Home: a movie review? Language Constructs, Ever-present Origin, and Scintillating Sentiences

I’m going to go on a journey here— hopefully, a journey that dissolves a bit of this notion that my I is somehow separate from your You, you a separate autonomous reader reading the object that is this text. This journey is both one of exploration and dissolution, and it begins with a film called Home. A film that I saw twice this week, and with each viewing, arrived at completely different destinations. Maybe some of you have seen this. If you haven’t, you should. This film has blown me away both times now- and in some unlikely and different ways.

The first viewing of Home was grounding. I opted to stay in from a warehouse party one night to instead collect ideas for writing poetry. But rather than writing, I found myself watching a film that I stumbled across on YouTube. While I found some of the narration of Home to be heavily dramatized in a Lord of the Rings kind of way, I was extremely inspired by the vistas of aerial footage- the entire film shot from the air, gave the viewer a panoramic spanning vision of the infinite patterns of life on Earth. In Home, the camera pans landscape after landscape— telling the story of Earth, the story of mankind, and the story of oil. The film embraces both the simplicity and the complexity of the climate crisis driven by big business oil drilling— patterns of life abruptly broken with spires of metal, raging torches of fire.

I’m almost never a pessimist. But, I was left with this pervading thought, “It’s bad now, but this is only going to get much, much worse.” After watching the film, I came to a sudden understanding that most of the world’s conflicts are conflicts over resources: oil in Iraq, oil via pipeline in Afghanistan, water in Israel/Palestine, oil and water in Darfur… the list goes on. These conflicts are masked as conflicts of terrorism and religious extremism, and in many cases most certainly devolve to this, but all these conflicts stem from the same root cause: from fighting over scarce resources, from commodifying human rights. When we talk about insurgencies, war, genocide, we’re looking at the effects of what are truthfully resource wars. And as we have more extreme weather, we’re going to see more Katrinas, more earthquakes, more tidal waves, more mud slides, more droughts, and flooding. With this will come vast numbers of people turned climate refugees flooding across borders. Climate devastation and wide spread political instability is certain. It’s a horrifically sobering thought- that as violent, unjust, and chaotic as the world is now, if we continue are current trends, things will only grow worse. Yet the refrain that’s repeated at the end of the film by the female narrator is, “It’s too late to be a pessimist.” “It’s too late to be a pessimist.” She’s right. There is no time at all for this. Indulging in pessimism is a huge part of the problem. I’ve heard many a friend glibly say over the years, “The problem is humanity, just eradicate us and the world will be fine.” I’m sure I’ve said this too at points in time. But, the problem is not all of humanity but rather the economic structures in place that allow 20% of humanity to use 80% of the world’s resources, disenfranchising the other 80% of the world’s population. I’m not just speaking of Americans; though we have our role to play- this is certain. I’m speaking to an artificial, unnatural, and unjust power structure that destroys real wealth, the biodiversity of our planet, for a superfluous wealth of products driven by personal insecurity and greed. Money is not real wealth: it never has been. It has become an artificial and unstable structure that threatens the stability and wellness of all life.

Reeling in the sobriety of these thoughts, I found myself watching Home again two nights later. I wasn’t expecting to arrive at this next set of ideas. I watched again the patterns in nature: one ice tundra, a cracked indigo and white porcelain plate, re-pieced together along ridges— patterns beside patterns of mankind, beside patterns of the wild— how seamlessly man fit with the Earth with his livestock back in time, yet just across time, across land in another country that was another world, that is our world now- because this is how people— still live. As I/eye was watching the camera pan above a landscape of pelicans, eye saw the pelicans not as a single species, but as the Earth itself given sentience and sight. Every single creature was not nurtured by, seeking refuge in Gaia’s shelter- but was Gaia itself with eyes. “I” suddenly saw it/us as one organism with trillions of pairs of eyes. Us too, “hairy bags of water” as Anne Waldman would say. One species, one form arisen, but still wholly and completely, suffering egos and all, the Earth. Then “I” (is there one beyond this ego?) moved one step further with thought. In the 1960s, when we saw the Earth from outer space, from sky, when we saw ourselves outside ourselves, we experienced a shift in consciousness that helped birth the environmental movement.* It was a shift in sight that was a direct expression (and/or vice versa) of a shift in consciousness. So here, arriving back at our Evolver vision, a shift in consciousness is necessary for the survival of us as a species. We have to (and will) recognize this beyond the abstract intellect, into whole body awareness, that we’re not just from Earth, the Earth isn’t just our planet, our home, rather –we’re simply one complex hive expression of Gaia’s sentience and energy, and for that matter— the universe’s. We’re not peering out into the vast, alone universe. As Alan Watt’s would say, the universe is sentient because we’re sentient. We’re the fruit of the universe perceiving itself.

