Unconscious in the Cosmic Ocean of Consciousness
Y’know, reading all this hubbub about historical accuracy in “The Odyssey” film, well, it is nonsense. The haters and naysayers come across as ridiculous purists unaware they’re as dirty as the glass they throw stones through. I do not care if Helen is black as night. In historical reality Black people traveled far and wide from Sub-Saharan Africa. They intermarried into other cultures and vice versa. How else did Humans ever get out of Africa, LOL? The Ancient hunter-gatherer tribes of the British Isles and coastal Iberia were black skinned people with blue eyes and curly hair anyway. This discovery upended a conventional, Eurocentric narrative of early European settlers being mostly White folks. The current fuss over Christopher Nolan’s epic film is the same type of tempests in old teapots. Deriding such as “woke” betrays the persistent ignorance of Humans whose minds seem as clogged up with debris as a storm drain after a hurricane.
Furthermore, the movie is a movie, a fictional adaptation of a book. As such many liberties were taken as movies usually do with books. This especially true if the book is dense literature in the form of an epic poem. And Homer’s books are themselves fiction, a mix of mythology written in Ancient Greek as a long poem. Why are purists of all kinds so upset? Cinema critics are raving about the movie as a movie. As a movie, it is a real as a movie, so the adventures of Odysseus occurred as real within the context of a movie as a work of fiction. People get so wigged out when their interpretation of reality clashes with another’s creative manifestation into reality of their vision.
The interesting thing is as researchers and psychologists have noted, the human brain experiences the events of a movie as real, and its events are stored in human memory in real time. They elicit the same emotional responses as if they themselves experienced the events of the film they’re watching. Cognition makes a distinction between virtual and real, but both are versions of reality. Memory, however, especially the emotional feelings stored across time, does not make such distinctions. Dr. Diana W. Pasulka dives deep into this issue in her 2019 book, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology. Is the reason so many moviegoers are upset is because “The Odyssey” as they visually experienced it is at odds with their memory of epic prose as read and analyzed back in their college and university classes? That we all have a grotesquely incorrect and actually flat-out wrong Modern ideas of ethics, race, culture, gender, and ethnicity from Prehistoric and Ancient Times? Continue reading
