Mystic At the Movies #4: Everything Everywhere All at Once: On googly eyes inside of bagels.

With the unprecedented success that Everything Everywhere All At Once experienced  at the Oscars last week, it’s a better time than ever to continue our deep dive into the mystic, spiritual and philosophical underpinnings of the film.  I suspect that this exploration will be quite understandable even if a person didn’t read our installments.  However, if you haven’t seen the movie, that’s a different matter.  Spoilers abound and the writing below will probably seem rather nonsensical if you haven’t yet seen the movie.

Our focus today is probably a good example of just how strange this all seems without the context of the film:

  Today, in Mystic at the Movies we’ll look at googly eyes and bagels.

These two items are part of a wider pattern of emphasizing circularity within the film.  For example, circular mirrors are used as  portal for people to see events across the different universes.  This occurs in the film’s opening shot, where we see a shot of Waylond, Evelyn, and Joy laughing together in familial bliss.  Given that the film ends with the three title characters coming to a deep understanding with eachother, and that a person would be hard pressed to find a time when all three of these characters truly enjoyed each other before that climax, there could even be another aspect of circling back around on display here.  I don’t think it’s too speculative to suggest that the opening shot is a bridge linking the end back to the beginning, and suggesting that time itself is circular. (The possibility of eternal recurrence, that only the forms change while a deeper reality remains untouched beneath, is a major article of mystic faith and a theme that recurs so consistently in the film, it merits quite specific treatment.  We’ll circle back to this topic at the next installment of Mystic at the Movies.)

  We also see a circular-mirror portal happen when Waylond-Prime is speaking to Evelyn in the IRS office, hoping to get her attention.  The laundromat that the family runs also possesses row after row of washing machines, where the circular portal-like windows, representative of  of their livelihood are put on display in some of the earliest shots of the film.   Circular cookies pop up in a couple scenes in the movie.  The first is circular cookies are given by Waymond to Dierdre; the second is held up to Martial-Arts Evelyn by her teacher.

After being gifted the cookies, Deirdre is quite intentional in circling the cost of the karaoke machine on the receipt. It’s easy to miss the fact that later,  the placement of this receipt on one pile or another, comes to be the fundamental decision which splits Evelyn’s reality into a number of alternate paths. 

When one of the Evelyn’s resulting from this divergence ends up dead, Jobu declares that this version of Evelyn wasn’t the one she was looking for after all.  She returns to the other Evelyns existing from thai divergence, who’d placed the receipt on different piles, to continue the search for her mother.  

  From the circular shape of symbols like Yin and Yang (which was initially a Buddhist representation of a Taoist concept) to the reccurent, cyclical nature of concepts like reincarnation, to the importance of silence and nothingness which might be symbolized by an oval ‘0’, to the fact that the shape is named in the mystic-friendly schema known as spiral dynamics, the importance of the overall shape in mysticism and spirituality can hardly be denied.    

Within the film, there are two different types of circles that have a special importance.  These are googly-eyes and bagels.  Visually speaking, the bagel and the googly eyes have some things in common.  The outer perimeter of each is a circle, of course.  But there is an inner circle for each as well.  The inner circle of the bagel is, of course, where the bagel stops.  

This is not to say that googly eyes and bagels are treated exactly the same.  Initially, they even appear to be opposites.  Googly eyes begin as Waymond’s gift.   But these do not belong to just any Waymond.  The googly eyes, for example, are never used by the serious and heroic Waymond Prime.  

It’s worth sticking with this observation.  Waymond prime embodies all the characteristics we’d normally ascribe to a hero.  But this version of Waymond doesn’t actually do much.   For all his bravery, knowledge, and gear, he does little more than set the plot in motion and provide opportunities for exposition, catching the audience up with the nature of reality and the way everything works in the world of the film.  

Meanwhile, the version of Waymond who occupies the main universe of the film is not particularly knowledgeable, brave, or competent.  His tendency to affix googly eyes to objects seem to do little more than annoy Evelyn at first.   We come to find that this duality between the two versions of Waymond, like so many other dualities presented by the film, is not what it appears to be.

This version of Waymond is passionate about the power of love.  He seeks to keep the peace, to comfort the hurting and wounded.  The googly eyes seem intimately connected to representing this loving world view.  Everlyn places one on her forehead and then seems able to embody the lessons she has learned from her husband.  This single act is in many important ways a climax for the whole drama, despite the fact it comes surprisingly early in the narrative.  After this basic act, we find that Evelyn is able to integrate her own feistiness with Waymond’s loving approach.  The duality between even love and war falls away when she brings together her approach with his.  Before moving onto the bagel, it’s worth looking at this moment, when Evelyn puts the googly eye on her forehead.

Eyes are, of course, organs of sight.  The idea that a person might have an extra eye suggests that they can see things in a new way.  But in fact, there is a spiritual significance to this act.  The idea that a person might have be able to see spiritual truths by opening an eye above and between the two physical eyes belongs to Hinduism.  The idea of that third eye is clearly evoked at that moment.  

Simultaneously, the eyes also represent a way of viewing all the universe as alive.  The placement of googly eyes on an inanimate object cause it to become an anthropomorphic, cartoon version of itself.  There is a juvenile strangeness to this, undoubtedly.  But there is something more.

There are a number of routes that mystical traditions take to arrive in a place where they are able to affirm that everything is alive.  Whether someone like Richard Rohr is affirming the power of a panentheistic worldview though talk of a universal Christ, or a Celtic Christian is showing us to a thin place where the line between the natural and the supernatural is nearly impossible to discern, or Hildegard of Bingen is writing about the greening, mystics follow Waymonds example in longing to see that everything is alive.

If we really sit with the image that everything is alive, we come to see that this means a list of everything that could be listed is alive.  Even when one thing is contained within another, both of them are alive.  So if everything is alive then the wheels of my car are alive.  But simultaneously, my entire car is also a single entity, and it is also alive.

