine-mind which powers itself by keeping us ignorant throughout our lives? Is the human condition simply powering the mechanisms that keep us bound in darkness? Is there help?
How can we wake up? This is the ultimate question. The Matrix portrays the desperateness and misery of our ignorance with a punch. We’re not awake. We’re living in dream-world, fueling the mechanisms of our own delusions. We need to wake up. Who will show us the way?
The hero-savior
Zion is the only city of free people remaining. However, the “Real World” is not very pleasant. The hundred thousand or so people who have been taken out of the illusions of the Matrix are losing a desperate war against the machines (the spiritual battle against the forces of delusion). Morpheus (named after the god of dreams) rescues Neo from the Matrix and brings him into the Real World, believing him to be “The One,” the savior who can end the war and save mankind. Neo also meets Trinity, whose love symbolizes the love of God. Together, the three work on freeing mankind by going into the illusory world to wake up others and find the machines’ weakness.
Neo is the most-discussed savior character to appear in recent cinematic fiction. Neo is both Greek for new as well as an anagram for one which underscores his Messianic title: The One. Anderson literally means “Son of Man,” the title Jesus used in the Gospels. Neo not only typifies Christ as the Savior, but also the Buddha as the Awakened One.
Like the Buddha, when Neo becomes aware of the enormity of human suffering, he devotes himself to training so that he will have the power to go into the Matrix without succumbing to the illusion. When he becomes truly aware of the falseness of the Matrix, he can see the “agent programs” who seek to destroy him simply as the machine code they really are.
However, like Christ, he manifests superhuman powers as he realizes his own true nature in both the Matrix and the Real World (spiritual reality). It’s interesting that the story actually shows two Resurrection scenes. The first one, which takes place at the climax of the first film shows the divine point-of-view; when Neo dies within the Matrix (our world), Trinity (in the Real World) brings him back to life with a kiss, symbolizing Christ being raised by God. The climax of the third movie is another Resurrection scene focussing on the human point-of-view of the Resurrection. In the Matrix, he voluntarily allows the satanic Agent Smith to kill him, and his sacrifice floods the false world with a glorious, purifying light. The result is that everyone still captive in the Matrix now has the choice to either enjoy a beautiful illusion (free from the agents) or to awaken and live in true freedom. Simultaneously, conscious people in the Real World enjoy divine peace, and the machines can no longer threaten them.
The Matrix’s myriad religious images are mostly Christian and Buddhist, but there are other elements in the mix. Although Zion is a city of about a hundred thousand people, its worship is tribal—a wild, sensual dance galvanizes the people as they prepare to face the battle that may destroy them. It’s one of the most interesting scenes in the trilogy, and a sad reminder that our modern religions have lost almost all traces of primal earthiness. Neo and Trinity’s lovemaking in the background pictures a restored human innocence as well as the spiritual lovemaking of God and the soul in Christian mysticism.
Chris Seay points out in The Gospel Reloaded that The Matrix is particularly consistent with the Gnostic movement in early Christianity, which emphasized the inadequacy and falseness of this world, with the need for enlightenment or awakening, (which they called gnosis. “knowledge”). Other Gnostic elements are the Oracle (Sophia, divine Wisdom) constantly urging those who call on her to look within for the Truth, and the Architect (the Demiurge), the deceptive spiritual force which keeps the massive illusion in place.
What The Matrix doesn’t show is the Reality beyond the “Real World”: the hidden splendor and unity of all things in God. Instead, it offers an original and powerful lesson on the urgency and challenge of living in true freedom: You are in the Matrix. It’s time to wake up.
Hollywood often receives criticism for the morality (or lack thereof) it portrays in movies, and few are more notorious than that odd creation of the past few years, the teen-oriented sex comedy. However, 40 Days and 40 Nights is an interesting and unexpected twist on the sex comedy genre. It’s not about teens and it has abstinence (temporary, at least) as its theme. (It’s been done before; Aristophanes’ Lysistrata comes to mind, but that was 2500 years ago!)
