Profound Movie Quotes

Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.

I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker - a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten.

believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it. I don’t want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That’s the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don’t even see it, because I’m too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over. The nuances and shades and secrets and intimations of love and friendship and marriage an parenting are action-packed and multicolored, if you know where to look. Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.

But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

A Gift for You I send you... A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond. You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time.

Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.

Many people—particularly the young—have been persuaded that such a search is futile. They have been told from their preschool days on that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s, that each person can pick his or her own truth from a multicultural smorgasbord. If one choice proves unsavory, pick another, and so on, until, in a consumerist fashion, we pick the truth we like best. I think the despair of Generations X, Y, and now E comes from this fundamental notion that there’s no such thing as reality or the capital-T truth. Almost every new movie I see these days features a bright, good-looking, talented young man who is so downright sad, he can barely lift his head. I want to scream, “What’s wrong with this guy?” Then I feel a profound compassion because his generation has been forbidden the one thing that makes life such a breathtaking challenge: truth.

How many people are watching a movie right now, or reading a book or listening to a song or looking into their life or dreaming with this profound, conscious or not, yearning more than anything for some kind of relationship somewhere with someone or something that would cause them to stagger in intimate rawness in friendship and love?

He slowed to a walk. As he approached her he was surprised at just how pretty she was. She looked a little like Maureen O'Hara in those old pirate movies. His writer's mind kicked in and he thought, This woman could break my heart. I could crash and burn on this woman. I could lose this woman, drink heavily, write profound poems, and die in the gutter of turberculosis over this woman. This was not an unusual reaction for Tommy. He had it often, mostly with girls who worked the drive-through windows at fast-food places. He would drive off with the smell of fries in his car and the bitter taste of unrequited love on his tongue. It was usually good for at least one short story.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

In the 1991 movie City Slickers, Jack Palance gives Billy Crystal some profoundly simple advice. When Crystal asks him the secret of life, Palance holds up a forefinger, answers with a single word: "One." Choose one thing. Do it to the best of your ability. Let it go. Pick something else. Repeat endlessly.

ARE YOU A MOVIE STAR? Prerequisite for Laziness: Creativity, award winning actor/actress, convincing speech

Actually, I'm what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker—a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten: not bad, but not particularly good either.

She wondered what it was about storytelling that made people want it almost as much as food and water, even more so in bad times than good. Movies had never drawn more patrons than during the Great Depression. Book sales often improved in a recession. The need went beyond a mere desire for entertainment and distraction from one's troubles. It was more profound and mysterious than that.

About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer. No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that everyone’s had enough of me to last a month. Actually, I’m what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker—a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten: not bad, but not particularly good either. I hate having to tell you this, but why shouldn’t I admit it when I know it’s true? My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne—to beat her down, hide her. But it doesn’t work, and I know why. I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I’m used to not being taken seriously, but only the “lighthearted” Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the “deeper” Anne is too weak. If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she’s called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. Before I realize it, she’s disappeared. So the nice Anne is never seen in company. She’s never made a single appearance, though she almost always takes the stage when I’m alone. I know exactly how I’d like to be, how I am … on the inside. But unfortunately I’m only like that with myself. And perhaps that’s why—no, I’m sure that’s the reason why—I think of myself as happy on the inside and other people think I’m happy on the outside. I’m guided by the pure Anne within, but on the outside I’m nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether. As I’ve told you, what I say is not what I feel, which is why I have a reputation for being boy-crazy as well as a flirt, a smart aleck and a reader of romances. The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she doesn’t give a darn. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy. A voice within me is sobbing, “You see, that’s what’s become of you. You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.” Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world. Yours, Anne M. Frank ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.

Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it’s something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of inchoate possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one. Sometimes.

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!

Almost every new movie I see these days features a bright, good-looking, talented young man who is so downright sad, he can barely lift his head. I want to scream, “What’s wrong with this guy?” Then I feel a profound compassion because his generation has been forbidden the one thing that makes life such a breathtaking challenge: truth.

PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you’re under thirty, you have never heard of a song called “Spies Like Us,” and I am a horrible person for being the one to tell you. It was the theme for a big-budget Hollywood spy comedy starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Nobody saw the movie, but Paul’s theme was worse than the movie could have been. MTV played it constantly during the 1985 holiday season, though radio wouldn’t touch it. Paul does a rap that goes something like, “Oooh oooh, no one can dance like you.” In the video he plays multiple roles as members of a studio band, mugging and biting his lower lip. The drumming is where his cheeky-chappy act gets profoundly upsetting. You see this video, you’re going to be depressed for at least ten minutes about the existential condition of Paul-dom. His enthusiasm makes you doubt the sincerity of his other public displays. It makes you doubt yourself. You might think it’s a cheap laugh but it will cost you something.

People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization—we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.

In the Awakenings movie I found it very interesting that the most profound awakenings in the catatonic patients occurred in 1969, the year that the Aurora Borealis was seen from N.Y. to Louisiana. It seems the patients were getting environmental radiation stimulation in addition to their L-Dopa drug that year. L-Dopa plus radiation therapy may eventually be proven to be a very potent brain stimulant.

In this book, I have selected seven quantum movies that carry direct healing messages. These movies are powerful because they clearly depict the truth of Jesus’ spiritual teachings from A Course in Miracles; they contain the same deep wisdom, light, and love that Jesus demonstrated. Quantum movies propel us into a direct experience that is aligned with the world-changing perspective of quantum physics. The profound lessons from these movies are directly relevant to the core concerns of life; they are helping us to see all of the ego’s myriad tricks—the belief in history, ambitions, goals, outcomes, and so forth. The Holy Spirit is now using Hollywood to reach the sleeping mind! Holy Spirit has infiltrated Hollywood! This book is our prayer to Spirit: Make everything new! Show us the world anew—fresh, clean, and clear! Then we have nothing to worry about. When we trust, listen to, and follow Spirit, it is game over for the ego. Game over for worry, sadness, and anxiety. As Jesus says in the Course, “Trust would settle every problem now!” Happiness is Who We Are Now!