If the chair I am sitting on is a single living entity, then so too is the room the chair is sitting in.  If this single room is a single entity, then the entire building is a alive, and is a single entity as well.  The entire Earth is alive.  The solar system is alive.  The entire galaxy is a single living entity.  So too is the entire created cosmos.  

In an odd way, the conviction that everything is alive is intimately connected to the mystical idea that everything is one.  The googly eyes, at some profound level, bring us back to the awareness that we are God, and that we, as God, knowing Everything.  

Contrast this with the bagel.  For all the similarities in shape and prevalence, there are several significant differences.  If the googly eyes are associated with Waymond, then the bagel with everything is associated with Jobu.  If the googley eyes are associated with the idea that everything is alive then the bagel is associated with the idea that Nothing really matters.

One of the few times that the writer-directors have gone on the record about some of these spiritual themes in this film is their association between the bagel and nihilism.  It is unusual in the course of things to consider the idea that something which contains everything, might be a stand-in for the possibility of the ultimate value of nothingness.  

EEAAO is a film which frequently gives the most token attempt at logical explanation.  Nowhere is this more on display around the meaning of the bagel and why it symbolizes nihilism.  Early in the film, Waymond-prime references the idea that nothing is the way it is supposed to be and they need someone to stand up to Jobu’s ‘perverse shroud of chaos.’  A few minutes later, a version of Dierdre who already has a circle drawn on her forehead staples a piece of paper (which closely resembled the previously mentioned receipt) with another clear circle on it.  For reasons that are not immediately clear, the captioning– and presumably the script– identifies this figure as ‘Bagel Dierdre.’

Within a few minutes of Bagel Deirdre, we are introduced to Jobu Topeki.  Though she does great violence to the police attempting to arrest them, she ends up wanting merely to show the nature of the bagel her mother.  The nature of the bagel is that when you look at everything that has come together there, you find that nothing matters.  

One aspect of this might be that Joy, and eventually Everlyn, come to see all of the identities they have ever had in the multiverse, and eventually both of them seem to coming to grips with the realities that none of them are worth anything; none of them are above any of the others.  All of them are as absurd as the denizens of the universe where people have hot dog fingers, or the universe where a chef hides a raccoon under his hat.  But no one ever makes this connection explicit.  Regardless of what it means within the movies world and logic, it certainly evokes some elements of mysticism.

The book of ecclesiastes features a narrator who seems to be living in this kind of universe, when he says “Everything is meaningless.  What has been will be again.  What has been done will be done again.  There is nothing new under the sun.  With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” This leaves the implication that with infinite wisdom comes infinite sorrow; with infinite knowledge comes infinite grief.

Half a world away, traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism would venerate nothingness for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes, it would seem that the importance of this quality they are calling nothingness is that it transcends anything we have a category for.  The Christian Mystic tradition would eventually come to identify what has been called the via negativia and the apophatic with that which can not be defined.  St. John of the Cross would describe a dark night of the soul.   Centuries later, mystic Don Juan would tell Carlos Casteneda that everything a wise man does is folly because nothing matters.

A common thread of all these traditions is a belief in some sort of divine union.  The strange paradox that arises when a person becomes one with that which is   transcendent, is that they suddenly they find that the whole reality that they have ever known is suddenly rendered moot and irrelevant.  There is an entire other level to this dynamic.  There is a way in which the here and now finds itself strangely elevated.  But this is an exploration best saved for another time.

We might envision a googly eye sitting within the hole at the center of a bagel.  We might see that the two arise together– nihilism at the heart of panentheism, a nothing-emptiness sits in the middle of contemplation, Despair hides away at the heart of liberation.

If the bagel and googly eyes aren’t strictly identical, each of them certainly implies, entails, and depends on the other. 

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Mystic at the Movies #3- Everything Everywhere all at Once: Jobu, Joy, and Evelyn

Mystic at the Movies is an exploration of contemplative themes in popular culture.  We have begun with a deep dive into the amazing Everything Everywhere All at Once.  So far, issues of identity, boundaries, and duality have been our central considerations. For the first installment of Mystic at the Movies click here. To read article #2 click here.

This time,, we take a look at the two central figures in a film driven by an intricately formed ensemble.  Though the many supporting characters are certainly amazingly done, Evelyn and Joy are in so many ways the center of the whole drama.  The journeys of each has numerous mystical implications when considered individually, but some of the richest wisdom that might be gleamed comes up from the dynamics between them.

They are opposites in so many ways.  Not only are they mother and daughter,  but Evelyn is repressed where Joy is explosive.  Consider, for example, the fact that Evelyn is so unwilling to engage in conflict that Waylon feels forced to file papers for divorce in order to instigate a fight compared to Joy’s bold confrontation in the laundry parking lot.

Secondarily, Evelyn is traditional where Joy is contemporary.  For example, it is clear that Becky has been coached to called Evelyn “Mrs. Wang.”  This is sharply contrasted just a few minutes later with Waymond, who delights in Becky addressing her by first name.  On the otherhand, Joy wears tattoos, is quite open about having a girlfriend, and is even needed to help translate from the IRS.  

 Finally, Evelyn is fatalistic, submitting to societal expectations for her life path, while Joy is iconoclastic, rebellious, and determined to take action to change the course of events no matter what the cost.  This distinction is perhaps the most important to each of the characters’ trajectories.  We see this fatalism in everything from Evelyn’s unwillingness to confront her father to her almost inexplicable unwillingness to do anything about the IRS audit, even though it threatens her very livelihood.   Meanwhile Joy is desperate to buck the status quo that she literally risks the entire multiverse simply to attain a sense of peace and understanding about the nature of her life.  