Not surprisingly, 40 Days and 40 Nights is a far different story from Lysistrata. The concerns are modern, the issues more serious, and the setting is-somewhat, at least, Christian. Christian?! A Christian sex comedy? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I’m joking, but 40 Days is about the sexual angst of a young man in San Francisco, Matt Sullivan, played by Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down), who happens to be a Christian, although his faith is far from control of his life. Matt has suffered a devastating breakup, and like many people (Christians included), does not know how to regain his grip on life. An early scene shows Matt in a confessional, describing that he feels he’s falling into “a black hole.”
Matt longs for love, but like many people, he settles for sex. His breakup with Nicole has left him floundering, and he covers his pain with sex, using weekly sexual flings as a drug. After six months, the meaninglessness is beginning to take its toll, and the “black hole” of his addictive behavior is leading to a crisis.
Matt visits his brother (a Catholic seminarian) at church on the first day of Lent and has a revelation: Since this is the start of Lent, the season of repentance, self-examination, and sacrifice to identify with Jesus’ temptations in the desert, he will give up sex for Lent. Not just “sex” alone, but all sexual activity, period: hugging, kissing, pornography, self-gratification. (This actually is the course of treatment used by sex-addiction 12-step groups.)
Having made a sacred vow, Matt steps out of the church feeling peace for the first time in months. A heavenly light shines on him, Jesus smiles at him, and Mary gives him an approving wink. And Matt is going to need all of this grace, because his vow is suddenly going to become very tough to fulfill: he is about to meet the woman of his dreams, Erica, (Shannon Sossamon, A Knight’s Tale). Furthermore, it’s quite an understatement to say he does not get any help from his friends: in fact, they begin betting that he’ll fail, which leads to some hilarious scenes.
An honest portrayal of religion and sexuality
Although this isn’t a “religious” movie per se, it has some of the most natural religious conversations I’ve ever seen in a theater, including talking about Jesus. There once was a time when the name of Jesus couldn’t even be mentioned even in “religious” movies. (Remember Bing Crosby as a priest in The Bells of St. Mary’s and Going My Way? There was little mention of God, and Jesus was completely unmentionable. In fact, in the latter movie, the priest actually had to say “Santa Claus believes in you” as a euphemism for God!) In 40 Days, Matt, his parents, his brother, and even his roommate talk freely and comfortably about their personal lives, from God and Jesus, to romance and sexuality.
This willingness (at least at the beginning) to treat the spiritual and sexual sides of life together is the most original aspect of 40 Days. We are all simultaneously spiritual and sexual beings, and many of us live in some degree of tension between the two. Due to the relentless “sexual evangelization” of society, young people (like Matt) are increasingly choosing to consider their bodies’ urges before moral teachings, and often (like Matt), experience severe and needless suffering because of it.
Another difference of this movie is a willingness to treat the light and dark sides of sexuality simultaneously. Matt’s parents describe their satisfaction with their sex lives and consider it a gift of God. On the other hand, there is an illustration of the danger of confusing sex and love. When Erica, who can’t conceive of love without sex, tries to seduce Josh, who prefers to abstain, it causes him great anguish, and touches on the selfishness inherent in creating that pressure. Other scenes show the entirely selfish attitudes of seduction without love, and the violation of sex without consent. The difficulty of celibacy within the Church also comes up.
. . . with a formulaic ending
Yet in the end, 40 Days not only shies away from its initial challenges to a sex-obsessed culture, but gives in with a vengeance. I would’ve loved for it to end with Matt taking Erica to church on Easter Sunday, but our friends in Hollywood weren’t feeling that adventurous, and unfortunately the actual ending undercuts almost all the potential which came before. That said, it still is one very funny movie. (One technical oversight: the director doesn’t seem to know that Lent is the period from Ash Wednesday to Easter. The festive decorations in the church for “the first day of Lent” weren’t appropriate to Ash Wednesday. And though Lent is called the “forty days,” it actually is forty-six days long.)
