Cosmic Game Magic of Maya 3

Flickering Images—The Play of Light

Lila, as we have seen, has its roots in flickering movement, and so it seems to be no accident that lila shares this in common with modern moviemaking. To the Vedic seers, the world was:

a place of wonder, of amazement, of puzzlement; it was a shimmering, almost translucent world, which at once, veiled and revealed hidden subtle forces that, though their effects could be known initially through the senses, finally transcended the empirical realms . . . . this world was . . . a universe of sparkling light and energy, glimmering with creative power and splendor, and shining with transformative potential brilliance. (Mahony, 1998, p. 17)

Light was especially important to the Vedic seers and indeed the ultimate goal was enlightenment. As we have seen, the Indo-European root for divine, dyeu, means to shine, and the root for lila, lelay means to flicker, and so both light and its play were divine.

Since it was through the illuminative power of light that objects were known to exist, all things therefore were seen to consist of light: the light of the sun revealed the objects on Earth as much as it revealed the sun itself; physical objects were, to these seers crystallized light. In a sense, therefore, sublime light was the universal essence of every and all particular things . . . . As the universal essence and creator of everything, light was seen to be equivalent to being itself, and thereby to truth. To perceive light was thus to gain knowledge of reality itself: this was revealed by the play of light. The universe as a whole glowed with the inner creative power of light, which suffused and gave being to all things. Since creative light played on the many surfaces and forms it created, the world as a whole was a world of play; it was a cosmic game, a universal riddle, the meaning of which few could understand. (Mahony, 1998, p. 18)

We create our movie-magic through flickering light as well. What we experience as a movie is a series of moving pictures on a strip of celluloid through which a powerful light source is projected. The moving pictures are, in actuality, many still pictures that go by rather quickly (24 frames per second). What we experience as continuous movement when seen up on the screen, are in fact discrete and discontinuous images. The strip of film determines the forms and colors we see, while the soundtrack is encoded on a magnetic tape, which we hear through speakers placed throughout the theatre. Grof (1998a) notes that this is reminiscent of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, and also is similar to insights from the East:

According to Tibetan Buddhism, reality is radically discontinuous. The world is constantly flashing in and out of existence, being dissolved and recreated from one moment to another. Similarly, we ourselves do not have continuous existence, from birth to death, but die and are reborn all the time. (pp. 75-76)

What we see on the screen while watching a movie is a story in which different actors have different experiences, which have is no independent reality. The film is made up of bits and pieces of different things, often what we see on film does not even exist at all in the phenomenal world. For example in the case of actors acting in front of blue or green screens, the backgrounds and other special effects are computer-generated and added in later. A recent film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Conran, 2004) was filmed entirely using this blue screen technique, everything was computer generated except for the actors!

If we go to a horror movie, we expect to be scared, while with an action-adventure film we expect to be on the edge of our seats and at a comedy we expect to laugh. The whole intent of the movie is to provide a certain experience to the audience and the audience willingly pays to have this particular experience. This is the whole idea behind genres and also the typecasting of actors. What we are really watching, Grof (1998a) reminds us, are “actually various aspects of one and the same undivided field of light,” even though they look like different people. He says that “in a certain sense, the protagonists and the drama do not exist at all, or they exist and do not exist at the same time.” Thus we can “interpret our perceptions as a complex real life drama or realize that we are witnessing a dance of electromagnetic and acoustic waves of various frequencies that are carefully orchestrated and synchronized for a specific effect” (pp. 126-127). We usually decide to do the former, we treat the movie experience as if it were real, even though we know on another level it is not. Now that we have got a feel for the smoke and mirrors of maya, we will go behind the scenes of creation itself to see . . . .

End of section, continue to How Do You Do It