The Guardian this morning reports an alarming rise in brain diseases caused, apparently, by pollutants.

On a metaphorical level, what seems to be happening is that our widespread smelly thoughts and emotions are bringing on early dementia.

We are at a turning point, a transitional time between the Very Old and the Very New. We are in the process of destroying our old creation myth (tearing up Iraq)...but we cannot see the new yet.

Riding the wave between these two extremes, who wouldn't get crazy?

Box Office Dreams

Dreams and movies have a lot in common, including what they can tell us about ourselves.

By Joseph Dispenza

Movies are the dreams of our culture. Both dreams and movies unspool vivid images into our brains while we restore ourselves in the dark. Both play with time, telling their stories in flashbacks, flash–forwards, dissolves, quick cuts, fade-ins and fade-outs. Both emerge out of the dark and entrance us, engrossing us completely in other times and other worlds. As in dreams, in movies we live vicariously."

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies," said master filmmaker Federico Fellini, "The cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of images. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream."

Fellini was so taken with the fundamental similarities between the mechanics of dreams and films that, after studying the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung's essay "On Synchronicity," he met regularly with Rome's most distinguished Jungian analyst, Dr. Ernest Bernhard, and kept a meticulous dream journal that had a great influence on his films.

Jung was no less taken with movies. "The cinema," he wrote, "makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life."

Below the surface of our awareness, Jung taught, lies an accumulation of attitudes, beliefs, values, mindsets, and accepted "wisdom" that is common to everyone in our society, and our world. Jung pictured all of this human experience draining into what he called the Collective Unconscious, just as a continent's streams and rivers drain into a great body of water. Out of the Collective Unconscious arise archetypes—characters that typify humanity and scenarios that summarize the history of our species.

As a summer of action movies and comedies winds down, we moviegoers can feel as if we are bobbing on a great lake of images and sounds, formula plots and swoony leading men and ladies. They are our archetypes.

The kinship between films and dream studies is partly a matter of history. Freud published his "Interpretation of Dreams," the first clinical examination of the subject, just four years after the Lumiere Brothers' first public exhibition of movies in Paris in 1896. By the time Jung's "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" appeared a decade later, D.W. Griffith's landmark "The Birth of a Nation" had already created the blockbuster, propelling movies to their central place in popular culture. It's little wonder these cradle mates share ideas and even terminology. Jung spoke about amplification, the shadow, projection, and the persona. Hollywood was nicknamed "the dream factory."

But the connection is more than chronological. Movies allow us to examine our culture the way a psychoanalyst uses dreams as a key to personality. Showing at the multiplex is what we really believe about the grand metaphysical issues that animate our material and spiritual lives--life, death, the afterlife, our human destiny, and God.

We need not look to deeply metaphysical films to tap into our dreamlife; quite the opposite. Since we're seeking a collective unconscious, blockbusters yield the purest information, since movies that make the most money are the ones that connect with something deep down. The huge moneymakers represent our common denominator, and therefore say the most about what is hanging out –– and hiding out –– in the human psyche.

We also need to suspend our critical facultiies. The usual thumbs–up, thumbs–down approach doesn't help us here. Art has little or nothing to do with a movie's usefulness as a shared cultural dream. Popularity, market saturation, merchandizing opportunities, and box office stats are everything.

For instance, let's examine the top-grossing movie of all time: Titanic, which has earned $1.8 billion since its release in 1997 (so far). Set at the end of empire and economic expansion, the popularity of "Titanic" signals our fear that our present age is passing, threatened by external forces and by shifts deep inside us.. In "Independence Day," still 19th on the all-time money list after eight years, the old order was threatened by aliens from outer space. The next year, "Armageddon" (No. 55) showed earth earmarked for annihilation by an asteroid.

Alien invasion is even at the heart of "Titanic." Remember the moment in when the sharp point of the iceberg pierces the hull of the 'indestructible'ocean liner? Think of that image juxtaposed with the now iconic video pictures of planes puncturing the walls of the World Trade Center. It was as if the movie had dreamed this defining event of our time, predicting it four years before it happened.

More recently, the agent of change has become a natural event, albeit one we are helping to bring on ourselves, as this year's "The Day After Tomorrow." Whatever births our new eposch, we seem to be convinced that, whatever is bringing it on, the coming of the new age will be accompanied by bloodshed and large-scale destruction.