One way to view the film is to see it as  the story of the pair learning from each other.  They are opposites, holding the tension between themselves dynamically.  They are extremes, not coming merely to cancel each other out but here to become something new.   Evelyn, for example, emulates her daughter in absorbing and welcoming all the identities that she has.  Joy is the first person to absorb all the alternate universe versions of herself.  Evelyn, it would seem is the second.

It’s worth considering these dualities with care.  As we discussed previously, this approach to holding polarities in tension is a highly important aspect of mysticism.  But Joy and Evelyn’s relationship also offers some new insights into the nature of mysticism.  The idea that a parent learns from their child is counter cultural.  The story we are generally told is that the young should be learning from the old.  Mysticism is at home in paradox and transgressions in general.  But this particular reversal is especially central to the mystic’s journey.  Zen traditions speak of beginners mind.  Jesus told his followers to take on the aspect of a child.  EEAAO represents this idea by having Evelyn emulate Joy.

One of the notable aspects of this lesson learned is the fact that it goes against the common perception of right and wrong.   The film, in fact, as a whole, tells a story whose protagonists and antagonists flip so frequently and convincingly that a viewer can end up with a sort of psychic whiplash.  

One of the major examples of this happening is the positioning of Jobu and Evelyn.  Jobu is initially presented to the audience as the most evil villain imaginable.  She is the ultimate Satan Figure.  The characters we assume to be our protagonists, Waylon-prime and his support are engaged in a life or death battle with her.  And suddenly…  Jobu becomes a sort of spiritual guide to Evelyn.  And they are united in a battle against Evelyn’s formal allies, the occupants of the prime universe.  

Of course, this evokes the idea explored previously, that a hallmark of mysticism is a transcendence of traditional concepts of right and wrong.  But we can go even a little bit further than this.  Evelyn might be seen as a person in the early stages of a spiritual journey.  

Waylon prime and all of the people from his universe resemble in a sense the traditional religious establishment.  Evelyn steps into a deeper world, understands the true nature of things, begins her journey stewarded in by the champions of non-mystical religion.  They present her with not only a wider story to live in, but also a series of absolute laws of good and evil.  They approach her not only with reverence and love, but also a willingness to combat her if she ever steps out of line, beyond the narrow confines of their rules and expectations.

Just as so many mystics took their first baby steps in literalistic, fundamentalist environments, so Evelyn begins with a group who are quite sure that they know right from wrong.  They experience the world in a black and white way.  They are uncomfortable embracing Everything.  

In those environments so many of us are told things are evil when someday we will find ourselves madly in love with them.   A person who meditates for hours a day might once have been told and even have believed that meditation is evil.  A person who would later come to experience union with God might have, once upon a time believed that God and man are wholly and forever separate.  An immature religious person might violently cling to the narrowest confines of their own single tradition even if many years later he might find the glorious ecunemical dance of interspirituality to be the most life giving thing imaginable.

So it is that Evelyn was taught that something she will later embrace is the root of all evil.  There are, in fact, two aspects to this.  There are two dynamics that Evelyn will eventually come to embrace, even if she was forbidden them earlier.

The first thing that Evelyn will embrace is Joy.    She will come to heal the rift with her daughter.   Perhaps, there is even a bit of word-play going on here.  In the act of embracing Joy, her daughter, we see for the first time that Evelyn has the possibility of embracing joy, the emotional reality: the first time we see Evelyn truly happy is when she realizes she must support and embrace her daughter rather than attacking her. 

 The second thing that Evelyn will embrace is all the various aspects of herself as represented by the alternate versions of her life.  She owns and accepts them in order to accumulate their gifts and abilities.  

Yet again, we find ourselves confronted with this macroscosm/microcosm fractal.  The drama is played at on the outside via the interactions with Joy.  The drama is played out on ths inside via the integration of all her different selves.

So much screen time is given to the teaching-relationship which is characterized by Evelyn learning from Joy.  But the most critical one, the climactic realization is one which is defined by learning flowing in the opposite direction.  The climax of the film is a teaching opportunity where Evelyn becomes the teacher.  

Groundwork needed to be lain for this to even become a possibility.  Though she seemed outrageous bordering on demented, Jobu initially appears powerful, confident, and self-satisfied.  It is only the gradual smudging of the boundaries between Jobu and Joy that make room for the climax.  

In a mystic-worthy annihilation of the differences between two things we had once been sure were distinct, as the movie reaches the end, it becomes more and more difficult to know when we are dealing with Jobu and when we are dealing with Joy.  Suddenly powerful, confident and self-satisfied Jobu becomes indistinguishable from disempowered, insecure Joy.    

If we never believed a pure and omnipotent Jobu Topeki could have anything to learn from Evelyn, we might see that a Joy-Jobu hybrid would be imperfect enough to need some wisdom from her mother.  As I watched the film, I found myself wondering whether perhaps we were misinformed about Joy all along.  Just as the traditional, literalistic, non-mystic religionists might say things to a future mystic that initially prejudice them against this or that initially, Waylon prime and his cohorts say things to Joy and the audience that prejudice us against Joy/Jobu Topeki.  

Complications arise when we see that Jobu was a murderer.  But nuance and complications are part of the lesson for us.  It pushes us into that mystic’s realm of both/and.  Joy was and was not Jobu.  Jobu was and was not misunderstood.  Evelyn should learn from Joy-Jobu; and Joy-Jobu should learn from Evelyn.

Ultimately, then, we are left with another both/and.  On the one hand, a case can be made that Jobu was good all along, and we just saw her unfairly.  On the other, she does seem to go through a transformation, ultimately even a journey of integration.

In so much as the Jobu we see earlier in the film is evil, she need to integrate the life experiences of the main Joy to become something better than she was.  Even while that Joy longed for liberation through Jobu’s power and strength, as Jobu becomes indistinguishable from Joy, she picks up the basic goodness of the protagonist.  On this level, it seems like this is a story that introduces us to Joy in the first act, focuses on Jobu in the second act, and brings them together in a single character Joy-Jobu in the third act.  

