Well, it's Disclosure Day.
And just as I suspected, Spielberg's latest cinematic ceremony of Watcher worship seems to be a bit of a damp squib to some folks. At least if all the reviews are any indication.
And just as I suspected, Spielberg's latest cinematic ceremony of Watcher worship seems to be a bit of a damp squib to some folks. At least if all the reviews are any indication.
Unfortunately, I still have to go see it. Not only for the blatantly obvious X-Files'ness of it all, but also because there's quite a bit of Fraseology in the trailer. So it's kind of my job to see it.
But in reading all the reviews and watching some YouTubers' takes on it, I'm preparing myself for a slog. But maybe there'll be so much gosh darn Fraseology that I'll enjoy it, despite the reviews.
But in reading all the reviews and watching some YouTubers' takes on it, I'm preparing myself for a slog. But maybe there'll be so much gosh darn Fraseology that I'll enjoy it, despite the reviews.
But it also got me thinking of another movie I need to take a very deep dive back into...
Everyone wonders how esoteric they really are, some folks can't think about anything else. Which is why I've worked up the first of three questionnaires so you can truly ascertain your true EQ (esoteric quotient). Can you go another day without knowing how mystical you actually are?
No, I didn't think so.
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Now back to our show...
Arrival is a film that is always lurking somewhere at the back of my mind. I saw it when it was released, which actually was during an extremely difficult period of my life.
In hindsight, I'm actually surprised I was able to write about it at all, give the condition I was in. I guess it hit me the right place at the right time, since a major subplot in the film aligned with events in my own life.
So the following is an edited and reformatted version of that 2016 piece, which also folded in a review of Doctor Strange. I've omitted that material here because it's not only irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant to this essay.
Anyhow, this is a film I plan on diving back into in a major way. I can't rightly say why at the moment, but it just feels like it's time to jump back into it. And it's definitely something we'll be exploring at the Secret Sun Institute...
Anyhow, this is a film I plan on diving back into in a major way. I can't rightly say why at the moment, but it just feels like it's time to jump back into it. And it's definitely something we'll be exploring at the Secret Sun Institute...
Arrival is a long, slow, quiet tone-poem, sci-fi in the Solaris mold, while Doctor Strange is a fairly traditional Marvel superhero origin movie with some cinegenic Hollywood metaphysics tacked on for seasoning.
I haven't been to the movies in some time, having been on a provisional boycott. I'm still very much interested in the form, but the intellectual vapidity of mainstream media — conjoined with the persistent social engineering agenda evident in nearly every form of commercial entertainment — is keeping me away.
I want to be entertained, rather than indoctrinated by what Bruce Rux describes as a postmodern version of Soviet Socialist Theater.
Arrival was a surprise. That it's done comparatively good box office is probably encouraging news.
The film is slow and languid, and is fueled more by dream-logic than standard Hollywood octane. Doctor Strange goes big and stagey for the dream imagery, drawing heavily on Christopher Nolan's Inception, but also on Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. If you don't get the reference, Google it before you see the film. Or better yet, afterwards.
If you've been tuning out the media entirely, let me bring you up to speed: Arrival is a film about a mass alien contact event, where giant UFOs appear across the world overnight.
As you've probably heard, the aliens themselves are cephalopods, or as we called them back in the old days, giant octopi.
It reminds me in a way of John Keel, whose research into paranormal phenomena was second to none, and the paranoid worldview he came to hold.
The film is slow and languid, and is fueled more by dream-logic than standard Hollywood octane. Doctor Strange goes big and stagey for the dream imagery, drawing heavily on Christopher Nolan's Inception, but also on Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. If you don't get the reference, Google it before you see the film. Or better yet, afterwards.
If you've been tuning out the media entirely, let me bring you up to speed: Arrival is a film about a mass alien contact event, where giant UFOs appear across the world overnight.
As may well happen, the authorities discover they are completely unable to communicate with the aliens, so an American college professor — who also happens to be a languages prodigy — is enlisted to try to decipher the random grunts uttered by the visitors. Other countries do the same, but a crisis erupts when the aliens' complex, symbolic language is misinterpreted.
