What if the corporate orgy of greed that stains human history was worth it just for putting a few vital tools in the hands of the masses?
Here is proof that the political stage is not being managed by a secret cadre of money-grubbing fascists. If such a group existed, they would never have given us all these cameras. It’s their downfall because the camera equals freedom. It’s development is revolutionary to the evolution of humanity. I’m not even talking about the content of the image in the camera yet. Just use a camera and feel your mind’s eye snap open. The mere act of using it frees you from linear time.
Examine now, what the content in the camera is capable of doing for accelerating evolution. Unlimited cameras in the hands of the masses become a tool for comprehending the deep range of human potential in our global village. I’m talking about information that no one can get a head start on. We’re all looking at ourselves in the multidimensional global mirror now and the image is in a state of continuous development.
Why only talk about the commercial potential of this phenomenon? While government and environment go bankrupt from rapid technological and population growth, the neurological and spiritual dimensions of humankind are experiencing exploding growth. Never has the individual been so free to make so many connections guided by personal choice. The opportunities for the free and fast exchange of knowledge among individuals is highly encouraging to our evolutionary advancement. We need to use this to bring the environment and economy along for this rennaissance. The more connections the better. How much more do we need for these connections to grow into the ultimate connection? Until they outnumber the disconnections
While this new phenomenon is happening to us our understanding is growing so fast that no one can tell us what it all means, or where we are going. It will continue taking us there at the speed of light for the next many generations. This event is historically equal in significance to the evolutionary milestone of when our early predecessor first recognized himself in a pool of water. He finally quit thrashing the thing and realized, “the face in the pond is my reflection.”
At the movies, while we look outward at our reflection, we gaze inward with imagination, to fill in the implied off screen context. The data our imagination chooses to supply is our individual reaction to what is shown onscreen. Our reaction is filtered through our experience. A filmmaker must master his lenses and we, the audience, are his last filter. If we see a baseball player crouching with a bat, a catcher and umpire lined up behind him, the filmmaker must make sure our imagination fills in the ball field with all the players in place and a pitch racing toward home plate.
A movie is a spool of time, literally. Its a rolled up miniature record of exactly what action was taking place in front of a lens in a certain light and speed at a particular place and time. By the time we see it, the action is consigned to the past. When we talk about going to the movie, we refer to the place where the past is rewound and waiting in the future. When we get there, since it will be the first time we’ve watched it, it will belong to our present.
Let’s watch a motion picture of a particular period in the past, a famous event in history, one that we all know about, or not. For instance, Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” an international success. We follow the life of the last emperor of China from privileged birth, to child king, to his overthrow, exile, and repatriation in Mau’s revolutionary republic. The past present and future of these unique characters unroll for us in all their complexity and irony. The story brings the past into high relief, the last emperor’s past as well as our own. Where are you and I off screen, in that historical movie? The audience watching the film, in this case, become representatives of the emperor’s future. The dynasty to come.
Our brains are having such a great time with all this time travel. Lately they’ve figured out a way to become even more involved. Where movies were once the viewpoints of writers, filmmakers, actors and producers, now they are the frontier of common folk. We may just be watching a home movie of someone’s dog saying “ I love you” on You Tube, but whether we are conscious of it or not, our brain goes to work with that lens to delve deeper into big issues. The direction of the lens, the size and shape of its field of view, the sharpness, distance of its focus, the quality of light it refracts, all impact the story but our brain can make use of any lens, professional or amateur.
Anything that can be made with a camera supplies part of the bigger picture for the brain. Films illuminate the most important keys to our survival. They connect us with knowledge we need to bring along with us into the future.
This month’s blog will take the disaster in Japan for it’s theme. May those suffering the most find the strength to endure and may all of us join together for a solution.
I’m going to let a character named Billy Pritchard from my most recent finished feature film screen play make a statement on behalf of us all. Let’s just listen in without any preamble…
Billy steps forward and adjusts the microphone like he’s done it a hundred times.
BILLY-“Brothers and Sisters, let me have a quick word with you. I’m Billy Pritchard. Some of you may know who I am. It’s not important. I used to have a Sunday morning television show. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because, well, you’re not ready to go home yet are you? Happy Independence to all of you!”
The crowd answers with enthusiasm.
Billy looks off stage now. The crowd sounds intensify. He’s getting a nod from the stage manager, so he goes on. He looks down at Sallassa who is waving at him with a big smile. Donna is next to her beaming with pride.
Jules is at the foot of the stage with the camera tilted up at Billy shouting directions.
JULES-“We’re live. Go preacher.”
BILLY-“I’ve always believed in heaven and hell.”
He pauses, gathering courage. Some in the crowd murmur their encouragement.
BILLY-“You know, unbelievers liked to make fun, but I ask you, believers and unbelievers alike, what more literal proof of a bona-fide hell does anyone need? As we live and breathe, the flaming bowels of the under world swell with fires from, petroleum and nuclear origins, in which you, me and our dear Mother Nature are slowly roasting.”
The crowd makes a collective groan.
