Some thoughts on the movie Astral City
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
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.
Comments
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.
Where is this film? What platform? Prime? Netflix?
It’s free on YouTube, in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.
Soundtrack by Philip Glass.
Well if you think about Astral City as a a sort of weird SF, it is very interesting.
However it is based on the channeled spiritism of Chico Xavier (who might have been an X-man... or not)
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Chico_Xavier
Talking of comedy films, really enjoyed "Barbershop"
I think of it more as an alternate vision on the bardo. I knew about the Chico Xavier connection, who is still ranked by many in the top 5 greatest Brazilians of all time. Chico got a lot of his material from Allan Kardec, who was the founder of spiritism in 1800’s France. But it is actually surprisingly progressive, and takes in well-known aspects of the bodymind complex as it is known today.
The whole idea of negative emotions poisoning the bodymind is not so far removed from Buddhist ideas on anger, hate, jealousy and so on, from what I have read and seen. For example, I don’t think it is an accident that my mother got her autoimmune disorder after years of struggling with caregivers to provide the care that she wanted, to the level of quality that she wanted, for my stepfather. It was very stressful for her.
So to think that you may take some of these things with you to the afterlife is not wholly unexpected. I think it is conceptually quite beautiful, the way it is presented in the book and the film, as a journey of the soul to the divine spheres. That you start off in the lower regions due to your freight of emotions and karma, that you are eventually rescued and start to shed stubborn ideas of what you are, and that you become cleaner and purer the closer you come to the divine.