Prison: A Valuable Metaphor for Disease and Disorder

The Shawshank Redemption will do as a beautiful metaphor for pain, disease, depression, and suffering in general:

THE PATH OF APATHY AND DESPAIR:

FINDING A GLIMPSE OF LIGHT IN THE DARK HOLE:

CHOOSING LIFE:

When pain first arrives it’s a bit like the cops bursting into your house and arresting you. Either you feel non-plussed, like there has been some kind of mistake, or you feel like you’re being punished for doing something wrong. There’s no mistake, and you’ve done nothing “wrong”, it’s just change, or what we’ve come to refer to as “life”. Certain liberties that you took for granted have suddenly been taken away. You receive a sentence or “diagnosis” and the initiation begins. Often they tell you that it’s a life sentence. You feel doomed. How to tell your friends and family? How will they react? It’s a bit like you’ve been banished from the garden of Eden, like Adam, with a great sense of shame.

Adam was overcome by this shame and simply accepted that he could no longer experience heaven. There wa another tree in the garden though: the tree of eternal life, from which, if he had eaten the fruit, he would experience what Andy did in the second clip posted above. The place (heaven) that can’t be taken away from you, and available to be experienced in an infinite variety of unique ways. Pleasure provides an opportunity to experience Unithou, just as much as pain does. Pleasure descends from a peak, whereas pain can ascend from the valley. We can equate this ascension to a prison break.

The Brooks character symbolises the person who accepts their fate, but then doesn’t attempt the audacity to try and change it. Those who attempt to strategically, and methodically change their lifestyle to increase their vibration and awaken the Eden within are choosing to “get busy living” as opposed to “getting busy dying” (the later is what organised religion is well known to encourage).

Remember also that there is another aspect to vitality: that of power which is gained through the experience and the enduring of suffering. A voyage through hell (the prison of the mind, or the “hole” of solitary confinement) in which the individual discovers a strength which would otherwise have remained latent. This brings to mind the science of “epigenetics”:

Spiralling Through the Darkness – A Look at Sarah Connor’s Psychosis

I’ve posted this clip because I think it’s a great metaphor for the stage of awareness we’ve reached where we come face to face with our mortality, and the mortality of humans as a species. Suddenly our actions, our daily routines, and the routines of those around us appear to be completely useless and idiotic. It comes about in an even deeper way, when we realise “I am a human being named such and such” is a lie, and all of what we were, and are programmed with, is a lie. We’ve peeled off the skin and the mask of God, and found exactly the same thing as when we looked beneath our own name and image: void. It was all a trick. The Wizard of Oz is exposed as nothing more than an archetype, a symbol…

This is a massive shock to the system – to see yourself and those around you as nothing more than automatons, droids, or cyborgs, if you will – how is one to deal with this? There’s obviously no going back, and it appears that there’s no way to go forward, either. Linear time has transformed into a circle:

This is a dangerous point where a lot of people turn to nihilistic behaviour and develop a general apathy towards life. If none of it matters, then why not go off and get wasted – live for the day? “We’re all gonna die, so lets get high” – right? “I am god, I am perfect, I can do whatever I want”.

The funny thing is, that they are close to the mark, but what prevents them hitting the bulls-eye is their interpretation of the term “void”, and that they have failed to perceive the circle as a spiral.
This void they have felt has been interpreted as “devoid of anything”, when it is, in fact, “anything and everything” – pure potential H, and the spiral is the new symbol of evolution, as opposed to the old ladder symbol of “progress”.

The way to truly get “high” is through becoming more and more conscious of these fresh interpretations in the day-to-day theatre of life, so as to feel free from worry, and grateful to have the opportunity to experience Unithou: the joy of becoming, of unfolding, of release.

The Terminator myth shows us our robotic selves, which, in their natural state, are neither good nor evil – it’s how they are programmed which dictates their behaviour and priorities. Sarah Connor transforms from a trendy, subservient naive domesticated young lady, into a paraniod schizophrenic freedom fighter. It’s a bit like how Patty Hearst was brain-washed and reprogrammed.

Sarah’s strength comes from hope and determination, but is initially channelled through hatred and revenge, and she finds herself behaving almost just like a terminator when she tries to kill Miles Dyson , a Cyberdyne Systems engineer working on the microprocessor that will form the basis for Skynet, and cause the apocalypse she has nightmares about. When she’s holding the gun to his head, she is able to step outside of herself and see that she’s just become a different kind of robot: a reactionary controlled by emotion (particularly fear).

At the end of the film she tells us that she has found hope.

The darkness is a necessary phase – keep spiralling, and you will come the light 😉