Samsara

I probably shouldn’t have posted the link to this trailer on likebook with the message, “Everyone needs to see this.”

I keep forgetting about the unwritten rules of likebook. The more wisdom, intelligence or relevance you dare try to slip into a likebook post, the more that likebookers' uncanny substance-detectors alarm and the faster everyone scatters for the exits. God forbid we attempt to engage there, in dialogue aimed at improving our lives in any truthful or noble sense.

Oh, but it’s perfectly fine to pretend at it of course. It’s perfectly fine to re-post inspiring quote-image decorations which sound noble and which we pretend to have consolidated for ourselves and found them without flaw. What the hell, right? As long as a sound byte stems from some unfamiliar source, it must be right. Right? As long as it doesn’t come from any of the losers we know (who must secretly be as dull and phony as we secretly just-maybe fear we might ourselves be) then it must be legitimate. After all, there is one reliable constant in the universe: Our personal friends and associates will never be smarter, wiser or happier than we are. And they will never know something important that we don’t know first. This is the law pronounced by the ego which controls us. The ego that is the centre of your universe. And all of this conceit will run smoothly for us as long as we never learn anything or believe that anyone you know has learned anything. And this way we can merrily proceed, head in the sand, toward our oblivion. Easy Peasy.

Now, if your own ego tells you that you are better than that, here’s one way to demonstrate it:

Watch Samsara. Not because it is an excellent movie among movies. Not because it is different. Not because an incredible amount of time and effort and impartiality went into it or because of the great investment in top-quality film or its astounding imagery. Not because I say so. Not because I am a film buff whose frame of reference covers more than 2000 titles. 

Watch Samsara because it is an incredibly valuable tool if you actually have a mind that gives a damn about truth or knowledge or reality. If you have such a mind then this is a tool not easily replaced and if you take a pass on it, then you are forever less equipped to comment legitimately about the world you like to think you know.

It is not that these images will directly reveal things you didn’t know existed (well, maybe they will. In fact I might myself have been taken by surprise by a couple things). But it is your own mind that can reveal things to you when you look at things you know but from a different direction.

This film is a different direction.