In 1974, a 22 year old Italian named Alessandro traveled to India. He never went back. The moment he entered Benares, he was captivated. He adopted the life of a Sadhu and was given the name Shiva Das. The gentle soul departed his mortal body in May 2020.
I believe I met Baba Shiva Das at Assi Ghat in Varanasi in January or Feburary 1997. This is what he said to me (I wrote it down):
“Just make silence, the idea of turning off the ego machine and listening with your whole being. Become the harmony that is chanting the mantra, the names of God. Surrender to cosmic Bhakti, Live with balance in nature. Avoid the conflicts and chaos of desire. Realise what you need and travel through what is called days and nights. The moon is soma juice for all plants and from thoughts and actions you create us. Switch off and make the flow go the other way. Then tune consciousness through levels of perception to new states of ecstasy. What is really you is eternal and has been. We are all ascending into energy but there has been a breakdown. There has been a blockage along the way, a disturbance in the flow. Thoughts are self-fulfilling, so what happens if you stop thinking? Reality makes itself. Do not be distracted by your mind. Silence is penance.”
The definitive documentary that chronicles the UK's 'Misrule Cinema Movement' boom from (2010-2016) This period of social revolution and unrest gave birth to a new wave of pent-up creative energy and determined filmmakers who started shaking the chains of the mainstream film industries rigid cage, by making movies on mobile phones and using Youtube and Facebook to promote their films. Building their own cinemas and staging guerrilla-style movie screenings throughout the country.
Hard to describe this surreal Mexican movie about a outlaw gang of 'punks' who ride motorcycles, rob and party. The music, the costumes and the hairstyles are on another level. It is difficult to imagine this film was intended to be a serious work with shock value. Today it comes across as funny and over the top. Brilliant.
Heart of Glass (German: Herz aus Glas) is a 1976 German film directed and produced by Werner Herzog, set in 18th century Bavaria. The film was written by Herzog, based partly on a story by Herbert Achternbusch. The main character is Hias, based on the legendary Bavarian prophet, Mühlhiasl.
During shooting, almost all of the actors performed while under hypnosis. Every actor in every scene was hypnotized, with the exception of the character Hias and the professional glassblowers who appear in the film. The hypnotized actors give very strange performances, which Herzog intended to suggest the trance-like state of the townspeople in the story. Herzog provided the actors with most of their dialogue, memorised during hypnosis. However, many of the hypnotised actors' gestures and movements occurred spontaneously during filming.
Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, commonly known as Bat'ko Makhno, was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of an independent anarchist army in Ukraine from 1917–21. Makhno was the commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, commonly referred to as the Makhnovshchina.
The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine (Ukrainian: Революційна Повстанська Армія України), also known as the Black Army or as Makhnovtsi (Ukrainian: Махновці), named after their leader Nestor Makhno, was an anarchist army formed largely of Ukrainian peasants and workers during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. They protected the operation of "free soviets" and libertarian communes in the Free Territory, an attempt to form a stateless libertarian communist society from 1918 to 1921 during the Ukrainian War of Independence. They were founded and inspired based on the Black Guards.
The economic collapse of 2008 scared us. But little has changed since then. This 2012 film explains in fine detail why and how the global society operating within a system of neoclassical economics is in grave peril. All for the sake of a relatively small percentage of the population which controls the means of production, transport and resource extraction. The banks are complicit but they are not driving the system. It is a complex and complete network of actors, institutions, unsustainable laws, practices and methods.
A debt/credit cycle that is now a growing negative equation. Resources are in decline. Investment is no longer needed to be productive. Banking is a pyramid scheme. The rich have access to government support while the middle and working classes are forced to fend for themselves with welfare dismantled globally. The housing crisis - which spiked in 2009 but is still ongoing - is a well known example of how this system functions.