(A slightly different version of this review is mirrored on the Hollywood Jesus website.)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter …and Spring is the title of an enthralling movie I saw last night at the Naro. It’s a beautiful Korean movie about an old monk and a young monk in a small Buddhist monastery, and it’s almost as stunning as that other Korean movie about an old monk and a young monk in a small Buddhist monastery, 1989’s gorgeous Why has Bodhi-dharma Left for the East? The setting is magnificent and even surreal?the entire film is shot on a floating monastery in the middle of a lake and the surrounding hills. It’s a poetic exploration of the cycles of life and seasons, following one person’s life from boyhood to maturity. In Spring, he’s a child monk being raised by an old monk in the monastery, learning valuable lessons in compassion. In Summer, he’s a youth who ultimately leaves the monastery when he discovers the pleasures of love and sex, and in Fall, he returns to the monastery briefly as a young adult under surprising circumstances. In Winter, he returns to the monastery to stay, and in Spring, begins to raise a child at the monastery himself.
Spring has a much more substantial story than Bodhi-dharma. But it is not a Western story, and there are a few scenes which are baffling and even disturbing. Its vision of life is not at all sugar-coated…there is life and death, happiness and tragedy; but it is hauntingly beautiful and profoundly moving.
If you get a chance, see it. You won’t be disappointed.
I wasn’t the first out the gate to go to The Passion of the Christ. But of course I wanted to know about it, so I asked everyone for their impressions as they saw it. Almost unanimously, the answer was: it was very moving. And true enough, it is moving. I cried at several points, and I think someone would have to be either completely closed to it or else made of stone not to shed a tear. It’s a powerful film.
As well as having emotional power, Passion also remains strong from beginning to end, unlike for example, the CBS Jesus mini-series which started off with a bang and then deteriorated to a frantic succession of stock religious images. It’s also much more evenly directed than Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. The first two-thirds of Zeffirelli’s near-masterpiece truly were masterful, but Zeffirelli’s directorial skills foundered in his Passion sequence, and Robert Powell’s Jesus suddenly shifted gears to seem like a stoned, blue-eyed alien visitor to planet Earth.
A dispassionate Passion?
Nevertheless, I found the Passion somehow unsatisfying. Its emotional effect comes from three sources: brutality (and brutal it is), a sweeping, haunting, and moving score, and the viewer’s own faith.
That last part is crucial. Of all the Jesus films I’ve seen, Gibson’s Passion does the least to give any context or interpretation to Christ’s suffering. We aren’t shown why Jesus choose the path to the Cross, what he taught, how he impacted the lives of his disciples, his miracles, nor his radical message of universal and unconditional love. The emphasis is strictly on the Passion (the word originally meant “suffering”) of the Suffering Servant. Christians bring with them the necessary context for the film to be meaningful, but some non-Christians who see it may well see little more than an unbearably graphic depiction of a man being tortured to death. This probably accounts for some of the controversy around this film.
To be fair, Brother Mel does use several flashbacks (brilliantly, BTW) to try to give a taste of who Jesus was. While they’re well done, these scenes feel almost like afterthoughts. A shame, too, since they show so much missed potential, and left me longing for more. There’s a shot of Jesus falling as a child, and Mary comforting him. A short sequence of him working as a carpenter. And two or three more very short flashbacks of him teaching are all that we get. More flashbacks, and longer, could have made this far richer.
Show us enough of the Sermon on the Mount and his relationship with his disciples to realize that this Godman is proclaiming something incredibly revolutionary, and previously unheard of—to love—not just friends, but enemies, too! To rejoice not just in good times, but during slander, violence and persecution to ourselves. That the Kingdom of God is here, and all who love are part of it! That message is just as unacceptable today as it was 2000 years ago, (to Christians and non-Christians alike), but that is the message he taught and lived. Interspersing an unhurried and sensitive portrayal of his message with the brutality of the Via Dolorosa could have been much more moving and meaningful.
A Passion for the age of Fear Factor
Passion is almost unbearably violent for those who haven’t become desensitized to violence. Is it a case of wretched excess? Some find it too much, some don’t. Count me with those who did. The Gospel writers didn’t want to relive the torture and brutalization of the Lord—the accounts are succinct, anyone familiar with Roman scourging and crucifixion didn’t need (and certainly wouldn’t want) the gory details on precisely how mutilated his skin became. On the other hand, most of us now are ignorant of the terrible whips the Romans used, as well as the slow agony (often over days) of suffocation by crucifixion. However, having read The Passion of Christ from a Medical Point of View a couple of times, I can say that simply imagining the horror in my head was more effective. Watching the violence spelled out on the big screen (for well over an hour) seemed gratuitous and offensive.
