Symbol of our Times: My Ode to Avatar
by Rose Goddess on Feb.25, 2010, under Spirit Connection
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The big hit movie Avatar, directed by James Cameron, has been interpreted in many different ways and has stimulated much controversy. The New York Times article, “Opening Pandora’s Box: The Arguments Over Avatar,” expounds upon the uproar Avatar has caused in gender, racial, environmental and religious sectors. Everyone has a different take on the meaning of this movie. I have seen avatar 3 times so far. The first time I went with my family. Each member of my family had a different opinion as well. My sister Amy, who is proactive and organized, said it was way too long. My sister Rachel, a fabulous artist, said it had amazing graphics. My brother-in law James, a good old country boy, said he was glad it had a few explosions for the guys. Bryan, my nonchalant husband, said it was a pretty good movie. And as for me, Avatar touched the deepest part of my soul. It was a spiritually symbolic story representing everything that has been going on inside me and on our planet for the last few years. I think my first words after the movie finished were “WOW! That was an orgasmic experience!!” Here is my own personal synopsis of Avatar…
The main Character, Jake Sully, is living in Hell but doesn’t know it. He is living in a place filled with guns, wars, and devoid of beauty and connection. His body is deformed and he is paralyzed (spinal chord injury). This is all he knows about life. Through technology and his imagination, he receives a new body (his Avatar) and discovers a whole new magical world (Pandora). Once he commits to learning the ways of the Na’vi (the native people) he is given a guide who teaches him to understand “the flow of energy… the spirit of animals… a network of energy that flows through all living things” In his old world, he was taught that you had to be on guard because “every living thing wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes” Neytiri, his guide, shows him a different point of view. First he must let go of all his old programming. As the Na’vi say, “it is hard to fill a cup which is already full.” He starts to discover how easy and beautiful life can be. He revels in his new body, which allows him to run, jump, and feel the sand beneath his feet. This is not his real body however, day after day he must return to his “reality.” And each time he does it becomes a more and more bleak place to be.
Oh how I relate to Jake. I too feel I am living in two worlds… Heaven and Hell. On his video log his words express my feelings clearly… “days are starting to blur together… everything is backward now… like out there is the true world and in here is the dream…. I don’t even remember my old life… I don’t know who I am anymore.” I have felt this same confusion going back and forth through my own consciousness of “reality.” My first reality is in my imagination, where everything is pristine and we have activated our divine blueprint and potential. I feel glimpses of immense peace and connection which the logical brain could never understand. And then there is my other reality, the reality we live in, where children are starving and men are fighting and radioactive water and waste is being poured down the drain. Globally and individually I feel people are waking up to this insanity and getting a glimpse of how good it could and should be… just like our friend Jake.
In Jake’s new world he learns of the divinity in everything and everyone. The Na’vi have a saying “I see you,” which means so much more than just physically seeing someone. It means to see into and understand the soul of the person you see. I experienced this phenomenon with my dear husband when we were still dating. We were in a movie theater with a mutual friend. All of a sudden we both turned to face each other and saw into each other’s souls! It is difficult to put into words how beautiful this moment was. It was as if our eyes grew twice their size and I could see the love that Bryan is. I fell in love with him for real in that moment. There was a magical vortex of energy connecting us. It was one of the most cosmic moments in my life!!
In the end Jake’s people try to destroy everything he has grown to know and love for the sake of power and money. The odds seem imposible but Jake decides to fight with the Na’vi and for his right to live this beautiful way of life. He takes courage and says, “Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.” He asks the help of Eywa (the Goddess of the Na’vi), and when all hope was lost and defeat seemed inevitable, Eywa stepped in and won the battle for them. Just like in our own personal struggles and battles, grace is always required. We need grace to change our bodies and our world from one of destruction and hate, to one of beauty and love. Finally, Jake was able to leave the technocratic world behind forever and step into his new body and his new earth!! This is what touched me most, and this is the hope that sprouted inside my soul which made me cry for an hour after watching Avatar. The realization that we can, through the grace of God, fully step in to our new earth, both globally and personally.
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away… God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” ~ Revelation 21:1 and 4
P.S. Please share your own thoughts and feelings on Avatar with me below. I look forward to hearing from you!
