Every Moment, Everywhere,
Here and Now
Philosophy is one of my hobbies. It is also my physical and psychic exercise to make me bodily and spiritually fit. Two traditions of Western philosophy with which I most identify are American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology; they are two inter-translatable and complementary languages for me.[i] A third is Eastern Buddhism, especially Zen which I also studied while inevitably shading it with my own Christian Western and secular cultural upbringing.
And so, when I saw and lived the film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, those three interweaving traditions, were my prism for understanding this non-understandable magnificent piece of art. I loved it. I intend to see it often. I am not sure why.
I write here to complete my thinking about the film though I realize I can never complete my thinking. Even my dreams struggle to complete this experience. That happens to me with every great experience, starting I suppose with the travel down the birth canal of my mother into the light of existence. Or skiing down or climbing up a mountain that is a bit beyond my capacity. Or contemplating the night sky or my deep breathing. Or essaying a love poem or an act of love.
This is not a movie review. There are many good ones already written that describe the plot and staging, the direction and acting, and even what it means for the reviewer. Sometimes pretty negative.
The film, ending where it began, did not conclude for me. While I reached no conclusion to this three-part drama, I did as I left the theater feel a kind of integration which was exhilarating.
Phenomenology is the study (logos) of appearances (phenomena) that call attention to themselves in the stream of consciousness. We attempt to go behind the appearances which we objectify by naming them; and we go back to the “pure experience” or the subjectivity prior to our naming and cutting them out of our stream of consciousness like Christmas cookies from flattened dough or snap shots from a long vacation trip.
Pragmatism articulates that our consciousness prior to, but in the very act of, objectifying appearances by questioning and studying them (in common sense ordinary language, science, art, and religion) is the base and the beyond of all our cognitive activities in the world. Pragmatism stresses the moral and political dimension of consciousness in action with others. Thus, consciousness as cognitive is intentional (i.e., outward focused in and to the world of things) and consciousness as moral (conscience) is an awareness of self, interacting with other selves in creating their worlds and so resisting cruelty and abuse.
Zen Buddhism is a menu of corporal and mental exercises that shocks us out of the world of things back to the pure experience, founding and expanding consciousness, in an intersubjective Self beyond egos and every time and everywhere in the Present.
These philosophical traditions point to a pre-objective, pre-reflective lived experience of arising appearances flashing in and out waking and sleeping moments of many altered views. I fly over and through different worlds. I join, hear, struggle with my parents, my childhood friends, my aging teachers, my words, my heroes, my enemies, my self, my regrets, my desires, my fears, my choices, my hopes. I notice these appearances and I notice my Self with others in many different worlds and universes.
Just like the movie! Everything everywhere all at once.
Who am I? With whom and what do I relate? What choices and events identify me? What have I, what have We, become? What, in my waking world of action, do I and those I choose and those who choose me want to be? What universe do we choose to question, understand, pattern, and be?
These are perennial philosophic questions that arose when sapiens evolved with the ability to imagine and use images to live in our environments, to know our world and ourselves in relation to each other and our world.
Philosophy attempts to do the impossible. It attempts to visualize the invisible, to formalize or pattern or imagine the unimaginable source of vision, forms, and images. It does this in continuity with all philosophical attempts, past and present, East and West, in order to solve the problems that we are having here and now.
Therefore philosophy, even mine which I discover in the phenomenological, pragmatic, Zen traditions, is never fully understandable. Philosophy is always correctable because the problems change. The formulations of our issues emerge from that unformulated, ineffable, biased stance we are taking in our universe and which the universe is taking with us. Our words, formulas, images, knowledge will always be corrigible.
And it is so with a masterpiece like this film which uses scientific images (multiverses of string theory and quantum mechanical probability theory), humor, family tensions, music, and technologies so masterly contexed to our early 21st century condition.
William James in Varieties of Religious Experience asked us to notice that, as things appear to us in our streaming consciousness, we notice by naming them often at the direction of our caregiver. We use them, question them, get to know what they can do for us, what other things they are related to in our focus and attention out into our environment. That is the base of knowing our world.
But removing my/our gaze and attention away from those things (or what in Latin we call res or realities) to the base and the beyond and condition of those appearances and the naming of those realities do not appear or, better, appear as silence, invisible, nothing, open unfulfilled consciousness. I am experiencing the pre-expressed, pre-objective awareness of my Self and all other selves in the very act of naming, questioning, describing, and understanding those realities in the world. I encounter and live my own creative acts enjoined to the creative acts of all others in the world.
We are growing in consciousness by reading, writing, studying, conversing, playing, and laughing with each other. Then we returning to and approach a universal consciousness in all its potential and possibilities at the base and beyond all that we produce and see. I do not deny that “base and beyond” here and now that I cannot name and affirm. I can only feel it by excluding all judgments, all things, all words and formulas by directing my attention from the figures I address in conscious acts to the groundin my personal and interpersonal consciousness to the realities of the present world. But when we shift from the problems that we encounter in the world, we shift to the mystery of the universe. We attempt to objectify what is not objectifiable. But the failure keeps us going.
At this point, my philosophy becomes theology using mythic, allegorical, negative language, and humor. My outward-bound pragmatic attitude to things, places, events, to solve problems in the visible world unveils an invisible realm of mystery, a search light into infinite darkness or as Star Trek says, “going to where no one has gone before.”
At this point of encounter with Being beyond beings (Heideggar), Transcendental Ego (Husserl), Mystery (Marcel), No-thing (John of the Cross), Pure Self without ego (Zen Buddhism), the “I-am” in the I-do (Judaism), we know that we do not know and we search in darkness.
Without understanding, we are joined to everything everywhere all at once.
[i] By pragmatism I mean the tradition of thinking and action of William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty. By phenomenology, I mean the tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heiddegar, Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Michel Henry. Both traditions are considered postmodern in that they worked to solve the dualistic legacy of Descartes: Body/soul, material/spiritual, real/relative, secular/religious, science/religion. But I prefer to consider them transmodern since they build on many enlightenment insights of modernity — including science. And they are continuous with the whole Western philosophic tradition while adopting many insights from the East. And like Zen Buddhist philosophy, the transcendence is in the presence, the here-now-with, not in transcendents (places, persons, times, things).
Rollie Smith revised 8/4/2022