As with Doctor Strange, the plasticity of time is a central conceit in Arrival, but all that will sneak up on you in ways you can't anticipate. I'm not going to say too much about that because I don't want to spoil it. But also because I'm not entirely sure I could spoil it.
Doctor Strange is a movie about spells; Arrival is a movie that strives very much to cast one.
It's interesting to note also that Arrival featured a major player on loan from The Avengers, none other than Hawkeye himself, Jeremy Renner. He's capable enough, but I'm not sure I completely buy him as a physicist so brilliant that the government would choose him above his peers to initiate contact with an alien race.
Amy Adams — an actress I've had limited exposure to — is very good. It's a complex, challenging role, filled with hairpin emotional and narrative turns, and she pulled it all off, nary a seam to be seen. She conveys the sense of terror and awe (plus, more terror) one would experience in her situation.
As with Doctor Strange, the plasticity of time is a central conceit in Arrival, but all that will sneak up on you in ways you can't anticipate. I'm not going to say too much about that because I don't want to spoil it. But also because I'm not entirely sure I could spoil it.
Doctor Strange is a movie about spells; Arrival is a movie that strives very much to cast one.
It's interesting to note also that Arrival featured a major player on loan from The Avengers, none other than Hawkeye himself, Jeremy Renner. He's capable enough, but I'm not sure I completely buy him as a physicist so brilliant that the government would choose him above his peers to initiate contact with an alien race.
Amy Adams — an actress I've had limited exposure to — is very good. It's a complex, challenging role, filled with hairpin emotional and narrative turns, and she pulled it all off, nary a seam to be seen. She conveys the sense of terror and awe (plus, more terror) one would experience in her situation.
This jibes quite well with recent scientific discoveries about these fascinating creatures:
There's some real theory behind the sci-fi here, though, a theory dealing with the transformative effects of language:
But you can read all that anywhere, can't you? What's the Secret Sun angle here? I'm glad you asked.
Over the years I've mentioned a guy I used to know who kind of got me started on this whole Synchromystic business, some 20 years ago now. He was a genius when it came to breaking down words and numbers, and finding parallels in history that people wouldn't even sense, never mind connect.
We got to know each other through email and were stunned to discover that he once lived a short distance from where I do now, off the very same highway. Stunned, but not surprised, really.
I lost touch with him several years back. He worked under pseudonyms and seemed to vanish back into the electronic fog. I thought I found him time and again, but could never be certain.
But before I lost track of him, he came to hold very radical — some might say extreme — ideas about Synchronicity. Where some people might take a quantum physics-based approach to the phenomenon, if not a spiritually-based one, he took a more specific approach.
He came to believe that we were all being manipulated by extraterrestrial, interdimensional beings of unimaginable scope and power, beings who exist outside of time and space. He came to take a profoundly paranoid interpretation of meaningful coincidence, and quite probably a malevolent one.
Octopuses are aliens — or, at least, so vastly different in their genetic makeup that they might as well be considered out of this world. Scientists recently sequenced the first genome in the Octopus Genome Project, a huge undertaking to map out the entire DNA structure of the complex cephalopod.
What they found was simply incredible.
Octopuses have 33,000 genes, roughly 10,000 more than a human. This alone sets it apart from any other invertebrate in the world. They are also uncannily clever, with the ability to open jars, solve puzzles, and even use tools. It's no wonder that some might think this creature is from another planet.
In uncovering the sequence, scientists found that octopuses have a similar set of genes to those found in humans, that make up a neural network in their brains, which accounts for their quick ability to adapt and learn.
We also share a large brain, closed circulatory system, and eyes with an iris, retina, and lens. All of these independently developed in another species vastly different from our own mammal origins.The film's aliens communicate by spraying ink in the dense atmosphere they exist in, and it's their complex form of communication that becomes the central McGuffin of the story.
There's some real theory behind the sci-fi here, though, a theory dealing with the transformative effects of language:
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual's thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks.