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

Zen does not ask you to believe in anything you cannot confirm for yourself. It does not ask you to memorize any sacred words. It does not require you to worship any particular thing or revere any particular person. It does not offer any rules to obey. It does not give you any hierarchy of learned men whose profound teachings you must follow to the letter. It does not ask you to conform any code of dress. It does not ask you to allow anyone else to choose what is right for you and what is wrong. Zen is complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority. Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real. That's real refuge.

In the 1991 movie, City Slickers, Jack Palance gives Billy Crystal some profoundly simple advice. When Crystal asks him the secret of life, Palance holds up a forefinger, answers with a single word: "One." Choose one thing. Do it to the best of your ability. Let it go. Pick something else. Repeat endlessly. How sad that so much of our lives is spent looking back over our shoulders or gazing far ahead instead of wringing full benefit from the only thing we truly own: Now. This moment. None other. There is no other. How tragic, therefore, not to fulfill its unique promise before it passes from us forever. How much of our regret comes from wasting so many of our moments wanting something better, something different, something other than what we have at the moment we have it.

...the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!” But really, how can a picture hurt you? Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction. Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

In his movie The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke depicts a normal middle-class family who, for no apparent reason, one day quit their jobs, destroy everything in their apartment, including all the cash they have just withdrawn from the bank, and commit suicide. The story, according to Haneke, was inspired by a true story of an Austrian middle-class family who committed collective suicide. As Haneke points out in a subsequent interview, the cliché questions that people are tempted to ask when confronted with such a situation are: “did they have some trouble in their marriage?”, or “were they dissatisfied with their jobs?”. Haneke’s point, however, is to discredit such questions; if he wanted to create a Hollywood-style drama, he would have offered clues indicating some such problems that we superficially seek when trying to explain people’s choices. But his point was precisely that the most profound thoughts about whether life is meaningful occur once we have swept aside all the clichés about the pleasure or lack thereof of “love, work, and play” (Thagard), or of “being whooshed up in sports events and being absorbed in the coffee-making craft” (Dreyfus and Kelly). Psychologically, or psychotherapeutically, these are very useful ways of “finding meaning in one’s life”, but philosophically, they are rather ways of how to avoid raising the question, how to insulate oneself from the likelihood that the question of meaning will be raised to oneself. In my view, then, the particular answer to the second question (what is the meaning of life?) is not that important, because whatever answer one offers, even the nihilist or absurdist answer, is many times good enough if the purpose is to get rid of the state of puzzlement. More importantly, however, what matters is that the question itself was raised, and the question is posterior to the more fundamental one of whether there is any meaning at all in life. It is also intuitive that we could judge someone’s life as meaningless if that person has never wondered whether her life, and life in general, is meaningful or not. At the same time, our proposal is, in my opinion, neither elitist, nor parochial in any way; I find it empirically quite plausible that the vast majority of people have actually asked this question or some version of it at least once during their lives, regardless of their social class, wealth, religion, ethnicity, gender, cultural background, or historical period.

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the power she was carrying some sort of project about World War II—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some poignant music, out is in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the poster board chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the poster she was carrying, some sort of project about World War Two—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration-camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

What if you can't help but judge life negatively? What if yesterday felt awful, today feels awful, and tomorrow is likely to feel awful too? What if you are poverty stricken, coughing up blood, incarcerated, alone, under siege, helpless, and hopeless? How absurd is it to ask you to make meaning and choose the meanings of your life? Don't you need medicine, money, and a friend more than some hard-nosed philosophy? Aren't you better off with a romantic movie, a pitcher of beer, and a dream of heaven rather than a demanding, soul-searching regimen? Doesn't natural psychology make little or no sense in your circumstances? ... It may be the case that someone who has a hard life is exactly the sort of person who would benefit from a philosophy that respects the hardness of reality and that proposes solutions, especially if that person is smart enough to understand the alternatives. That isn't to say that there won't be days when all of us need meaning to amount to more than this, to something more profound and important, to something that better soothes us and helps us forget that we are bound to suffer and that we will cease to be. The natural psychological view does not controvert the facts of existence, and there will be days—many days—when even the staunchest heart wishes that it could. We boldly stare at the facts of existence—and on some days, each of us will blink. Adherents of natural psychology know that days like that are coming.

Being raised evangelical in the Midwest gave me a personal experience of the phenomenon called “religious fundamentalism.” A story illustrates. When I was a boy in high school, I was interested in a girl from our church. It was an evangelical church, although some might have called it a bit fundamentalist—taking a hard line on cultural issues. But I took a chance and invited her to a movie, which was certainly frowned upon back then in our church culture (though my own parents snuck us out to Walt Disney movies at the drive-in, where we were unlikely to be spotted). I chose The Sound of Music, thinking it was “safe.” Who could object to Julie Andrews, I confidently thought? I was wrong. As we left the house, my girlfriend’s father stood in the doorway, blocking our exit, and said to his daughter, “If you go to this film, you’ll be trampling on everything that we’ve taught you to believe.” She fled downstairs to her bedroom in tears. We missed the movie, and the evening was a disaster. A year later, the fundamentalist father watched The Sound of Music on his television—and liked it. Fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity. It is a reaction usually based on profound fear and defensiveness against “losing the faith.” My girlfriend’s father instinctively knew that his religion should make him different than the world. That is a fair religious point, and to be honest, there is much about modernity that deserves some revolting against. But I wish he had chosen to break with America at the point of its materialism, racism, poverty, or violence. Instead, he chose Julie Andrews.

As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer. No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that everyone’s had enough of me to last a month. Actually, I’m what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker—a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten: not bad, but not particularly good either. I hate having to tell you this, but why shouldn’t I admit it when I know it’s true? My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne—to beat her down, hide her. But it doesn’t work, and I know why. I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I’m used to not being taken seriously, but only the “lighthearted” Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the “deeper” Anne is too weak. If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she’s called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. Before I realize it, she’s disappeared. So the nice Anne is never seen in company. She’s never made a single appearance, though she almost always takes the stage when I’m alone. I know exactly how I’d like to be, how I am … on the inside. But unfortunately I’m only like that with myself. And perhaps that’s why—no, I’m sure that’s the reason why—I think of myself as happy on the inside and other people think I’m happy on the outside. I’m guided by the pure Anne within, but on the outside I’m nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether. As I’ve told you, what I say is not what I feel, which is why I have a reputation for being boy-crazy as well as a flirt, a smart aleck and a reader of romances. The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she doesn’t give a darn. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy. A voice within me is sobbing, “You see, that’s what’s become of you. You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.” Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.

Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general sense than you can possibly imagine." "Huh?" "It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports - - you know." "So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent. "Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean." "I've heard the expression, yes." "That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel... "Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier." Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I can't believe you can think about people that way." "Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

When I’m in the right frame of mind, I start to create a list of dreams and goals. Some are preposterous; others are overly pragmatic. I don’t attempt to censor or edit the nature of the list—I put anything and everything down. Next to that first list, I write down in a second column all the things that bring me joy and pleasure: the achievements, people, and things that move me. The clues can be found in the hobbies you pursue and the magazines, movies, and books you enjoy. Which activities excite you the most, where you don’t even notice the hours that pass? When I’m done, I start to connect these two lists, looking for intersections, that sense of direction or purpose. It’s a simple exercise, but the results can be profound.

Maybe we can get away from our yes/no world of classical music, stop thinking in terms of pop versus serious, and refuse to ghettoize movie music…. Maybe, as we encourage our to sing in their personal voice, we can also bring back the music taken away from us. If you are very fortunate, music will take you to all those places and states of being that physicist are trying to explain/prove - parallel universe, non-linear times, and the vast majority of things that exist but we cannot see/hear, that connect us from today into the very reason we love music, the heart of the matter. Charles Ives made a distinction between the Unknown, and the In-Known the latter being what we profoundly sense but cannot prove or even explain. Just widen your embrace and listen without prejudice. What is the sound of it? No metaphors. No similes. No false criteria. No imposed walls: a gateway to the thing that is infinite, curved, expanding, and imploding - that always existed and will always exist as long as humans walk the earth. It is right there invisible to they eye, yet palpable to your ear, your mind, and your heart. It is called music. It is yours, and because it is yours, it is great.

SCALE THE HUMAN MOUNTAIN OF SUMLESS LIES UNTIL YOU LABORIOUSLY REACH THE SUMMIT THEN CAUSE IT TO CRUMBLE BY YOUR EQUALLY SUMLESS BURDEN OF VERITY THAT NO HUMAN MAY FAVOUR YOU WITH A GLANCE ANY MORE AND THOSE WHO DO ARE NO LONGER HUMAN HAVING DIVESTED THEMSELVES OF THEIR HUMANITY AS YOU DID BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT OF * WHAT MAN HAS DONE TO HIMSELF BESIDES , YOU ARE ABLE TO ASCERTAIN HOW MANY '' FRIENDS '' YOU HAVE WHICH IS THE EMPTY SET CONTAINING ONE ELEMENT ONLY : VERITY ! , TO WHICH YOU PERTAIN AS WELL IT IS WHY IT IS THE HARDEST THING TO FIND THE PATH LEADING TO YOURSELF AND IT IS BY THE EMPTY SET THAT ALL OF MATHEMATICS HAS BEEN MADE AN EGREGIOUS LIE TOO IT IS MORE FACILE TO KILL SOMEONE OR , IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO , YOURSELF DO YOU SEE THE POPLAR AND THE ROBIN THAT IS PERCHED ON IT ? ASK THEM ! THEY KNOW HOW TO LIVE YOU DON'T BECAUSE YOU ARE HUMAN AND INTELLIGENT : MAN IS ENDUED WITH HIS SPIRIT OF INVENTION WHICH HAS REDUCED LIFE TO ABSURDITY AS ALL THOSE THEORIES AND TEACHINGS SPRINGING FROM IT HAVE NEVER BENEFITED LIFE , ON THE CONTRARY , DESTROYED IT ! AN APPRECIATION OF THE MAJESTY OF VERITY ALSO ENTAILS THE INEVITABLE CATASTROPHE OF '' BEING '' AND HENCE THE INFELICITY OF YOURSELF WHICH HAS TO BE ASCRIBED TO THOSE PROFOUND TEACHINGS OF MAN AND THE IMPRECATIONS WHICH THEY HEAPED UPON LIFE AND BEHIND WHICH EVERYONE STRIVES TO CONCEAL HIMSELF AS SOMETHING SUBLIME , BROTHERLY , CUNNING , INGENIOUS CONVINCED OF THE '' SUCCESS '' OF SUCH BEING ! INGENUITY AND SUCCESS , DO THOSE TWO WORDS DIFFER ? , AS MAN IS DETREMINED BY THOSE CRITERIA AND HENCE LIFE !... WHAT ALSO COMES TO MIND HERE IS THIS - THERE IS SOMETHING VASTLY ABOMINABLE ABOUT SOCIETY : ITS MEMBERS ARE EVER SO FOND OF ALL THOSE MOVIE STARS AND ALL THOSE OTHER LUMINARIES AND WHAT IS LUMINOUS ABOUT THEM I DO NOT KNOW ! YET THEY ARE IN THE HABIT OF TREATING THOSE VERY SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE DIFFERENTLY FROM ORDINARY PEOPLE SUCH AS A HOUSEMAID OR A GROCER OR A SALESMAN AND SO FORTH , THEREBY CREATING SOMETHING UTTERLY CORRUPT : A FALSE IDEALISM ! THEY NEED THOSE LUMINARIES AS THEY LACK ANY IDEALISM THEMSELVES IN THEIR EVERYDAY REALITY WHICH HAS DEPRAVED THEM OF IT , OVERLOOKING HOWEVER , HOW TRULY ORDINARY IN TRUTH ALL THOSE STARS ARE ! AND ALLOWING THEIR LACK OF IDEALISM TO BE SUPERSEDED BY OTHER PEOPLE'S NONPRESENT IDEALISM ON ACCOUNT OF THEIR PROMINENCE MAKES EVERYTHING LOOK EVEN DARKER IN LIFE , AS THOUGH LIFE CONSISTED IN FAME ! IS THIS WHY IT IS SO DARK IN THE HUMAN WORLD ? AM I THE ONLY PERSON TO APPREHEND DARKNESS IN THEIR LIGHTNESS ? OR WHY IS SO DARK IN THIS WORLD ? SOMETHING LIKE THAT NEEDS TO BE SHRUGGED OFF AS SOMETHING INEXPLICABLY RATIONAL , WHENCE I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF IRRATIONAL IN NOT GROVELLING BEFORE THOSE WHO ARE EVEN MORE ORDINARY THAN ALL THE OTHER ORDINARY NON-FAMOUS PEOPLE ARE ! IT IS IN PARTICULAR THOSE ALL-IMPORTANT DIGNITARIES WHO TASTE OF METHYLATED SPIRITS IN A MOST ACRID AND NAUSEATING FASHION ! SO MUCH FOR CEANLINESS !...