A common conclusion offered within mystical communities is the idea that the end-game we think we want is not the same as the the destination we are actually headed for.  Awakening, enlightenment, and similar concepts are quite frequently described as things that work quite differently than our minds are anticipated.   Often times one of the biggest obstacles to these “destinations” is our mistaken understanding of wat we are actually doing.   Along the way are dark nights of the soul, times of desolations, confrontations with the absolute other-ness of God.

Evelyn’s ongoing evolving understanding of just what she is doing is not unknown to a mystic.  There was a time that I personally felt surprised, and almost embarrassed by how quickly things can change.  There are many times that I have experienced so much change that the “me” of five years ago would hardly recognize the “me” of today.  As times go by, I have learned that these times, when I go through such absolute transformations in such a small duration, these eras are so very often the richest times of spiritual growth.  I have learned to, on the whole, trust the process of spiritual maturation.  I am finding myself surprised at how rarely there are huge missteps, such that months and years end up feeling like a journey in the wrong direction, a series of missteps.  

At the same time, we find ourselves coming back into some of the same scenery, just from a new and different perspective.  Often times there is a departure, and then a return.  We might leave behind a religious community only to find that at a certain point we are ready for it again.  We might think that we have finished mourning a loss or celebrating a joy, only to find that now we are newly positioned to re-experience either positive or negative emotions.  We might spend some years apart from the tradition we grew up in, only to find ourselves newly equipped to much more deeply appreciate elements of the faith we grew up in.  

It shouldn’t be surprising then, that many elements of Joy are not present in the middle portions of the film, but that she is reintegrated into the whole at the end.  It’s worth returning, at this point, to the earlier point about the surprising, counter cultural elements  of Evelyn learning from Joy-Jobu.  This is merely an external manifestation of a dynamic operating within: even as we reach a certain point that we see it worth to emulate someone else who is more of a beginner, it is also necessary to find the beginner within– the Joy who had been left behind– and follow her, in all her niavete.

There is, in the end, a circularity to this.  And circles play no small part EEAAO.  The importance of motifs like googly eyes and The Bagel With Everything are worth leaning into.  But that will have to wait for future installments of ‘Mystic at the Movies.’

Mystic at the Movies #2: Everything Everywhere All at Once- The Journey of Integration

(Though this is a follow up to the first episode of Mystic at the Movies, I think it’ll be pretty easy to keep up with even if you didn’t read that. On the other hand, if you haven’t seen the film, not only is this unlikely to be very interesting, it’ll also hand over pretty major spoilers for what might be the best movie ever.)

Last time, Mystic at the Movies took began it’s exploration of the brilliant Everything, Everywhere All At once.  In that post, we looked at some ways that the film’s transcendence of boundaries was a handy lens for exploring the mystic’s journey.  We  took a beginning peek  at the concept of identity.   Today, we’ll dive a little deeper into this delicious topic, laying the groundwork for future installments of Mystic at the Movies, which will explore ideas like God, Good and Evil, and more.

Part of the brilliance at work in this film  is the manner in which it just gives a little twist to what could otherwise have been dry, academic discourses.  The film gives us a vocabulary, almost a symbolic system.  It might appear that we’re discussing some rather minute aspects of the film’s mythos, but in fact what is also happening is a profound discussion on the nature of reality. More specifically: it might feel abstract, stuffy, and irrelevant for us to discuss the nature of identity in the abstract.  Some people might be scared off of such a topic, fearing that they lack the proper background and training to “do” philosophy.  Others might think such a thing unworthy of their time, assuming it will never actually change anything about the day-to-day experience of living their lives.

EEAAO sidesteps this philoso-phobio  by hiding a heady topic in plain sight.  The main use of alternate versions of main characters in the film is really an opportunity to look at the competing aspects of our own self.  Alternative dimensions, in the movie, are ultimately short hand ways to explore the concept of identity.  

It’s worth noting at this point that  though it’s true that alternate universes have become quite a popular trope in recent pop culture, it has rarely been leveraged in just the manner it’s being used in the film.  More obvious and common symbology for alternate universes is to explore roads not  travelled.  Philip K Dick was interested in this question on a historical kind of level with his Man in the High Castle.  The central question at work here is “What if Hitler won World War I?.”  Other times, contemporary uses of alternate universes explore the personal aspects of what might have happened if things had ended differently.  In the Multiverse of Madness Dr. Strange meets and hears about versions of himself who made different choices at key moments.  Numerous versions of a popular Flash story explore the question of what would have happened if the titular character’s mother hadn’t died.  The recent animated Marvel series (which is in fact an homage to a comic series of the same name) went so far as to be clear about this common usage.  The title of both series, of course, was ‘What If?’

The thing that is worth noticing is that the various versions of Doctor Strange are completely independent of each other.  In some way, they are mutually exclusive.  One Doctor Strange comes about from a certain set of circumstances.  An alternative Doctor Strange results from other circumstnaces.  This is a stark contrast to the experiences of Evelyn in EEAAO.  While she does explore the world where she made a different choice, somehow, she is able to access the memories and the abilities of that other Evelyn.  

In summary, the use of the multiverse in EEAAO is fundamentally different than how this conceit is normally handled.  While these other stories are explorations of what might have been, EEAAO is about the ways our different identities integrate themselves.  If traditional multiverse narratives center the question “What if I had done something different?” our film centers itself on the question “Who am I really?”

“Who am I?” is a question that has some importance in the history of mysticism.  It was famously asked all night by a tormented St. Francis.  As the story goes, he spent the whole night in a  monastery asking “Who am I, God?  And who are you?”