Subtlety, understatement, letting the viewer’s mind fill in the details—nuance is becoming lost in modern cinema. We’re becoming a bit more like the Romans, we relish grossness, we want to see blood and guts. If the age of Fear Factor needs a Passion film to shake the most jaded viewer, this is it. Is it necessary? Maybe for some. But just as with the loudest note in a symphony, or the brightest color in a painting, the hardest-hitting effect in a film should not be over-used.
Creativity and literalism
Jesus films have generally come in two basic genres, the literal and the creative. Jesus of Nazareth, the CBS Jesus miniseries, and The Gospel of John are all prime examples of the literal kind, while The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Godspell are examples of the creative kind (which usually piss off conservatives).
Passion is almost exclusively literal. Gibson tried to produce it as realistically as possible, even going to the extent of having the Romans speak Latin and the Jews speak Aramaic. However, it’s baffling why he fails on very simple historical matters when he’s obviously put so much effort into historicity.
An example: the Latin the Romans speak is not the Classical Latin of the times, but Church Latin. While Church Latin is pronounced much like Italian, Classical Latin is quite different: veritas (truth) would be pronounced “weritas,” for example. Any Classical Latin scholar could’ve taught the entire cast the correct pronunciation in an hour.
I’m totally unqualified to judge the Aramaic in the Passion, but my hat is off to Gibson for doing it. Certainly Jesus and the disciples spoke Aramaic as their everyday language, and while the New Testament was written in Greek, its writers thought in Aramaic. There are simply dozens, if not hundreds of passages that make more sense when retranslated back into Aramaic or Hebrew than they do straight from the Greek. Lack of Aramaic studies is one of the biggest holes in contemporary scholarship. Anything which raises awareness of the importance of this vanishing language is helpful.
The costuming seemed badly off. The costumes of the Temple guards seemed almost impossibly heavy. Would anyone in a Mediterranean climate don what looks like 30 pounds of leather? Come on! And the Sanhedrin’s robes also pushed the edge of plausibility. The Romans’ armor looked more comfortable by comparison! (If you want to see superb costuming and sets, rent Jesus of Nazareth. In my opinion, no other director has even close to Zeffirelli in this regard).
Details of the crucifixion were also implausible. The nails go through Jesus’ palms, and he strangely carries a cross shaped very differently from those of the other two who were crucified that day. It’s a Christian cross! And Calvary now is a mountain towering hundreds of feet above Jerusalem, which would make crucifixion a pretty arduous punishment for the Roman soldiers themselves. Let’s face it, they were brutal and efficient; it’s said that Pilate crucified thousands during his rule in Palestine. Again, Zeffirelli’s depiction of ready scaffolding just outside the city seems so much more right than Gibson’s.
Hieronymous Bosch, “Christ Carrying the Cross” c. 1490
Some have charged the film with anti-Semitism. I can’t agree, although it is easy to why some Jewish groups were alarmed. To emphasize his agony as much as possible, Gibson gives us beatings that are never mentioned in the Bible, and here we see Jesus beaten to a pulp by the Temple guards before the Romans even see him. But on the other hand, the Romans have far more screen time being nasty than the Sanhedrin and Temple guards, and there is an abundance of reminders that all of Jesus’ followers were Jewish. For heaven’s sake, they’re speaking Aramaic! Probably the biggest cause for this perception is that the baddies, whether Roman or Jewish, greatly overact. There are times when the characters around Jesus look more like the leering maniacs in the Hieronymous Bosch painting “Christ Carrying the Cross” (see picture) than officials and soldiers.
What might have been?
Sometimes the literal film dares to do something creative with the Gospel story: the CBS miniseries had Satan appear in a business suit, taking Jesus outside of time and space in the Temptation sequence. The final scene (deleted by CBS) showed Jesus alive in the modern world, playing with a crowd of children.
Mel Gibson has several of these creative touches as well, some more effective than others. A less effective example is the repeated appearance of Satan as a bald androgynous person in black, watching Christ suffer from the midst of the crowd. Much more effective is the all-too-brief Resurrection scene. It’s stunningly beautiful.
