Showing posts with label ridley scott. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ridley scott. Show all posts

Sunday

The Flipside meets Jumanji and All the Money In the World

Happened upon two Flipside films over the weekend.  (Happy New Year!)

Can you hear me now?
In the film "All the Money in the World" (no spoiler alerts here) J. Paul Getty walks his grandson Paul into Hadrian's villa in Rome and says "I felt like I was returning when I first came to this villa."  He claims he is the reincarnation of Roman Emperor Hadrian.


The film is brilliant by the way, and Plummer plays the role of a lifetime, reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane. Since Getty is depicted as a prevaricator (or a fool, hard to tell which) I'll have to dig up the source for that claim.  (He did say he wondered that he had been the Emperor Hadrian but in General Patton's case, he "knew it" about his reincarnations as he writes in his poem "Through a Glass Darkly.")

But if it's true that he "felt like he had returned" or that he felt that he once been the Emperor Hadrian it's possible that indeed Getty was Hadrian. It's hard to tell when returning to a place that we "knew" in a previous lifetime precisely what it is about the place is so familiar.  Everything seems familiar, yet there's no guarantee you were that person who lived in that house - the only way to access the memory is through deep hypnosis (or a coma, nde or some other consciousness altering event.)

Hadrian checking out his empire.

J Paul, looking over his shoulder at the Ghost of Christmas Past.
By doing a between life hypnosis session (and I recommend those done by the Newton Institute because their therapists are trained in exploring the between lives realm where we can access not only a previous lifetime, but why we chose that particular lifetime, why we chose this lifetime and what the two had in common) we can access many details about previous lifetimes.  

There are many therapists who do this same form of therapy (Dr. Brain Weiss comes to mind) but in the Newton Institute, they examine "why" we chose a lifetime. It's a different experience learning why we chose a lifetime and more like taking "the red pill" in my estimation.

And in that instance, it's pretty easy to show what the two lifetimes of Hadrian and Getty had in common, because both lived lives that were written about. Hadrian is remembered for being an architect as well as a builder of an empire (He's credited with the Pantheon and Hadrian's tomb - though it's anyone's guess if he took credit for another's work).  Getty was famous for being a scrooge, a curmudgeon, and being fooled by fake art for decades.  

Attributed to Hadrian. (from wikipedia)
Attributed to Getty (from Getty.edu)

(I read one account that claimed his curator was "scammed" for millions of dollars - the "Kouros" of the Getty center, the 8 million dollar statue that was claimed to have been found at the bottom of the sea, which clearly had been created in someone's workshop, is one example. I used to chuckle at the artwork in the Getty in Malibu that originally said a famous artist's name - then was changed to say "from the school of" that artist, then eventually they were all called into question, and they've gone into the basement. 
That's not to say the Getty doesn't now have fantastic art - and as the film clearly shows, there's a moving metaphor for why that happened, and who took over the curation of the estate. But I digress.)

This Getty Kouros went from "Ancient Statue!"
to "Ancient Statue?" then to the basement. From a "famous
fake art" website.

Back to the Flipside.  

Let's pretend for a moment that Getty remembered a lifetime as Hadrian in Rome.  Was he the Emperor himself? Did he remember all the details of his growing up, his ascension to the throne or his journey on the planet?  Or was it just a feeling he had walking through Hadrian's villa? If it was the latter, then he could have been anyone who worked in that villa, including slaves, including a cook, plumber or maybe a gladiator who may have been assigned to Hadrian's front door. Either way, the only method I'm aware of to access that memory is via deep hypnosis, or some other consciousness altered state.  But let's pretend he was.

Hadrian was also a poet - one of his ditties: 

"Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos...

"Roving amiable little soul,
Body's companion and guest,
Now descending for parts
Colourless, unbending, and bare
Your usual distractions no more shall be there..."

Flipside anyone?  

Even the Emperor understood that this amiable little soul was not going to spend much longer as his body's companion.   Funny to think that 1800 some years later, (which according to some accounts, feels like a month on the Flipside) he'd suggest a lifetime as the most unhappy person in the world; "Oh, I think I'll come back and be the richest man in the world.  Learn some lessons in being a Scrooge.  Sure, why not?"

Wonder what he'll come back as next time... we'll have to stay tuned.

The other Flipside film I caught was Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle."


I'm not here to criticize my fellow filmmakers or their work.  The film had many laughs in it, a few cringe worthy moments, but the screening I was in was crowded with families chuckling throughout. Thumbs up from me.

But the Flipside aspect is this:

Life is a game.  Just like the game in Jumanji.  We are who we are back home - back on the flipside before we choose to come here.  (Like the high school students in the film) Then we choose our avatars, and we vaguely know what roles we are supposed to play (i.e. Dwayne Johnson, had a character that he knew his strengths and weaknesses, as did everyone else, but had no clue as to how to navigate the game) and we sign our "contract" to come here and play that role.  We come here to the planet without a map of how to navigate the game, so to speak, but we dive in anyway.