Meanwhile, across the world, the question formed the very basis of a Self-inquiry: a Vendantic practice which invites the contemplative to consider the likely “locations” of our trueest self.

This practice puts words and gives a level of specificity to how to go about the process.  Self inquiry brings a journey to a high degree of focus.  But it taps into something quite universal, and rather central to a mystic’s journey in general.

The journey of the mystic is an inward one.  And it is profoundly a journey of integration.  The question for a mystic becomes one of proper relations.  How are these tiny portions of me meant to connect.  It is a recreation of the macrocosm at a microcosmic level.  

Even as a mystic contemplates the possibility of an interpersonal union, as he longs, hopes, and believes that all the people, all the matter, all the energy, all the actualities and potential, as he considers that all these seemingly independent entities that began as larger than himself melding, melting, becoming one…

Just as that is going on there is a similar longing happening within.  There were these dis-integrated, independently functioning, sometimes competing pyschodynamics.  We speak of mind and soul and ask which is supreme.  We categorize id, ego, and super ego and consider which is best.  We contrast body and spirit…  A mystic heals these divides by rejecting these dualities.  

As above, so below.  

EEAAO portrays this selfsame journey inward, this path of descent and integration.  And in the film, we see it in the same external and internal venues.   Just as the mystic has a longing for external union, where all the things larger than the self become one, we see numerous examples of people wanting an external union in the film.  The Bagel with Everything is the most conspicuous example of something which threatens to make everything one.  

And just as the mystic is on an internal journey to bring together all of her internal experiences, thoughts, etc, in the film  we are confronted with at least two pictures of such internal  integration.  One is Jobu Topeki.  In a sense, Jobu’s journey is complete.  She is presented as someone who knows all the versions of herself.  (And strangely, she is the incarnation of evil.   Whether or not Jobu’s journey really  was complete, and why she is something of an antagonist are topics due a full assessment.  For now, we leave those questions aside though, in favor of sticking with the topic at hand: identity.)

Evelyn, meanwhile, represents the very beginning stages of this journey of integration.  There’s a sense in which this is quite literally woven into the plot.  Evelyn gains the strength of the alternate versions of herself when she comes to accept them.This concept is also thematic.  Evelyn– the main one–  grows by integration in other ways.

She comes to accept Joy’s bisexuality. She learns to come to grips with  her father’s lack  of affection; she ends up embracing her similarities with her daughter, and ultimately is willing to accept the inevitably of hurt in her relationship with Joy.  On her path to the climax of the movie, Evelyn must integrate the kung-fu prowess of an alternate version of herself with the gentleness of her husband as she declares that she will fight like him and suddenly, even as she does Kung-Fu, she is adjusting one person’s neck, slamming together  a pair destined for love, feeding the desires for kink of yet another person.  

There is, of course, a connection between this dynamic and some of the considerations we consider in the initial installment of Mystic at the Movies.  Recall that last time we explored the artificial binaries that EEAAO transcends.  That was a necessary first step, but in many ways, simply naming the existence of binaries falls short of the act of integrating these extremes.   The difference is around the important distinction between naming that such-and-such a thing is a reality and proclaiming that both are worthy and good.

This is no easy task.  It is not easy to look at all the parts of ourselves and declare them all worthy.  It is not easy to consider all the things which have happened to us and claim them as our own.  It can be even more difficult to integrate within ourselves the feelings, attitudes, and thoughts that we grow so accustomed to deflecting, projecting, and other-ing; this is shadow work, and involves embracing the part of ourselves that had once been denied.

For a mystic, this eventually leads to reconsidering the very nature of Good and Evil; it is an act of reclaiming the actions we had once ascribed to God or God’s nemesis, whatever our tradition names it.  This is the territory of Rumi, when he invited us to meet him in a field beyond good and evil.  This is the territory of carefully excavating the creation myth, where the root of the fall of humankind lies in our unfortunate decision to eat from a tree said to bestow the knowledge of good and evil.  

For the film that is our primary concern here, this bring us to consider Jobu Topeki and her mother Evelyn.  It brings us face-to-face with the whiplash changes the film has for who counts as the protagonist and who counts as the antagonist.  That topic is at least as big it sounds, and is deserving of a much deeper assessment than we have here.  I hope you’ll join us next time, as we begin to assess these important topics.  

Mystic at the Movies: Everything Everywhere All At Once: Part I: Identity

Mystic at the Movies is my every-now-and-again deep dive into nondualism, contemplation, mysticism, and second-half-of-life spirituality as they appear in some of my favorite films.  

One of the movies that helped inspire me to begin writing Mystic at the Movies was the amazing, transcendent, profane, surprising, absurd, heart-breaking and hilarious Everything Everywhere All at Once.  EEAAO (as it will be called for the rest of this piece of writing) is the story of a family of Chinese Immigrants attempting to do the hard soul work of being the best people they can be.  It is also a multiversal martial arts epic.  And an existentialist comedy that is very, very nsfw.  The rest of this piece will contain numerous spoilers.  And to be honest, probably won’t be that interesting if you haven’t actually seen the film.  The movie is available at the normal venues for paid rent/sale (Amazon, You Tube, et. al.)  It is also streaming on showtime’s service.  (Hot tip: there’s not that many interesting offerings in Showtime other than EEAAO but they seem to be offering your first month for free.)

One of the first questions for me about EEAAO is just where the writers were coming from, spiritually and philosophically.  Interviews with the Writers-Directors who go by the name ‘Daniels’ are not hard to find.  They have appeared on numerous podcasts, print interviews, etc.  They even published a coffee table book available through their production company’s website with a variety of supplementary information.  

The weird thing is that though spirituality seems to be a HUGE subtext of the movie, it doesn’t seem like they are very interested in talking about that.  The book, podcasts, and interviews have tackled many interesting topics, but it doesn’t seem that the spiritual side of it all is high on their list of priorities to discuss.  I’m not sure if this lack of discussion implies a disinterest on the part of the interviewers, a reluctance to “go there” on the part of The Daniels, or something else entirely.  Regardless of the cause, we will have to approach this subject without much explicit commentary from the creators themselves.

