As could
have become clear in some of the other pieces on this blog I am a firm believer
in the interconnectedness of all things, which is unfortunately the almost
exact opposite of what we are taught in our civilization, as most Western
people seem to treat all of life as nothing more than a string of unrelated
coincidences and chance meetings. Arguably this is precisely why so many people
suffer from a total lack of purpose and wholeness in their lives, an imbalance
which then has to be blocked out by the ego, automatically prohibiting any true
openness to all things around us. Traditional religion has always given many
people this kind of purpose and, even with all the problems and deficiencies
plaguing most organized religions, it still seems to me preferable to the
spiritual emptiness that seems to have become the standard in Western society. What
is lacking then is purpose and guidance, two things which ironically are within
everyone if people only knew how to tap them. Really the only thing that's
needed is to trust our innate wisdom which resides in our souls instead of
blindly relying on our ego, as is common nowadays. Not that ego is a bad thing,
in fact it's quite necessary, but ego can only become helpful instead of
harmful when it is mature and this can only be truly accomplished when it has connected
with the Soul. I know from experience people can get quite violent at the mere
mention of a concept like 'Soul', as it reminds them too much of the organized
religion they have gladly left behind them. But by breaking the shackles of religion
many don't realize they have thrown away much more than they really wanted. So
it is high time to reclaim a concept like Soul for modern times, to pry it
loose from the taint of religion, while at the same time avoid falling in the
trap of confused vagueness of so many New Age movements. Ego and Soul may seem
a bit vague, but they really needn't be. You could compare them with a power
source: Ego is very much like an emergency generator: it can provide power when
needed, but it's not really suitable for the long run as it wastes too much
energy and can start to malfunction at the slightest bump. Soul on the other
hand is a source of infinite power, one that is clean, easy to tap (when you've
learned how) and without limit. It stands to reason the source of infinite
power should be preferable to the emergency generator, yet too many in society
function only on this improvisatory power source because they don't really know
how to tap their infinite power resources. Or to put in another way: they rely
on their Ego when they should be trusting their Souls and the spirit of the
universe.
Let me
give a review of the last two years of my life to give an example of what I
mean by this: after my boyfriend and I moved to our first little home, we lived
happily for the first two years. We always knew it wasn't exactly a palace, but
we didn't mind all the little problems. But when these little problems grew
bigger and bigger, it became harder to just ignore them – until at one point
everything just about exploded and our whole world came crashing in on us: we
lived right above a bar which tended to play very loud music on some nights,
often disturbing us in our sleep and preventing us from having any sensible and
steady rhythm. There used to be only scattered incidents, but as time marched
on they became much more frequent until we couldn't sleep at all anymore. We
would then call the police complaining about the noise, they would come and
check it out and the music would stop for a while. At first these silent
episodes could be as long as six months, but this began to decrease, until we
had to call in the police several times a week. At one point the police
actually started saying the didn't hear any noise, basically calling me a liar
and making it clear they wouldn't come again when I phoned. So, our only source
of help was suddenly cut off, leaving us without any protection against the
loud music. As if this wasn’t already inconvenient enough, other problems began
popping up at exactly this moment: first we began having extreme difficulties
with our plumbing. They had been clogged once before, but were fixed
immediately by our handyman, who wasn't so lucky this time around: he couldn't
seem to get at the root of the problem and started to shift the blame to us,
claiming we would clog our drains with food and fat. This was nonsense of
course, as would be later acknowledged by a professional plumber, but the
resolution only came after a month of problems and heated discussions not only
with the handyman but also the landlord. And to make matters even worse, at that
very moment we got new downstairs neighbors who, for some reason, were always
feeling cold and so used the heating non-stop – until midsummer. Since it was
all wooden floors we had no way of stopping the heat coming directly into our
home, insuring we were attack by sound, water and heat all at once. It made our
home quite the living hell and even though we never thought about moving before,
we began to feel it was really the universe's way of telling us to do so. But
not only did the universe create this particular problem to nudge us into a new
and different direction, it also neatly provided us with the solution. Surely
it is all just one big coincidence in the eyes of most, but all these problems
started happening in April and my boyfriend just ‘happened’ to get a permanent work
contract the next month. It was only when we started to look around for new
apartments, we suddenly realized we really needed that permanent contract
because without one we would be flatly refused by all agencies. So, if my
boyfriend hadn't gotten it at that exact time, we would have been trapped into
our old apartment, which had stopped being an even remotely healthy environment
quite some time ago.
