Recently I have been on US radio a couple of times and also interviewed for a magazine in Texas.Links to these can be found below:
Just Energy Radio
Holistic Networker Magazine Interview
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Interview with the director
Recently I have been on US radio a couple of times and also interviewed for a magazine in Texas.Links to these can be found below:
Just Energy Radio
Holistic Networker Magazine Interview
Avatar 2012
An Alchemical Afterword: The 2012 Avatarby Echan Deravy
I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.
W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica
A woman and a man. A scientist/healer and a layman/heretic spend two days together. Neither had met the other before yet they began with a spontaneous, warm embrace. Surrounded by interpreters/publishers they shared visions, evoked memories, reconfirmed central concepts related to our near future, drank coffee and laughed quite a bit. Remember the English definition of a heretic is: a person who holds unorthodox opinions in any field
Having interviewed dozens of scientists as well as several outrageous heretics over the last two decades, nearly all of them for Japanese publications, I have a rather unique sense of where a dialogue will go. Since I am a writer and particularly because my life has been largely spent here in Japan, I have an idea of how a book should flow. I therefore set out to guide this dialogue in such a way that the reader could get the most out of the distinctly bright mind of Dr. Jude Currivan. What you have read was then, a very open ended interview in effect. I would provide Jude with some starting ideas and with no hesitation she would immediately develop the themes. The publisher never once told us what to do. We never had a list of silly questions. Like the silliest question of all time: “What will happen in 2012?” As if mere mortals could tell you how any system undergoing accelerated chaos will end up! What we shared was our vision of a possible future.
I say that with deep respect for how humanity will realistically navigate the currents that once seemed so stable but, like our Earth's own ocean conveyor belts, now might change direction at any time. We are certainly no prophets. If anything we are perhaps more acutely aware than the public of how little we know. That is because we have studied a lot-not simply with a view to getting credits and furthering careers but because we have both felt the powerful need to cross reference our intuitive hunches with real science. That is why the word alchemy is so appropriate to this discussion. I may just have re-defined alchemy: the art of taking heavenly hints and grounding them in physical reality. Do not forget that science indisputably evolved out of alchemy as surely as a new alchemy will evolve out of our current science. The alchemical symbol of ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail symbolizes that perfectly.
Stanley Kubrick was also an alchemist though he is best known as the film director of '2001 A Space Odyssey.' That was truly the first film about 2012 and it was released in 1968. Key scenes in the film, like when the monkeys first learn how to use bones as weapons, are accompanied by the mysterious monolith and one other phenomenon. An eclipse. As above, so below. Great signs in the heavens are significant to us here on Earth. I wonder if the reader is aware of just how many solar and lunar eclipses have occurred in the last year and how many more await that breathtaking date of Dec 21, 2012? Or is all this eclipse and Mayan folklore just, you know, coincidence-like any well trained parrot will tell you who has sat through hundreds of hours of reductionist training in any modern, materialistic science program?
As I approach the age of sixty in 2012 I have little patience with any science that divorces and isolates its findings from all other sciences. Archaeologist do not talk to chaos theorists in our current educational system-not unless they are at the pub and have had a few. But in the real world when you stub your toe (one scientific field) on a sharp rock your entire being knows all about it. Everything is connected. Then why do so very many scientists simply not realize this as the fundamental beginning and ending statement about the universe and everything else??
Jude Currivan does realize this. And she is willing to stand up for that awareness and join ranks with other forward thinking scholars and lay people alike. Bravo! There is still hope in the suffocating halls of academia where our cleverness betrays a gigantic pomposity: we know in those enclosed spaces, that 2012 is surely just a load of millenial rubbish. Ah, the comforting glow of scientific certainty. The new religion is here!
Remember I am a heretic. Though I deeply respect true scientific endeavour I am vigorously opposed to science-as-new-religion and am well prepared to be burned at the stake for it. Kubrick was 45 years before his time with that alchemical masterpiece. On a Japanese TV program recently I was part of a panel looking at Nasa photos of Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. Retired US astronaut Buzz Aldrin was interviewed for this show and asked to comment on the presence on that moon, the clear and obvious presence of...a monolith. Its unmistakably rectangular shadow thrown across the utterly barren surface of an alien world was indisputable.
What put it there you can now perhaps better guess, having read our dialogue! We did not forget to mention Kubrick on the program either, of course. Kubrick's moon set was almost definitely hired by Nasa to shoot backup scenes in case Apollo crashed into the moon.(his wife revealed this in an interview) Luckily it did not. Either way America had to be number one even as its current president shamefully announced in his 2010 State of the Union. What a state we are all in, when a war mongering nation declares it has to be number one. And this is democracy? Thank God I am still a heretic at the core!
Yet other films have not been so sophisticated in their scenarios of future chaos. The Hollywood movie disaster, sorry, the Hollywood disaster movie '2012' is one such example. With ne'er a hair out of place its heroes miss exploding mountains, falling freeways, tsunami obliteration and volcanic rage as continents buckle and bend. The heroine looks like she has just popped out to the local supermarket to fetch some goodies as she battles through the end of the world on her way to rescue. No blood. No guts. No pain and no sense of hopelessness whatsoever since her man is going to get her and the kid through it. With a few lucky others from the elite oligarchy for our DNA gene-pool future , they get enveloped in steel arks (just as our current civilization is already metaphorically stuck inside) and ride the tsunami to safety.