There are many themes that are worth investigating here and I look forward to exploring questions around topics like the nature of God, good, and evil in future installments of Mystic at the Movies.  An issue foundational to all of these are the questions of identity and boundaries.    

It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that these concerns are fundamental to mysticism.  A reasonable definition of mysticism would want to center itself on questions of identity.  For me, the best way of defining  mysticism is as a fundamental skepticism that things are as independent, separate, and isolated from each other as they appear to be.  In other words, the boundaries between us are slippery resulting in a universe where we are fundamentally one.    

There are so many examples of confused, overlapping, and nontraditional boundaries in EEAAO  that it can be difficult to know where to begin.  We might start at the very widest level possible and observe that on the level of plot and theme, this film is a dizzying hodgepodge of genre, tropes, and mood.  Wikapedia seems to agree.  The  article discussing EEAAO describes it as “absurdist science fiction comedy drama.”  It’s hard to imagine many genre that this movie couldn’t be filed under.

We could continue in this vein and note that even the title promises us something with a universal, boundary-crossing significance.  We might make the more nuanced observation that the film can’t even completely stay within the boundaries of being a fictional story and in a few strange and powerful ways, it transcends the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.

The most obvious examples of the fiction/non-fiction boundary crossing comes in the form of the universe where Evelyn is a movie star.  Some of the footage shown of the character’s famous existence is actually repurposed footage from the life of the actress playing Evelyn.   The nonfiction aspect of the movie is further toyed with in not one but two separate scenes which remind us that everything that we are watching is a film.  Not only do we find ourselves sitting with the famous Evelyn in a theatre, where the cinematography is arranged to give the illusion that we are in the same theatre with her, we also get a scene, right after intense action, where we find that this was nothing more than an action scene; suddenly we see the cameras and crew.  These scenes have a strange effect on the viewer.  There comes a sense of “we were in the made-up world of fiction, but now, the narrative has come to exist in our real world.”

(It is not insignificant to note that EEAAO was originally written for Jackie Chan to be the protagonist.  When Michelle Yeoh was cast, the protagonist’s name was initially also Michelle.  Thus, from the very beginning, a link between the character and the actress existed firmly in the writers’ minds.)

As we consider the plot, we can find dozens of further examples of boundary crossings.  Within the first few scenes of the film, we find that the Wangs struggles include: navigating the boundaries between personal time and business needs; navigating the boundaries of respecting elder generations and honoring the lived reality of younger generations, navigating the boundary between friends and family, navigating the line between being healthy assertive with a spouse with out over doing it.  Even one aspects of the Wang’s tax problem seems to be related to failing to navigate the boundaries between profession and hobbies.

It might be convincingly argued that transgression of boundaries on it’s own is not sufficient to demonstrate a thing has mystical roots.  Transgression of boundaries is also, for example, considered to be a component of both post modernity and queerness.  While I suspect fruitful explorations of both these elements within EEAAO might be conducted, there are several aspects of the film that mark the boundary crossings as uniquely mystical.

There are important distinctions between how mysticism, queerness, and post modernity view the crossing of boundaries.  This seems like a topic an entire book might explore.  But for our purposes here, let’s begin with the fact that queerness tends to view distinctions like male and female as social constructs that a person should feel free to ignore.  Post modernity is more descriptive than prescriptive, observing that a sign of the age we find ourselves in is that the traditional distinctions between things is breaking down.  Mysticism is unique among these three ways of being.  It is more radical, generally, than the other two.  Mysticism won’t be satisfied until everything is one.   Like queerness, the boundary-transcendence is prescriptive.  Unlike queerness, the boundary-transcendence goes beyond humanity.

Jobu Tupeki’s “bagel with everything.”  is of course, a pun.  A person could go to a deli and order such a thing, and they would expect that there are many different flavors and seasonings to it.  The “everything” in Jobu’s bagel is much more inclusive.   It is a mystic’s “everything.”

Moreover, when Evelyn finally comes to an understanding of the way the universe is, she takes one of Waymond’s googly eyes and places it on her forehead.  This motion is equal parts profoundity and silliness.  The profundity arises from the fact that a third eye, imagined to be right where Evelyn placed the decoration, is a common mystical symbol of awakening.  The silliness of the situation, arises, of course, from the fact that it’s a cheap bauble, a craft supply.  

To reiterate: this is a clear example of the boundary transgressions that are explicitly mystical.  But it runs deeper than the mere presence of a third eye.  It seems that the sorts of things Evelyn seems to suddenly awaken to is that all the aspects of her various selves, scattered across the universe, can reside within her. 

This is, of course, familiar mystical territory.

Sometimes the language is prescribed by the spiritual tradition.  But some of these traditions’ terms and phrases have migrated into the broader vocabulary of mysticism as a whole.  So we hear that the concern is between self and Self; or “I” and “Thou” or “small self” and “Large self” or “true self” and “false self.”

Looking at these various designations, we find ourselves in a space that is rather appropriate for a consideration on mysticism.  Because we began with a rather distinct and specific idea.  We considered the question of identity.  But now, we find ourselves in some intersection with so many other topics, themes, and ideas.  Rather appropriately, the individual differences have faded back and we find ourselves facing collapsing boundaries.

For example, especially as potrayed in the film, a single “person” who has managed to embrace all of their various identities has suddenly become something more like God than a human.  Rather fittingly, we began with a journey inward and find ourselves staring right at God.  Meister Eckhart would be pleased, I think to imagine this– that even as we stare at God, we find ourselves, being God, staring at us.  

