At the Movies
Have you ever been watching a film and been so totally absorbed in the film that you forget that you’re watching a film? It’s almost as if you’re in the film yourself. You have sympathy for the characters and you have an emotional connection to the story that’s unfolding. To me that’s one of the qualities of a good film - I can get lost in it. Well from the perspective of consciousness that’s what’s happened relative to our body and mind. Consciousness has become so interested in the body and mind that it has forgotten that it’s only watching the body and mind. We, consciousness, have become so absorbed in the body and mind and all the experiences and characters it interacts with, and feel such sympathy for the body and mind, that we, consciousness, forget that we’re actually only observing the body and mind, and aren’t in fact the body and mind.
When the picture at the cinema ends we realise again that we’re in the cinema watching the picture and that all we were watching was a screen on which the picture was projected. When you awaken to consciousness you again realise that the body and mind simply grabbed your attention for a period of time, and that for all the time you were assuming yourself to be the body and mind you were in fact just watching them, just experiencing them. But you simply became so interested and involved that you forgot you were watching them.
If you’re watching a movie and the scene is particularly disturbing, then you can always remind yourself it’s just a film, it’s not real, and gain comfort in this. Likewise, from the position of consciousness, when the body and mind experience particularly disturbing circumstances, it’s comforting to know that you’re not the body or mind, that you’re consciousness merely observing them.
The characters in a film go through all kinds of changes and experiences, you are always sitting there comfortably in your seat, observing, not actually affected by the action on the screen. Well, so too is consciousness, always there, comfortably observing all kinds of changes and experiences of the body-mind, yet totally unaffected by them. Consciousness remains changeless, always in a state of bliss, of love, of happiness.
From the moment of your birth, and possibly before, consciousness has become more and more interested and absorbed in the body and mind that you call yourself. This movie of your life has gone on for so long, and become so absorbing that you have forgotten that you’re merely observing it. Consciousness has become so distracted by the body-mind that it’s forgotten who and what it is. It’s become as if the characters in the movie are real and the audience is imaginary.
So release all concerns for what you’ve mistakenly presumed yourself to be, forget all of that in a loving embrace of what you actually are. In assuming yourself to be the body and mind you have lost touch with your true self and its qualities. Children, not having been at the movies as long as you, are generally more in touch with their true self. So we must remember what we actually are, remember that our most basic nature is love and happiness. We aren’t merely a mortal body within the world, although we experience this; we aren’t a mind within the body, although we experience this. We are always the happy observer of the body and mind; we are always the love that embraces all and is all. If we live as that which is love and happiness then the life of the body and mind will be transformed.