The Profound Lessons in Waking Life the 2001 Indie Film
Waking Life, a psychedelic-like film that makes you question who you are, your place in the universe, and if anything is real at all. Although most of the ideas seem radical and absurd, most are based on actual concepts that have been conveyed throughout history. From Nietzche’s Amor Fati to Kierkegaard’s Existentialism to Shaman Lucid Dreaming States to Bohm’s Quantum Physics, this film hits them all. You get this eloquent mixture of western philosophy and eastern philosophy that are almost indistinguishable because the perspectives are presented showing their similarities and not their differences.
The central question being, How do you know you’re not living in a dream?
It makes you question whether or not we have free will, and whether politics is just two sides of the same coin.
“Do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”
You’ll be taken on an ontological joyride of thinking you understand what’s happening then the director recontextualizes you into a new reality that is then also broken. It’s a dive into the idea that we’re in an ontological state that is indistinguishable from a dream and that lucid dreaming can show you this and help you uncover a deeper reality and truth than the one you’re living in now.
In a sense, it starts by making you consider that you’re in a dream in the first place then promotes that maybe there’s a way to wake up from the dream even if the film doesn’t tell you directly how to do so. And this isn’t a concept that’s been made up by the director, there are countless references to waking up in modern and ancient culture. It makes you consider that you’re entire life is just a story and that we’re all contributing to one collective story with no inherent reality.
The most important lesson I learned from this film is the power of being open-minded. Maybe the ideas in this film are utterly wrong and miss the point, but what if they aren’t?
It makes you question the relationship of authority with knowledge, similar to Noam Chomsky’s ideas on Manufacturing Consent. How do we know that the information we’re receiving as a culture isn’t just one giant, albeit unconscious, process of indoctrination and brain-washing? It puts front-and-center the many assumptions that you may be holding at this very moment to show you how many beliefs aren’t actually your own.
And if you want to watch the full movie here it is on amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B008GM9O6A/ref=atv_dl_rdr