Weirdly interrelated to the question of individual identity and attaining Godhood is the question of Good and Evil.  Doctrinal religion frequently offers up a clear and dualistic list of what is right and what is wrong.   Intertwined with this is a view of the world in terms of us vs them.  Finally, an individual who inhabits such a world finds himself having to choose between and among identities.  Within a Christian environment, for example, a person endorses the picture of themselves as chaste or temperate.  They focus and own and select the aspects of themselves which reinforce this picture.  

EEAAO flexes it’s mystic muscles by proclaiming the adoption of all the versions of ourselves.  Contemporary mystic Richard Rohr has made famous the phrase “everything belongs.”  This is a representation of a fundamental belief of mystics stretching all the way back.  When Joy and Evelyn are willing to take all the pieces of themselves in, they embody this principle.

There are so very many rich questions worth exploring here.  I hope you will share some of your thoughts here, and I will plan to come back and share some more of mine.  This is fitting, too, though; mystics do love their questions, their journeys and their processes.  Let’s continue on that journey together.

Installment #2 of Mystic at the Movies goes deeper into the nature of Identity in EEAAO; we explore the journey of integration. Click here to read it.

Instalmment #3 of Mystic at the Movies focuses on the relationship between Evelyn, Joy, and Jobu. You can find it it here.

Big Picture Consideration: the Apophatic & the Cataphatic

A somewhat trite folk song and an amazing section of the bible say it well:

There is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Maybe this points to a really important distinction, one that sometimes feels as though it were a hidden, a thing that modern Christianity sometimes seems to want to treat like a dirty little secret.

On the one hand are the things we can speak of.  This side of the spectrum is characterized by understanding and light.  It is built on the assumption that the world is knowable.  It is associated with happiness and explanations.  This has been called the Cataphatic.

On the other hand, there is the truth that words only get us so far.  This side of the specrum is characterized by the not-knowing and darkness.  It is built on the understanding that there are some (many?) things that we can not comprehend.  It is associated with a lack of joy and a reluctance to explain.  This has been called the Apophatic.

To whatever extent these things are true about reality in general, they are doubly true about The Ground of All Being/God/Spirit/ Jesus/Truth/Allah….

The Cataphatic is easier for most people today.  I don’t know if it is a sign of modernity.  Or the evangelical church.  Or one of the inheritances of the age of “Enlightenment.”  Or simple and universal human nature…  Probably a bit of each.

Much of what we do in modern faith context is built around words (sermons, singing words, small group discussions) and happiness (upbeat melodies to worship music, cherry picking the happy parts of psalms)   There are lots of powerful spiritual exercises to explore this side of the spectrum.  But it seems to me they are a little less necessary than apophatic spiritual exercises.

Because we don’t spend much time in the apophatic.   We don’t have too many options open to us.  We have lost the art of lamenting.  We are so tempted to view agnosticism as a sign of weakness and ambiguity as a sign of the weak.  I think these are all the signs of a mature spirituality.  Perhaps we could enter into them earlier if we had more avenues for it.

Or maybe not.  Maybe it requires some life experience, some humiliation, some dying in order to be able to recognize that this all can not be out prayed, out sang, and out worshipped.

Regardless, this is where it is.  Give a try to an apophatic meditation today.

 

Big Picture Consideration #5

I have spent some time wrestling with how best to share the stuff I am writing about today.

In true contemplative fashion, I am doing my best to hold two equally important (and in some ways contradictory) realities.

The first reality is that The Faith-ing Project is a labor of love for me.  I am passionate about sharing these practices with anybody and everybody, regardless of their ability to financially support this endeavor.

The second reality is that there are a handful of direct expenses involved with this.  They include the expenses of keeping this website ad-free and able to host things like audio files.  I also have a hope of upgrading some of the equipment being used here.  And the time I am investing is no small thing.  It would be nice to be free of the temptation of taking up a side hustle or second job.  Having to do that would not be good for the development of materials here.

Since The Faith-ing Project began, I have utilized Patreon to give people an opportunity to make a small monthly contribution.  In exchange for $3.00 a month, patrons receive access to a growing library of audio files which present the spiritual exercises.

If you would rather make a 1-time contribution through paypal, I can be reached at otherjeffcampbell7@gmail.com

If you are in a position to support this important work with a small monthly gift or a 1-time payment, I am deeply thankful to you.  If The Faith-ing Project’s resources and email campaigns have been helpful to you, or if you share my conviction that these practices are desperately needed by the world, this financial assistance is one way to express your solidarity with me.

If you are not equipped financially to support what we are doing at this time, I would not want you to hold on to any kind of guilt about this.  I (generally) believe in the power of prayer and would ask for your prayers regardless of your financial situation.  Offering feedback and concrete suggestions on what you see here is another way to support this project.  (I feel particularly out of my element in the visual and technological side of all this)

Regardless of whether you can support The Faith-ing Project in any specific way, I am thankful for your presence here and wish you peace on the journey.

You can help in turning The Faith-ing Project into a fully functioning community.  You can do this in several ways:

• Share your thoughts, feelings, and criticism below in the comments.
• email otherjeffcampbell7@gmail.com to share something directly with the Project’s Director, to join our next email campaign, or to ask to be placed on the mailing list.
• Access exclusive content and help The Faithing Project continue to deliver this conetent to a world in need: become a Patron.
• follow @faithingproject on twitter.

 

Big Picture Consideration #5: Inclusion, not Appropriation

A phrase that has landed on lots of our radars over the past couple years is “Cultural Appropriation.”

My understanding of why this is a bad thing is evolving.  It took me a while to see how it is a problem at all.  As time has gone by, I still need somebody to go slow and help me with some of the details.

The problem of cultural appropriation plays out in a few specific ways for me here, at the Faith-ing Project.  The most obvious one is my use of practices from traditions that I do not consider my own.  It is inevitable that I am going to oversimplify, misrepresent, and gloss over important aspects of all the practices that I present here, especially the ones that don’t come from the tradition I identify as my own.

