Some thoughts on the movie Astral City

Jeroen

I yesterday watched the movie Astral City: Nosso Lar (twice), and I wanted to talk a little about it. The Buddhist beliefs don’t talk very much about what the Tibetans call the Bardo, the state between lives, and that is the focus of this movie’s story. It follows a Brazilian doctor named André Luiz, who dies and ends up in the Umbral, the dark and dense region of the astral where suicides end up. It turns out he didn’t really commit suicide, but by not paying attention to his anger, his hardness, his emotions he ended up poisoning his astral body and this was the cause of his physical death, his mind didn’t sustain his body anymore.

Andre is rescued after a sincere prayer in the Umbral, and taken to the astral city Nosso Lar (Brazilian for ‘our home’) where his astral body is healed and he slowly comes to terms with being dead. He wants to send a message to his family, and hears that in the city, such things are earned through merit, work. He ends up working in the chambers of recuperation, first just reassuring new arrivals and sweeping the floors, and later as he gets in touch with heart-felt kindness as a healer. He eventually earns the privilege of returning to Earth to see his family, and while there heals his ex-wife’s new husband of a terminal illness.

The ideology of Astral City is centred around an awakening, that most negative emotions poison the energy body, and that the ground of being of people is love and kindness, and that work has a beneficial effect. This is the realisation that André has, which allows him to accept the mission to return to his family, and face his possessiveness and my-making. The idea is that the Earth’s lower astral space is polluted by negative emotion.

People in the Astral Cities (there is more than one) are privileged, they can work towards resolving their emotions and their family ties, and eventually can come to dwell in the higher spheres when there is no need to reincarnate anymore. I find this process, of first finding an awakening to love and trust and kindness, and then working on ones harmony with the people you have ties to, very beautiful. It speaks to me of deep truths.

I hope you will watch the movie, and be as affected by it as I was.

Jeroen

One of the things I felt while watching the film, is that close family ties, of mothers and sons, and man and woman in particular, are important to our spiritual selves. In Buddhist life, not much attention is paid to this, and in Osho’s teaching, he holds that family ties are unimportant, except that he said about himself that he had spent various past lives with different people.

But I think the people we spend our lives with definitely leave traces in our spiritual selves. In a way the film slightly reminded me of Michael Newton’s book Journey of Souls, which was less bound to ideas of the psychic body, but had some similar thoughts about families of souls.