SURROGATES is a new film starring Bruce Willis.
This film is a great ride, and one that reveals the 'covert ride' that too many people are already on, often unconsciously, while striving to become something other than who they are, in this world. The film is a sweet trick of the mind adventure film. Ah "if wishes were horses, then beggars could ride" as the saying goes. We all wish for that eternal youth and beauty, and the magic of shape-shifting when we get into a sticky spot in life.
Ah to dematerialize at will and keep
As a writer and teacher, I will 'sprinkle the spiritual' throughout this commentary and review. I hope you enjoy it, and that it gives you a bit of 'pause' for consideration in your own life.
Willis does a brilliant job of playing himself as a man lost in sorrow and loss, and his alter-ego red-haired surrogate, all the while struggling with the reality of life and the failure to escape being human, his own 'real' life. He is living in a house-divided through grief, which is often the case with parents whose children do not outlive them.
Alter-ego surrogate to the rescue. Have you ever had that snap-of-the-fingers, wiggle-the-nose desire yourself? Admit it:)
If we could but think it and reverse events in our world, like Superman could do. This film will get you thinking about nooks and crannies of your own life...and the messy spots swept under the proverbial rug.
Even with this advanced pseudo-human machinery fixing things--consequence-free, tricking our life, our desires, and our senses, giving us yet one more place to hide from painful reality--in a mechanized 'all-that-I-wish-I-could-be surrogate creation ...we can never fully escape being human. we can only escape in fantasy for a little while.
This is pure entertainment to fan the flame of that escapism habit, but more so, that overwhelming desire TO escape our life. Of course work-a-holic's will deny they are escaping anything. Just ask one.
What are we escaping?
Connection to the consequences of our humanness. The consequence of being ordinary, of feeling like a failure, feeling hurt, unworthy, lost, wounded, insecure and afraid of what is unknown, unplanned, or out of our control. The consequence of being a feeling, decision-making, tender, visible, present, connected, and vulnerable human Being, impacted by what we think, feel, react to, and do in this life.
The phrase, 'we are spiritual beings, living a human live' doesn't soothe a beaten psyche, or embattled heart, it only make one feel worse for being so very imperfect. It is too far a reach to even contemplate that as reality, when life has beaten you up, and your inner resources are thin. This is why people live escapist lives, are on Prozac, and depression drugs, ill, and acting out unmet emotional debris like crazy people these days. The world is on tilt from emotions running wild and people will do whatever they can to stop the madness within.
In addition, we have to be on even better behavior than before, while feeling more controlled by life-circumstances and others who seem to hold our destiny or security in their hands. We tip-toe through the mine-field of suppression in order to survive. Don't rock boats, or someone will sink yours. People are more than just 'one-paycheck' away from the street of blues--they are playing a mind shell-game every day while co-opting others into their drama.
What follows a life of drama and self-deception? Crashing.
In many cases of people I work with on a weekly basis, until they get a grip from within, an apathetic life. Also, it isn't pretty, acceptable, or politically correct to be angry, or revengeful, fearful, experiencing seemingly never-ending grief, or feel apathetic about life, so we hide 'that' part of our actual personality and psychology. We are programmed to 'treat' it with drugs and numb ourselves further.
This film is a great reflection of the direction our society has taken well down the path of manifesting robotic lifestyles. After all, we are grown up now and simply stuff it--especially if watching THE SECRET for the 100th time, or reading the Law Of Attraction stepping stones find you sinking even lower in your life. Now you are also a failure at implementing the Divine Laws.
How bad can it get, people ask me? Do I need to crash and burn, in order to resurrect? Well, sometimes it is like that, and the life circumstances and events truly are beyond our control. How do we know how our destiny, lessons, learning, and redemption will come? In the rear-view mirror, we finally 'get it'.
How can one be a Spiritual being living a human life, if the spiritual laws can't even be lived to manifest this elusive thing called 'happiness'?
Happiness sounds like utopia although every step, action, word, and deed, people are looking for just that...to be happy. This film highlights the magical thinking that is put up in front of us as if shopping for the next sweater or pair of pants. Let's try on a surrogate, and 'get happier'. We do it all day long. Change the channel, call someone, watch a comedy to change our mood, have some chocolate, hit Starbucks, go to a meeting in order not to be alone. We are shifting our consciousness in order to be happy.
In SURROGATES, we get to see what we do, in living color, and in such an acceptable way, that when the system 'fails', only then do we see what we have created. That is a great scene.
Life is what it is and everyone's psyche, ability to cope, need to disappear, or emotional lack of well being reveal themselves under strain. People simply snap. People go crazy, come out of hiding, reveal themselves, and even flip out from self-judgment when shifting consciousness, kicking in shakti, or Kundalini. We all want to escape, it is just that some escapes are more acceptable and less messy than others. Let's escape into beauty, into bliss, and into pseudo-perfection, that is at least in a 'good direction' right?
