Cameron’s New Consciousness
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Have you heard about the new world consciousness arriving by 2012?
According to experts:
a) A worldwide natural disaster will occur, directed by Roland Emmerich, only this time the special effects will be really happening.
b) A return to the Utopian world of Avatar, only this time you won’t need 3D glasses because it really will be in 3D.
Which will it be? The answer in a moment.
If civilization ended tomorrow, would this create a new consciousness? Let’s see. There’d be fewer people. We’d live close to the land and close to each other. When we wanted to create art we’d just pick up some squirrel dung and make shapes to stick on our cave walls. See, I don’t like this scenario already. You can forget culture altogether: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Henri Rousseau duly noted, people like to form groups and kill other people. Also, why would Nature start cooperating with human aspirations and goals? It hasn’t so far.
Rousseau, the painter among the three sages mentioned above, got it right. Sure, he did “The Dream,” showing a woman communing with nature on a comfy divan, but he also painted “The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope,” which is more like it.
Nature looks nice but can be brutal, and if the world goes primitive it won’t be pretty.
The good news is that the leading edge of the new age is already here, and like most great changes, it’s gradual. In Hollywood, it’s not just Jim Cameron dreaming of a future guided by the wisdom of Gaia, the Earth mother. c3 Conscious Creatives is dedicated to creating more conscious media, and John Raatz of the Visioneering Group is finding new ways to distribute what he is calling Transformational Media: Media that shows how people change and uplifts humanity. Bob Ballard runs the Hearts of Fire Project, which is intended to empower homeless people through artistic self-expression. He sees homeless people not as helpless people, but instead as those on the vanguard of a new culture expressing what’s really important in the world: love, community and connection. “The homeless can teach us that people are important, not what people have,” he says.
Change means that onetime fringe values are entering mainstream culture. Michael Cera can discuss silent Vipassana meditation on the David Letterman show, and Letterman can sound genuinely interested. James Cameron can do a $230-mil (maybe more) movie that glorifies respect for the Earth and millions embrace it. Only the critic from the New Yorker didn’t seem to get the Gaia message, dismissing Cameron as a hippie thinker with a huge checkbook. Cameron may be that, but good thing his message was heard by many.
Oh, the answer to the quiz? There isn’t one. The Mayans may have been great predictors of the future, but the fact that their calendar ends in 2012 means only one thing. Time to get a new calendar.
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Lee,
It’s odd how apocalyptic thinking seems to be hard-wired into us. Almost every culture on Earth seems to have a genetic memory of a great flood, which mainstream archaeolgists dismiss but one never knows. Of course, most apoocalypsts believe in a “fire and brimstone” ending to our current world, certainly the Judeo-
Christian-Islamic texts. Norse and perhaps Vedic myths.
The “2012″ phenomenon fascinates me. People have latched onto it and made it more than a cottage industry selling books and films. Even the history channel, which is disconcerting. Religious leaders have been claiming the end is imminent from the days of the Sumerians. So far they’ve been disappointed. The Mayan predictions of a cataclysm? As brilliant as the classical Maya were in architecture, mathematics and astronomy (including the incredibly precise calendar systems) they didn’t always draw sound conclusions. They believed that the sun needed sustenance–the human blood of sacrifice–to propel it across the sky each day. A fine example of the dangers of mixing “religion” with science.
Other New Age thinkers predict not a cataclysm but a new dawning of human spirituality and awareness. Apparently a magical and mass change in the human brain–which will require annihilation of the ego, of course. Instant Buddhism–without all that tiresome meditation work. Instant karma. Kind of like the age of Aquarius and hippies in the late sixties. I guess it makes a lot more sense if one is whacked on acid.
I keep getting images of Diogenes with his lantern. Of course, he searched the streets of Athens for an honest man during the day. He was too wise to search at night when all the honest men were “cloistered” in the brothels.
“In praise of cynicism.” Think I’ll write a book and arrange some very expensive seminars!
Bob
Lee, loved this post! Yes, nature can be cruel and life goes on. Hard to keep a good entity down. Still haven’t seen Avatar and I’ve heard both, but my closest friends got the message.
Happy New Year and New Decade!
Happy New Year! “Hard to keep a good entity down” – I like that.
Clearly, the use of cataclysmic threats has been a way for religion to control its followers – simply by scaring the crap out of them to keep them in line. Various cults, the Catholic Church and Fox News have all found this method of control to be useful from time to time. I agree you about the dangers of mixing science and religion, particularly when human sacrifice is involved. If the guys at CERN ever tell us it will require a human sacrifice for the Large Hadron Collider to work I will really have to question them. Thanks for commenting and Happy New Year.