THIRD EMENDED VERSION , SOME OMISSIONS HAVING BEEN ADDED TO MY LAST '' PUBLICATION '' TO KEEP THE LOGIC MORE LUCID SORRY FOR SETTING EVERYTHING DOWN SO QUICKLY - ''SCALE THE HUMAN MOUNTAIN OF SUMLESS LIES UNTIL YOU LABORIOUSLY REACH THE SUMMIT THEN CAUSE IT TO CRUMBLE BY YOUR EQUALLY SUMLESS BURDEN OF VERITY THAT NO HUMAN MAY FAVOUR YOU WITH A GLANCE ANY MORE AND THOSE WHO DO ARE NO LONGER HUMAN HAVING DIVESTED THEMSELVES OF THEIR HUMANITY AS YOU DID BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT OF WHAT MAN HAS DONE TO HIMSELF BESIDES , YOU ARE ABLE TO ASCERTAIN HOW MANY '' FRIENDS '' YOU HAVE WHICH IS THE EMPTY SET CONTAINING ONE ELEMENT ONLY : VERITY ! , TO WHICH YOU PERTAIN AS WELL IT IS WHY IT IS THE HARDEST THING TO FIND THE PATH LEADING TO YOURSELF AND IT IS BY THE EMPTY SET THAT ALL OF MATHEMATICS HAS BEEN MADE AN EGREGIOUS LIE TOO IT IS MORE FACILE TO KILL SOMEONE OR , IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO , YOURSELF THAN IT IS TO LIVE ! DO YOU SEE THE POPLAR AND THE ROBIN THAT IS PERCHED ON IT ? ASK THEM ! THEY KNOW HOW TO LIVE YOU DON'T BECAUSE YOU ARE HUMAN AND INTELLIGENT : MAN IS ENDUED WITH HIS SPIRIT OF INVENTION WHICH HAS REDUCED LIFE TO ABSURDITY AS ALL THOSE THEORIES AND TEACHINGS SPRINGING FROM IT HAVE NEVER BENEFITED LIFE , ON THE CONTRARY , DESTROYED IT ! AN APPRECIATION OF THE MAJESTY OF VERITY ALSO ENTAILS THE INEVITABLE CATASTROPHE OF '' BEING '' AND HENCE THE INFELICITY OF YOURSELF WHICH HAS TO BE ASCRIBED TO THOSE PROFOUND TEACHINGS OF MAN AND THE IMPRECATIONS WHICH THEY HEAPED UPON LIFE AND BEHIND WHICH EVERYONE STRIVES TO CONCEAL HIMSELF AS SOMETHING SUBLIME , BROTHERLY , CUNNING , INGENIOUS CONVINCED OF THE '' SUCCESS '' OF SUCH BEING ! INGENUITY AND SUCCESS , DO THOSE TWO WORDS DIFFER ? , AS MAN IS DETREMINED BY THOSE CRITERIA AND HENCE LIFE !... WHAT ALSO COMES TO MIND HERE IS THIS - THERE IS SOMETHING VASTLY ABOMINABLE ABOUT SOCIETY : ITS MEMBERS ARE EVER SO FOND OF ALL THOSE MOVIE STARS AND ALL THOSE OTHER LUMINARIES AND WHAT IS LUMINOUS ABOUT THEM I DO NOT KNOW ! YET THEY ARE IN THE HABIT OF TREATING THOSE VERY SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE DIFFERENTLY FROM ORDINARY PEOPLE SUCH AS A HOUSEMAID OR A GROCER OR A SALESMAN AND SO FORTH , THEREBY CREATING SOMETHING UTTERLY CORRUPT : A FALSE IDEALISM ! THEY NEED THOSE LUMINARIES AS THEY LACK ANY IDEALISM THEMSELVES IN THEIR EVERYDAY REALITY WHICH HAS DEPRAVED THEM OF IT , OVERLOOKING HOWEVER , HOW TRULY ORDINARY IN TRUTH ALL THOSE STARS ARE ! AND ALLOWING THEIR LACK OF IDEALISM TO BE SUPERSEDED BY OTHER PEOPLE'S NONPRESENT IDEALISM ON ACCOUNT OF THEIR PROMINENCE MAKES EVERYTHING LOOK EVEN DARKER IN LIFE , AS THOUGH LIFE CONSISTED IN FAME ! IS THIS WHY IT IS SO DARK IN THE HUMAN WORLD ? AM I THE ONLY PERSON TO APPREHEND DARKNESS IN THEIR LIGHTNESS ? OR WHY IS SO DARK IN THIS WORLD ? SOMETHING LIKE THAT NEEDS TO BE SHRUGGED OFF AS SOMETHING INEXPLICABLY RATIONAL , WHENCE I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF IRRATIONAL IN NOT GROVELLING BEFORE THOSE WHO ARE EVEN MORE ORDINARY THAN ALL THE OTHER ORDINARY NON-FAMOUS PEOPLE ARE ! IT IS IN PARTICULAR THOSE ALL-IMPORTANT DIGNITARIES WHO TASTE OF METHYLATED SPIRITS IN A MOST ACRID AND NAUSEATING FASHION ! SO MUCH FOR CLEANLINESS !... VENERABLE ANCIENT SHADES HOVERING OVER THIS LAKE THAT IS NO MORE AND OF WHICH I AM PART THE WORLD AROUND ME FADES I DISPEL ALL THOSE BLANK AND GRAINED IDEAS MAKING UP HUMAN EXISTENCE I AM NO MORE I DREAM AND HOPEFULLY I WILL NEVER TURN BACK SO AS TO SEE THAT BLANK AND GRAINED HUMAN EXISTENCE AGAIN WHICH CAUSES LIFE TO BLUR SO MUCH THAT I AM NO LONGER IN A POSITION TO SUFFER FOR THIS MUCH GUILT , WHAT IS LIFE ? AMEN !...

