I posted this yesterday morning, but it seems to have disappeared into the Black Hole Of Yahoo, so here goes again...
It occurs to me that I should explain to those who have criticized me on occasion for "derailing" spiritual conversations on this forum with my irrelevancies about movies that I don't see them as irrelevant. Movies are very much a part of my spiritual sadhana. They were long before I met the Rama guy, but that kinda cemented things. As students, we used to go en masse to the movies with him, and then discuss them afterwards. In the same way that teachers from the Vedic era used metaphors from that era that their students could identify with -- cows, milk, cows, and cows -- Rama used the metaphor of movies in his teachings. He could somehow turn "The Road Warrior" into a dissertation on Buddhist ethics and the nobility of sacrifice. This may have had some influence, Bob, on my ability to see "Cowboys & Aliens" as a similar dissertation. :-) Because we had seen many of these movies together, we developed a kind of weird spiritual shorthand with regard to them. If the guy wanted to talk about a certain aspect of the warrior mindset, he could just drop into one of his talks the appropriate line from a great warrior movie, and zap! we'd be in the mindstate of that scene. Remembering that moment in the movie somehow "drew" the power of that moment into the present. Same with comedies, when drawing laughter into the present, or with actual spiritual films like "Gandhi." Assuming you've seen that movie, what mindset pops into your mind when you hear the line "I know a way out of hell?" Doesn't that whole scene and the impact of its timeless compasssion leap to your mind, and allow you to feel the emotional impact of it again? Spiritual shorthand. On another level, movies are for me the perfect metaphor for Maya because they don't even really move. They're nothing but a series of still images projected onto a screen so fast that our brains are tricked into perceiving the images as moving. But, if we suspend disbelief and immerse our selves in this illusion of motion, for a couple of hours we can move along with it, remarkably free from our selves. At least I can. I've seen a LOT of crappy movies, but I love that thrill of delight that accompanies the moment when I realize I'm watching a good one. The story or the characters or something about the cinematography *grabs* me, and it's like the cry of the parrots in Aldous Huxley's "Island" -- "Attention! Here and now, boys!" When that happens, something in me stops being me and starts participating in the movie by giving it as much as I can of my full attention, relaxing, and seeing where it takes me. Sometimes it takes me to a shinier, happier place, as "Midnight In Paris" recently did. Sometimes it takes me to a darker but more honest place, as watching "The Whistleblower" recently did (it's about human trafficking, and thus SO not "light viewing"). But if the dance of light on the screen takes me somewhere other than the place I was at before I watched it -- if, like Gil I leave the theater and realize that I've mentally moved to Paris, and am no longer in the Kansas of my normal, everyday mindset any more, Toto -- then I feel that I've gained something from the experience spiritually. YMMV. Some see movies as a way to divert themselves from the tedium of their lives. I see them as a way of reminding me that nothing about life is tedious.
