--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thanks for playing. I wish you well in your pursuit > of the cosmic McGuffin.
For those of you who don't know the term 'McGuffin,' it's really cool, and quite relevant to the game of viewing one's self discovery in terms of a detective trying to solve a mystery. From Wikipedia: A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or Maguffin) is a plot device that motivates the characters and/or advances the story, but has little other relevance to the story. The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Hitchcock explained the term in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: "[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is most always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers." . . . The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Commonly, though not always, it is the central focus of the film in the first act, and later declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. Sometimes the MacGuffin is all but forgotten by the end of the film. on of disbelief. . . . Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story: "It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all." It seems to me that the McGuffin has distinct parallels in self discovery. Can't one, after all, view the mantra as the McGuffin of TM meditation? It's only something to "follow" until it disappears, and then it has no relevance at all. From the point of view of transcendence, it never even existed. And isn't enlightenment *itself* a McGuffin? We pursue it doggedly, onepointedly, and when we find it we find out that it's always been present, and there was never anything to pursue. Like the contents of the briefcase in "Pulp Fiction," the McGuffins we choose to pursue in our role as Sam Sadhana, Third Eye are basically unimportant. We'll probably never know the real nature of the McGuffin, just as we never know what's really inside the briefcase. It's a McGuffin. It just gave us something to focus on and pursue for a while. McGuffins are good. Billions have been sold, and followed by billions of self detectives in search of Self. And not one of them meant a damned thing. They were just a mechanism we used to trick our selves into realizing the Self. Sam Sadhana: "Give me a McGuffin. Hold the lettuce." The Universe: "You want fries with that?" :-)
