Unscrewed (02-02): Movie Review: What the Bleep Does Jonathan Livingston Seagull Know?

Movie Review:  What The Bleep Do We Know?  (I know, the title should have math symbols in it)Captured Light Distribution, 20th Cent. Fox, available DVD

Cross posted at Gadfly's Muse

I liked this movie and I will tell you why, but first, contrary to all the movie promotes, let's get the negatives out of the way first.

1.  The movie is solidly anti-Christian in the sense that it is solidly anti-organized religion.  Like the prevailing trend in modern spirituality  it promotes a primary individualistic theology while seeking to promote unity.  It clearly seeks to remove any ultimate distinction between good and evil reducing them down to harmful and positive constructs originating in the human mind.

2.  The movie is solidly pantheistic rather than atheistic.  Like all  pantheistic philosophies it reduces the Ultimate down to a mindless Unity which embraces all, is in all and originates all.  It offers no explanation for this Unity nor seeks to understand it further than the individual's contribution to it.  It accepts this unity in the same way that pagan religions accept the reality of magic or Luke Skywalker accepts the Force.  It is simply the construct on which all subsequent cosmology is understood.

OK, that being said, the movie still has some very good things to say and says them very well.  Even though the whole "plot" of the movie culminates in the central character transcending the need for "religion" (she stands in front of a church which was important to her past, looks at it with some deep sympathy, and then with a glow of self-confidence in her new found acquisition of truth, she smiles contentedly and turns away), yet there is much in the movie that resonates with the Christian teaching.

I will try to be specific.

The primary emphasis in the movie is that through the scientific discipline of quantum mechanics, we humans have learned that  reality isn't really objective and detached at all.  Reality is created by the individual observer and is shaped by the mind.  Life is full of infinite potential(s) and the individual acts to realize those potentials through the organizing principle(s) that govern(s) how each of us think.  For those who think harsh, demanding thoughts and understand reality in harsh, demanding terms, life is indeed harsh and demanding.  It is not that it is perceived as harsh and demanding, it truly is harsh and demanding.  As we think so we live and so the atoms that surround us organize themselves in response to how we think and live.  Conversely for those who think joyful and optimistic thoughts, life truly does conform to the reality they perceive.

Now, if anyone is old enough to remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you know the score right away.  If you want to fly perfectly, you must first think of flying perfectly and the thought will become reality. 

But the movie doesn't stop there.  It goes on to postulate how these individual shaped realities have a cumulative socially determinative force.  As one thinks along with others, their individually shaped realities interact to form a social reality which forms a kind of feedback loop on each individual.  I have not verified the datum, but the movie states that in a 1993 demonstration of this principle, the crime statistics in Washington, D. C. were reduced by 25%, the exact amount predicted, when some 4000 mystics were invited to spend the summer there meditating and thinking good throughts about the city.  What was striking was the claim that this "experiment" had been reproduced 40 times before.  I will have to do some research on that statement but it was a striking claim.

Further the movie really impressed me with how it completely undermined most of the pop-psychology and self-help books and resources which every where afflict us.  It fundamentally destroys the idea of "victimization" as an imposed reality.  A person is a victim only so long as they perceive themselves as one.  The move goes into great detail about how the individual brain synapses form and and adapt to constant emotional shaping such that it becomes the norm for ordinary thought processes.  It was probably one of the best  popular-audience explanations for the anthropology of believing and knowing that I have seen.

If one detaches a bit from the warped theology of the movie, the exploration of ideas that are raised in it can be quite productive.  For example:  the idea of shaping reality through the application of a disciplined mind.

Jesus came preaching and teaching the metaphysical concept of the Kingdom of God as existing "among you."  It is clear that His intention was for His disciples to take this Kingdom and make it become the reality of their lives and through the combined effect of their individual realities, have it become the leaven in the loaf which altered the surrounding world environment.  Further, Paul teaches that "what so ever things are pure, noble, of good report... etc.  let your mind dwell on these things."  Paul was teaching  that we are to be essentially focused on those things which produce and amplify the good and true rather than those things which evil and false.

In essence Jesus and indeed the whole of Scriptures teach that the central concern of discipleship is a focused "heart" which understands the world and the individual in it, in terms of positive reinforcement of that very Kingdom which God established through Him.  The movie speaks of the moment of "enlightenment" which is required before a person can truly begin to understand the different paradigm that a person must embrace before the principles of reality shaping can truly be undertaken.  The Scriptures teach of this  in terms of being "born again." 

So there are many points of contact with fundamental Christian truth in this movie.  It is a shame that the principle speakers involved stopped short of asking the more important questions that  arise from the theories they explore.  They allude to the questions "why are we here?" and "what is the purpose of life?" but they deliberately stop at that point.  They leave the answers to the individually constructed realities that each person is supposed to adopt.  Yet, the contradiction is manifest.

If reality is a mind-formed construct then there must be an Ultimate mind which forms the mileau in which we live and breath and have our being (Acts 17:28).  The movie does an excellent job of capturing and explaining Kierkegaard's observation , building on Pascal, that man exists between two infinities, the infinitely large and the infinitely small.  In the movie, there is the clear explanation that the composition of both is primarily space.  That the material things we encounter are not really solid at all but only appear solid through the manner in which the atomic realities (they are not particles you know) pop in and out of being. We exist in a world of space in which the molecules (for lack of a better term) have latitude for inhabiting in different compositions at any given instant.  The world really is as we shape it.  Now remember, these are physicists and mathematicians speaking about quantum mechanics.  They are exploring the results of their own discipline's theories.  Their  whole point and the point of the movie is that through mind, people can influence how this popping in and out occurs.  The natural conclusion is that all reality is subject to Mind, governed by Mind and shaped by Mind. 

In the movie the idea is that the collective mind of man is the Mind of God (pantheism) and makes manifest the reality in which man exists.  A far simpler explanation to which the movie glosses over, is that man participates in that Mind and is in fact an outworking of it.  That puts the cart in proper relation to the horse and completely eliminates all pantheistic interpretations.  The Mind exists independently of man and all other things and is the ultimate source of them.  The Mind is present whether or not the cosmos or man in the cosmos exists or doesn't.  When Jesus prayed for his disciples to be one with Him even as He was one with His Father and through Him for His disciples to be One also with the Father, He was pointing toward the general intention of this statement. 

So, I liked the movie.  More could be said of it but for something in the popular domain, it was one of the better attempts at theorizing about how man knows things, how he perceives things, and how the universe is more of an interactive reality than we tend to suppose.  Though it should never be mistaken as being compatible with Christianity in its ultimate conclusion, yet you can't watch the movie without thinking big thoughts, and that alone makes it worth watching.