Then the center of influence shifted to London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Who, the Kinks, and all the bands that orbited them. San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana, had its moment in a psychedelic spotlight around the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but as the 1960s gave way to the '70s, the center of the musical universe shifted unmistakably to Los Angeles. "It was incredibly vital," said Jonathan Taplin, who first came to LA as the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band and later relocated there to produce Martin Scorsese's breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. "The nexus of the music business had really moved from New York to Los Angeles. That had been a profound shift . . . It was very clear that something big had changed."'' For a breathtaking few years, the stars aligned to glittering effect in Los Angeles. The city attracted brilliant artists; skilled session musicians; soulful songwriters; shrewd managers, agents, and record executives; and buzz-building clubs. From this dense constellation of talent, a shimmering new sound emerged, a smooth blend of rock and folk with country influences. Talented young people from all over the country began descending on Los Angeles with their guitar cases or dreams of becoming the next Geffen. Irving Azoff, a hyper-ambitious young agent and manager who arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, remembered, "It was like the gold rush. You've never seen anything like it in the entertainment business. The place was exploding. I was here—right place, right time. I tell everybody, `If you're really good in this business, you only have to be right once,' so you kind of make your own luck, but it is luck, too. It was hard to be in LA in that time and have any talent whatsoever in the music business—whether you were a manager, an agent, an artist, a producer, or writer—[and] not to make it, because it was boom times. It was the gold rush, and it was fucking fun.

Zen doesn’t ask you to believe in anything you cannot confirm for yourself. It does not ask you to memorize any sacred words. It doesn’t require you to worship any particular thing or revere any particular person. It doesn’t offer any rules to obey. It doesn’t give you any hierarchy of learned men whose profound teachings you must follow to the letter. It doesn’t ask you to conform to any code of dress. It doesn’t ask you to allow anyone else to choose what is right for you and what is wrong. Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority. Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real. That’s real refuge. Reality will announce itself to you in utterly unmistakable ways once you learn to listen. Learning to listen to reality, though, ain’t so easy. You’re so used to shouting reality down, drowning it out completely with your own opinions and views, that you might not even be able to recognize reality’s voice anymore. It’s a funny thing, though, because reality is the single most glaringly obvious thing there is. As the woman said in those old Palmolive commercials, “You’re soaking in it!” Yet we’ve forgotten how to recognize it.

The story was okay, but the acting bothered Andrei. Sometimes he would watch a scene and then it would go to the next; Andrei would blink, bewildered at the time that had passed. The film just went by. Scenes would jump to the next but his mind was the same. Why? He noticed that the lead actress in her later years was extremely gorgeous, except some sharp concentration in him blocked out her beauty. This seated heart screamed for the movie to shatter him. And it drew upon him that this was another film that the world was not bothered by of its acting. In fact, they did not even see it. In its short scenes, audiences were hypnotized for an average of five to eight seconds by an actor’s beauty and if the editor timed it right, and with enough spectacle, movies could get away with doing nothing. Gorgeousness stimulated the mind. “Wow, they are so beautiful,” the audience was forced to think—and then by jumping to the next beautiful part fast enough there was something called a movie. And the movie seemed to use the actors’ appearances to drive most of the scenes. And many actors in different scenes sort of just stood there, handsome, and whispering. That was their strategy—mumbling murmurs of breath and rasp. Their indecisive bodies were unnaturally still, as though they had close-ups when the shot was wide. All of the actors’ voices were dumbly lowered to a safe natural cadence while in an unnatural situation and yet seeming real, no actual thought needed to be shown. 'Beauty is good,' says the industry. 'Sell that. Sell beauty! Make it beautiful. Ugly stories about beautiful people. It naturally turns a crap film into a decent one. The people are left with a good impression, as though having watched something fascinating. Make sure to let the camera sit on those beautiful people and their faces will give the audience something impossible to understand and give us runtime while they gaze. But having ugly people in it, people that look like people, actors that look like their audience—er, that’s not so profound,' says the industry. It was why the scenes moved without Andrei knowing: nothing was done by its actors.

People say things move more slowly in situations like this, and they’re right. My mind watched the action in the microseconds that followed as if it were watching a movie in slow motion. The instant I saw the pilot chute, my arms flew to my sides and I straightened my body into a head dive, bending ever so slightly at the hips. The verticality gave me increased speed, and the bend allowed my body to add first a little, then a blast of horizontal motion as my body became an efficient wing, sending me zipping past Chuck just in front of his colorful blossoming Para-Commander parachute. I passed him going at over 150 miles per hour, or 220 feet per second. Given that speed, I doubt he saw the expression on my face. But if he had, he would have seen a look of sheer astonishment. Somehow I had reacted in microseconds to a situation that, had I actually had time to think about it, would have been much too complex for me to deal with. And yet . . . I had dealt with it, and we both landed safely. It was as if, presented with a situation that required more than its usual ability to respond, my brain had become, for a moment, superpowered. How had I done it? Over the course of my twenty-plus-year career in academic neurosurgery—of studying the brain, observing how it works, and operating on it—I have had plenty of opportunities to ponder this very question. I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess. I realize now that the real answer to that question is much more profound. But I had to go through a complete metamorphosis of my life and worldview to glimpse that answer. This book is about the events that changed my mind on the matter. They convinced me that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain is, it was not my brain that saved my life that day at all. What sprang into action the second Chuck’s chute started to open was another, much deeper part of me. A part that could move so fast because it was not stuck in time at all, the way the brain and body are.

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We weep for characters, and then we go brush our teeth and have to face the fact that the world is warming at such a rapid pace that a terrifying number of amphibians are vanishing every month. And so through plays, through soccer games, through novels, through movies, through video games, through political elections - through story - we rehearse feelings we might eventually need in our own lives. ... Through drama, in the moments of greatest suspense, when the hero is hanging by a support from above, swaying to and fro ... we rehearse anxiety and longing more profoundly than any other emotions. ... And longing is the reach, the extension, the wild desire to attain the next stable platform at the end of the high wire. It's the hope against hope that the water shooting out of the fountain will stay aloft forever. (Anthony Doerr, "The Sword of Damocles: On Suspense, Shower Murders, and Shooting People on the Beach")

It is a shame when a Christian gives an unqualified approval to the positive messages in The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Little Miss Sunshine, but doesn’t even stop to wonder if the crassness in the storytelling method in both those films undermines them. It’s a bigger shame when Christians pan a movie like In the Bedroom because it is about a revenge murder, and miss the profound theme in the piece about the need to forgive.

