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02
Feb 10

Sitting with the Na’Vi

In response to my last post about the film Avatar, someone commented that the film reminded him of the feeling of community with others and with all life that he had growing up in the country.   Recently, I realized that it is just this sense of communing with life that comes rushing back vividly when I sit with others.   Sometimes when I sit alone in my room with the windows open, bird song or the smell of snow or spring or even a car on the road,  can bring me back to my senses but mostly when I sit with others.  I remember that primordial longing to be part of life the way the Na’vi were portrayed as being part of life–each of them able to braid themselves into the whole of life and into individual aspects they loved.

Shortly after I saw Avatar at a suburban mall, I had the  strangely complementary (braided?) experience of listening to Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi discourse on Sutta (or Sutra) #18, “The Honeyball,”  from the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, at Chuang Yen Monastery.  This sutta (so named because the truth it describes is as sweet and nourishing as a honey ball, which I believe is a yummy Indian dessert which is still served) describes “papanca,” the proliferation of thoughts and projections.  What we perceive, we think about, which is natural enough–and so is the tendency to delight in what we think.  And then comes craving, the yearning to be this or that, the projection of all kinds of views and opinions.   This is the way it is for most of us most of the time, isn’t it?  We walk around dreaming and talking to ourselves.  With both of these experiences fresh in mind, I sat down to meditate with a group of friends in Manhattan.  As the layers of thought and projection fell away and I returned to the sensation of being present in a room among others,  it struck me that what was happening was something akin to time traveling.   Supported by the energy of the group,  I was travelling back behind the thoughts and feelings and the distorted perceptions that proliferate from hurt feelings and thoughts–back to the primal perception of being here now.

Recently, a critic wrote that the Na’vi woman warrior Neyfiri doesn’t deserve an Oscar because as fine a creation as she may be, there are nuances in real live acting that are lost.   In the same way, of course,  my childhood fantasy of being a jungle warrior princess, isn’t real life.  But I wonder if there isn’t a connection between that longing to go back in time to a purer state, to be among the Na’Vi or fight for Middle Earth, and the desire to return to our original state, to the immediate felt sense of being alive.

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
15
Jan 10

Avatar

It has always intrigued me that the computer world applies words traditionally meant to point towards sacred realities– “icon” and “avatar”–in  weird but apt ways.   An icon, for example, is a small image that can be clicked on to become a gateway to a much larger reality–a two-dimensional technological version of the way an Byzantine icon can lead an Orthodox Christian who contemplates it to an appreciation of the  greater reality it represents.   Similarly, an avatar is a picture vehicle or a cartoon personification for a real person while a traditional avatar was a Hindu deity incarnated in human form–the way Lord Krishna appeared to Arjuna on the battlefield.     Who first thought of using these terms?   What computer geek (s) with a love of comparative religion chose those words instead of the cute common word  “cookie” or the made-up word  “google”?  It seems to suggest that at least some of the time, computing and software design attracts people who have  some of the same questions and hopes that animate spiritual search–i.e. the exchange of energy.  Certainly, this is true of technologist and gift economy entrepreneur Nipun Mehta, whom Parabola interviewed last year.

James Cameron’s film “Avatar” is a gorgeous digitally animated and live action fantasy exploration of what it could be like to be human and inhabit a greater reality.  Regardless of how they may judge the story Cameron tells,  almost everyone  who has seen the film has been bowled over by the way Cameron (working with a crew of thousands) has reimagined nature.  In the New Yorker, David Denby writes:  “As Cameron surges through the picture plane, brushing past tree branches, coursing alongside foaming-mouthed creatures, we may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending–a sustained mood of elation produced by vaulting into space.”  Set on Pandora, an Eden-like planet, and among the tribal clan, the Na’vi, who sense and worship the connections among all living beings.    As Denby describes them:  “In their easy command of nature, they are meant to evoke aboriginal people everywhere.  They have spiritual powers and, despite their elementary weapons–bows and arrows–real powers, too.  From each one’s head emerges a long braid ending in tendrils that are alive with nerves.  When the Na’vi plug their braids into similar neural cords that that hang from the heads of crested, horselike animals and giant birds, they achieve zahelu“….the Na’vi can merge with the animals  and govern their behavior with their own thoughts (in some other reports I’ve read, this is the way the Na’vi merge with one another as well).   In the film, a shadowy mega corporation grow tall blue avatars by incorporating a few peoples’ DNA–among them Jake, a paralyzed ex-marine.  When Jake slips into his avatar body he can suddenly run and jump againg–even before he goes flying on a kind of huge, colorful pterodactyl–we feel the soaring joy of movement.

Another writer calls Avatar “a long apologia for pantheism–a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”   That columnist claims that “pantheism has been Hollywood’s religioun of choice for a generation now…It’s the metaphysics woven through Disney cartoons like The Lion King and Pocahontas.  dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force ‘surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.’”

Hmmmmm.  So many interesting questions bubble up.   I remember so vividly experiencing meditation for the first time–that experience of coming down out of my thoughts and reconnecting with sensory awareness–and with feelings and thoughts before they hardened into ideas.  That was like slipping into an avatar and visiting a gorgeous new world, a connected world.  But now, decades on, I can also see how easy it is to take that realm for Reality…when perhaps there is a higher heaven?   How crucial it is to get out of the cage of the ego and rediscover the body…yet there is even more….