When we
moved into our new apartment, the universe didn't stop from guiding us toward a
transformation that would ultimately lead to a biological and ecological way of
life. After settling in, I started to take up serious cooking again. I had
tried my hand at it in our old place, but it was just too small to be practical
so I more or less gave up on it, but with our newly acquired space the path was
clear to start dabbling in the kitchen again. So I began cooking more and more
with fresh ingredients exclusively, leaving all the instant or half-instant
products for what they are. Then something happened which I can't explain in
any rational way: I suddenly was seized by the urgent need to learn to
appreciate vegetables much more than I had done before. In fact, vegetables had
always been quite problematic for me and I had never gotten around to
conquering this childhood deficiency, but now I was suddenly moved to do so. In
retrospect of course it's easy to see this was quite a necessary step toward
the mostly vegetarian diet we enjoy today (try one without really liking vegetables),
but that was still very much in the future – at that point it never even crossed
my mind. My boyfriend, who works as a dental assistant, chipped in also: through
work he got me a mortar which I could use in the kitchen, but it also came with
seeds to grow our own basil. As with the other things, I had never thought
about growing my own herbs, but as it was thrown in my lap I got real excited
about it, as it seemed to fit right in with our changing way of life. Sometime
later something similar to the vegetable thing happened: I always used to read
film literature every day with the greatest of pleasure and curiosity, but
suddenly I noticed the passion began to fade. At first it puzzled and
frightened me a bit, until it inexplicably gave way to the sudden desire to
start reading up on spiritual and psychedelic drugs, which eventually lead to
the picking up of several ecological-minded books, the fruits of which you are
now reading. We gave up alcohol completely: we never drank anyway except one
bottle of champagne about once a month, only because we really like the taste
of champagne. But we never liked the alcohol in it and we became fed up with
the negative effects it had on our bodies and minds, so we gave up even that
one bottle. This too, in retrospect can easily be explained as a necessary step
towards our new life as we now eat and drink what we want, with our bodies as
our only guide – which are the most sensible diet coaches in the world anyway.
And so we not only follow the path our bodies dictate for us, but we also let
ourselves be guided by what the universe is trying to tell us. It’s not that I
just sit passively at home staring out of the window, but I only undertake
action when the universe tells me to, which is quite different from the
ambitious achieving that’s prevalent in our society. When I tried to explain to
friends how all these seemingly unrelated events clearly point to the same
direction, it was all brushed aside as complete nonsense, yet the pattern in
all this seems so clear to me – all we need to learn is how to read these signs
again and see how we can interpret and incorporate them into our lives. Let
yourself be guided not by the strictly rational and narrow striving of
our Ego, but open yourself up to the universal being of our Soul and our
direct link to the Mysteries that gently try to steer us into the right course
and feel the interconnectedness of all things. Because as Taoist master Lao-tzu
famously declared: “the best way to do is to be”.