Chapter 2: The Blinders of the Senses: Awakening from the Sensory Dream Close your eyes and imagine standing in a garden. The air is fragrant with the scent of flowers, and the sun's warmth kisses your skin. You hear the rustle of leaves, the chirping of birds, and the distant hum of life. This sensory symphony envelops you, defining your experience of the world around you. But what if I told you that this symphony is both a blessing and a limitation? Welcome to the chapter where we pull back the curtain on the senses—the windows through which we perceive reality. These senses are our gateways to the world, allowing us to touch, taste, hear, see, and smell. They are our connection to the external, the bridge that links us to the physical universe. However, in their splendor lies a trap—a trap that keeps us tethered to the surface of existence. Picture this: you're in a theater, engrossed in a captivating movie. The screen and the story before you are so compelling that you forget you're sitting in a theater, watching a mere projection. In the same way, our senses project a vivid reality that captivates us, making us forget that they're just a means of perception, not the ultimate truth. Our senses act as both guides and misguides. They offer us a glimpse into the world, but they also distort reality. They're like a paintbrush in the hands of an artist, creating a beautiful but partial picture. We become so focused on this picture that we overlook the canvas on which it's painted—the canvas of consciousness. Consider the blind spots in your eyes. These are spots where you literally cannot see, yet your brain fills in the gaps seamlessly, creating a complete image. Similarly, our senses have "blind spots" when it comes to the inner world of thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. They excel at perceiving the external, but they struggle to illuminate the internal. Herein lies the paradox: while our senses are our windows to the world, they can also be our blinders, keeping us from seeing the whole picture. Just as a map provides information about the terrain but not the essence of a place, our senses provide data about the world but not the essence of our being. So, how do we escape this sensory dream and peer beyond the blinders? The answer lies in a shift of focus. We must turn our attention inwards, away from the dazzling spectacle of the external world. It's here, in the quietude of introspection, that we can begin to untangle the threads of our consciousness from the threads of sensation. In the coming pages, we'll delve into the paradox of perception and introspection. We'll journey through the ways our senses illuminate the external and yet leave us in the dark about the internal. And most importantly, we'll explore the profound power of looking beyond the surface, awakening to a reality that transcends the sensory landscape. So, get ready to peel back the layers of perception, to unveil the subtle dance between our senses and our consciousness. As we journey through this chapter, remember: just as a photograph captures a moment in time, our senses capture a moment in reality. But to grasp the essence of existence, we must go beyond the snapshot and embrace the living, breathing symphony of

If we think deeply about our childhood, not just about our memories of it but how it actually felt, we realize how differently we experienced the world back then. Our minds were completely open, and we entertained all kinds of surprising, original ideas. Things that we now take for granted, things as simple as the night sky or our reflection in a mirror, often caused us to wonder. Our heads teemed with questions about the world around us. Not yet having commanded language, we thought in ways that were preverbal—in images and sensations. When we attended the circus, a sporting event, or a movie, our eyes and ears took in the spectacle with utmost intensity. Colors seemed more vibrant and alive. We had a powerful desire to turn everything around us into a game, to play with circumstances. Let us call this quality the Original Mind. This mind looked at the world more directly—not through words and received ideas. It was flexible and receptive to new information. [...] Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizeable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood. This spirit manifests itself in their work and in their ways of thinking. Children are naturally creative. They actively transform everything around them, play with ideas and circumstances, and surprise us with the novel things they say or do. [...] Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Although they have profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approaching problems. They are able to ask the kinds of simple questions that most people pass over, but they have the rigor and discipline to follow their investigations all the way to the end. They retain a childlike excitement about their field and a playful approach, all of which makes the hours of hard work alive and pleasurable. Like children, they are capable of thinking beyond words—visually, spatially, intuitively—and have greater access to preverbal and unconscious forms of mental activity, all of which can account for their surprising ideas and creations.

The irony I’ve always found most haunting about Grizzly Man was how close it came to avoiding its ending, thus never being made at all. How close Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard came to going home. They’d called it a season, packed up their gear, and got as far as the airport ticket counter before deciding to return to the Alaskan bush awhile longer. As if they’d heard a call to go back. Had Lydia seen this, and never told me? She would know I had. And trusted I would understand exactly what it meant when, after a trip to the bathroom at Vancouver International, I found her seat in our gate’s waiting area empty. Or if not right away, I’d get the message eventually. When I missed our flight, too, I couldn’t say if it was because I was still waiting for her to come back. Or because I wasn’t aware of when everyone else started to board. Or because I was trying to work up the courage to go after her, but couldn’t get past my fear of the mess that might be waiting. Mostly I wished I’d paid more attention to how much of herself Lydia must have seen in Stefan—alive in the wrong time, unable to see anything more ahead for her. All I’d ever wanted was someone to watch movies with, and talk about what they meant before we went to bed. Profound ones. Silly ones. All the ones in between. It seemed so simple, so little to ask for. So why couldn’t I have reached out a hand’s length farther, and accepted it? But as I sat transfixed by the sky, by the clouds and all they concealed, the maker of teeth made it clear. That’s not how this universe works. That’s not how any of this works.

Had Paris seen a film version of the story every couple of years, I can’t imagine that he would have had such a profound and deepening series of encounters. As he listened, he had to draw from an inner well to conjure another world, with its smells and sounds and people: the metallic concussion of a spade on dry soil, the cold shock of seawater, the pink, shining, hamlike face of Long John Silver. A child watching a movie doesn’t need to do any of that.