Some will not make it. For those who do, life will be different—more compassionate, perhaps, more gentle, less materialistic, more spiritual. At the end of "The Day After Tomorrow," Americans who have managed to survive the destruction in the northern two–thirds of the country end up in Mexico, "grateful for the hospitality," in the words of a repentant and humbled president, 'of what we once arrogantly called "the Third World."'

Our bodies are going to require alteration in the new age. We feel the need to mutate, take on powers we don't yet possess. In "X–Men"—a surprise hit in 2001, now outgrossed by its sequel in 2003, and the two "Spider–Man" movies, mutating humans use their powers tohelp and heal. These plots ease, perhaps, our anxiety about cloning, cryobiology, in vitro fertilization, and other advances that fall under the heading of 'extropy'--the belief that we are driven by an insatiable passion for improvement.

As we transform, we appear like the centaurs, mermaids, satyrs, and other creatures of mythology, half–animal and half–human. Our spiritual nature is emerging from our animal selves, like Cat-Woman, and Batman.

Many of these characters are decades-old comic-book heroes. What's shifting is our awareness that our new powers are not novelties or toys. In a sobering moment, Spider–Man, for whom Manhattan is a big playground, is instructed about the uses of power. Spidey's uncle counsels him (and us), 'With great power comes great responsibility."

Our movies also betray our conviction that the world (like the movies) depends on our going along with an assumed idea of reality, as in "The Matrix" and its sequel. Time in this man-made world is exceedingly slippery. Dinosaurs can revive ("Jurassic Park"), we can move freely from past to future ("Back to the Future"), or a day can repeat itself over and over again ("Groundhog Day").

In such a universe, we live in the past, present and future all at once. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the settings are pastoral, medieval, but the sensibility is futuristic. The Star Wars films take place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." but that "past" boasts advanced technology and easy intergalactic exchanges. Space also may be an illusion. Harry Potter walks through a train station wall just as Men in Black dash in and out of dimensions. In "The Truman Show," a man discovers his world is completely simulated, defined by a scrim at the outer edges of a television studio.

If the past is not even the past, nor are the dead dead. Compare the "undead" in "Night of the Living Dead" with the ghosts in "The Sixth Sense." Far from fearing them, we are charged with helping them in their process of transformation.

Or perhaps it is ourselves who, we dream, will be shown a way through. Not technically a blockbuster, Stephen Spielberg's "The Terminal" sports a blockbuster director and star. In the movie, Tom Hanks plays a man cannot leave a New York City airport, because a war causes his native country to collapse, rendering his passport invalid. The Terminal may be today's central, most insightful dream. We are between worlds. The old world (the Eastern European main character is literally from what we used to call the Old World) has passed away –– but the new world has not appeared yet. Far from despairing over the situation, we should be patient, Spielberg counsels, and try to make the best of it. Paradigms don't shift overnight.

What about God? We think of God as someone of something 'up there' or 'out there' to be feared: for some time, our major moneymakers have portrayed God the Father as professional avenger. This year's second highest grosser, "The Passion of the Christ," redoubles the suggestion that extreme suffering is necessary for salvation.

That dream image of the Divine is shifting, if subtly, fromGod as a Judging Destroyer to God as a Loving Parent. Just four spots down the all-time list from "The Passion" is "Finding Nemo." Set in an ocean--Jung's symbol for the unconscious—"Nemo" portrays a clown fish who searches for his son across the seas. It may look like a simple children's story, but in dream terms, it is a parable of, well, Biblical proportions, telling of the abiding love of the Creator for the creation.

The next time you are sitting in a theater watching a big, popular film, ask yourself what it is communicating about the large issues of life. You may be surprised to find that the cinematic dreams unfolding in the darkness hold the key to understanding who you, and the rest of us, truly are and where we appear to be going.

(posted on Beliefnet 08 August 2004)

In 'Troy,' Where Are the Gods?

A subtitle for the new blockbuster, Troy, could be: 'Where Have All the Gods Gone?'

Except for a few jabs at the apparent powerlessness of the sun-god, Apollo, patron and protector of Troy, the gods are absent. In this way, the movie may be an accurate mirror of our contemporary secular culture, where spirituality is kept discretely out of public affairs.

In the real Troy story, the gods play an active and decisive role. The story opens at a wedding feast on Mt. Olympus, the realm of the gods. King Peleus is marrying a sea-goddess, Thetis (they will become the parents of Brad Pitt...er, Achilles).

