"Every morning three million ‘free wills’ flowed toward the center of the New York megalopolis; every evening, they flowed out again – all by ‘free will,’ and on a smooth and predictable curve."
– Robert Heinlein, The Year of the Jackpot
"In India they called it parabdha karma. Even if, a very big if, a man reached a stage of enlightenment as to the nature of reality, the momentum of his previous illusion-delusion mix would carry him on its resultant behavior patterns until its energies were exhausted, even if, an even bigger if, he stopped renewing its fuel."
– Johnny Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet
Only a very tiny section of the human brain does choosing consciously. Some slightly greater fraction’s dedicated to creating stories, justifying actions that the body took reflexively, as if they were intentional, to sew a self together. Vastly more of mind and body than both parts combined just goes about its business automatically, our pumping blood as natural as tidal currents, no one there to “push the river.”
That’s what neuroscience tells us. But in fact, the part that knows itself as conscious and the part that tells the stories both exist spontaneously, too. As Alan Watts notoriously noted, we observe the universe’s “selfing” – ”I” precipitates from everything quite effortlessly (effort being something that the “I” does). We, then, are not living, so much as we’re being lived – the choices simply happen, and we learn from our conditioning to latch onto the chooser we observe, not-exactly-choosing self at the expense of being everything.
Or we unlearn the boundary’s concreteness and allow the flow to do its thing(s). The self still happens; plots are hatched, and then unfold; and everyone around is obviously automatic, (likely) unaware of their identity as fate-in-motion – just as the internal “I,” unwoven, groundless, nonetheless continues making choices, telling stories, blithe to the reality that it’s an algorithm: light assuming form to organize and animate itself, mysteriously, spinning spheres and movie reels, illuminating everything.
Juan Pablo Zaramella’s “Luminaris” offers us a glimpse of this: the light that synchronizes motion, everyone and everything a single gesture; the characters not noticing, supposing that they choose to move according to their will, and suffering accordingly; the story living through their actions drawing them together in a great conspiracy of love that challenges the limitations of their occupational identities and the limits of their cycles. It works on many levels, from merely quaint to mythically profound to something even deeper – pointing past and leading us to ask, who chose to watch this film? Who’s waking up through this?
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