The situation with the ecology of the planet and its limited resources is the frame to this crisis that has not (yet) ruptured completely. The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020 identifies five major categories of threat to biodiversity: land and sea changes, pollution, species overexploitation, invasive species and disease, and climate change. The size of the problem is illustrated by the report’s data that suggests 23 percent of land is now degraded (for example, the Amazon rainforest has lost 17 percent of its area in the last 50 years), while agricultural-land use is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation. The oceans’ “dead zones” already encompass an area larger than the United Kingdom. A draft UN agreement envisages that in the next decade, at least one-third of the planet should be put under nature-conservation protection. This plan also includes targets for reducing the use of pesticides, cutting plastic waste, channeling some US$200 billion into developing countries and reducing harmful government subsidies by $500 billion per year.
If the global economic system is not dramatically reformed within the next decade the results will be catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, if not the entire world's human population. There will be nowhere to go to avoid it.
Ross Ashcroft's Four Horseman (2012) does a good job of examining the vast system that is the global economy. But on the micro and personal levels the film does not sufficiently question the ethics of wealth and accumulation. Innovation is seen as a ends in itself, rather than a focal point within the overall system of human society and how it relates to the limited resources of the planet. Four Horsemen uses a Christian ethic to justify wealth and a modernist interpretation of time to qualify a future that continues the exploitative motives of the present system but just with better rules (a 'salvation'). The film posits a capitalism managed better will be both sustainable and fair and that a two-party representative political system can still deliver the best for the majority of the population if we just get rid of lobbyists and money. I doubt these assumptions but unless action is taken to change these elements we will never know. Time is running out.
Sebastian leads a group of mathematically minded dolly girls in a quasi futuristic 1960s London as they decode Cold War secrets. He falls in love with one of his new recruits. Swinging London forms the backdrop for this strange somewhat pointless but very groovy film from 1968.
Complete Cast and Crew
Starring, Dirk Bogarde, Susannah York, Lili Palmer, John Gielgud, Janet Munro, Ronald Fraser, Margaret Johnston, Nigel Davenport, John Ronane, Hayward Morse, Donald Sutherland, Ann Beach, Susan Whitman, Ann Sidney, Veronica Clifford, Louise Purnell, Portland Mason, James Belchamber, Charles Farrell, Charles Lloyd Pack, Alan Freeman, Sally Douglas, Stuart Hoyle, Lynn Pinkney, and Jeanne Roland.
Directed by David Greene. Released in New York on January 24, 1968.
The notion that capitalism treats people as things while things take on quasi-human attributes is nothing new: Marx was writing about reification (sometimes translated as ‘thingification’) and commodity fetishism more than 150 years ago. But we’re also coming at this from another angle. In The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli explains that “the world is made of events, not things.” He goes on to say that there is “the simple fact that nothing is: that things happen instead.” If we stop thinking about being, and start thinking about becoming, then our emphasis switches from permanence to change. Put bluntly, the world doesn’t have to be like this. There are echoes here of the way E.P. Thompson insists that ‘class’ is not a structure or a category, but “something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.” In Crack Capitalism, John Holloway goes even further and suggests that a self-determining society would probably have a language where verbs are primary. It sounds like a crazy idea, but is it really any crazier than the fucked-up way we live today?
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We live in an upside-down world.
People (living, breathing human beings) are treated as things – as figures in a report, as numbers on a spreadsheet. At the same time, inanimate objects (cars, phones, a company logo) are treated as more important than people.
How does this happen? It happens because capitalism is above all a process of double separation.
First, through the organisation of work, human activity is turned into things to be bought and sold. Verbs (our activity) are turned into nouns (commodities).
And then those commodities are used to divide and separate us. Our relations with each other are mediated through things.
In this world of nouns, everything seems fixed. The economy. Profits. Business. Normality. “Things are the way that they are,” we sigh, as if change is impossible. “It is what it is.”
But it is the world of nouns itself which is the problem. It obscures our escape route.
If we think of a phone as a noun, we don’t think of the processes that lie behind it. We don’t think of the mining, the manufacture, the marketing. We don’t think of how the phone is to be used, or what happens to the phone when it’s finished. The phone just “is”.
It’s the same with poverty. If we think of poverty as a thing, we imagine that “the poor have always been with us”, as if poverty is a simple fact of life.
But poverty is not just a “thing”. It involves some people actively denying other people the means to provide for themselves – and many other people actively refusing to care about this ongoing denial.