But my favorite shot in the film was something entirely creative and wholly unexpected: a raindrop falls like a tear from heaven and shakes the earth. It’s simply brilliant, and packs an emotional wallop far beyond that of the whippings and scourgings. That incredible scene made me wonder what Gibson is really capable of. What could he have come up with if he wrote a screenplay based on how he felt about the Passion, rather than how he thought it happened? Surely that would have been a masterpiece.
You won’t find Hardcore Zen at the bookstore by looking for a cover with a pretty “Zen” picture. This one is about showing us what we don’t want to see; in keeping with that spirit, the cover features a toilet. Brad Warner uses many expressions of the kind which Captain Kirk described as “colorful metaphors” in Star Trek IV, some of which are really striking, “like a pit bull [on] a postman’s ass,” to quote Brad. This ain’t your grandma’s Zen book.
A friend asked me a couple of years ago what I found so valuable about Buddhism, and I replied that Buddhism seemed obsessed with reality. Brad seems to agree, and the difference between reality and “religion” is a running theme throughout the book.
Brad is a married American Zen priest living and teaching in Tokyo, whose day job is making Ultraman monster movies. In keeping with that theme of learning from reality, Brad teaches Zen from his own life, and the book is about one-third autobiography, and two-thirds hard-hitting Zen lessons. He discovered Zen while a punk-rock musician studying at Kent State University (at the same time I was there, BTW). From there he went to Japan, and found employment in making cheesy monster movies, a Soto Zen master, and a wife. Hmm, did I say hard-hitting? Isn’t Zen supposed to be something like a spacious room covered with floor cushions, perfumed with incense, New Age music rippling through the air, and a copy of The Art of Tea on the coffee table? No, it isn’t; It’s about discovering your true nature, and Brad’s mission is to shock us into realizing how desperately we avoid our reality, even with most of what we consider “spirituality.”
Hardcore Zen does have some flaws. Sometimes Brad seems to condemn whatever awakening experiences and traditions which are not like the Zen ideal. My suspicion is that although enlightenment is only one thing, all who experience it do so differently, and will use different terms to describe it.
a brilliant introduction
But if you can take an occasional jibe to your tradition, you’ll find that Warner Roshi is an excellent teacher. His explication of the Heart Sutra is the best I’ve ever read, and his chapter on the “The World of Demons” by itself is worth much more than the price of the entire book. Brad explains how practicing zazen lifts the lid on the things we’ve tried to hide from ourselves, and often reveals what we didn’t want to see: makyo (our psychological demons). This extremely helpful chapter gives excellent advice on how to cope when we start seeing ourselves as we really are instead of how we’ve told ourselves we are. Beyond that, this chapter also has the most lucid explanation of the “no-self” concept in Zen, which can be helpful even to those who have been practicing Zen for years.
The next chapter, “In My Next Life, I Want to Come Back as a Pair of Lucy Liu’s Panties” (I wonder what his wife thinks of that title!) follows, with the clearest explanation I’ve ever seen on how the Buddhist concept of rebirth differs significantly from the general idea of reincarnation. Brad shows how our concepts of the afterlife are usually far off the mark because we don’t understand this present life, which happens in the present moment.
“No Sex with Cantaloupes” (great chapter titles, huh?) is a delightful perspective on personal and social Buddhist morality through the ten training precepts, with an emphasis on its importance: “There are nitwits out there who’ll tell you Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, isn’t concerned with morality, that it’s enlightenment that really counts. They’re wrong. Enlightenment is crap. Living morally and ethically is what really matters.”
That leads into another “hardcore” message: the waste of searching for “enlightenment.” Soon after I realized that enlightenment is real, and there actually are people who maintain a constant awareness of non-duality, I succumbed to the disease of enlightenment-seeking, and from which my own teacher had been trying to cure me. Something clicked in me when reading this:
Zazen isn’t about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It’s about facing who and what you really are, every single goddamn moment. And you aren’t bliss, I’ll tell you that right now. You’re a mess. We all are. But here’s the thing. That mess is itself enlightenment. You’ll eventually see that the “you” that’s a mess isn’t really “you” at all. But whether you notice your own enlightenment or not is entirely inconsequential. Whether you think of yourself as enlightened or not has nothing to do with the real state of affairs.
