Movie

From Bluetruth

What is one of your favorite movies?

Remember what you liked about this great movie, its action, romance, or characters.

Now, suppose you are watching this movie on video. You have a special fast-forwarding control device. You can speed the movie up just a little so it’s difficult to follow what’s happening, or make it go really fast, so it’s just a blur.

Starting from normal speed, how fast can you speed it up and still find the movie interesting? Eventually, the image is moving so fast that you lose interest. At what point does the story no longer hold your attention due to its speed?

You can also imagine slowing down the movie. A tiny bit slower is fine. The voices are a little lower and people are moving like molasses, but you can still follow the plot.

However, if you go slower and slower—three minutes are required for an actor to take one step—the movie becomes intolerable to watch. It’s too boring; not enough is happening.

You are only interested in stories that move at a certain speed. You can actually determine your personal range for this speed-of-interest by doing the experiment just described with your favorite movie. You may find that your friends can enjoy the movie after you lose interest because the movie is going too fast or slowly for you but is still okay for them. Your speed-of-interest is personal.

Obviously, much is happening in the world around you that is too fast or slow to interest you. Grass grows too slowly to interest you. High-frequency sound waves move too fast, but still catch your dog’s attention.

What you actually think of as your world—the drama you pay attention to, your real-life story, your work and love life—is composed of happenings moving at a certain speed.

If you could see your whole life played in fast speed so its entire duration lasted one minute, the blur of images and feelings wouldn’t interest you. Your life would be moving too fast to notice the everyday dramas. Your attention wouldn’t get wrapped up in the one-minute flash. Likewise, if your life were slowed down so that years were required to walk across a room, you’d go crazy with boredom.

Nevertheless, parts of your life are happening really fast—such as the constant motion of your eyeballs that scientists call physiological nystagmus, a high-frequency tremor of the eye that serves to continuously shift the image on the retina.

And, your hair grows far too slowly to occupy your attention, although you notice when it’s finally too long.

Yet, the angry argument with your spouse about who forgot to pay the utility bill does occupy your concern. The quarrel happens at a precise speed, which catches your attention more than your hair as it lengthens or your eyes as they oscillate.

Everything happening too fast or slowly to catch your attention goes unnoticed; the human domain of drama is paced within a very narrow range, indeed, yet we take it very seriously.

Instant enlightenment is to feel the rigid and arbitrary timescale of your life’s drama.

You are concerned about the tiny slice of your life-in-motion between too fast and too slow. From a geological timescale, your life pops faster than a corn kernel in hot oil, done in an instant. Yet, from your human perspective, daily events seem massively significant.

You can actually train yourself to experience events moving faster and slower, expanding the range of the story you can follow and understand. This has a profound effect on your capacity to offer love to others, rather than getting caught up in a popcorn moment.

But your capacity to feel a wider scope of happenings must be real, not just an intellectual exercise.

Sit still, and learn to feel the formation of a single thought as if watching a balloon being slowly inflated, before it pops to gone. Feel the thought’s fantastic dynamic of interconnections, including your parental interactions that warped your sense of self in childhood, the predetermined categories allowed by your native language, and the images or sensations that have become haphazardly associated with your internal verbalizations throughout your lifetime.

Closely follow the building-up drama of one thought with the same interest you give a typical conversation.

Your anxious sense of self-concern will begin to loosen up when the story of each of your billions of daily thoughts is as interesting—or boring—as the drama of each conversation.

Your tension loosens along with your speed-range, and soon humor softens the tightness of dread, hope, and fear as the story of your life plays out. You can watch the fluctuating price of traded commodities, or the intricacies of your spouse’s emotional balloon before it pops, or, with proper scientific equipment, you can become absorbed for days in the polarized attraction and repulsion between subatomic particles, rotating so fast they disappear like an airplane’s propeller. You can choose to pay attention to quite a range of happenings, all equally real.

This wide-ranging capacity to feel doesn’t detract from the seriousness of war, disease, or the immediate needs of your friends and family that surround you. The human speed of moving, talking, and responding to attractive and repulsive people is very real.

So is the step-by-step formation of a single aggressive thought, as it spontaneously takes form within a vast interconnection of influences over a few microseconds in your mind. And equally significant is mankind’s duration on planet earth—so far, an infinitesimal fraction of a second, not even a blink—in the earth’s time span.

When you seriously contemplate the whole scale of time, the humor of being so tightly engaged in the itsy-bitsy movie of the narrow human speed overwhelms you. Your birth, life, and death remain vividly felt; your heart is still torn by your lover’s betrayal.

Your spirits are lifted by the scent of a rose or a baby’s sudden smile. All is embraced, including what is usually too fast and too slow for the common human speed of life. And your humor opens as vast as existence.

When you can do this exercise—really feel the speed-range of your attention and care, not just intellectually think about it—then your love is freed from time.

Freely fast: You can intuitively feel the exquisitely crystallizing, sudden, blurring-to-invisibility speed of prior light, taking form as your lover’s shapely appearance, noticed only after the fact, like this entire moment, which actually occurred nanoseconds ago, before being processed by your eye and brain into a perceivable image you call “now.”

Freely slow: You can relax as the waiting-forever of continental drift, as oceans form and islands erupt from volcanic upheavals.

You still may prefer watching life’s movies at normal human speed: your child playing with a kitten, your husband remembering your birthday. But on either side of each moment’s speed of noticing, massive dramas are unfolding, involving countless beings, large and small, within which your life’s drama is but an evanescent pop.

Anytime you notice that life is getting you down, you can imagine fast-forwarding your life’s movie until it becomes a blur. Then, find out where your attention goes, when the images of your lifespan no longer hold you.

When you are ready to be free of time, you fall through the crack in the universe where every body dies.