Psychic Adventure

2010_5_29 Psychic Adventurers
I saw three films the past few days, two were French and one was shot in Northern India by a Director from Bhutan, movies at a great remove from each other, to say the least; but strangely enough each focused on an exploration of the Dark Side—one could even say the occult, cryptic manifestations that are hard for the rational mind to comprehend. It is this common feature, occult occurrences, that interests me the most and prompts to attempt to write about, and then to relate the happenings in the movie to an experience I had in 1968 which was similar.
Let me start with the film about Milarepa, the 11th century legendary saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It was made by Neten Chokling, a first time Director from Bhutan and Rimpoche at a monastery in Northern India. It is called Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint and it was released in 2006. The designation Rimpoche means “precious” and is generally understood to refer to a teacher of Mahayana Buddhism. So in essence it is a Buddhist making a film about a Buddhist to achieve wider understanding about one of its major figures. It illustrates what a rough time Milarepa had in his youth and how he gave in to feelings of resentment and revenge, and how he had to resort to “black magic” for his mother’s sake. Part two, which is call Milarepa: The Path to Enlightenment, hasn’t been released yet. Milarepa’s father was wealthy and he had left instructions with his brother-in-law to take care of his family after his death; but the brother-in-law ignored those instructions and walked off with all the wealth, leaving the family in utmost poverty. When Milarepa becomes older his mother sends him off to a Tibetan teacher who can teach him sorcery so he can wreak revenge on the brother-in-law and his wife. He does what his mother wants; indeed, he displays early on a penchant for super-normal powers. The son of his teacher can transport himself from one place to another as if he was on Star Trek. I have heard stories of yogis doing remarkable things. I heard Ram Das tell of the puny little Tibetan monk who remove a huge boulder from a road by merely picking it up like it was a small stone. Milarepa’s aptitude for such extraordinary powers comes to fruition when he returns to the village and evokes his magic to create a storm that destroys most of the village. His mother was satisfied but he had deep regrets over the destruction he had caused and so he decides to find another kind of teacher, a Holy Man who will help him utilize his talents and powers for positive ends. The next step in his spiritual development will be in The Path to Enlightenment.
Jean-Claude Brisseau was the Director of the two French films. I’d describe Brisseau as an avid voyeur who is obsessed with probing female sexuality. In fact, he was once arrested for having three young women masturbate for an audition in front of him. Actually, that scene was repeated in Exterminating Angels, one of the films I will discuss. One commentator on his films called them “cerebral skin flicks” which seems apt. They certainly could be called a thinking man’s porn. This was especially true of his other film, which in English was called The Adventure. In that film, besides a lot of explicit sex, there is also a boatload of Philosophy, Cosmology, Mysticism, Metaphysics, and Psychoanalysis. (But not one ounce of humor, ever. It is all very serious business.) Somehow it was all typically French in treatment. Americans would never intellectualize sex like Brisseau does. He pushes the envelope in both films, attempting to reach a new plateau of sexual experience, something that borders on Tantric sex in the East. Sexual ecstasy is a legitimate pursuit and goal. Spiritual truths can be garnered many ways, with sex being one way.
I am going to concentrate on The Adventure because it was better grounded, clearer, and a more interesting narrative than Exterminating Angels. The story started with Sandrine (Carole Brana), a young woman who lived with a guy and has a steady job but she feels unfulfilled, bored, and empty—what the French call ennui. She yearns for something else, something more exciting and deeper. Her mother tells her to bite the bullet and adjust to reality. You know, quit your bitching and get back in line. An open door presents itself when her Grandmother died and she inherited enough money to not work for at least a year. (This opportunity reminded me of Ulrich in Man Without Qualities who at age 32 takes a year off to reevaluate his prospects.) Two new men showed up right after she quit her previous scene, Greg, a psychiatrist who becomes her lover and exploratory mentor, and the “Wise Old man,” a Taxi Driver and ex-teacher of Physics, someone she meets on a park bench who becomes her intellectual guide. Two other women, one an old girl friend of Greg’s, the other a woman named Mina, and Sandrine undergo hypnosis with Greg, and the three women, at Greg’s command, made love together, as Greg watches. But the second time Greg was greatly impressed by Mina’s susceptibility to hypnosis and her ability to go to sexual extremes. Finally, his own curiosity aroused, he drops his objectivity and has wild and transcendent sex with Mina. At the end of coitus an inexplicable loud noise is heard in the walls and terrible winds suddenly whipped around the room like a tornado, and just as suddenly it stopped. Sandrine cowered in the corner scared to death. The next day Greg broke up with her because he had fallen in love with Mina and her special potential, sexually and mystically speaking.
When she finds the Wise Old man he called her sexual experimentation “risky business’” and almost as an antidote took her out into the country where he lived to refresh her with the consolations of Nature, which she responded to. His parting remarks as they sat amidst the grandeur of the French countryside were like this: “We are either a silly accident in the universe or fallen angels. I don’t know which.”
So the narrative ends on another French note, what one reviewer termed typically French “existentialist agnosticism.” I’ll buy that.
As for my related experience, it has to do with that loud crack in the wall, a noise that was inexplicable and mysterious, and obviously connected in some way to the sexual events—how I couldn’t guess. Neither could the shrink or the Wise Old Man. My experience was similar; a loud cracking noise in a block wall, but it had nothing to do with sex in my case. This is not the place for a long explanation, but let it suffice to say I was in an extreme state after a few weeks of high tension and in a spiraling mood of increasing introspection, when the wall behind me made a very loud noise. I jumped out of my chair; I went outside to take a look at the wall, which was fine and intact. Later, in a book by Colin Wilson, probably The Occult, I discover something called an “occult rap,” a signature of a psychic event. Okay, that may put a name to it, but it’s no explanation. For me it remains a mystery, one I can live with and puzzle over endlessly.