This is an extremely important point which all the thousands of enlightenment seekers in the world would do well to take to heart. The bottom line, Brad says, is that reality is real. Enlightenment isn’t escaping from it, but going into it, and finding the treasure inside every part and every moment. Hardcore Zen ends with a compelling appeal to practice zazen, the concentrated practice of looking at reality. Zazen can change us, and the world, from within, by destroying the self-interest that comes with the myth of self. He closes with some clear, simple instructions for beginning Zen meditation, written with the confidence of a master who has himself been transformed by this practice.
by St. John of the Cross, adapted by Loreena McKinnitt
Upon a darkened night The flame of love was burning in my breast And by a lantern bright I fled my house while all in quiet rest
Shrouded by the night And by the secret stair I quickly fled The veil concealed my eyes While all within lay quiet as the dead.
(Chorus)
O, night thou was my guide! O, night more loving than the rising sun! O, night that joined the Lover to the beloved one! Transforming each of them into the other.
Upon that misty night In secrecy beyond such mortal sight Without a guide or light Than that which burned as deeply in my heart.
That fire ’twas led me on And shone more bright than of the midday sun To where He waited still It was a place where no one else could come.
(Chorus)
Within my pounding heart Which kept itself entirely for Him He fell into His sleep beneath the cedars all my love I gave.
From o’er the fortress walls The wind would brush His hair against His brow And with its smoother hand caressed my every sense it would allow.
(Chorus)
I lost my self to Him And laid my face upon my Lover’s breast And care and grief grew dim As in the morning’s mist became the light. There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair.
It’s certainly not a perfect adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s popular thriller, but director Doug Liman’s production of The Bourne Identity (with Matt Damon and Franka Potente) remains a decent yarn about a character who doesn’t know who he is. (It fails as a thriller, though, because the audience is always way ahead of the protagonist.) Yet it’s a great metaphor for a situation that applies to all of us.
Amnesia as the simple loss of personal identity is rare, but it remains a perennial subject in novels, film and television. Why? I suspect its universal appeal is because loss of identity is a universal phenomenon. After all, when you were born, you had no “identity.” You came from somewhere, but where? You were someone, but who? This was the amnesia with which we all came into the world.
Jason Bourne is a man in trouble. He is pulled out of the ocean by a fishing trawler, and treated for two bullet wounds in the back. Obviously someone wanted him dead, but who? He has no idea who his would-be killer is, and his problems are much more immediate—he can’t remember his own name, or anything about who he is. He begins investigating himself from external clues, and finds he owns a safe-deposit box full of wads of cash in different currencies, along with numerous passports, each with a different identity.
But within hours, you met your parents. Like the passports in Bourne’s safe-deposit box, they gave you a name, and a start in the world. As you continued to grow up with your family, they gave you your story, and that, they told you, was your identity. It told you what was right and wrong, which country was yours, and what beliefs were yours, and if you were “good” or “bad” as well.
Jason soon learns that he’s still in a fight for his life. He endeavors to find his real identity—not just a name, to stop the madness he’s trapped in. He learns that he is fluent in many languages, and has shocking skill as a deadly fighter. He finds a woman who comes to his aid, and depends on her to help him to stay alive, and piece the clues together.
Just receiving a name and a story from our family wasn’t satisfactory to most of us anymore than it was to Jason. After childhood, the time came when many of us refused to accept our identity from our parents. We tried for a while to find out who we were by ourselves and with our friends. We looked at our skills and activities, likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, and found some labels that seemed to fit for a while: jock, brain, stud, babe, bitch, fighter, wimp, winner, stoner.
But looking at his skills, actions, and tastes doesn’t give Jason his identity. He is still unable to determine why people everywhere are trying to kill him. However, in reading a newspaper article, he learns the vital truths about his past: he’s a CIA assassin, a professional killer. And the people who want him dead are none other than his former colleagues. (BTW, the audience has known this since almost the beginning, so this is not a spoiler!)