Remember I am a heretic. Though I deeply respect true scientific endeavour I am vigorously opposed to science-as-new-religion and am well prepared to be burned at the stake for it. Kubrick was 45 years before his time with that alchemical masterpiece. On a Japanese TV program recently I was part of a panel looking at Nasa photos of Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. Retired US astronaut Buzz Aldrin was interviewed for this show and asked to comment on the presence on that moon, the clear and obvious presence of...a monolith. Its unmistakably rectangular shadow thrown across the utterly barren surface of an alien world was indisputable.
What put it there you can now perhaps better guess, having read our dialogue! We did not forget to mention Kubrick on the program either, of course. Kubrick's moon set was almost definitely hired by Nasa to shoot backup scenes in case Apollo crashed into the moon.(his wife revealed this in an interview) Luckily it did not. Either way America had to be number one even as its current president shamefully announced in his 2010 State of the Union. What a state we are all in, when a war mongering nation declares it has to be number one. And this is democracy? Thank God I am still a heretic at the core!
Yet other films have not been so sophisticated in their scenarios of future chaos. The Hollywood movie disaster, sorry, the Hollywood disaster movie '2012' is one such example. With ne'er a hair out of place its heroes miss exploding mountains, falling freeways, tsunami obliteration and volcanic rage as continents buckle and bend. The heroine looks like she has just popped out to the local supermarket to fetch some goodies as she battles through the end of the world on her way to rescue. No blood. No guts. No pain and no sense of hopelessness whatsoever since her man is going to get her and the kid through it. With a few lucky others from the elite oligarchy for our DNA gene-pool future , they get enveloped in steel arks (just as our current civilization is already metaphorically stuck inside) and ride the tsunami to safety.
Whoopee, the human race survives as maudlin housewives and anal retentive globalists who will just start the same sorry story all over again. It goes: we want to carry on just as always. We will lie and cheat, control and plunder, we will rape and pillage our environment in order to be happy. We will conveniently forget that millions of others will pay the price for it, including finally ourselves. But through an astonishing genetic fault called fatal anal denial we shall never evolve highly enough to actually see the error of our ways, even as we justify them with quotes from God, Jesus and the prophets of old. Hey, we're humans!
James Cameron would have enjoyed a dialogue with Stanley Kubrick. Cameron is another alchemist who takes a vision of another world, the planet Pandora, and he gives us a truer reflection of ourselves as pathetic, war addicted imperialists who will do anything for new resources, for money. Even if we have to be in hibernation for five years to cross vast distances in space, (as did the 2001 astronauts long before the concept had arisen of putting people in suspended animation) even if we have to infiltrate a proud and beautiful people to usurp them from the inside, (as all Caucasian history in particular will show happened to indigenous populations) we will simply not give up that most insidious habit that threatens our very survival. In a word: ME
I have been in jungles like the ones on Pandora. I have shared glasses of priceless plant elixirs with indigenous chiefs like those proud bird-riding warriors, the Na'vi of Pandora. I have seen that world just like the iridescent forest glows at night on the Na'vi's home planet. I have known the sense of being connected to every last molecule of every last living being. What I do to them I do to myself. As above so below. We return full circle to the great cosmic art and science of alchemy. But the message of Avatar goes further. We actually straddle both worlds. Our consciousness can take us into any future. We can return to our old ways in shame and defeat, a ruined species that has gorged itself to extinction. Or we can transfer our hearts and minds to a higher being, the next level of ourselves, stronger, wiser, in humble harmony with every being. We, and we only, are what links the above and the below. You will not be saved by steel arks but rather by hearts of gold. The alchemical transmutation is eminently possible. I hope this dialogue helps you to sharpen that possible link to our own species' evolution.
Echan Deravy
Sanda Jan. 30 2010
James Cameron would have enjoyed a dialogue with Stanley Kubrick. Cameron is another alchemist who takes a vision of another world, the planet Pandora, and he gives us a truer reflection of ourselves as pathetic, war addicted imperialists who will do anything for new resources, for money. Even if we have to be in hibernation for five years to cross vast distances in space, (as did the 2001 astronauts long before the concept had arisen of putting people in suspended animation) even if we have to infiltrate a proud and beautiful people to usurp them from the inside, (as all Caucasian history in particular will show happened to indigenous populations) we will simply not give up that most insidious habit that threatens our very survival. In a word: ME
I have been in jungles like the ones on Pandora. I have shared glasses of priceless plant elixirs with indigenous chiefs like those proud bird-riding warriors, the Na'vi of Pandora. I have seen that world just like the iridescent forest glows at night on the Na'vi's home planet. I have known the sense of being connected to every last molecule of every last living being. What I do to them I do to myself. As above so below. We return full circle to the great cosmic art and science of alchemy. But the message of Avatar goes further. We actually straddle both worlds. Our consciousness can take us into any future. We can return to our old ways in shame and defeat, a ruined species that has gorged itself to extinction. Or we can transfer our hearts and minds to a higher being, the next level of ourselves, stronger, wiser, in humble harmony with every being. We, and we only, are what links the above and the below. You will not be saved by steel arks but rather by hearts of gold. The alchemical transmutation is eminently possible. I hope this dialogue helps you to sharpen that possible link to our own species' evolution.
Echan Deravy
Sanda Jan. 30 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
