HIS-Sterical
This post contains a lot of spoilers for the movie Don’t Look Up so do with that what you want…
I watched “Don’t Look Up” with my mom last night and thought it was a pretty good exaggeration of what is actually going on in the world right now. At least that’s how it looks from the perspective I have. One of the moments I appreciated most was the “crazy woman” trope. Initially Leonard DiCaprio is portrayed to be the anxious scientist and of course this is his weakness. As Hollywood has been doing in the “gIrL pOwEr” movement, I expected Jennifer Lawrence to be the badass bitch that saved the day. That isn’t what they did though. They, instead, got real.
It isn’t a behavior that is only inherent to women, but some sort of programming has led us to believe it is. This is why I really appreciate the “crazy” being introduced by the male character to show that he had within him that very strong reaction that is often associated with being a woman. In fact, the word hysteria was created to describe a condition in women. Big feelings mean you are out of control. However, feelings are actually an adaptable guidance mechanism, so when we mute them, its like smothering our internal GPS system. They covered that too with the invention-tycoon guy that seemed like a cross between Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Mr. Rogers, and Elon Musk. He lacked any heightened emotions and seemed to have all the answers. The moral being that if you go too far into the Ashram, then you are also not participating in the yoga of life.
We are terrified of feelings. We run from them. We do not express them fully. We have allowed ourselves to think they make us weak. Instead of contending with them and therefore allowing them to become more mild over time, we fight them off like the devil. We also get thrown off when other people express them (if you don’t, just know other people are thrown off by you). When someone is loud in a subway or elevator, we look at them funny. “Why is he acting like that?” “Why is that homeless man talking to himself?” When we fucking know we do it too. In the privacy of our own home, of course. When no one is looking, we do those very things we judge other people for doing in public.
More intellectuals need to jump off their high horse. That’s right, I said it. Step off the imaginary thrown of superior knowledge and open up to a realm of dangerous thought and unknowing. I don’t even dare to mention what some of those thoughts might be, but at least consider the occult. Not to get hooked on or swept up by. Just as a thought experiment. You see, the problem with most of these ancient pseudosciences is that you can be susceptible to the superstitions if you’ve got no other over-arching framework. But you, all you bright shining experts will have no problem resisting the magic. I do say this facetiously, because I found that the wisdom of the ancients only served to reignite my passion for exploration. The land of fairytales gave me back my imagination. And what do we need to build experiments? That’s right, creativity. Not more definitions. Not more videos on how to resolve a matrix. Not even more funding.
I didn’t want to digress so much into a feelings-based post, because I don’t expect many intellectuals to allow themselves to relate to that. I do know they have it in them, repressed and hidden away, only to be let loose in private. They fear, much like our friend Leo Di’o, that others will not take them so seriously if they aren’t serious all the time. humph. I mean, honestly it should come as no surprise that scientists are no longer the heroes they were. They are all party poopers from the eyes of the youths. All the rules and no fun. The common core killed science exploration by making it dull. Society killed science by making imagination lame.
The reason these concerted efforts to really get to the heart of a problem appear to be spearheaded by men is because our masculine energy has yet to figure out how to deal with our feminine side. This has driven our feminine side to manifest as its shadow. Needy, moody, and even aggressive. The more we ignore our collective feelings, the more pressure they build. Feminine power is not meant to be experienced in bursts like that. It is the container of soft power we can regularly visit to ease our spirit. But when we do not consult her for her wisdom, we grow angry inside from a lack of direction. This anger makes us want to numb ourselves because we find no value in feeling out of sorts, yet this will only separate us from source even more.
If we open up to the mystery of what we cannot control, we find a world of magic exists. The very world we knew as children; the realm of imagination. The beautiful place we create that makes our heart swell ten times its original size. Astrology, for example, allows us to fall in love with the stars again. It encourages the entire world to look up, knowing that what happens up there is a part of our story. Dancing grounds us into our bodies and opens us to the euphoria of blood rushing through the body. We need to fall in love with the beauty of this world again to appreciate her and to take better care of her, and most of all to understand to her.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