Like Jason, we look to our past story and our present conditions to know who we are. You were hired by the company five years ago, so you’re a worker for Acme Widgets. You have three kids, so you’re a mother or father. You love your spouse, so you’re a good husband or wife. You love your country, so you’re a patriot. You believe in God, so you’re a Christian or Muslim or something else.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with these roles. But are our roles and life-situations truly us ? Who are we when companies lay off employees, when families split, and when loved ones die? What remains? Who are we, independent of our circumstances?
Jason gets a glimpse of his true nature when he stops looking to his past and his role. In one wonderful moment in the film, he looks into his heart and says, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Spiritual teachers tell us that we need to stop taking our identities from others and find our “true nature.” Nothing external to us can be our true nature. How could it be? Jesus asked, “what would it profit someone to gain the whole world and lose their true self (soul)?” Zen masters ask their students “what was your original face, before your parents were born?” What were you before you were born? What will you be after you die? What is constant about you? If there is anything unchanging, it must be here, right now. Finding and living from your true nature—that constant, sacred core of your being—is the ultimate self-knowledge.
We come from that which was never born. Ours is “The Unborn Identity.” Around the world, we call our true source by many names—God, Father, Brahman, Nirvana, and others. But understanding it mentally is no more helpful than reading it as a name on a passport. For this task, don’t accept the quick labels and lengthy descriptions of your mind. Look within your heart. Ask “Who am I?” Keep asking until you know, and know from the Ground of your Being.
https://www.frimmin.com/2004/07/05/the-matrix-saga/In film, the exploration of an unreal world is often a vehicle for exploring spiritual truths. This was most famously done by The Matrix Trilogy. However, a year before The Matrix appeared, a delightful fantasy named Pleasantville offered its own insights. Pleasantville is a wonderful story that entertains on more levels than a millionaire’s wedding cake, from being the simple fantasy of modern teens trapped in a 50s sitcom, to a marvelous retelling of the Garden of Eden which might provoke you to look again at the questions you learned to ignore when you first heard them in Sunday School.
Pleasantville tells the story of David, a nerdy high-school student (Tobey Maguire) obsessed with a “gee-whiz” 50’s sitcom called “Pleasantville” (perhaps inspired by Father Knows Best). When David gets into a fight with his sex-obsessed sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), they both soon find themselves transported into the world of Pleasantville by a strange TV repairman (Don Knotts).
Trouble in Paradise
Once in Pleasantville, David and Jennifer find they are living the lives of the main characters, Bud and Mary Sue, complete with their characters’ families, friends, and after-school jobs. Although David is amused by living in his fantasy world, Jennifer is horrified to be trapped in a black-and-white world where no one knows a thing about sex. Not one to live by a script, she seduces her boyfriend, bringing free will and the “knowledge of good and evil,” into Pleasantville. And a rose turns red, bringing color into Pleasantville for the first time.
David is horrified that Jennifer has begun sabotaging this paradise, and warns that she’s “messing with their whole universe.” Jennifer’s answer is “maybe it needs to be messed with.”
And maybe it does. Pleasantville is a stagnant ideal of perfection—the weather forecast is always “high 72, low 72, another beautiful sunny day.” The high school basketball team never loses—in fact, the players never miss a shot. They actually can’t miss, even if they try! Firefighters have nothing to do but save cats, and mothers nothing but to cook, play bridge, and adore their families. But as Rabbi David Cooper writes, “without the potential for perfecting, perfection itself would be imperfect.” Pleasantvillers have no sin, no strife, no worries. There are no achievements because there are no challenges. There is no passion, and no love has ever been tried and proven. There is no “knowledge of good and evil”—all books are blank, all conversations vapid, and all roads lead nowhere.
Since the seed of the “knowledge of good and evil” has been planted, it begins to grow. The changes of growing awareness, of people being stretched beyond the roles of their Pleasantville characters, are shown as color. A girl’s tongue turns pink. A jukebox playing rock and roll has colored lights. A couple falls in love and cease being black and white.
