A Tangled Web - Samsara, Entropy, the Borg and Zen Again

By Wayne Brown
A few things that have deeply impressed me in the last few weeks:

Samsara - the movie. If you still have a pulse, this will blow your mind. It's visually stunning but also deeply disturbing. It may challenge your most cherished assumptions about what it is to be human. Much of what I have to say in this piece will make a lot more sense if you take a break to watch the movie - it's on Netflix for example.

The Orenda - an instant classic about the horrors of early French conquest of what is now Canada. Easily the best Canadian book of 2014. Maybe the best book period. There is a lot of overlap between the themes in Samsara and those in Orenda.

The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-Being - Basically an on-line "how to" course in Zen philosophy and practice. There is a lot more to Zen that what's in this course. For me, the difference the course made was to encourage me to actually put Zen into practice. None of what I write here would have made sense otherwise.

Samsara covers a lot of ground -- in fact its subject is "everything". There are no words in the movie - only images -- but let me extract a few ideas behind the images:

  • Impermanence. On the one hand, we are impressed by the stunning achievements of man, but also shown that it will all turn to dust in the long run. This is a central tenant of Buddhist teaching.
  • Irrelevance of human values. While showing the deeply personal and intimate side of human life, we are also shown that we are like ants or industrial machinery. "Reality" doesn't care which. Both perspectives (and many others) are equally valid. 
  • Acceptance and compassion -- threads that bind both Samsara and The Orenda. Ideas that are central to Buddhism and Zen.
The Orenda portrays a clash of civilizations and especially world views. From a "modern" perspective, both world views seem alien. Unlike the "savages" and the Inquisition, we no longer torture our enemies (much). We (most of us) no longer believe that anyone who is not a Catholic is bound for eternal torture in Hell, nor do we expect to run off to the happy hunting ground when we die. The genius of Orenda is to portray the conflict in breathtakingly real terms -- without a single word of judgement -- from the "inside" of the character's heads.

How does entropy come into this? In another piece, I have discussed the idea that entropy is the ultimate evil. Basically everything turns to dust in the long run. It is against entropy that all life struggles -- a fight that we know must ultimately be lost. Samsara deals with this idea from several angles -- it spends a lot of time showing us the garbage heaps of the world, but also another kind of entropy -- simplification and regimentation of human life. One of the most disturbing scenes is an industrial chicken factory -- all the chickens are identical -- just many copies of the same chicken. The people cutting up the chickens (tens of thousands of them) are very much the same. If there are differences between the chicken-cutters, they are ironed out and irrelevant. Everyone wears the same clothes and does precisely the same simple job over and over like an industrial machine. This is precisely the horror that Huxley portrayed in "Brave New World". A modern reader of that book will be amused at how bad Huxley was at predicting the details of future technology from his 1931 vantage point. But what he did see was the reduction of human beings to mass-produced robots. The reality in 2015 is far, far more horrible than anything Huxley feared, yet we have gradually accepted it just a bit at a time until it seems "normal".

I have in mind another metaphor from Star Trek -- the Borg and their oft-repeated demand for surrender "You will be assimilated". It is plain from "Samsara" that a large part of humanity has been assimilated. Unlike in the movies, there is no great script writer in the sky to protect humanity from this being its ultimate fate.

All this suggests an answer to the ultimate question - What is the Meaning of Life. The answer is both terrible and wonderful.

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