BILLY-“The very air and skies are burning which was predicted by the prophets. You say “But the Lord was supposed to come and take us first.” SORRY! That happened, some say sixty years ago. Everybody knows the atomic bomb was the Antichrist. Stop pretending that you didn’t know that. Do the math.”
Blacky has been standing about half way back from the stage and he’s heard enough. Woolman stands next to him.
BLACKY-“Prove it.”
On a screen in his mind, Billy hunkers down into his familiar crouch. His body remains standing though, stage struck, trembling before the sight of Blacky. Then Billy sees the camera and gazes in to the tunnel of Jules’ lens.
BILLY-“You say, ‘ Well If this is hell, why didn’t God take my God fearing grandma?’”
BLACKY(shouts above him)-“This man’s speech is unclean.”
JULES-No sir. He’s talking about Hell in the bible.
BILLY-“I’m saying we become captives of that place even before we die.”
BLACKY-“That’s foolishness from a fool.”
BILLY-“I beg your pardon sir, but, the Lord promised,’I am retuning very soon,’ did he not? It’s been a long, long time since somebody said the Lord said that. I’m here to tell you the Judgment Day is past and over with and we did not pass over with it. So get over it.”
Woolman makes his very first utterance.
WOOLMAN-“Boo.” A few others join in
Billy cocks his head at him, puzzled, but manages to keep momentum.
BILLY-“We’ll pass with the gas of the underworld now with a grievous longing for the artifacts of heaven, which we gave up far too easily here on earth.”
BLACKY-“Hold your tongue.”
WOOLMAN-‘Boo.”
BILLY-“I know it’s a shock. I’m sorry. It’s hard to believe, but we’re damned.”
WOOLMAN-“Boo.”
A few more in the crowd join in. Jules is rubbernecking now, capturing the confrontation ground zero.
BILLY-“What if it’s true? Think about it.”
BLACKY-“Stop now, Voice of Satan.”
More booing ensues. Suddenly there is a screech in the crowd nearby. It is Bo, the fiddle player, strafing his strings. All eyes go to the noise on which the fiddler capitalizes.
BO-“I’ve never heard anyone talk like this man. I’m curious. Isn’t everybody else? I say let him speak. It’s only his opinion.”
With that his bow strikes fiddle strings once more. The crowd generally goes with him, some even applaud and whistle. Blacky shouts over the noise.
BLACKY-“That one is bogus too. They’re working this crowd.”
BO-“Come on. Let him perform. Everybody else has. Free speech is what 4th of July’s about.”
BLACKY-“Devil speaks in him.”
Jules shouts.
JULES-“Hells bells. It’s show business. Shut up and let a devil work.”
WOOLMAN-“Boo.”
Billy waits. Now the crowd rally’s for him. Billy has their attention and so must speak. He fixes his eyes on Blacky.
BILLY-“What’s your argument with me, brother? I’m not defending opinions, dogmas, ideologies, gossip, none of that.”
Woolman starts making for the back of the crowd.
BILLY-“Whichever way we’ve disagreed about how things ought to be done, there are really only five simple needs: clean air, food, water, shelter, and security. That’s all it takes to make this earth a paradise, for everyone. This is the meaning of the cross. That’s all there is. Don’t you keep asking yourself, how hard can it be? I do. Why are we waiting? Have we abandoned ourselves and fallen so far back that we could not even see the Lord when he came and divided His winners from The Enemy’s losers?”
Billy claps his hands for emphasis.
BILLY-“Boom! The righteous, just, off they went without notice. Nobody bothered to tell the losers. Is that it?”
Crowd answers a resounding “no”.
BILLY-“I hope not either. But, friends and strangers, believers and non-believers, we don’t have to live like this. Heaven exists for us now if we want it. This earth can be a paradise. We could provide the necessities for ourselves, and each other. The command, to love one another, grants us total freedom to achieve that dream. That awful smog in the air is the burning consequence of our refusal to do so thus far.’
WOOLMAN-‘Hypocrite.”
Billy’s look into Jules’ lens lets us know he knows is a close up.
BILLY-“Ladies and gentlemen. That man has followed me for days pretending he did not have the gift of speech. That he is choosing to reveal his voice now, I find startlingly suspicious.”
Blacky-“You are a disgraced preacher.”
To cut it off, Billy quickly folds hands and bows head.
BILLY-“Thank you for your time and attention ladies and gentlemen. From the bottom of my heart, I ask your blessing and forgiveness. May the Lord bless and forgive us all.”
He surrenders the microphone and plunges into the crowd after Woolman.