I have considered whether I should be sharing them at all.  After lengthy consideration, I have decided that it is worth it, despite the risk.  There are a few reasons for deciding I should include Buddhist, Jewish, and (soon) Islamic practices here.

#1) Part of the mystic’s journey is to recognize the thing that all the major world religion’s have in common.  This is not saying they are all identical, or that they all take us to the same “place.”  But it is important to recognize their commonality.  And for me, that begins with the spiritual practices.

#2) My hope is that your time here is the launch pad for your spiritual practice, not the end-game for it.  As you dive deeper into a practice or belief system, I am hopeful that any errors you picked up here will get corrected.

#3) The real power of the internet is the possibility for interactions.  I truly, deeply, and sincerely hope that if I have misrepresented something that you will help me out.   There is a fine line here, of course.  There are certain things which are simple disagreements and can’t be authoritatively decided in this lifetime.  I don’t mind you sharing these sorts of things if you would like.  But what I am more passionate about is the places where I am demonstrably, objectively wrong about what a certain group practices or believes.    Please hear this invitation: if I got something wrong, please feel free to use the comment section of the posts, the contact button up top, or to email me at otherjeffcampbell7@gmail.com

 

Big Picture Consideration #4: Beyond Words

One of the most important people in my life regularly undergoes a procedure that has the unfortunate side effect of really messing up certain parts of her brain chemistry.    One of the main areas impacted is the language part of the brain.

For a good week or two, she is very limited both in understanding and speaking.  Loving and supporting her has been a learning experience for me.  (To be clear: I have the easy part of the deal.)

I am a very word-oriented person.  It is one of my main ways of relating and of spending time with someone.  Recently, I was thinking about this learning process.  And realizing it mirrors the changes in my relationship with God.

A bunch of years ago, my main connection with God was through talking.  And sometimes listening.  So many of my practices now wordless.  I have developed this whole new list of ways to spend time with God.  It’s not different than the re-learning I have had to do with this special person: finding new ways to be together.

One of the best things I am learning is that words only get us so far.  In some ways, the spiritual activities were a little more chosen.  But the reality is that the new things I am learning to do, those not reliant on words, are some of my favorite things to do.

Consideration 3: What’s in a Name?

Names are important and powerful things.

Even in our everyday life, there is a weird thing that we bump into, when describing a person who is known by a different name or title to lots of different people.  For example, at a family gathering, a single person might be known simply by her first name to half the people present; she might be called ‘Auntie’ to some, and ‘mom’ to others.

When we tell a story about this person, we are faced with a number of equally unsatisfying choices.  We can choose one, and assume that everbody knows who we are talking about.  We can try to link them all together and create an awkward, hyphenated name-title that sounds only a bit familiar to everybody.  Or we can allude to her with vague words, pronouns mostly, that makes the whole thing seem vague, as if we don’t know who we specifically are referring to.

In contexts like The Faith-ing Project, there is a similiar problem.  There are many names for the object of our spiritual practices.  It might turn out that there are more fundamental differences between these various names than there are between the single person who is known as sister, aunt, or cousin.  Despite the idea that there might be more fundamental differences, there is some use in this metaphor, too.  Because the young children who call a person “Auntie” probably see a different side of the person than the adults who refer to her by her first name.  Similarly, all the people who refer to the divine by the name “God” are probably having a similiar experience.

Most of the time, I am using the term ‘God’ in these spiritual practices here.  This is the name most deeply to me.  I am not interested in convincing you that you should use that term.  If there is a name or title that connects with you, I hope that you will simply replace the word, each time you see it.  I believe that most of these exercises are relevant to most people, regardless of what word they chose to describe the highest power; I believe that there is a rich and wonderful diversity of beliefs out in the world, and I don’t think it is a viable end game to reduce all of these beautiful traditions into a single super-religion.  When it comes to spiritual exercises, though, I think there is a lot of valuable potential that most of us are disconnected from.   So my hope for you is that you will explore something a little outside your tradition, and consider whether it might inform and strengthen the tradition you are a part of.

 

Consideration #2: Personal, Impersonal, Transpersonal

Perhaps some of the broad strokes of my journey will sound a bit like yours.

The first faith comittment I made was awfully focused on the personal nature of God.  The creator of the universe has a human-ness, even a gender.

There were very good things about looking at it this way.

During the time I drifted away from Evangelical Christianity, it was easy to see the very bad things about looking at things this way.  Like many people, I call this stage my deconstruction.

This was the time I fell in love with contemplative practices.  This is the time I rediscovered meditation. Many of these practices helped me get in touch with God’s transcendence.  I suspect they were suppressed by modern Evangelical Christianity precisely for that reason: they did not fit well with this picture of God as fellow human.

This fueled my resentment.  It motivated me to develop a robust spiritual practice.  The most obvious intuitions this practice fed were intuitions about God’s otherness, God’s distance, God’s hugeness.

But it put, I hope, on a path forward truth.  I began to get reminders: God is both here and there, human an other, transcendent and immanent.

The point at which I began to trust these ideas again, that I orvercame my prejudice against these ideas, is the point at which I went from deconstruction to the early stages of reconstruction.  (I think. Maybe in time I will see this differently.)

My time embracing contemplative practices has prepared me for this sort of non-dualistic, both/and thinking.   A simple way to think about is perhaps this: in Evangelical Christianity I proclaimed my belief in a personal God.  During my deconstruction I interacted with I God I saw as impersonal. Now, I think I would say that God is transpersonal.

And so, this corner of the Faith-ing Project is devoted to practices that some of us might do well to refresh ourselves in.  This area includes prompts for word-based prayers and journaling, lenses to read scripture through, and other traditions to consider.  To explore these traditions, click here.