And while we play this game called "Life" we learn, as the characters do in Jumanji (no spoiler alerts here) that we all need to "help each other" in order to successfully navigate the game. It is the point of the game.

Some people are offended when I call life a "game" - because they feel its an attempt to diminish the kind of suffering and pain that many people experience while they're here.  But it's a metaphor for what is happening.  We take the "blue pill" and show up here on the planet and do what we think we've signed up for.  Some part of our consciousness is always "back home" aware that this is a game, or a construct, or a university where we are trying our best to learn or teach lessons, often lessons in love, but lessons nonetheless. (People claim only about a third of our consciousness or soul come to any particular lifetime, we leave roughly two thirds behind.  When asked why, people claim "it would blow the circuits of the human brain" or "we've got other things to do back home while we're playing this game.")

In this version of the film franchise, four people sign up (unwillingly, but to be sure, they did actually sign up to play the game) to experience an adventure. And as a Meta example, there are actors (Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart etc) who are playing characters in the film, who are actually other people "back home."  So in their guise of being each avatar, they are also actors pretending to be actors pretending to be... well,  you get the point.

It ain't real.

But it is real.

It's the game we play every time we come to the planet.  

Hacking the Afterlife

And according to the research I've been doing (which includes 45 filmed sessions, 5 more that I did myself and filmed, and the 2000 cases from Dr. Helen Wambach and the 7000 cases from Michael Newton) - based on this research, we can opt out, or choose NOT to play a character.  Just the way these characters do when they are actually signing up to play Jumanji. 

"Do you want to play the scientist or shall I?"  "You like science, why don't  you play that guy?"  "Oh okay, I think I'll give it a shot."

It's as simple as that.... and yet as profound as that.  

I'm fairly certain the screenwriters nor Jake Kasdan the writer/director are aware of this between life research - or aware of the accounts of people who claim that the "Journey of Souls" is a bit like the game #Jumanji. 

But there it is.  It is what it is.


It's not my opinion, belief or theory this is the case.  I'm only reporting what people consistently say about the flipside.  It's not up to me to convince anyone to believe in any particular aspect of it - and I offer it only as research. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Happy New Year!




Monday

The Martian and the Overview Effect

Via Paz on FB

Are you familiar with the "overview effect?"

You should be.

It's what astronauts report after coming back to Earth after spending some time in space, circling the "pale blue dot."

It's important because a number of people have cited it as a "consciousness altering event" that occurred when seeing the earth from outer space.

Carl Sagan mentions it and coined the phrase "the pale blue dot."

Scientist/Philosopher Giordano Bruno had an out of body experience where he "saw the earth" from outer space, and it altered his idea of the heavens (and he was burned at the stake for it.)

Private Manning cited it in the film by Alex Gibney as to why she felt compelled to share the secret military files she's spending life in prison for.

"The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface."

In my life of research, a "cognitive shift" is what I'm hearing over and over in interviews with people who either have had a near death experience, an out of body experience, a run in with someone who is no longer on the planet, or while under deep hypnosis. ("Flipside" and "It's a Wonderful Afterlife.")

People who've had these profound experiences claim that they've gone through some form of cognitive shift, where they no longer see their lives, or the lives of those around them in the same way.

During one hypnosis session, a woman was asked "what's the reason behind this shift?" and her "spirit guide" replied - "In terms of the cosmos, it's not a big deal.  However, if you want to understand a shift in consciousness, imagine yourself a crab walking on the ocean floor and you suddenly open your eyes and realize - you're in an ocean. That's a shift in consciousness."

So how is "The Martian" like the "Overview Effect?"

It's in the plant. (Funny. "Plant" and "planet." Can't get much closer than those two words).  

The plant that the "Martian" says hello to on Mars, and later we see a plant on another planet, which the actor in the scene says hello to as well.

How fragile. How precious. How indelibly linked are we to this place.  How incredibly amazing it is that we can actually have food and light and water - when obviously the experiment on Mars didn't have the same effect.  The experiment on Mars, for lack of a better term - we could call it the Universe's ability to turn a planet into a lush place teeming with life - didn't take hold on Mars.  For whatever reason.  And yet it did on Earth.

So when you go to Mars, and inevitably you will go to Mars when you see this amazing film, think for a moment how that sister planet - Mars might be an example of what Earth will look like in the future. 

If we don't take care of it. 
If we don't realize how precious it is. 
If we don't consider, embrace, understand the overview effect.


Here's a booklet from the overview project that is worth reading about space exploration:
http://www.overviewinstitute.org/images/overvieweffect.pdf

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