The strong version of the hypothesis states that all human thoughts and actions are bound by the restraints of language, and is generally less accepted than the weaker version, which says that language only somewhat shapes our thinking and behavior.So Alan Moore's truisms about "spells are spelling" and "grimoires are grammars" aren't quite as facile as they sound, are they?
But you can read all that anywhere, can't you? What's the Secret Sun angle here? I'm glad you asked.
Over the years I've mentioned a guy I used to know who kind of got me started on this whole Synchromystic business, some 20 years ago now. He was a genius when it came to breaking down words and numbers, and finding parallels in history that people wouldn't even sense, never mind connect.
We got to know each other through email and were stunned to discover that he once lived a short distance from where I do now, off the very same highway. Stunned, but not surprised, really.
I lost touch with him several years back. He worked under pseudonyms and seemed to vanish back into the electronic fog. I thought I found him time and again, but could never be certain.
But before I lost track of him, he came to hold very radical — some might say extreme — ideas about Synchronicity. Where some people might take a quantum physics-based approach to the phenomenon, if not a spiritually-based one, he took a more specific approach.
He came to believe that we were all being manipulated by extraterrestrial, interdimensional beings of unimaginable scope and power, beings who exist outside of time and space. He came to take a profoundly paranoid interpretation of meaningful coincidence, and quite probably a malevolent one.
It reminds me in a way of John Keel, whose research into paranormal phenomena was second to none, and the paranoid worldview he came to hold.
No one can accuse Keel of jumping to conclusions, of failing to do his homework or show his math. He knew the material better than anyone, and forgot more than most people will ever know. So if nothing else, we should take his POV under careful consideration.
But it may be more complicated than all that. Maybe we are not in fact bound by time and space, as both Doctor Strange and Arrival come along to tell us.
There are scientists like Rick Strassman who took people to realms like those we see Doctor Strange travel, and there were scientists like Wolfgang Pauli who flirted with ideas about the transformational effect of reframing time as something other than a fixed constant.
But it may be more complicated than all that. Maybe we are not in fact bound by time and space, as both Doctor Strange and Arrival come along to tell us.
There are scientists like Rick Strassman who took people to realms like those we see Doctor Strange travel, and there were scientists like Wolfgang Pauli who flirted with ideas about the transformational effect of reframing time as something other than a fixed constant.
- Is there a way of recording our experience that will in fact work to help us transcend the nature of those experiences?
- Is Synchronicity itself a kind of language, one we haven't even begun to map?
Those who work with Synchronicity can't help but notice how it seems to communicate with the experiencer, how it responds to thought. And it can do so the more rigorous and analytical you are in approaching it, which certainly seems counterintuitive to many people.
Just don't pretend that that process is always going to be easy or pleasant. The deeper the waters go, the colder they get. And the pressures can become intolerable. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been there.
JAILBREAK
Space is not the final frontier, Time is. Learning to break Saturn's spell might well be the true Grail.
We're hardly at the beginning of that journey, but we may finally be beginning to realize that there may be ways out of Kronos's cosmic concentration camp.
Time is our jailer, it's the great taskmaster. It's the ultimate destroyer. It takes everything away from us. But only if you choose to play by the very reductive and incontrovertible rules you are taught when approaching it.
Does Synchronicity play a role in breaking this spell? I don't know. But it certainly usurps conventional models of time and causality, and that is definitely a good place to start.
Just don't pretend that that process is always going to be easy or pleasant. The deeper the waters go, the colder they get. And the pressures can become intolerable. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been there.
JAILBREAK
Space is not the final frontier, Time is. Learning to break Saturn's spell might well be the true Grail.
We're hardly at the beginning of that journey, but we may finally be beginning to realize that there may be ways out of Kronos's cosmic concentration camp.
Time is our jailer, it's the great taskmaster. It's the ultimate destroyer. It takes everything away from us. But only if you choose to play by the very reductive and incontrovertible rules you are taught when approaching it.
Does Synchronicity play a role in breaking this spell? I don't know. But it certainly usurps conventional models of time and causality, and that is definitely a good place to start.