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February 25th, 2010 on 11:00 pm
I will say…I liked the graphics and probably looked at it through the eyes of a single girl with a touch of A.D.D. However, I went back and saw it in 3-D and noticed as well as appreciated the movie much more. The connection we all have to each other and the accountability we have not to just our world but others’ worlds is very well communicated.
February 26th, 2010 on 12:12 am
I watched Avatar at the Odeon in London (so I get to say that even though it cost a fortune, lol) and I would not list it as a favorite movie nor do I have the sense of appreciation you had for it but there was one thing that certainly deserves attention: Leave alone the parts of the earth that do not belong to your intrusion!!! I think it was trying to make that point and it has stayed with me since.
February 26th, 2010 on 1:22 pm
Hi there I like your post
February 27th, 2010 on 7:14 pm
Debbie I felt the same way as you.
I too cried with this movie. I had to just sit there and absorb it till it was time to go. To watch that movie and just get up and start blabbering away felt like blasphemy, in the same way that I wouldn’t want to talk if my best friend just died. I feel that world of Pandora inside, to me the beauty and the connection of Pandora IS this world, IS this Earth, yet most people are blind to it.
So I too feel like I live in two worlds.
I’ve seen the movie twice and the second time I saw it, was with some new friends whom are either university students or have spent a lot of time in that world of Uni. I were SHOCKED at their response to the movie. A movie that portrayed the sacred to me, they found to be “hollywood,” “glorifying fighting and war,” “a copy of …..(insert movie)…”
Basically they analyzed the movie so much that it just took all the wonder and beauty out of it. And that is sad, yet VERY common nowadays I think.
I used to be that way till I woke up and realized that to view the world with fresh eyes is far more enjoyable than analyzing it.
March 2nd, 2010 on 9:16 pm
Thank you so much Lothar! I am so excited to know that there are other people who see through the same eyes I do:) Lots of Love and Light to you!!
March 3rd, 2010 on 2:45 pm
great post on Avatar, and i love the pictures!
i saw it twice! that’s how much i loved it. i really loved the part when they say, “i see you” what a great way to love someone. loved the spiritual element and it totally made me want to live in pandora!
thanks for the great post.
Sue Vittner´s last blog ..Law of Attraction Technique: Pivoting
March 8th, 2010 on 2:39 pm
Isn’t it funny that Bigelow has beaten her ex? For me Avatar is far more a winner anyway.
March 10th, 2010 on 12:05 am
You didn’t tell them that it wasn’t the kind of movie you wanted to see but I convinced you and then you loved it! hehe. This movie was awesome, the imagery was so fantastic I felt that sense of wonder and imagination that I crave. I love to dream and imagine and I think that’s what touched me most about this movie; I felt like I could step into Pandora, breathe in the nature around me, and be happy as a pretty, fit person with catlike features
I see both the positive and negative aspects of this movie, but I like to focus on the positive. Thanks for your post sis! I enjoyed reading it immensely.
March 13th, 2010 on 8:41 pm
I did not know that there was a lot of controversy over this movie. I have to look that up. I saw on one comment page where many were saying it was totally awesome. As far as it being too long, that is what some said about Cameron’s last movie, Titanic that broke box office records. Mnay, like me, say that it was the greatest movie ever. I saw it 6 times in the theater.
Cameron is a genius but that may make it harder for people to get his message. For example do people really understand that Einstein proved that as things go faster, time slows down and lenghts and distances contract? Before the eclipse, over 100 top physicists said that his theory of relativity was nonsense.
Then the eclipse proved with precise mathematics that his theory was a law of nature and he was an overnight celebrity. The front page of the New York Times told all about him the next day. Before it was proven, physicists did not believe it since they could not understand it.
But Cameron’s movie can never be proven since it is subjective but it did break all box office records just like Titanic. Rose, have you seen that movie? If not what are you waiting for? The people wanted to destroy all that land for money in the movie. We are destroying the planet earth for money. Avatar is fiction but is so much more.