The idea
that we’re already accomplishing so much by just being instead of doing, is
also given voice by radical biologist Rupert Sheldrake. In his book 'The
Presence of the Past' he relates the scientific mystery he calls 'The Case of
the Blue Tits' (which would make for a killer giallo title): blue tits are
small birds who apparently learned how to open milk bottles in England just
before World War II. This in itself may not be that eyebrow raising, were it
not for the fact that the rate at which other tits across the country were able
to learn this new trick actually increased exponentially. Which opens up the possibility
of some sort of universal across species learning process larger than
traditional communication. But it still gets weirder; World War II broke out
which meant no more milk bottles and thus no more opening them by the tits. But
when the bottles started to come back after the war ended, the tits began
opening them again. And what's most astonishing is that these new tits simply
picked up where their forefathers left off and started opening bottles just as
quickly as just before the war, even though all the original tits who had
learned the trick died during the war. What this clearly suggests is the idea
that when species learn something new, this knowledge is actually passed on
somehow to subsequent members of the same species, so these later blue tits
could actually benefit in some way of the experience from earlier tits even
though they could never have been in actual contact. Of course, conventional
science is still at a loss to explain how this is possible, which is why
Sheldrake has coined the idea of what he calls 'morphic resonance' which more
or less means that there are invisible morphic fields all around us that
influence all species in a way we yet have to fully understand.
Obviously,
Sheldrake's ideas have encountered fierce resistance from conventional science,
with one concerned reviewer even advocating all his books ought to be burned.
Whether or not these ideas have any credibility is a discussion that's best
left to scientists, but what is important, to me anyway, is that Sheldrake's
theories do point toward a more holistic system than most Western science,
religion and education is comfortable with. It also forms an almost direct link
with the film I wanted to talk about here, Steven Spielberg's amazingly warm
and misunderstood 'Always'. Because the idea that every species is able to
learn from the experience of its earlier members gets an almost literal
translation into the movie with the Richard Dreyfuss character who, after
dying, is sent back to earth by an angel (Audrey Hepburn no less) with the
explicit purpose of guiding other people. He eventually has to train the very
man who will also be emotionally attached to his widow, thus also forcing the
Dreyfuss character to letting go. But it not only makes literal the concept of
morphic resonance, it also point to the holistic system of wholing and
wholeness that underlies the morphic resonance theory. The assumption that all
life is connected is something Spielberg also acknowledges with the formal
qualities of 'Always': there are John Wayne and James Cagney impersonations and
the film is directly inspired by a 1943 Victor Fleming film 'A Guy Named Joe',
which all force us to remember that 'Always' doesn't exist in some kind of
vacuum by playing up the film's relation to the rest of film history. Besides
this, two old songs are used: the standard 'Pennies from Heaven' is
incongruously sung by modern day fliers and
'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes' gets an even more prominent place, which is
all the more appropriate because it was made famous by Irene Dunne in
'Roberta', the same actress who also plays the lead in 'A Guy Named Joe'. This
song functions as something of a musical leit motiv and is heard in many
different versions, most prominently as something that sounds like a 12 inch
eighties keyboard rendition. It may not be the most inspiring interpretation of
the song, but that is quite irrelevant, because these different interpretations
of the same song function in exactly the same way as the co-existing of all the
product placement in the film next to the deliberate throwback to old Hollywood
movies. Roger Ebert called the film 'dated', but this is the point: by its
intentional mixture of incongruous elements, by making it a dated and
contemporary movie at the same time, Spielberg insists on the universality and
interconnectedness of all things. Of course, it is also what the very title of
the film points to.