LSD profoundly alters cognitive unity. Many people feel that the separation between the self and world dissolves when on LSD, and they begin to feel at one with everything. Conscious experience as a unified whole also breaks down on LSD, especially during the acute phase at high doses, so that perceptions that originate from inside are difficult to disentangle from those originating from outside. Experience itself becomes like movie frames slowed down so that each frame is perceivable. We know now that there are neurobiological reasons for this; hallucinogens have profound effects on global brain activity. Psilocybin, for example, decreases the connections between visual and sensorimotor networks, while it seems to increase the connectivity between the resting-state networks. Temporal integration is related to one’s sense of the current moment. Conscious experience is somehow located in time. We feel like we occupy an omnipresent widthless temporal point—the now. As Riccardo Manzotti says: Every conscious process is instantiated by patterns of neural activity extended in time. This apparently innocuous hypothesis hides a possible problem. If neural activity spans in time (as it has to do since neural activity consists in trains of temporally distributed spikes), something that takes place in different instants of time has to belong to the same cognitive or conscious process. For instance, what glues together the first and the last spike of neural activity underpinning the perception of a face? We know that neuronal oscillations at different frequencies act as this temporal glue. However, when you’re on LSD, this glue seems to dissolve. As Albert Hofmann and many others report, your normal sense of time vanishes on psychedelics. The famous bicycle trip on acid during which Hofmann reported that he felt he was not moving, and yet he arrived at home somehow, illustrates this distortion of the brain mechanisms that support our normal perception of the flow of time.

God has made us to respond to beauty with greater fullness and individuality than that, and it’s a good thing since human art is far richer than any one of us can fully apprehend. The range of human taste and sensitivity to beauty mirrors the amazing diversity of God’s creation. What I am suggesting is that being drawn to finely crafted films is not forbidden or somehow suspect of true spirituality. My love for film is instead an extension of my love for God and his glory in creation that is reflected—dimly at times in a fallen world, but still reflected—in human art. Film is able to do things no other art form can accomplish. It is a profoundly communal art, requiring the cooperation of so many different people with so many different skills it is a wonder that any movie comes together well, yet many do.

The colonel blew out a long breath. “I was here for about an hour before you awoke. And as I was studying your file and gazing upon a beaten, wayward soul with staggering potential, I was struck by the uncanny similarities between you and the young James T. Kirk. From the reboot movie.” Eric made a face. “The psych ward is on another floor, Colonel.” Thomison laughed. “Very good. I deserved that. But let me elaborate. The movie hit theaters in 2009, when you were only five. I take it you’ve never streamed it.” “Good guess.” “Then you missed out. Not only did you remind me of that Kirk when I got here, but I realized I was about to recreate my favorite scene from the movie. So I’ll make you a deal. I’m convinced you can make a mark. One more profound than you can imagine right now. Be a bigger hero even than your father. You were destined for greatness, and that got derailed. But you can still arrive there by a different route. So watch about ten minutes of the movie. The opening scene and then a scene a little later. If you do that, and still want me gone, you’ll never see me again.” “You’re kidding, right? What, will I be hypnotized?” “No. But I think you’ll be moved. It’s a reboot, so the timeline differs from the original, while keeping key elements. In this version, James T. Kirk is about to be born on the starship Kelvin while his father is the first officer. That’s when an unstoppable Romulan ship from the future travels back through time and alters the timeline forever.” The colonel paused. “Watch ten minutes. That’s all I ask.” Eric thought about this for a moment and sighed. “It won’t

The depth and breadth of the loss is unfathomable, and its full impact is never realized immediately, but only gradually over time. The mind tries to protect us from near-lethal initial shock, and a type of emotional anesthesia often ensues so that we may feel as if we are in a movie or operating in slow motion. Sounds, figures, and movements change, and we may exist in a profoundly altered state of consciousness.

No matter how highly placed they were, they were still officials, their views were well established and well known, famous. It could have rained frogs over Tan Son Nhut and they wouldn’t have been upset; Cam Ranh Bay could have dropped into the South China Sea and they would have found some way to make it sound good for you; the Bo Doi Division (Ho’s Own) could have marched by the American embassy and they would have characterized it as “desperate”—what did even the reporters closest to the Mission Council ever find to write about when they’d finished their interviews? (My own interview with General Westmoreland had been hopelessly awkward. He’d noticed that I was accredited to Esquire and asked me if I planned to be doing “humoristical” pieces. Beyond that, very little was really said. I came away feeling as though I’d just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says, “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says, “This is a desk.” I couldn’t think of anything to ask him, and the interview didn’t happen.) I honestly wanted to know what the form was for those interviews, but some of the reporters I’d ask would get very officious, saying something about “Command postures,” and look at me as though I was insane. It was probably the kind of look that I gave one of them when he asked me once what I found to talk about with the grunts all the time, expecting me to confide (I think) that I found them as boring as he did. And just-like-in-the-movies, there were a lot of correspondents who did their work, met their deadlines, filled the most preposterous assignments the best they could and withdrew, watching the war and all its hideous secrets, earning their cynicism the hard way and turning their self-contempt back out again in laughter. If New York wanted to know how the troops felt about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, they’d go out and get it. (“Would you have voted for him?” “Yeah, he was a real good man, a real good man. He was, uh, young.” “Who will you vote for now?” “Wallace, I guess.”) They’d even gather troop reflections on the choice of Paris as the site of the peace talks. (“Paris? I dunno, sure, why not? I mean, they ain’t gonna hold ’em in Hanoi, now are they?”), but they’d know how funny that was, how wasteful, how profane. They knew that, no matter how honestly they worked, their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.

The party of technocrats and consultants—of calculating triangulators and fans of the smoke-filled rooms—must eventually give way to the populism that we must have. Thus will the Democratic Party learn once again to breathe hope into those who despair. The populism I am describing is not formless anger that might lash out in any direction. It is not racism. It is not resentment. It is not demagoguery. It is, instead, to ask the most profound question of them all: “For whom does America exist?” I take that question from the culture critic Gilbert Seldes, who saw it as the great unanswered demand of the 1890s Populist revolt. The question was raised again in 1936, the year when Seldes wrote those words. It came up again in the 1960s. And here we are, asking it again today.8 For whom does America exist? Its billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people just a laboring, sweating instrument for the bonanza paydays of our betters? Are we just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings? Are we nothing more than a vast test market to be tracked and probed and hopefully sold on airline tickets, fast food, or Hollywood movies featuring some awesome new animation technology?