The N’avi live in the rainforest and we have tribes living in our rainforest that people want to cut down. Charles, Prince of Wales says that doing this is producing more carbon dioxide than all the cars, ships and boats in the world combined. See his 90 second commercial about this with the Dalai Lama, Robin Williams and Harrison Ford in this 90 second commercial– http://c-frog.notlong.com Then see his commercial with leaders of Google, Yahoo, amazon.com, Sony, Nike with Sir Richard Branson and Michael Dell. http://g-frog.notlong.com
Then there is the whole spiritual side of the movie that Debbie touched on. I think that Debbie is a genius just like James Cameron. In fact Albert Einstein says that Debbie is among the top 2% of the smartest people on the planet since she solved his Einstein quiz. That means that her IQ is over 132. http://www.phifoundation.org/einstein-intelligence-quiz.html Make sure to see this movie to see what you think. Before Debbie went to see Avatar I asked her who is more likely to cry during the movie, her or her sister. That was even before I saw it but I heard heard the reviews.
It did not win best picture, like Titanic, but that must be because of the controversy that I am still clueless about. I guess it was controversial since it does deal with how the greed of man is destroying life on the planet earth. The next step after destroying the land of the N’avi would be to make the N’avi slaves just like America did with black people. If that is how the movie ended, people would be outraged but they would come to see the sequel to it.
Chuck Bluestein´s last blog ..French Girl Gets a Baby Brother
March 14th, 2010 on 11:53 am
Ia Avatar simply a fantasy? or is there something more sinister to it? Are the writers trying to enlighten us?
March 14th, 2010 on 10:55 pm
It would have been interesting if the movie had dealt in more depth with the issues related to transferring one’s mind into another body for instance, maybe a la Twelve Monkeys Army, where the “hero” is clearly deeply affected by experiences that the mind is not used to deal with (time travel in that case, but it is not that different from what we have here). Likewise, the love interest of our hero seems very indifferent to the fact that he really is a human remotely controlling a human – Na’vi bastard. I was expecting someone (him, her, or even one of the other humans in the scientific group) to show at least some kind of surprise / doubt when these feelings emerge. I was expecting more complexity in the social interactions of the characters, and their personality.
March 15th, 2010 on 2:57 pm
Absolutely loved your post. My wife and I just saw Avatar this past Sat. at the IMAX in Indy.
We both loved it. Not only did we love it, we felt connected to it, just as you did.
We both cried a little, as did others around us. This movie spoke to our souls.
I feel that those who saw the movie and compared it to other Hollywood movies, or loved the violence, aren’t quite ready to make that connection, such as the reading of “The Power of NOW” and “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. Just as he states…those who read these books will make perfect sense of it or it will make no sense at all, and if that’s the case, that’s fine. They just aren’t ready yet.
I believe thousands, if not millions, made the connection with this movie.
To bad living on Pandora isn’t a reality…yet!
My wife and I will see this movie again.
Thanks for the great post.
Blessings,
Randy
March 17th, 2010 on 7:26 am
Wow! Great Blog, Great post
March 18th, 2010 on 8:55 am
Thank you Chuck:) I did see Titanic… It was a beautiful movie and I used to listen to it’s soundtrack all the time as a teenager.
March 18th, 2010 on 8:56 am
That is a good question Maurice… Anything is possible and I have learned not to rule anything out:)
March 18th, 2010 on 8:59 am
You are right Randy. When people are ready they will “get it.” I also had a spiritual awakening when reading The Power of Now and yet people close to me found it boring or too tedious to read. *Big hug* to you and your wife:)
March 22nd, 2010 on 11:02 pm
Rose, WOW. thats awesome, I felt quite similar, and after I finished watching, the ‘real’ world was extremely dissapointing. I really like your style, I reckomend you read ‘The Power of NOW’ by eckhart tolle. if you havent already. keep in touch, all the best.
Just saw your last post. well done. lol.
April 19th, 2010 on 4:57 pm
I did not know that there was a lot of controversy over this movie. I have to look that up. I saw on one comment page where many were saying it was totally awesome. As far as it being too long, that is what some said about Cameron’s last movie, Titanic that broke box office records. Mnay, like me, say that it was the greatest movie ever. I saw it 6 times in the theater.
