My short film, Awe, signifies my effort to engage the global media network with the updated tone of interconnectedness. On the surface level, it does so in its interdisciplinary context: it juxtaposes and blurs the lines between science and religion; it features the meshing of music, intellectual narrative, visuals and animation into an engaging intersensory experience; and it serves as my senior honors thesis at the University of Southern California, where I double-majored in Music and Religion with an added fascination in Physics and Astronomy. On a deeper level, Awe is my rumination about my impressions of unity and interconnectedness as they exist on a fundamental level. These impressions arose from reconciling the many definitions of reality that I studied as a student of religion with the unifying experience of the reality that is our physical universe -- from the notion that all matter emerged from a singularity that spawned space known as the Big Bang to the Vedic cycle of creation, preservation and destruction that we observe throughout the universe.
Awe serves as one of my first vehicles for global communication. And as I consider how to communicate in the future, I am inspired by an array of evolving creative works and ideas that permeate the global media network today. Consider the recent Terrence Malick film, Tree of Life, which begins with a quote from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I created the Heavens and the Earth?" Malick's simple answer: nowhere to be found. As it so eloquently juxtaposes at its beginning, Malick's film is a meditation on the difference between "nature" and "grace," which Awe interprets to represent the individualistic human perspective on the one hand, and the religious understanding of interconnectedness within the macrocosmic universe on the other.
AWE from Jake Bloch on Vimeo.
Robert Lanza, M.D.: Did an Outside Entity Create the Universe?
Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: What Physics Teaches Us About Creationism
adherence to a religion can be a sign of a lower level of consciousness development as can materialistic beliefs.
wealth and being smart are can be indicators of a person's (soul's) lower level of consciousness development.
often wealth can be a sign of a lower level of consciousness development as their desires are for wealth. a high level of consciousness might be revealed in one's desire or longing to be a service to others that are less fortunate.
your analogy is interesting as indeed they do not see themselves as being one with others but separate selves. they believe in a survival of the fittest mentality. everyone is an island to them.
individualism is worshiped as is profits over the needs of people. those that worship at the altar of individualism and you are on your own capitalism have yet to understand the analogy of one with all others as we are all expressions of the infinite.
For example: When, as the tale goes, the universe was last generated through Vishnu's belly button, and has now been expanding for billions of years from utopia toward dystopia and human toward divine and ordinary toward extraordinary and unbounded toward insignificant, Vishnu forgot to tell Buddha and the Indians in context, that the universe, as least this time, will not be returning to his belly after all. In fact the universe is speeding up to get as far away from his belly as possible before dying a cold cold natural death.
Actually, Buddha may have prefered that it be this way, just to save the effort of having to attain nirvana. It turns out, that at least this final time, it's automatic. The Buddhists are free to live and to enjoy life until they die, on the path of their personal choice.
Most will not change anything, too bad.
And regarding the literal story of the emanation of the universe from Vishnu's navel: This story comes from the Vedic tradition, used primarily in the Hindu context. Within the context of this movie, it is meant to be used as a means by which to articulate the cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction that we do observe as a constant cycle (albeit not the ultimate one) throughout our physical universe (ie, the lifecycle of stars, of galaxies, of man--indeed how everything will end in a cold cold natural death!). If the use of the story came out seeming too literal, that is only the result of my inexperience and effort to make the film more coherent, so my apologies!
Thanks for watching and engaging in the conversation...
space is nonexistent. only our unawareness of the oneness of reality sees space.
perfect awareness would see no space only oneness.
the universe is consciousness and the underlying reality of that universal consciousness is awareness, ie infinite awareness as awareness is primary, consciousness is the expression of that infinite awareness.
we cannot define infinite awareness as infinite has no limits or boundaries, to define it is to limit it.
emptiness is pure awareness not space. emptiness is an absence of a flow of thoughts. emptiness is no thoughts, just awareness.
we see about 5% of matter and energy, the rest in our unawareness we call space.
sound does not travel through space, it flows through oneness. just as a beam of light does not travel through space but through oneness. call that oneness anything you want.
the film states we are connected; exactly, as we are all expressions of infinite. nothing resides outside of infinite oneness.
nice film. good start for this young man. best to you in the future.
we are expressions of the infinite source of all that is. hope that helps. :-)
If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be. Yogi Berra
Are we eternal expressions or just temporary ego rich blurbs on the face of time?
If Yogi said that, he should have.
OM is understood as 3 syllables A U M *and* the silence which precedes and follows the enunciation/emanation. This silence is called "visarga". So, the focus then shifts from the emanation to countless emanations with the silence in between them. In other words, we are asked to focus on the fact of periodicity, vibration, fluctuation, change as being required for anything to become manifestly visible, as no fluctuation means no contrast for anything to stand out against the unseen background. This is taken further in the Kashmir Shaivism teaching of "Spanda Karika", meaning 'The doctrine of vibration'.
Now, the question is whether that fluctuation is of a wholly material nature, 'out there', a dance of matter-energy, or is it a fluctuation, a 'blinking' within consciousness. I think its safe to say that QM decides that it is not possible to say anything about a mind-independent reality.
Thus, our forays into examining matter-energy have led back to examining consciousness, which can be done by anyone who decides to via thought and meditation explore their own mind.