One of the minor deities, Discord, has not been invited to the wedding, for obvious reasons. Miffed, she tosses a golden apple into the banquet hall. When it comes to rest on the marble floor, the gods see that it is engraved "For the Fairest One." Immediately, the apple is claimed by three goddesses -- Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.

To settle the dispute, the gods conscript a mortal, one of the hunky princes of Troy, Orlando Bloom...er, Paris, and bring him up to Olympus to make a judgment on the golden apple. One by one, the goddesses come to him secretly and offer him a bribe. Hera offers him power, Athena wisdom, and Aphrodite the love of the most beautiful woman in the world.

For Paris, this is a no-brainer. He awards the apple to Aphrodite and receives in return the beautiful Helen, who is at the moment married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. The gods transport Paris to Sparta, where he and Helen instantly fall in love. The two flee to Troy. Menelaus calls his fellow-Greek kings together, armies are assembled under Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus, they sail for Troy, and the rest, as they say, is history.

All during the ten years of the Trojan War, the gods, like celestial cheerleaders, root for their favorite side, often influencing the back-and-forth battle victories by direct divine intervention. They also figure highly in the end of the war: the Horse, created by the tricky hero, Odysseus, is sacred to Poseidon, god of the sea; by dragging it into their city, the Trojans believe they have captured the defining spiritual token of the withdrawing Greeks.

Troy the movie, unlike Troy the legend, is virtually godless. What references there are to the Olympians are couched in the arrogant boasting of heroes. As the helpless Trojans look on, Achilles chops off the head of Apollo's statue, as if to say, "So much for your belief in spiritual help!" King Priam of Arabia...er, Troy...makes fatal state decisions based on the results of auguries by temple priests.

The unintended message of Troy may be that in a world without gods -- spirituality -- we are deprived of life's deeper meaning. What exactly are we learning about life from watching men battling it out with each other? One by one the great heroes of the war fall; eventually the invincible fortress of Troy itself falls. But their toppling appears to have little consequence beyond testosterone provoked score-settling.

Ironically, Achilles, with his disdain for the gods, is brought into the conflict through his desire to be like them, immortal. Invulnerable except for his heel, the place where his mother held him to dip him into the mystical waters of the River Styx, he falls to the arrow as part of the same lethal game of tag.

In the Iliad, which 'inspired' Troy, all these heroic falls come to pass, but, with the gods involved, they have a far-reaching significance that affect the affairs of both mortals and immortals for the ages. The whole story of the Trojan War can been seen as a lesson in human -- and divine -- nature. It is a textbook in psychology, anthropology, cosmology, and metaphysics.

All the myths have something important to say about human nature, because they are always about the interaction of men with the gods. The myths are spiritual at their core, and therefore offer us guidance in how to relate to the higher power within us. A myth told without the gods is only half of the story, and not the better half at that.

In Troy, the gods have become useless, foolish, and even dangerous; to put our confidence in them is to bring about ruin. Like our secular culture, which avoids the mysterious (mythos) in favor of what we can see, hear, and measure (logos) a story of Troy without the gods is only about the arrogance of warriors and their strategies, which end in either victory or defeat. A story thus told misses the opportunity to teach us about the human heart and the human soul.

Another argument for polytheism: this morning, news that the word GOD is hampering efforts to establish the European Constitution. We have been chained down with the word (and concept) of GOD for so long now. It's tearing us apart. I say, up with the gods. Down with monotheism.

An article in this morning's New York Times about The Da Vinci Code being made into a film...not quite yet, but some talk about it.

The collapse of the Roman Catholic Church is part of the new planetary scenario. I believe we are living under the last full papacy. When JPII goes to heaven, a new guy will be put in, but only to oversee the dismantling of the whole operation.

The Code has opened up the public imagination to the notion that organized religion is at least suspect, if not dangerous. We don't need it. We've outgrown it.

Epiphany

A Christian feast celebrating the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. January 6, on which this feast is traditionally observed. A revelatory manifestation of a divine being.

A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.

A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: “I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself” (Frank Maier).

We are not emotionally mature enough to send humans to Mars. If you had thought that we were ready to venture outside our Terra/Luna confines, look at this piece on US plans for weapons in space. I suggest we stay at home on our own planet until we grow up.

The Passion of the Christ: A Nail in the Coffin of Organized Religion

Every form of culture, in its vanishing, receives its most elaborate and intense expression. (William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light)

A couple of weeks and $212 million (domestic box office) into the screen history of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a bit of the dust kicked up around its opening seems to be settling –– a good time, perhaps, to reflect dispassionately on what the film might represent as a cultural phenomenon.