Cameron is a genius but that may make it harder for people to get his message. For example do people really understand that Einstein proved that as things go faster, time slows down and lenghts and distances contract? Before the eclipse, over 100 top physicists said that his theory of relativity was nonsense.
Then the eclipse proved with precise mathematics that his theory was a law of nature and he was an overnight celebrity. The front page of the New York Times told all about him the next day. Before it was proven, physicists did not believe it since they could not understand it.
But Cameron’s movie can never be proven since it is subjective but it did break all box office records just like Titanic. Rose, have you seen that movie? If not what are you waiting for? The people wanted to destroy all that land for money in the movie. We are destroying the planet earth for money. Avatar is fiction but is so much more.
The N’avi live in the rainforest and we have tribes living in our rainforest that people want to cut down. Charles, Prince of Wales says that doing this is producing more carbon dioxide than all the cars, ships and boats in the world combined. See his 90 second commercial about this with the Dalai Lama, Robin Williams and Harrison Ford in this 90 second commercial– http://c-frog.notlong.com Then see his commercial with leaders of Google, Yahoo, amazon.com, Sony, Nike with Sir Richard Branson and Michael Dell. http://g-frog.notlong.com
Then there is the whole spiritual side of the movie that Debbie touched on. I think that Debbie is a genius just like James Cameron. In fact Albert Einstein says that Debbie is among the top 2% of the smartest people on the planet since she solved his Einstein quiz. That means that her IQ is over 132. http://www.phifoundation.org/einstein-intelligence-quiz.html Make sure to see this movie to see what you think. Before Debbie went to see Avatar I asked her who is more likely to cry during the movie, her or her sister. That was even before I saw it but I heard heard the reviews.
It did not win best picture, like Titanic, but that must be because of the controversy that I am still clueless about. I guess it was controversial since it does deal with how the greed of man is destroying life on the planet earth. The next step after destroying the land of the N’avi would be to make the N’avi slaves just like America did with black people. If that is how the movie ended, people would be outraged but they would come to see the sequel to it.
Chuck Bluestein´s last blog ..French Girl Gets a Baby Brother
April 20th, 2010 on 11:47 am
I too just finished washing Avatar. A very strong film, I would say just as much in its political allusions as in its spiritual ones. I would like to present to you an article by my teacher, here at the Islamic Theological Seminary in Iran, entitled ‘The Profanity of a Profane Wolrd’.
All the best,
Zahir Davdani,
UK/Iran.
The Profanity of a Profane World
The modern era in which we find ourselves is unlike any other era in the history of the world. From the very beginning of human history, the greatest and most intelligent men of every epoch have given credence to the existence of worlds and beings beyond this physical realm and have posited an Absolute Being who is at once the Origin and Destination of all things. It is only now – in the last few centuries – that man has found not only “reason” to doubt the things that his forefathers saw to be certain and sacred but has also discovered the “courage” to break from tradition and, by standing on his own two feet, has had the audacity to deny the very existence of anything sacred. The roots of this newfound “enlightenment” of man can be traced to his predilection to rebel against his Creator, individually speaking, and to the effects of the Fall of man, on the level of society and civilization. A thorough examination of these roots reveals the fact that modern “reason” is nothing other than the obfuscation of metaphysical insight and vision or, at best, the vestiges of the sacred Intellect deposited in man; and the much touted “courage” is really foolhardiness and merely the masked rebelliousness of Promethean man.
To understand the rebellious nature of fallen man, it is important to first understand his “created” nature and the fact that he is not the cause of his own existence. Man exists, but then so do dogs. What separates man from other creatures is his ability to reflect on and intellectualize his “own” existence. Upon doing so, he discovers that in himself and by himself he is nothing, and that his existence is nothing but the consequence of his connection with the Source of all existence. Just as a ray of light radiating from the sun has no independent existence, so too man is an effusion of Divine Being. But when man does not use his intellect and does not see in this essential way, he begins to imagine that his existence is real and that he is a “something” in its own right. Such a skewed view of reality results in a corresponding deviation of human will. Fallen man in this new and modern fashion of “seeing” now starts to appropriate powers and rights for himself that he previously saw as a trust from Heaven which he had to safeguard and be true to. As he is now the measure of all things, he is also the sole criterion of human activity, and henceforth, only he decides what is to be done and what is not to be done – a bona fide rebel without a cause.