David himself changes Pleasantville, although only accidentally at first, by letting Mr. Johnson, his boss (Jeff Daniels) know that not everything has to be done the same way every time. Soon Johnson dreams of painting, and falls in love with Bud’s mother (Joan Allen). A turning point comes when David stops fighting knowledge, and starts spreading it. When he tells the stories of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, suddenly the books in the library fill up with words. And as he falls for Margaret (Marley Shelton), he becomes even more dedicated to helping the evolving awareness of the town, and he refuses being sent back by the repairman who wants to prevent further damage to the “reruns.”
But change comes with a price. Whether it’s the basketball team losing, rain and fire threatening the perfect environment, or a marriage collapsing, the changes seem most unpleasant for the many of Pleasantville’s citizens. Negative effects range from heartbreak, to riots, bigotry, and legal persecution.
As Jennifer is somewhat of a serpent figure, introducing temptation, David becomes a Christ figure, fighting the bigotry and violence rising in Pleasantville, and urging the citizens to use their free will for beauty and good.
The Myth of Perfection
There’s a natural human tendency to resist change and long for a perfect place and time. In religion, we see it in the past in Eden, and in the future in Heaven. It’s just being here, now, that we can’t stand. This isn’t just a Christian phenomenon. Gnostics taught that the world is so evil that the Creator had to be a false god, and many in Eastern religions seek enlightenment in order to no longer be born into “conditioned existence”.
The genius of Pleasantville is that it gets us to look at the Eden story closely, and ask some serious questions: Was free will a mistake? Wouldn’t it have been better if Adam hadn’t sinned, and mankind stayed innocent? Wasn’t God ultimately to blame, since he knew everything that would happen?
Until I began studying Christian mystical theology, I, like most Christians, assumed the Fall was a bad thing. Even C.S. Lewis, in his paradise story, Perelandra, seemed to feel a Fall must be averted on the new world by any means possible. But an unprejudiced look at the Genesis story shows God felt otherwise: An omniscient God, knowing full well what would happen—disease, death, despair included—put two curious moral infants, completely ignorant of good and evil, in reach of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and said “don’t touch”. Just for good measure, he made sure the tree would be the central feature of the Garden and it would come complete with a cunning serpent to persuade them to eat the “forbidden” fruit.
We know what happened. and since then, we’re inclined to believe that the world is “lost”, that somehow things “got away” from God. We wonder if free will was a mistake and we mistrust it. We’re conditioned to not recognize that this was the divine plan all along.
The night I joined the Catholic Church, I remembered being surprised by the words of the Exultet, the great Easter Vigil hymn that proclaims:
O happy fault! O necessary sin of Adam, that gained for us so great a Redeemer!
This idea is called the felix culpa (happy fault), that Adam is to be thanked for his sin bringing the divine light of Christ to the world. In C. S. Lewis’ science-fiction novel, Perelandra, the Fall is averted on that world, but there is a mention that “the greater thing” cannot happen there. Without this fall from pure innocence, there can be no redemption. Recognizing this upholds a radiant faith, that not now, not ever, and absolutely never has God lost nor will he lose control of this world, for even when we work outside his will, we cannot live outside his plan!
The fruit we deal with is not evil, but the knowledge of good and evil. As Pleasantville suggests, an innocent can have no real knowledge of good. The knowledge of good and evil is necessary to be able to choose the good. Otherwise, we are automatons, scripted characters living perfect, scripted lives. There’s a powerful metaphor for awakening here. We need to become conscious, aware of the fact that we are alive, aware of our awesome ability to choose, aware that God lives in us, and that we live, breathe, and have our being in him. Only then can we truly live as Jesus told us to, as cunning as serpents and as harmless as doves (Mt. 10:16).
Want to remember Adam and Eve this year?
St. Adam of Eden, March 10, Catholic; Sts. Adam and Eve, December 24, Orthodox.Source: The Old Hermit’s Almanac, by Fr. Edward Hays
I was actually going to pass on making any mention of The Day after Tomorrow?it was a fun way to kill a couple of hours, a blend of sci-fi and disaster movie. It suffered from poor marketing and poor timing?being released against major blockbusters like Harry Potter III and Spider-Man 2; as well undeservedly negative criticism, much of which was ranting about possible political motives rather than simple critiques of a Sunday afternoon escape.