But, when a 'good' one fails, then we are really in trouble. When a son or daughter joins a religion, or community, or herd of others seeking the light of awareness, not all roads lead to where we plan.
Over the past 2 to 3 years, I have worked with clients whose concerned, and wiser parents confiscated all things The Secret and Law of Attraction, after putting their child into a mental hospital, and on heavy drugs and medication after flipping out, Granted, no one would point to a book or series as a 'seduction' into the dark night of the soul experience, yet, there are many catalysts...and not achieving what others say is ordinary and natural can certainly push people over an edge.
This woman had been working with very successful and well-known marketing mentors, and was overloaded with books, workbooks, accountability assignments, calls, and affirmations, trying to make all of it work, and instead was met with having everything in opposition to it, come like gremlins out of the gutter to greet her and roll over her like a tidal wave from hell. This happens more than people will admit when they are seeking to make changes.
We only 'think' we are grown up, in fact, most people I find are living the surrogate life, or have surrogates in their lives, taking the focus OFF of what is actually the reality in their own life.
We are never grown up, unless we wake up out of this numbness and unconscious slumber.
But wait, as a surrogate, we don't have consequences or consciousness that one needs to worry about when a freshly minted image is playing the role of us in a 'phone-it-in' life experience. We get to be fake, and new and improved at the same time. We are numbness itself, and it is OK because everyone else is doing it, too.
In fact it is beautiful, and untouched by life's emotional messiness. As a successful surrogate, we are person-by-proxy, in a life-by-design--distant, detached and dead. We are dead pretending to be alive. This is the life people live in more ways than people care to admit. Living dead.
SURROGATES has elements of The Firm, Pleasantville, and several others plus the pseudo-spiritual leaders, pretending to be what they are not while mesmerizing a flock, all rolled into one. Our mind is a double-agent, playing whatever role we need, in order to keep us locked into the lie of self-deception. It plays 'good cop and bad cop' all at the same time, depending upon which button is pushed in our subconscious programming.
But with pretense and surrogacy, we can be a super-star, super-hero, super-brain, super-leader, super-world saver, super-achiever, and super-perfect without the scars that living a human life can often leave. Never mind that the crumbling of the illusion is taking our soul with it unless we wake up out of this diabolical dream.
There are layers of protection in being a surrogate, and it is safe, so we keep playing the game, lifetime after lifetime. That is another topic.
The mind is a bottomless pit of creativity. If we get hurt, we get rewired by the geek wizard, and our host simply disconnects, and walks away having had an adventure--or bailing out if things get too dicey. Nothing can go wrong---can go wrong---can go wrong. We fool ourselves as long as we can with the fantasy in our mind. Eventually we lose sight of what is real and what is unreal and we can no longer tell what is true and what isn't. Our former compass becomes a stone around our neck weighing us down, and leading us nowhere.
Surrendering into this film is like living through a lucid dreaming adventure and spinning a yarn while we watch, yet untouched by reality of the drama unfolding. Most people are living a life where there is ONLY reality of the drama. As slumbering humans, we live most of our lives like this in ways we cannot see, for the programming and conditioning of our subconscious mind protects us from showing what is really behind the curtain in OZ.
We are pulling the strings ourselves, pretending as if we are being victimized.
As a surrogate, we have no real stake in any outcome. What a relief? It is temporary which is why we are a quick-fix, fast-food, adrenaline and thrill-seeking society. Just ask anyone coming off of a 'high' that is euphoric, chemical, meditative in a state of bliss, food rush altered, energetically zapped, out of their mind or out of touch in some way, or even one manufactured through a false experience for ego-satisfaction. A fix is a fix.
We crash and burn when the rush is over and seek the next high as quickly as possible. In this film, one wonders who the good guys and the bad guys really are.
SURROGATES is worth reviewing and giving a perspective from my own experience and observation, and from a 'higher' more consciously-aware perspective. This is how I view ALL films, from the vantage of a conscious heart. This film is a pure joy for me and pure satsang.
SURROGATES is a beautifully designed film to reflect the choice people make as technology seduces us into a land of escape from being real, present, and feelings that being human cause us to experience. It is clever, sleek, well-done, and revealing if you will see beyond the powerful visual special effects for they are often breath-taking in the impact they are meant to have upon our emotions.
During this film, we are taken to a kind of utopia.Ah, create an alter-ego, younger, perfection-by-design, and the ultimate lab for beauty, fitness, and without human flaws. Therein lies the 'rub' as they say. Humans, by nature ARE imperfect, sensitive, feel, are vulnerable, and suffer. In this film these inconveniences are avoided when we are attached to and live life, through a surrogate...one who lives the life 'out there' while WE are safely hidden away in a lounger with headgear.It is the kind of deception that we attempt every day without knowing it.
We hide in our mind, in our conditioning, in our attitudes and opinions, about ourselves and others. We live our life in suffering and regardless of the 'shiny tricks' of the external are quietly desperate with just a scratch under the thin surface.