It is when man is rebellious and a renegade from heaven that he does not see the need for mediums and conduits of grace that connect him with the Source of all being and all grace. He balks at authority – spiritual or mundane – and hopes to go it on his own. Unwilling to see anything beyond his own self, he fails to transcend his limited and relative reality and becomes a prisoner of his body and a slave of his carnal desires. Sensing this and the futility of his situation, he becomes desperate, and in an occasional act of vulgarity, lashes out at the very sources of grace and sanctity that could save him from himself and his dire situation. Hence, it is not a coincidence that profanity and blasphemy aimed at holy personalities are commonly observed in our modern era. But arguably that which is worse than the verbal or pictorial blasphemies is the general attitude of indifference and nonchalance that modern men have adopted towards religion and the sacred. It is one thing to vent “hatred” towards sacred realities; it is quite another to totally ignore them. In this vein, the very act of living a modern, liberal, secular life that is “untouched” by religion is the greatest of blasphemies.
Turning now to the social plane, it is the general conditions of the Fall which bear heavily upon modern man’s inability to have faith in God and the men of God. To explain, in opposition to the cult of progress that modern man subscribes to, traditional religious doctrines have always seen man’s entry into this world to be a fall from a higher realm to lower and lower ones. They speak of a degression, not progression. On the noetic plane, they hold that since the former generations of men had more of a direct access to Revelation and the vision of the prophet through whom the religion was established, the later ones – due to their distance and the entropic conditions of the Fall – have more difficulty in “seeing” the truth. They need to be helped from the outside, so to speak. They require aids to achieve the vision and intellection of the former generations. These aids and “artificial” constructs are providentially provided and are a part and parcel of the religious tradition as a whole. So while they are in reality instruments which compensate for the overall decline, they are seen ostensibly as “developments”. After the initial vision, there is for instance the development in the religious universe and orthodoxy of a doctrine, theology, ideology, sociology, and political system.
For a time, the constructs, ones that pertain to a discursive and rational understanding of religious truths, were satisfactory and sufficient, as reason was still based on higher levels of the intellect, and the sense of the sacred and holy was still alive and strong in traditional societies. Further on this was not the case, and reason was increasingly divorced from its higher principle – namely the sacred intellect or al-Aql al-Qudsi – and a purely human rationality came to take its place, a rationality that insisted that all aspects of being fall within the pale of its discursive and deductive methods. This led to the absolutization of the said constructs – things which are in principle relative – leading to their solidification, irrelevance, and eventual impotence. This in turn opened a Pandora’s Box of religious criticism, after which there was nothing sacred left. All things were to be dissected by man’s rational faculty and pronounced as dead after the event. Indeed, God himself was pronounced as dead at the scene of the crime that modernity represents.
Man without a sense of the Absolute is a man that is bewildered and distraught amongst countless relativities. In a world where there is no Sacred, everything is profane. In a profane world, profanity is indistinguishable from truth and noble speech worthy of man and his divine origins. Without such distinctions, man is free to bark everything and anything that comes out of his mouth, not realizing that the very freedom of will that he uses to express his profanity is only made possible by the existence of the sacred and supreme will of his Creator. Hence the profound statement of Meister Eckhart, “the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God” rings true in our day more than in any other. But the final word must be from the Master of Eckhart, Jesus (peace be upon him) who said:
“Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.” (Matthew 18:7)
(Shaikh Shuja Ali Mirza is a graduate of the University of Toronto. For the past 19 years, he has been studying at the Islamic seminary in Qom, Iran.)
April 22nd, 2010 on 10:13 am
Thank you for sharing Zahir! Very interesting points in this article.
April 24th, 2010 on 4:41 pm
Thank you for sharing Zahir! Very interesting points in this article.
May 1st, 2010 on 11:17 pm
I saw Avatar for the second time today. 35 years ago I experience a mystical union which I never effectively integrated with my Christian upbringing. I have recently decided to more completely accept the validity of that union. It seems like James Cameron must have some mystical knowledge to be able to touch some of us so deeply. It was a great pleasure to see the secret longings and knowledge hidden in my heart played out on the screen.