Curiously,
though ‘Always’ is openly acknowledged to be inspired by 'A Guy Named Joe' and actually
follows the plot of the original film almost to the letter, the feeling of both
films is entirely different. In fact, the first part especially feels much more
like a direct homage to the Howard Hawks classic 'Only Angels Have Wings' and
by infusing Dalton Trumbo’s script with the spirit of Hawks, Spielberg and his
scriptwriter Jerry Belson manage to bring out the more subversive elements that
the Fleming version glosses over. In ‘A Guy Named Joe’ Spencer Tracy is also
sent back to earth to help other fliers, which is of course the same in ‘Always’,
but there is one crucial difference: motivation. Tracy, Dunne and Ward Bond in ‘A
Guy Named are as dedicated as Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter and John Goodman
are in ‘Always Joe’, but basically do nothing more than their duty: they are
called upon to fight for America and freedom and do so with much conviction. Like
‘Casablanca’ and other films from this World War II period, Fleming and Trumbo
clearly conceived their film as a way to get the American public behind the war
effort, and by using Divine intervention as yet another aid to defeat the Nazi’s
and Japs, they do little more than strengthen the morale to give the people
some more faith in the positive outcome of the war – which quite diminishes
some of the implications of the script. Since there is no war whatsoever in ‘Always’,
no call to arms or appeal to one’s duty is necessary and the protagonists are
indeed not fighting for any freedom but merely to save some trees. They are ‘just’
people who give everything they’ve got to prevent forest fires which makes
their total dedication all the more impressive, which is probably why Spielberg
saw it fit (or perhaps even necessary) to reference Hawks so much. For Hawks,
of course, was famous for his usually all-male groups of professionals who are
bonded together by their shared goal and who live on the edge of society. These
worlds are a microcosm of its own, with their own values and rules of conduct
and as such are quite a frontal attack to all the values of bourgeois society,
because Hawks was all about taking risks, living dangerously and believing in
what you do, regardless how the rest of society may regard that. By comparison,
virtually all of bourgeois society has always been a rather desperate search
not only for respectability but also for a shallow financial and emotional
security. Not that these concepts are without any value, but as always it's all
about balance: while taking too much risk can be foolhardy, the opposite is
also true as taking little or no risk at all can easily lead to spiritual and
emotional deadness. Seen this way, the films of Hawks can still be regarded
either as quite subversive or as a healthy alternative to the stifling
conformism of conventional society. Because I had experienced 'Always' in this
Hawksian spirit up until this point (and only saw ‘A Guy Named Joe’ afterwards)
, I was much surprised by the sudden turn in tone when Holly Hunter tells
Dreyfuss she has had enough of his risky flying and basically wants to settle
down. She questions his reasons for doing what he does by complaining he
doesn't even do it for society or other human beings, while this is precisely
what's so liberating about it. Because only when seen through the blinkers of
conventional rationalistic Ego thinking with its egocentric hunkering for
security does their work make no sense. When seen through the universality of
Soul no such problems arise, as that would make it perfectly clear Dreyfuss
takes the risk he does not only because it makes him feel alive, but also
because he's part of the greater whole which understands the universe is more
important than the interest of personal self; he understands saving nature and
trees is just as important as saving people even if it might mean dying
himself.
Unfortunately,
in an effort to please his wife, Dreyfuss agrees to settle down and live the
life of comfort and security Hunter longs for. And almost as if to punish them
for succumbing to Ego instead of being true to the calling of the Soul, the
universe takes Dreyfuss’ life – only to send him back to earth to start his
spiritual mission, because as Hepburn explains 'spiritus' means to breathe life
into something. The idea that everything is connected, even the spirit world,
is more than just a comforting thought as in so many organized religions – it
is what all the things I have been describing so far are based on. Only through
spiritual death and rebirth is any true change possible. ‘Change’ is a tricky
word here, as most people are apt to misunderstand what I mean by change as
their conception is so different from mine. For example, when I complained to a
friend recently it was a shame so few people are able to change in any
meaningful way, he vehemently objected to it as he honestly thought everybody
around him changed. But it is a completely different kind of change. He meant
by change nothing more than some cosmetic change: people may get a bit wiser, a
little less reckless or more responsible, but that’s not really change. At best,
it’s more or less of the same thing, but since all of it is clearly in the same
general direction, no real change is
accomplished. Change as I see it, in the meaning of complete transformation, is
only possible when directions are radically changed; when you have always
believed or thought in one thing and come to take the exact opposite position.
This is not hypocrisy, but true openness, because only as you have seen
something from at least two points of view, your idea of it can become more
whole.
