Notes made while watching Baraka:
*Note to Baraka fans: Ron Fricke is working on a 'sequel'. Info here: http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/samsara.aspx
Part 1 (particularly during the songs "Host of Seraphim," "Village Dance", and "Varanasi Sunrise"):
It reminds me - as so much has recently - of my heart's hunger for the world (dare I say 'former hunger'?); it reminds me of a younger self, looking into every corner and to the furthest stars, expecting answers, truth, and beauty. "How terrible and wonderful is the world!" I said. "Such sorrow, incomprehension, suffering! Innocence is crushed, knowledge is pain - and all of it so beautiful! I can't take it all in - I am crushed by my own incomprehension, I suffer from my own knowledge. Oh, let me experience all that is real, all that can be imagined! Just let me be part of this beautiful, terrible world. Let me see it with innocence and be crushed, rather than darkening my eyes with knowlege and becoming too burdened to wish to see any more."
That's what I said, oh my soul; that's what you said, and that's what you still say. But now I ask myself - is it good to make suffering beautiful? If we must desire, must we desire pain as well as pleasure? And the answer returns:
What you desire is what you are, and also how you will end. It is the rest of you - your opposite. Gaining your desire, you blend with it; blending with it, you will disappear, one into the other. You will have all and you will be nothing. You are nothing now, but knowing it, you will cease to be.
Part 2 (time-lapse cinematography):
A life is a life for every being. A life is the basic unit of time: a human has a life, a tree has a life, a mountain, in its way, has a life. All that you can experience in your time of existence is all the life you have.
For the longest-living trees, days pass like hours, seasons like days. A mountain feels the climate change like you feel a cloud pass in front of the sun. An ice age is a winter's night. On the other hand, the exposed stone feels the protons washing over it, disintigrating it in a constant waterfall of particles. It feels rain showers and weather like breaths that involuntarily come and go. The flow of protons is as present and palpable as the water of a stream washing over your hand; you reach into the water to pick up a fragment of the mountain that has broken off and tumbled down the waterway to be worn smooth to your momentary touch.