When we think in the world of nouns, we think of definition. We think of “this side” and “that side”, of Brexit and Remain, of vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. We lose sight of the fact that real social change comes about when people leave those fixed identities and start to form new collective bodies.
When we think in the world of nouns, we imagine Covid is a thing which has just appeared from nowhere. It has a beginning and an end. We can “send it packing”. We lose sight of the fact that zoonotic diseases, like Covid, will persist as long as humans share the planet with other species – constantly mutating and evolving, not simply being, always in the process of becoming something new.
When we think in the world of nouns, we lose sight of the fact that the society we live in is one that is made – and re-made – every day by us.
Capitalism – this system that dominates and destroys – is not a “thing” at all. Capitalism is a social relation between people.
When we think in the world of nouns, we remain trapped inside this social form that systematically tries to hide the fact that we are its creators.
We can start to turn the world the right way up if we begin again with verbs.
In this story of emancipation and freedom in the face of the Syrian war, Commander Arian guides a women's battalion towards Kobane with the mission to liberate the population living under the yoke of Daesh (ISISIS). Arian, who when very young witnessed the viscous treatment that victims of sexual violence received, does everything possible to make her comrades discover the true meaning of their struggle: freedom for the next generation of women. After living for months with the commander and her troops, filming with an unprecedented intimacy that includes raw sequences of Arian's slow recovery from wounds, Sotorra makes a fascinating portrait of a woman on a mission.
2018 Duration: 77 min.
País: España
Dirección:Alba The Warrior Guion: Jesper Osmund, Alba Sotorra, Steffano Strocchi
In the 1960s and 70s thousands of hippies journeyed east to India in search of enlightenment. Hippie Masala is a fascinating chronicle about flower children who, after fleeing Western civilization, found a new way of life in India.
It is with love we announce that Baba Cesare has left his suffering body today 29 December 2018.
“I'm nine, it's my first time in India. I don't like it at all: dirt everywhere, poverty, lepers in the streets pushing themselves on trolleys with bloody stumps. We go to visit a large temple in Delhi. To enter you have to take off your shoes and that's the last thing I want to do. I walk barefoot, with the terror of getting some kind of disease. I am shocked and lock myself in the hotel to watch television and eat peanuts. I don't want to go out anymore.
Then shortly before leaving, I put my head back out and in a square, in the midst of the large moving crowd, I see three men crouched, practically naked. They look serene, composed, and their very long hair wrapped over their heads like a kind of crown. One of them is holding a very simple musical instrument, with only one string. They have fewer than beggars, but they look like kings. "Who I am?!" We get closer and people explain to us that they are ascetics. They live alone in the jungle. It seems incredible to me that such people exist. I never forget them " [Folco Terzani from the book, A Barefoot on the Earth]
Baba Cesare felt he was not suitable to have a normal family or a normal job, he wanted something different, another life, always on this Earth, but different, not interested in material issues and needs, but made only of spiritual fulfillments. And so, Cesare leaves Italy to go to India dressed only with rags and begging along the streets. Step by step, people start to trust him, step by step Cesare also learns to speak Hindi and this makes him more reliable as an Indian guru, or rather, Sadhu. A Sadhu is a person who lives with no possessions, such as a home or money.
A Sadhu always enjoys the greatest respect of his fellows and common people who help him to have food, clothes and a place where he can sleep. Cesare attends other Indian gurus to learn the secrets of a spiritual life, showing that an alternative way to live is always possible. Until when, thanks to his knowledge, Cesare is really regarded as an Indian guru and he can live a wonderful life with no goods or other possessions. This story can be read like an educational or spiritual journey, the reflections about the meaning of life are amazing and gripping, the style is sharp, but always true.
Cesare’s life is fully different from the Western life where people are accustomed to seek saints and angels inside the beatification procedures of the Church. Humbleness and patience are the unique ingredients in Cesare’s life, but thanks to them, his life is totally fulfilled. Maybe for us it will be impossible to live like Baba Cesare, but this book reveals that nothing is impossible when accomplished with the true essence of our soul. Nothing is impossible, even with no money, no home, no jobs. This book shakes our sensitivity, screams, make us cry, and shapes a unique book, an adventure novel, but, above all, a spiritual journey inside the real meaning of life on the Earth.