Audience reactions to the movie are all over the place, from adulation to freak–out (at least one patron died of a heart attack in the aisles), but critical appraisals are virtually unanimous: the depiction of the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus is violent in the extreme, a sadistic dead-man-walking downer that strives for a realism bordering on fanaticism.

Unsparing, punishing realism apparently was the essential approach to the Jesus story for Gibson and his colleagues. One of the publicists working on the film’s pre–release promotion got the Pope himself to say after a screening, “It is as it was!” –– as if the Holy Father were present at the Crucifixion and therefore qualified for religious quality control. Later, the Vatican repudiated the “alleged” Papal statement by saying that the Pope holds no opinions on matters of artistic expression (you can hear Julius II, who commissioned art from Raphael and Michelangelo, turning over in his crypt), but the seed had been planted.

“The Passion of the Christ” appears to want us all to return to religion, and Gibson’s fundamentalist take on it in particular, as if extreme realism by itself could pry souls open. But, ironically, this in–your–face cinematic Stations of the Cross might be another indication that organized religions everywhere are on the way out. The drift at this moment in history is away from the specific practice of religion, with its doctrines and regulations, and toward a more eclectic and personal spirituality.

A recent Gallup poll [1] confirms a trend which sociologists and others have observed for some time –– Americans are abandoning institutional religion in favor of “cafeteria style” faith, and replacing denominational dogma with a more nonspecific “spirituality.” The results of the survey suggest that despite their outward affiliation with a religion and frequent church attendance, “less than half of Americans live their daily lives strictly by the code or teachings of their religious faith.”

“People want more than a long-distance relationship with God,” Gallup says. Organized religion puts priests, ministers, rabbis, ayatollahs, rinpoches and gurus of every sort between your and my relationship to the Divinity. But if it is true that so many of us are growing away from the “long–distance” religious dynamic in favor of direct spiritual experience, how to explain this peculiar movie?

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace has explained how a culture at the edge of extinction explodes into a ritualistic ‘revitalization movement.’ The end of a cultural activity is announced by the activity’s frenzied and fanatical application by its core adherents. From this perspective, organized religion resists being dragged kicking and screaming to the bone yard by making itself even ‘more religious.’

In this way, Mel Gibson is right in line with, Pat Robinson–type Protestant Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sunni Muslims in Egypt, Shii Muslims in Iran, Buddhist and Hindi monks in India who incinerate themselves to protest modernity, and religious fundamentalists in other places around the world who are trying to reverse the inexorable decay of organized religion by applying it more vigorously –– literally, violently, and fanatically.

Karen Armstrong, in her brilliant study of religious fundamentalism, “The Battle for God,” tells us that fundamentalists “fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past.” If you were wondering about the use of Aramaic and Greek in “The Passion of the Christ,” it’s only another way the film seeks to be literal, and therefore “pure.” Dr. Armstrong: “To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture…” –– remember that Gibson leads a small congregation of reactionary Roman Catholics out in Malibu who hear Mass in Latin.

It’s a losing battle. Here in the real world, most of us aren’t interested in saving religion. We are growing up spiritually, and growing away from the patriarchal, rule–bound religious structures of our spiritual childhood. We are beginning to understand that we may not need religion (“religare, to restrain, tie back”) to restrain our own unruly passions to tie us back to God. We can define the Divinity and relate to It directly on our own, thank you.

When you think about it, Jesus himself was on the side of the personal spiritual seeker –– and quite against organized religion. He likened the Pharisees and Sadducees, those rigid interpreters of God’s law, to whitened sepulchers and encouraged his listeners to seek the Kingdom of God within their own hearts and souls. Jesus was anti–religious. In the end, that is what got him crucified.

“The Passion of the Christ” is a religious shock treatment designed to convert the heathen and bring the wayward back into the fold, but the jolt doesn’t work. It just reminds us that the dinosaur of organized religion is lumbering slowly but surely toward extinction, leaving considerable blood and gore in its path.

The new biography of Jung is making the round of reviewers. The New York Times reviewer turned in a scathing report, making him into a boor and wife-beater. The genius of Jung was that he understood myths as the dreams of the collective unconscious -- and dreams as personal myths.

What is needed now is to cultivate a cosmic consciousness.