People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization. We have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy, that it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality. Prejudice is foundational to understanding white fragility because suggesting that white people have racial prejudice is perceived as saying that we are bad and should be ashamed. We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them. In this way, our misunderstanding about what prejudice is protects it.

To understand racism, we need to first distinguish it from mere prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice is pre-judgment about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs. Prejudice consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalizations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected onto everyone from that group. Our prejudices tend to be shared because we swim in the same cultural water and absorb the same messages. All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it. If I am aware that a social group exists, I will have gained information about that group from the society around me. This information helps me make sense of the group from my cultural framework. People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization—we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.

And years later too, when Martín would return to Buenos Aires from that remote region in the South and come to see him, out of that eager desire (Bruno thought) that causes men to cling to the last remaining traces of a person whom they have loved a great deal, those last traces of body and soul that the beloved has left behind in the world: in the vague, fragmentary immortality of photographs, of words spoken to others at one time or another, of a certain expression that someone remembers, or says he remembers, and even of those small objects that take on an inordinate symbolic value (a little box of matches, a ticket to a movie theater); objects or words that then bring about the miracle of giving that spirit a fleeting, intangible, though despairingly real presence, just as a fond memory is brought back by a breath of perfume or a snatch of music, a fragment that need not be important or profound and may indeed even be an unpretentious and even banal melody that made us laugh in those magic days because it was so vulgar, but that now, ennobled by death and eternal separation, seems moving and profound to us.

Perhaps to be human is to struggle one’s whole life to find some solid ground to stand on and then die never coming anywhere close. And perhaps that’s not even a bad thing. To know the true meaning of life and self is to do what with it? End the mystery? End the game? What then? Perhaps one day we will find some unifying theory of everything and perhaps somehow this will make everything better, but what are the odds that we still care about the point of life after we’ve found it? Imagine a movie in which you knew exactly why and what everything was from the start. Imagine a life, if we found a theory of everything or an equation that connected the mysteries of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and we understood the very core of how and why the universe worked, what difference would this really make in terms of the meaning of life. Would two different people still not watch the same movie and experience and interpret two different things? We would of course all agree that it’s a movie and on how the movie works, but when it comes to meaning, there will always remain a perceptual layer completely relative to the individuals observing it. Because of this, if we found the overarching ultimate truth of existence tomorrow, half the world would not believe it, and the other half would fight for it. And as a whole, we would be no different. And if somehow the whole world did agree upon one truth, what then? Utopia? What then? The truth we seek when considering the quality and meaning of our lives is not an outward truth, not a truth that resolves the questions of the universe, but a truth that glimpses inward and assembles into a stable self that can be integrated seamlessly into our perception of the whole around us, a truth we can’t ever truly have. Truth is not even the right word here, there is no right word here. That’s the point. I sit here writing, thinking about my being, about the strange relationship I have with this life and this plane of existence. I think about how alive I feel right now while writing. How potent this moment is. How insane and beautiful it is. How important it has been to me in the past. Thinking, writing, talking, and reading about earnest experiences and attempts at living. Personally, the direct confrontation with the challenges, complexities, sufferings, and plights of the human condition have provided me with some of, if not all of the profound, potent, and beautiful moments of my life. And I wonder if I would have ever experienced any of those undeniably worthy moments if life made sense. If it didn’t hurt and overwhelm me… How beautiful would the night sky be if we knew exactly where it went and how the stars got there? Would we ever be inspired to create art and form interpretations out of this life, what would I have written about? What would I have read about? How would I have ever found love or friendship or connection with others? Why would I have ever laughed or cried? What would I be doing right now? Would there be anything to say? Anything to live or die for? I don’t feel that my life would have been any better if I had known any more of what it was all about, in fact I think it would have only worsened the whole thing, we seem to so desire certainty, and immortality, a utopic end of conflict, suffering, and misunderstanding, and yet in the final elimination of all darkness exists light with no contrast. And where there is no contrast of light there is no perception of light, at all. What we think we want is rarely what we do, if we ever got what we did, we would no longer have anything. What we really want is to want. To have something to ceaselessly chase and move towards. To feel the motion and synchronicity with the universe's unending forward movement.

Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

‬Scarecrow's‬‭ face‬‭ lit‬‭ up‬‭ as‬‭ he‬‭ took‬‭ the‬‭ diploma,‬ his‬‭ eyes‬‭ shining‬‭ with‬‭ newfound‬‭ confidence.‬‭ "E‬‭= mc‬‭ squared.‬‭ Pi‬‭ is‬‭ an‬‭ irrational‬‭ number‬‭ representing‬‭ any‬‭ circle's‬‭ ratio‬‭ between‬‭ its‬‭ circumference‬‭ and‬‭ diameter.‬ There‬‭ is‬‭ something‬‭ profoundly‬‭ immoral‬‭ and‬ ‭unsustainable‬‭ when‬‭ one‬‭ family‬‭ owns‬‭ more‬‭ wealth‬‭ than‬ the‬‭ bottom‬‭ 130‬‭ million‬‭ Americans."‬‭ He‬‭ paused,‬‭ a‬ contemplative beat. "Die Hard is a Christmas movie."‬

But, just like Ellie in the movie, if we can break through the barriers of hindering ideas and attune to the realization that there is always more to learn, we can find a peaceful and meaningful connection to something much bigger than any of us. Are we willing to let go of our self-made boundaries to discover the truth in broader and more profound ways?

When [James] Kelman talks of 'the narrative belonging to them and them alone', he echoes Frantz Fanon (1921-61) and Edward Said (1935-2003)'s accounts of how imperial power expropriates not only the material life of the colonised, but their mental life as well, causing them to think of their own identities within categories fashioned by their oppressors. The Scots areperhaps particularly schizophrenic in this respect. At a material level, they are a First World people, the beneficiaries of being what Tom Nairn (1932-2023) has described as the junior partners in a highly profitable imperial enterprise. Inside their heads, however, they are a Third World people, their identities shaped by images and discourses (English literature, Holywood movies) articulated elsewhere but lived within by the Scots themselves. It has been the profound political as well as artistic achievement of novelists such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, and poets such as Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), Tom Leonard (1944-2018) and Liz Lochhead to have fashioned a distinctively Scottish voice, one homologous with Scots' interior life and experience of the world.