As a life counselor, spiritual guide and author, I often meet first-hand this phenomenon in every human being who is my student or client. No one's life is one that is fully embraced. Everyone hides. Everyone has pain the don't want to feel, and everyone would LOVE to just be someone else, and let the one we are just go away.
We feel often that our own life is just too complicate, too messed up, or too blatantly overwhelming...so what a dream to 'dream up' a surrogate to live that beautiful life we don't seem to be able to get a handle on---right? Wrong.
The surrogates are dead, don't exist, are a figment of a technological mind of nuts, bolts, and circuitry, and the flesh and blood one sitting in the lounge with head-gear is in escape mode, doing one's best to handle the stress of being a human at all. Humans age, they hurt, they suffer, they have painful life experience, and they have a rainbow of emotions like riding a bucking bronco or a screaming roller coaster that simply will never slow down or stop.
There is never an end to the ride until our last breath.
Some people do better at manipulating their creative mind, imaging, and closing the gap between themselves and their dream or ideal scene idea, but that doesn't make the surrogate the true alternative to existing as a real, authentic, honorable, and yes, flawed human being.
As we discover we are caught in the dream, we cry for more clarity, for more presence, and become more aware, the more alive. The more one wants authenticity, the more what is false, fake, and inauthentic causes pain--well beyond a normal human feeling kind of suffering. This is a suffering of a knowing Soul...playing as if it is real, in what is fake.
This is the Spiritual Journey of awakening.
The Bruce Willis character walks this tightrope. It is like living in two world's as reversed from the 6th Sense. He chooses roles that cause him to choose or wake up to the life he is actually in. Interesting myth he plays in his collection of films. Most of the time, his character solves, resolves, or forces a solution that rocks people's world. This will not disappoint if you like his approach and film choices. His myth is exposing what appears to be real, but is not and he is constantly shattering reality as it is accepted by others.
In this film he represents us as a collective.
We face ourselves, our pain, our failings, our mistakes, our hurts, our anger, defensiveness, rage, falseness, unworthiness, stubbornness, unforgiveness--simply put: our humanness.This awareness-ing journey is hard work, demand courageousness, and asks everything of us. It says, "show yourSelf". Wake Up. Be Real. Let go of who and what your are not. In this film, the journey takes us into the latest, greatest seduction of escaping what is so very imperfect about life. It is a sleek shape-shifting ride and experience.
It matters not who we are, for we can be any age, and either gender. We can ride 2 horses in this film, with Bruce's vulnerability, anger, determination, and intensity, without splitting apart...at least for a while.
His character softens the blow for us while we get to escape our own lives and you may wonder who is living your own life, you, or a surrogate?
That period of his numbed escapism eventually ends when the life of falseness has eclipsed our heart's desire to love, truly--to be real, truly. We nearly die in order to live, and becoming UN-numb is certainly a road less traveled by most humans.
When THAT kind of un-numbing pain arises within us, we must address it, or die, and that is the work of a spiritual teacher, guide and pointer. Bruce's life is messy. His life reflects and reveals more pain than we think he can handle, and life is often challenging beyond all previous experience.
Like his character, we, too, are always being asked to take charge, have self-control, be creative, and move ahead past obstacles. There are may tricks that people use to jump over and around the blocks, but unless they are dissolved and merged within, they still kick us in the butt.
As is most people's lives, the Bruce Willis character got a good kick in his own heart to cut through the heart with searing pain.
The inventor of this transforming technology got a boot in his as well which woke him up to the far-reaching impact of playing God by eliminating God in people's life. They both had the depth of pain that woke them up to the fact that being real, loving, and remembering, although painful as a human, is better than living a life of trickery and avoidance of living the human life fully. This includes everything that we wish we didn't have to face, feel, remember, or watch.
Being real, in the end, and coming from the heart, always wins out over the mind, science, cleverness, slick tricks.This is a great message for everyone to remember, for one day, that facing of ourselves comes. It is like a rite of passage into maturing as a loving soul. One day we are asked to be human...and that means to LOVE under all of life's many messy circumstances.
Eventually, even the most addicted, most stubborn, most afraid, and most hurt, most lost, find that waking up into what is Real, true, honest, and genuine is a farr better way to live, that to live the lie of a false life.
Enjoy the film, and let it awakened you more to becoming an authentic, loving, and real human being. If you do remain alert during this film you will see bits and pieces of your own life waking up to becoming more connected, truthful, alive and more available to life--with exactly how things are.
LIFE IS A BLESSINGS...LIVE IT!
Jeannie Fitzsimmons, Licensed Releasing Facilitator for Emotional Well Being and Love--Awakened!
BLOG: www.Awakenedheartblog.com for more articles, tips, and calls for a more authentic life. To join my Subscriber list and receive 2 Free Audios: www.EffortlessReleasing.com
(C) 2009 Jeannie Fitzsimmons All Rights Reserved
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