The
Dreyfuss character will quite explicitly function as the agent of change in his
role as spirit from this point on. He is the little voice of the universe that
through the Soul will speak to people to give them advice. It is a role that’s
new for him too, even as spirit, so he has to grow into it as the film rather
intriguingly suggests. For instance, there’s a moment when a woman in a bar is
hitting on the guy who clearly has always been interested in Hunter (and who
will eventually end up with her). Social grace isn’t something he has been
naturally blessed with, so Dreyfuss, functioning as the voice of Soul, nudges
him on to speak out for himself. Given a new confidence by this he finds the
courage to do so, although not in the way Dreyfuss expected, as he roundly
ignores the advances of the woman before him and for the first time openly
speaks out his love for Hunter. To much consternation of Dreyfuss of course,
who suddenly realizes he will have to play a crucial role in the wholing
process and thus has to leave his own feelings behind him and start functioning
in the interest of the universe (which although it's here the job of a spirit, clearly
could also serve as a valuable lesson to the mortals of this earth). It’s one
of those unexpected results that often produce fear and anxiety in people, as
they want to be in complete control of their life even when this isn’t
possible. Only when we trust in the ways of the universe and open ourselves up
to these chance occurrences can we truly become whole and mature and so Dreyfuss
must come to realize that as spirit he will have to fulfill a most important
role in the wholeness of his former wife – even if it means ‘giving’ her to
another lover.
He has
to help Hunter to learn to trust the universe/Soul instead of Ego. She can only
truly enjoy life if she is completely open to the universe, to let herself be
guided like a pollen in the wind. She has to learn to savor every moment of
life, to live every moment to the fullest, something she had never been able to
do when Dreyfuss was alive as she had always been living in fear of his death.
At first, this attitude prevails again of course, when she has much trouble
coping with the death of her husband and simply tries to ignore it. But try as
she might, the universe won't let her: first she gets a wake-up call from John
Goodman, who was their best friend and who forces her to go to the very spot
which reminds her most of Dreyfuss. At this point she falls in love with the
flier who has Dreyfuss as his guiding angel, so she is yet again forced into
the same conundrum: loving a man who gets into dangerous situations on an
everyday basis. At first she still holds back as when she complains he is too
pretty and perfect and she doesn’t want to be with a guy ‘who looks like I won
him at a raffle’. But eventually, in order to not repeat the same mistakes she
does face the situation head-on and lets herself be guided by her feelings
instead of rational thinking or fear. The transformation is made complete
during the moment at the end of the film, when she impulsively substitutes for
her boyfriend and faces the risk of flying the dangerous mission herself,
despite all the rational objections from those around her. Now, strengthened by
the spiritual help of Dreyfuss she is able to just jump into the situation and
trust in the ways of the universe. It's a moment that's curiously similar to one
dreamed up by Spielberg's companion George Lucas, when Luke Skywalker has to
destroy the Death Star at the ending of the original film. There too, mere
training, rationality or trust in the equipment isn't enough, as Skywalker has
to rely on the ‘Force’ to complete his mission successfully. It should be
obvious by now that the ‘Force’ from the Star Wars universe is directly related
to what I have been calling Soul and Jedi Knight are little more than those who
have learned to trust their Souls instead of Ego. In fact, the Jedi are
curiously similar to the Buddhist concept of the Bodhisattva, which are people
who, after a prolonged enlightenment training, return to civilization to offer
their enlightenment in service to society. While arguably this spiritual
message is somewhat diluted by Lucas' playground vision, it is remarkable how
much more mature Spielberg manages to be in 'Always'. For someone who is one of
the most successful directors of all time and whose name (rightly or wrongly)
has become synonymous with flaccid entertainment, this particular film is a
daring and honest attempt to change that. It manages to do the almost
impossible: it uses the mechanics of commercial cinema to deliver a deeply
spiritual picture without any of the sentimental trappings of the New Age,
although very probably it has been accused of this. All it needs now is a
radical change in Western society to be truly appreciated.
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