The Harried Mystic

I took in this James Cameron film in the first week of its release and it was simply delightful. Avatar is a melange of mythic elements and powerful archetypes that speak to and from our depths. The 2 hours and 45 minutes went by almost too quickly. This is a testament to the film’s rich symbolism and conformance to the twelve stages of the hero’s journey as articulated by Dr. Joseph Campbell, and the extraordinary and captivating CGI iconography.

As a Jungian, Avatar was a cinematic tour du force leaving me with plenty to think about.

While the storyline itself is not especially remarkable, the images and the interdependence among them certainly are. Of the many things in the film worth reflecting on and talking about, three things were especially striking as I look back on the experience:

1. The Home Tree World: The central place of community and family life of the Nav ‘i people.
2. The Tree of Souls: The luminous tree that acted as a nexus of the planet Pandora’s neural network, and the physical signifier of the presence of the sacred and ancestral souls of the Nav’i.
3. The Contrast of Capitalistic Greed and Pastoral Intimacy: the Military-Industrial mining of Pandora that acts as the reason to displace an indigenous people by force, coupled with the Nav’i’s strong connection to the planet, it’s feminine spirit, and their deep respect for all living things and resolve to defend them.

The Home Tree world of the Nav’i was an enormous living structure with towering branches that served as passageways through the Nav’i homeland. It was reminiscent of the Tree of Life and was filled with delightful creatures (like the spiral plant-like worms with beautiful plumes that would retract as soon as touched). There were also the Seeds of Eywa, the spirits of the Nav’i divinity: phosphorescent parasol-like creatures that are intimately connected to Eywa.

The Tree of Life appears in traditions throughout the globe. It connotes the interdependence of all life, and the common heritage (brotherhood and sisterhood) of all sentient beings. It symbolizes the mystical history of the Family of Humankind and the Family of All Creation. As I watched the film, I was impressed with the sense of filial feeling and accountability that the Nav’i express toward all life, including the life they take for food or in self-defense.

There was a clear allusion to Wisdom and Sophia in the characterization of Eywa, the divine presence. The Home Tree is a symbol of life before the “Fall,” an Eden of beauty and youthful exuberance, filled with an authentic sense of awe before the Sacred: a pristine and simpler world threatened by the harsh and violent intrusion of weapons of war and technologies of death.

The Tree of Souls was the Heart of the Nav’i and evokes symbolic recollections of the Tree of Knowledge (the knowledge of Good and evil), or in Hebrew, עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע, Etz haDaat tov V’ra. The Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was located at its center in the Creation mythology of the Abrahamic religious traditions. In like fashion, the Tree of Souls lies deep within Pandora protected by mountains and in a quiet valley away from the Home Tree world. It is central in Nav’i spiritual life, and is depicted as a tree of branches streaming with radiant light that encapsulate within luminous pulses all the souls of the departed Nav’i: their collective conscience and wisdom, consciousness, and most especially, collective unconscious.

By literally physically joining physical body appendages to the branches of these trees, the Nav’i are made one with Eywa. The communication is deeply personal, intuitive, and most certainly two-way. A variety of scenes serve as allusions to this intimate contemplative state as the height of spiritual awakening among the people.

In like fashion, the Tree of Light, our sense of what is good and what is evil, is best informed by directly experiencing the Beloved. It was most interesting to see how sensuous the process of connecting with Eywa is played out on-screen; an actual physical, not disembodied union. The process was clearly a sacrament, a profound form of eucharist, all bathed in a Marian blue-light that adds to my sense of the archetypal feminine energy running throughout the movie.

Pastoral Intimacy is assaulted by the greed of capitalism that we are all able to relate to after the economic crash of the last year: a crash caused by unbridled and overly risky market speculation in poorly understood derivatives, and the subprime mortgage lending fiasco. Left to its own devices, capitalism will consume everything in its path in service to the profit motive. A governance and regulatory system must balance that shadow-facet of the so-called free market with prudent wisdom.

As a species, we too easily sacrifice the beautiful for the expedient, the truly meaningful for the externally celebrated and well-marketed icons of ads and fashion. Across history, we see the march of folly as people do things simply because they can, and not because those things are right to do.

It is precisely because of endemic ignorance, acting as a veil over true seeing and full awakening, that we need our guides. We need to cultivate our appetite for prophets as a counterbalance for the addiction to profits. Business always strives for wider and wider profit margins. What’s so terrible with good-enough profits, good-enough returns for re-investment, capital spending, compensation, and benefits? I recall the lovely book Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Matter by E.F. Schumacher that was one of the few refreshing moments of lucid insight on the matter about which I am aware.

The “green” theme in the movie largely revolves around the importance of sustainable growth with attention to consequences, adroit and sensitive husbanding of resources, and the capacity to forgo today for a greater long-term good. But, once again, the birds of appetite are insatiable. The movie is rich with implicit inquiry about the condition of our spiritual estate as consumers and keepers of the world.  On Pandora, it’s the mining of “unobtainium” that drives the voracious military-industrial juggernaut.

The shadow side of a lack of impulse control is to act as a gathering virus consuming wholesome resources without replacement or regard. Stewardship of the Earth is a crucial aspect of 21st century leadership. What’s needed is a Theology of the World informing our consumption and our business practices. It is fortunate that Matthew Fox and his Creation Spirituality found a home in the Anglican church after he was sanctioned for his thinking by Rome.

I also recognize in the storyline a reflection on the real-world losses of cultural spirituality among peoples, such as the Pygmy of the Ituri forest. Collin Turnbull, author of The Forest People, and a renowned British anthropologist (with whom I had the privilege to study for a semester), often complained of the loss of a beautiful and delicate intimate relationship between people and their environment as Western prying and meddling insinuate themselves into what was for so long pristine. In itself, progress is neither beneficent nor wise ,though it may be technically smart.

Spiritual leadership demands that, as we advance, we do so mindful of the interdependence of all parts of our delicate physico-bio-psycho-spiritual ecology. We live in a time when the voices of the Eywa must sing boldly as a choir to be heard over the din of rapaciousness and ignorance.

The many archetypes of the movie are the same as those that course through the veins of the major religious traditions. Naming just a few more:

• Earth Mother, Goddess – Eywa

• 1st Man & 1st Woman of the next age – Jake, 1st Man &, in fact, an avatar, or man transformed through a second birth, & 1st Woman, Neytiri

• Father of Heaven – Torok, Chief among the dragons and without peer

• Resurrection – Jake’s choice to die to his human body and flow through Eywa into his avatar body

Intended or not, films are replete with the archetypal motifs and images that flow through us. By looking into them, they act as a looking-glass for the soul. We see aspects of ourselves in the best of them and the signposts of the journey we travel together as brothers and sisters. It is in fact thrilling to catch a glimpse of these powerful foundational forces as they erupt from the system unconscious.

This is high art and the great opus by which we tell the story of the subplot that runs continuously underneath the surface details of our daily lives. If you’ve not seen the film, I do recommend it, and hope you also find it uplifting and evocative of your own imagery as you look back on it and as you dream.

© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.