This next thought occurred: if Earth is one singular and infinite expression of shifts in form and sentiences, then there is no separation between mind and matter. Rather, the only separations that are ever enforced, are enforced by language. Language calls me, me- and separates me from you, from chair, table, book, laptop- separates me from oak, cardinal, moss, rain- pelican, porcelain, hive. This is one type of language of a world broken into discrete things that creates an artificial hierarchy imposed by dividing subject from object. Western languages, and English especially, focus on the thingness of things, rather than focusing on the negative space created by words. But all languages are filters through which we view the world. When we change the filter, we change our relationship to ourselves and thereby the world. But what if we leveled our awareness of language beyond the written and oral? We understand that plants respond to more than sunlight and water; that animals have their complex languages of sounds, body gestures, and scents; that cells in our bodies communicate via chemical release. Is it possible for form itself to be an expression of language?

When we look at a table we know that the table has a molecular composition and can be broken down into infinitely smaller parts. But what if we reversed this thinking back out, what if we saw the table, our home, or our neighbors’ home, or ourselves as energetically expressed language form? In the Cartesian, Newtonian worldview, form is devoid of spirit, but what if form were actually the direct evidence of spirit? Gaia (however you choose to name this life-expressed-energy) is sentient because we’re sentient, all of us— every plant to every animal with an inherent intelligence of form. Even the inanimate, connected to us, arisen from the same void. You could say it (all of It or Us) is both/both, multiple myriad, depending on a point of view, numerous as species, numerous as all forms of life. All life proliferating at every place it’s touched, as life proliferates on the biological level, the chemical level, the quantum level. Meaning proliferates at every level too. It radiates in and out of existence. It’s everything, nothing, and the dissolution of the language boundary between everything and nothing...

……………..

When we experienced a shift in global consciousness in the 1960s, with a view of the Earth, outside Earth, outside ourselves, it may be that the next (or rather continuous) shift in consciousness will be with how we see time and understand the world/ourselves as a direct expression of time. When I sit in meditation, if Mind is not noisy and running distracted, “I” becomes every sound of the room— the roar of the train, the cat’s meow, the steady hum of the refrigerator—there is no division between inside and outside, divisions dissolve.

In 2012: The Return Quetzalcoatl, Daniel discusses in some length the writings of the German philosopher Jean Gebser, analyzing Gebser’s work The Ever-Present Origin, as Daniel explores man’s relationship to time and space,

“He defines four previous stages—the archaic, the magical, the mythical, and the mental-rational— and argues that we are currently on the verge of transitioning to a new stage, which he calls integral and aperspectival, characterized by the realization of time freedom and ego freedom. A new form of consciousness arises—as a sudden ‘mutation’–when the previous structure enters its crisis having exhausted its possibilities.”

Daniel goes on later to say, “…mental-rational humanity became not only obsessed with space, but possessed by space—by the possibilities that developed from our increased ability to transform matter and shape physical reality. We learned to see ourselves, for the first time, embedded in—and simultaneously alienated from—the three-dimensions surrounding us.”

Yet we know that in the aboriginal worldview- every day is the “first day,” sung into being every morning. Or that in the Buddhist worldview, “the universe (is) a net of jewels, each facet of reality reflecting every other facet.” In these worldviews that exist simultaneously beside the dominant Western view, the vertical I-ego structure of language not only flattens out but also scintillates in the multiple rods and cones of experience, the multiple truths, sentiences of reality. Both ego and time are liberated as they become embedded in, rather than alienated from the dimensions that surround them. In these worldviews is the direct expression of ever-present origin—without beginning, without end, existing in the eternity that is now.

This concept of ever-present origin might also be expressed as the simultaneous event of Time, Body, and Mind. We are a direct expression, in our physical forms, of Time. Rather than the snap shot perception we hold of ourselves as one fixed self, we are more like river or the taper of a worm, entering in, flowing through, and passing back out of life. Jorge Luis Borges famously said, “Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” And so it is that our most immediate perception of Time is expressed through our bodies. And Body is a direct expression, not just of our bodies, but also all bodies, all land and physical, or aphysical forms, as Mind is an expression of our sentience and all sentiences- coexistent and simultaneous. If we can see ourselves as embedded in and expressions of time, body and mind, we simultaneously free ourselves from linear time and false ego.

The window of opportunity that is 2012 is the apocalypse of the self. It’s the individual ego opening every eye, pore, nerve, cell, and receptor to recognize the multiple and simultaneous event of self within and without. It’s the realization that while the boundaries of body may not always appear as porous, our connection to every other living and inanimate thing is all one continuous expression of energy, form, and language. It’s the realization that our individual minds are scintillating reflections of the collective mind, as we are nothing other than the world.

* Barbara Hubbard discusses this idea in the film, EntheoGenesis.