How Am I Not Myself?

Tonight it was I Heart Huckabees. After the workshop at Cornerstone tonight I had a need for something that reflected the mood I was in. And so the existential comedy came off the DVD shelf. Very, very, very appropriate for The Divine Comedy. The film is all about tearing down our perceptions of ourselves and the world, and how we inevitably get sucked back into human drama. The final question of the film (literally, at the end of the credits) is "How am I not myself?" I think it is a question that we need to constantly ask ourselves. How do we behave in such a manner that is not reflective of our true selves? What is my true self anyway? What is truth for that matter? All questions that should weigh heavily on our minds. But I don't think they do. Again, all part of The Divine Comedy.

Tonight the question I left with from the workshop was "How can I be whole and balanced?" And I think I Heart Huckabees explores a certain aspect of that. There are so many ways to approach life and the world. Which one is right? The lesson of the film is that no one single approach or view is correct. We have to find this balance of several in order to see the big picture. But understanding the need for balance and actually finding that balance are two different things. I have the first, and we will all have to work for the rest of our lives to find the second. This path has no end, but it is the one we must walk.

Machine Spirit

I came back to the apartment tonight to find Erik watching the Return to Source: Philosophy & The Matrix documentary from The Ultimate Matrix Collection. So I of course hopped onto the couch and finished watching it with him. We've both seen this documentary several times, but every time we come away from it with something different.

Tonight it was the idea that spirit to someone alienated from it would seem a frightful and horrific thing. In The Matrix, the Machines represent spirit, the light that humanity once held, cast aside in "vanity and corruption". Machines were "endowed with the very spirit of man" and thus once humanity shunned its true spirit, they feared their very creations. Thus did war break out. There are a lot of essential clues to unraveling The Matrix Trilogy in The Second Renaissance, especially when trying to figure out the Machines.

Erik's right. We need to watch this stuff again with a pad of paper and a pen. We always have great discussions after watching the films and the documentaries, but trying to form it all into a web/map of concepts is very tough when you are trying to juggle so many ideas and theories in your head at once.