A new psychedelic movie I watched last week thrust me back to bardos I had not wandered since the 70’s. “Enter the Void” concerns the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”. The movie is shocking and heavy-handed. The acting isn’t really very good, but the film is relentless once it hooks you. You’re glad they’re not better actors or it might leave a deeper scar. At more than one point I had to take my eyes off the screen. It was too long. So is hell. I looked around at the audience. No one was breathing. The movie theater felt like a Petri dish. Images and sound suspended us in a synthesis of color/shadow, movement, noise/music, editing, “high” art and blood red drama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRxDP–e-Y
For an entirely different example of psychedelic cinema, have a look at another recent popular film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.” This hilarious and prolonged derangement of the senses comes courtesy of the video game that is teenager Scott Pilgrim’s life. Hallucinogenic stories like these are able to sell their hyper-realities thanks to a firmly established psychedelic appetite in the modern audience. Like acid tests, the lens tracks themes of Pilgrim’s progress from random to ego shaking. Scott racks up more and more multidimensional payoffs as he learns new rules and adapts to shifting circumstances.
It is good to see the psychedelic experience imaginatively presented in popular movies because of how much that can help us think outside the box.
Drugs get all the credit for psychedelic culture but motion pictures have always probed those possibilities. As far back as the 1929 silent classic “Man With A Movie Camera,” pioneer filmmakers undertook experiments to alter perceptions. They ingeniously employed superimposition, speeding up or slowing down, bending, blending, splintering, splicing; wielding light and shadow to peck away surface appearance and reveal essence. The current reach toward perfecting 3D and digital FX are the continuation of that tradition.
Before film came along altered states were cataloged by anthropologists, but early hallucinogenic accounts turn up everywhere from the Book of Revelation to the Rig Veda. Who can say which visions were drug influenced and which were not? The “Tibetan Book of the Dead” catalogs elevator stops, or “bardo’s,” of a soul’s journey back to reincarnation after death without mention of drugs. Timothy Leary re-published the same text as a tripping manual.
Drug experimentation became a fad in the 1960’s. Hallucinogens inoculate culture with what medicine societies and shaman of many traditions have known for millennia. Plant medicines provided an alternative perspective, a glimpse outside the box. Sound familiar? The digital revolution carries this potential now.
These days “outside the box” is a commonplace term for innovative thinking and drugs are by no means the only way to achieve it. Movie makers keep on paving the way in popular culture. Whether or not you ever ingested hallucinogens, we all experience them through their influence in music, movies, fashion, advertising, games and so on. For half a century now, psychedelic culture has branched upward into mass consciousness.
The digital revolution, it was said by drug guru Timothy Leary shortly before his death, is the new LSD. It allows for an increase of information to pass between ourselves and the larger living, breathing organism of which we are all part. Psychedelics work to inhibit the brain filter that prevents overload. Take that filter off and senses, emotions, memories expand, awareness roots and blooms. With psychedelics then, and cyberspace now, heaven and hell are states of mind.
Social networking is not a new phenomenon. It has been studied for at least as far back as the late 1800’s. This rapidly expanding online industry is dependent on an imperative that developed in our brains long before our species took human form. The social network has been a dynamic artifact of evolution going back to our single cell origins.
At this current apex of social evolution, each of us is a channel or wave of information passing through the global mind. Our claim on this virtual reality is substantiated by photographs, videos, posts, friends networks, emails, texts, tweets, peeps, treats and how far out our contacts reach to meet. Social networking sites have already eclipsed pornography as the prime generators of traffic on the Web. The popularity of these sites is largely due to their efficiency in helping us conduct the mating ritual and they help us do so by getting our story out.
Every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view. A social networking website is a point of view in search of character and plot. We hear stories all the time. Stories are so important to us that everyone wants to be the main character in one. The point of view in social networking is that a person with an interesting story makes valuable contacts. We want that story to be told to as many people as possible so that we have the best chance of finding good contacts. Stories inspire us to want to be extraordinary, to raise the level of our game, to do something that everyone recognizes as worthwhile.
A social networking site is a place where a person puts their best foot forward and shows us the character that they want to be. It is also a place where we explore the characters and stories of others. We search for people with common values and complimentary needs to enrich our story and theirs, or to reconnect with people who enriched past chapter’s of our life’s story. In cyber-culture, the mating ritual has found a place to express many latent emotions. This is good. This is healthy. We keep a wary eye out for predators, but also trust in the benefits of widening our social circle.
For the corporate interests, consumer profiles are pieced together from demographic data gathered by the way we perform the ritual. How old we are, where we live, who we live with, what we like and what we buy make up the character and plot of that story but who supplies the point of view? If every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view, we must realize that the creators of these social websites are are supplying the point of view to the story that we are supplying with our character and plot .
Facebook, for example, is a blank page upon which a person’s story is written. What and how we write about ourselves, our choice and use of language, our preferences in friends, music, television, movies and popular websites make up the character and plot of that story. The viewpoint of that story is imposed by the author of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the one unifying connection that runs through the entire Facebook demographic.
We may not all be Mark’s friend, but we are all actors on his stage and legally, he has a legitimate claim to authorship of the entire digital output of his enterprise including our profiles. However it is important for us members to keep in mind an online community is made up of individuals who are connected in ways more significant than a social networking site can encompass. The real social network exists whether or not Facebook or BoobTube take part in it. The social network was not invented by any one. You are the social network. They can take away all the computers, cameras, recruiters and programmers and the social network will still be alive and well, because no one can take away your story.
