- Gozu (2003)
This is the third movie I’ve watched by director Takashi Miike, the other two being Ichi the Killer and Audition. And just like those two, this movie is very strange, though “strange” is an understatement. It’s easily weirder and more unsettling than both of them combined. It’s also the movie during which I most often audibly said, “What?”
I feel sorry for the protagonist: he gets a supposedly routine job from his boss, only to encounter the most bizarre things imaginable. At one point, it felt like he wasn’t even surprised anymore, just resigned.
If you want to watch something completely abnormal, full of moments that make you go “What?” and refuse to make any sense, then watch this. It’s exactly the kind of movie I love. 8/10.
- Door of Perception
I like it. It’s by the author who wrote Brave New World, and it’s about his experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline and his attempt to make sense of that experience. Though I will say, to fully appreciate it, there are quite a few prerequisites one should be familiar with, such as having done psychedelics, Kant’s ontology (das Ding an sich), Meister Eckhart, Buddhism (e.g. “suchness”), and, especially for the second half (Heaven and Hell), art, paintings, and literature.
Maybe a bit about the connection between Heidegger and Huxley. For Heidegger, the world we encounter is already inherently meaningful. We do not first perceive an object and then assign meaning to it; rather, meaning is already embedded within it. A hammer, for instance, is not merely a stick with a head made of steel; it is something to nail with, a part of our toolbox and our practical world. Thus, for Heidegger, the problem with modern ontology is that meaning does not arise from detached observation, but from being-in-the-world. Our normal, everyday way of perceiving is already meaningful.
For Huxley, under the influence of mescaline, the opposite happens. Instead of meaning arising from objects through their associations, lived experience, and utility (that is, through being-in-the-world) meaning arises intrinsically from the thing itself.
Under mescaline, Huxley stops seeing things as practical entities within the network of everyday use and begins to see their is-ness (as Meister Eckhart would say), their sheer being and beauty. Space and time fall away, because they are part of the conceptual grid through which we usually understand the world. He experiences pure perception, without the interpretive framework of ordinary Dasein.
- Psychedelics and Faith
And what is true of the mescalin taker is also true of the person who sees visions spontaneously or under hypnosis. Upon this psychological foundation has been reared the theological doctrine of saving faith – a doctrine to be met with in all the great religious traditions of the world. Eschatologists have always found it difficult to reconcile their rationality and their morality with the brute facts of psychological experience. As rationalists and moralists, they feel that good behavior should be rewarded and that the virtuous deserve to go to heaven. But as psychologists the know that virtue is not the sole or sufficient condition of blissful visionary experience. They know that works alone are powerless and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful.
~ Heaven and Hell
- Stalker (1979)
Very slow — the first ten minutes are just of our protagonist waking up. It reminds me of The Turin Horse. Besides that, the atmosphere is great, though I don’t quite get the greater point the movie is making. Need to think more about it. 6/10.
How would I know the right word for what I want? How would I know that actually I don’t want what I want? Or that I actually don’t want what I don’t want?
They are elusive things: the moment we name them, their meaning disappears, melts, dissolves like a jellyfish in the sun.
My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?
- Asceticism
For a glimpse of beatitude, for a foretaste of unitive knowledge, no price seemed too high. Mortification of the body may produce a host of undesirable mental symptoms; but it may also open a door into a transcendental world of Being, Knowledge and Bliss. That is why, in spite of its obvious disadvantages, almost all aspirants to the spiritual life have, in the past, undertaken regular courses of body mortification
Fasting was not the only form of physical mortification resorted to by the earlier aspirants to spirituality. Most of them regularly used upon themselves the whip of knotted leather or even of iron wire. These beatings were the equivalent of fairly extensive surgery without the anesthetics, and their effects on the body chemistry of the penitent were considerable.
This may explain why the Curé d’Ars used to say that, in the days when he was free to flagellate himself without mercy, God would refuse him nothing. In other words, when remorse, self-loathing and the fear of hell release adrenalin, when self-inflicted surgery releases adrenalin and histamine, and when infected wounds release decomposed protein into the blood, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve is lowered and unfamiliar aspects of Mind-at-Large (including psi phenomena, visions and, if he is philosophically and ethically prepared for it, mystical experiences) will flow into the ascetic’s consciousness.
God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshiped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual,” purely “intellectual,” purely “aesthetic,” it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that most contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight. When they were not starving themselves into low blood sugar and a vitamin deficiency, or beating themselves into intoxication by histamine, adrenalin and decomposed protein, they were cultivating insomnia and praying for long periods in uncomfortable positions in order to create the psycho-physical symptoms of stress. In the intervals they sang interminable psalms, thus increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the lungs and the blood stream, or, if they were Orientals, they did breathing exercises to accomplish the same purpos
Today we know how to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve by direct chemical action, and without the risk of inflicting serious damage on the psycho-physical organism. For an aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation would be as senseless.
~ Heaven and Hell
I2P