Watching Movies of Life - the Movie Meditation
These descriptions of certain emotional states of mind are intended to encourage us to watch specific aspects of our life as if they were a movie. A five star movie in this list is not rated necessarily as a highly entertaining, mainstream movie. Instead, a good movie suggested here may more accurately reflect the drama of life in all its facets -- the shadow of an emotion as well as its positive side. Find out what moves you and learn to simply let it be. Meditation is watching, unidentified and non-judging.
C -- (Not-) Knowing Scientist
The shadow side
Collecting knowledge, creating false security through knowledge, narrow-mindedness, getting lost in scientific research, arrogance through knowledge, not feeling anything, doing absurd experiments, being unintelligent, being idiotic, being totally identified with something, living in a world of figures and formulas, being insecure and without a body, being afraid, being inhuman, being disconnected from one's feelings
The light side
Realizing laws of life, mastering basic difficulties of life, being able to learn something new, being comprehensive and discovering basic coherence, being innocent, creating something for humanity, knowing what keeps the world together, having a secure place in the world
Movies with these themes
Crazy People
Crazy People is a 1990 movie starring Dudley Moore as a burnt out advertising executive whose mental breakdown lands him in a psychiatric hospital. With time on his hands, the man quickly recovers his mental health and is inspired to make truthful advertisements, such as in an ad for Volvo, which proclaims "Buy Volvos. They're boxy but they're good." In the sanitarium he falls in love with Kathy (Daryl Hannah), a fellow patient, and transforms the place into a branch of the advertising industry, where other mental patients come up with wild, often funny advertising slogans, like "Forget Paris. Come to Greece. We're nicer," for a Greek travel agency and "Come... in the Bahamas" for the island nation's national tourism board, or for the movie The Freak, "It won't just scare you, it will fuck you up for life!"...
Bodyguard
In her film debut, Whitney Houston plays Rachel Marron, a pop music superstar. It seems that one of her fans is stalking her and has threatened to kill her, so Frank Farmer (Kevin Costner), a professional bodyguard and former Secret Service agent, is hired to protect her.
The film then follows Rachel Marron's life from performance to performance. Each performance features her singing a song (including Houston's hits I Will Always Love You and I Have Nothing) that reflects her emotional state. Frank Farmer successfully protects her from danger...
Rain Man
Charlie Babbitt (Cruise), a Los Angeles car dealer in his mid-twenties, is in the middle of importing four grey market Lamborghinis. The deal is being threatened by the EPA, and if Charlie cannot meet its requirements he will lose significant money. After some quick subterfuge with an employee, Charlie leaves for a weekend trip to Palm Springs with his girlfriend, Susanna.
Charlie's trip is spoiled by sudden news that his estranged father, Sanford Babbitt, has died. Charlie travels to Cincinnati, Ohio, to settle the estate, where he learns an undisclosed trustee is inheriting $3 million on behalf of an unnamed beneficiary, while he is to receive only a classic Buick Roadmaster convertible and several prize rose bushes. Eventually he learns the money is being directed to a mental institution, and he discovers that it is the home of his autistic brother, Raymond (Hoffman).
Idiocracy
A narrator explains that natural selection is indifferent to intelligence, so that in a society in which intelligence is systematically debased, stupid people easily out-breed the intelligent, creating, over the course of five centuries, an irremediably dysfunctional society. Demographic superiority favours those least likely to advance society.[1] Consequently, the children of the educated élites are drowned in a sea of sexually promiscuous, illiterate, alcoholic, proletarian peers...
Pi
Maximillian Cohen, a number theorist, theorizes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers, and that if you graph the numbers properly patterns will emerge. He is working on finding patterns within the stock market, using its many variables as his data set with the assistance of his homemade supercomputer, Euclid. He is shown to be capable of doing complex arithmetic calculations in his head when a young girl asks him to solve a problem for her and verifies the answer on her calculator...
Remark
Although the movie list is inspired by Tibetan Pulsing typologies on the human mind, it does not claim to be completely accurate in its assessment.
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