A brain is not inert between uses like a computer. It is a process of waves, circuits, blood and plasma circulation and constantly varying inclusions in those circulations. If they stop, the result is death. But the focus of action at a given time depends on the stage in the day/night cycle.
I’ve been thinking about “arousal” as part of my avoidance of too familiar terms. We don’t usually think of arousal as part of sleep except maybe “wet dreams.” This definition is from https://www.verywellhealth.com/arousal-during-sleep-3014849
“Arousal is an abrupt change in the pattern of brain wave activity, as measured by an EEG. Arousal typically represents a shift from deep sleep, which is commonly known as REM sleep, to light sleep, known as NREM sleep, or from sleep to wakefulness.”
So arousal as seen from the outside reflects deep tissue functions among the cells in one’s head, which may also include messages from the rest of the body. Most people just let that take care of itself.
But we are in a time when a state of arousal is so commercially promoted, so related to owning things, that what is normally internally integrated into a physical state in the course of life has become a performance to present to others. Like a movie of your life instead of your life. After a while the person may stop feeling anything at all.
Approaching this problem is — ironically — a movie, which follows a young man who says he feels nothing, neither happiness, sadness nor connection with others. But this film doesn’t leave the pharmaceutic paradigm — simply moves it to the trendy “primitive” concoction called “ayahuasca,” literally cooked up from jungle plants.
The writer/director/editor of “The Last Shaman” has done such a beautifully seamless job that like the omniscient author of a skillful novel, he disappears. His name is Raz Dagen and I had never heard of him until this film, but his connections — which include big name movie people — add up to a US sophisticated community that had the resources to take a young man from a mental hospital where he hadn’t found help to the depths of the Amazon jungle in order to record what happened to him there over 11 months.
All the while Dagen and his cameraman are so invisible that we believe the story just happened and never question how. We never know how the boy was chosen except that he comes from “entitled” parents who are doctors or why the film makers thought anything would come of the boy’s experiment anyway. He might have just died.
The state of not-caring is common in we overwhelmed busy people, so we do want to know what comes of this. What will reawaken him? Can he become “aroused”? Lurking in the background is what to do about a whole nation that is so unaroused that they will allow democracy to be stolen by flashy schemers. How does one wake up voters or calm them down when they are over-aroused? How do you get them to the polls without inciting them to riot and burn police cars?
The film exposes a whole economy based on what is supposed to be ayahuasca with tourists anxious to swig what is sure to make them throw up. There are plenty of cheaper emetics at the corner drugstore, so that can’t be it. The boy is aroused enough already to object to this commercializing of what he clearly expects to be spiritual, though no one uses the word. His name is James Freeman.
James speaking about ayahuasca.
The movie is online at YouTube and also on Netflix.
What I would pick out as crucial was experiences. He names reintegration with others. Community. Listening. Relationships. The step he hasn’t reach yet is service to others. What will he do to help the people he knew in Peru? The movie makes this a sharp question, showing the “last shaman” himself condemned to hard labor in a city.
This review rejects this film in favor of “Icaros: A Vision”. The reviewer “knows better” and considers the films to be competition. He’s from the kind of mind that sees meaning and value in horror films, some “better” than others. Hard to find the spiritual aspect of them.
The point is that the general US culture is all peaks and valleys, and the valleys are paralyzing depression while the manic peaks are provided by someone with an economic motive and in an unmodulated goal. Trump et al with their consciousness of Hollywood, have given us the equivalent of an hallucinogenic movie for the last three years and are now at the RNC trying to push a horror film starring Biden as a Slasher. As usual, their sense of casting is deranged.
After his eleven months in Peru, James came home, went back into the hospital for a while, and finally found anti-depressants that worked. Ayahuasca was not a miracle drug. There’s still not much talk about the “spirituality” he thought was important. But he’s no longer suicidal and is optimistic about the future. He’s so handsome and eloquent, good things seem probable.
I’m not talking about hallucinations and horror here, though they seem to have become part of our daily lives. What I’m really after is what gets some of us to wake up, to be “aroused”, and participating in politics instead of drawing away with cries of how dirty it is, how beneath nice people it is. Or getting drawn into an impassioned commitment to some empty cult.
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