Thursday, March 28, 2013

God vs. Consciousness

I was trying to think of an image to illustrate a comment on the film "The Life of Pi". The one where the man says his story will help a writer find GOD. He tells his story of being a ship wreck survivor on a lifeboat with a tiger (who kills the hyena who ate the zebra and orangutan) as his companion - except an alternate story he tells investigators is that he was the tiger who killed the hyena (still sexy Gerard Depardieu as the fat greedy cook) who ate the sailor and killed his objecting mother. At the end he makes it clear that one can choose the preferred version of the story, as did the writer and the investigators (both preferred the tiger story). And he says “and so it goes with God.” Meaning you can choose your God - or create your own reality - or something. 

Director Ang Lee said in a 2012 interview: "I wanted to use water because the film is talking about faith, and it contains fish, life and every emotion for Pi. And air is God, heaven and something spiritual and death. That's how I see it. I believe the thing we call faith or God is our emotional attachment to the unknown. I'm Chinese; I believe in the Taoist Buddha. We don't talk about a deity, which is very much like this book; we're not talking about religion but God in the abstract sense, something to overpower you."

I hate to be an old fuddy duddy Student of Consciousness but: GOD (or even 1000 Gods) is/are JUST A WALL between you and UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS - or spirit or creative force or life force or whichever word you think best explains the organizing principle of memory-imagination-will that through trial and error experimentation spins time-space-energy-matter into into existence, creates stars and planets, and self-evolves living, ever more conscious beings who populate the planets. And does so until their star explodes or an asteroid hits the planet or, if the beings' consciousness does not evolve fast enough, they die off from destroying their habitat and/or themselves.

Now I don't want to make CONSCIOUSNESS a new "God" - a means by which power-monger apparatchiks co-opt the natural spiritual impulses of humans to connect with the universal consciousness of which we are manifestations. I don't want to CREATE a GOD who GIVES ORDERS we must FOLLOW - like pretty much all the existing ones. 

I just want people to TEAR DOWN THAT WALL... Tear down the APARTHEID SEPARATION BARRIER between life and joy and hope (and survival) and our own still sadly wandering souls, trying to figure out what the heck that movie "Life of Pi" was all about and what it had to do with that brick wall - I mean "God".  

Just to be clear: God is a Tyrannical Brick Wall of Fear/Ignorance/Superstition/Manipulation Separating Humans from Searching for the Truth of the Nature and Purpose of Reality. 

Or a concrete wall or a stone wall, but a wall you cannot see through or see over. 

Even the Gandhi man who emphasized that because we all search for truth and see various aspects and visions of truth we should not use violence in conflicts over truth - even the Gandhi man bandied around the word God so much it muddied his message. John Lennon, also a Libra, had it a bit more right when he sung: "god is a concept by which we measure our pain."  If we keep hitting our heads against the brick wall of god, yes we will have lots of pain to measure!!

The cinematography was fantastic and deserved the Academy Award - but as with the rest of human reality on March 28, 2013, the technology was more advanced than the spirituality.

Dang, I wish Universal Consciousness would ZAP me so I'd focus on getting that message out instead of correcting every stupid "pov" edit that annoys me on a certain wiki that shall remain nameless.  But then CHOICE was the more obvious message of the movie.  To keep my head hidden in the trillions of  errant edits of sand of a certain web site or jump the wiki-god wall and get on with the spiritual (and thus nonviolent decentralist political) revolution.  Decisions, decisions.

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