Your Life Is Meditation by Mark Van Buren

Author:Mark Van Buren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

MOVIES WITH WISDOM

Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.

— BUDDHA

GROWING UP, I was terrified of the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy Krueger always scared me with his razor-sharp finger-knives. I vividly remember having nightmares after watching the movie in which Freddy would attack me. Although quite a frightening concept, the truth is that nightmares weren’t the only thing to be found on Elm Street. In fact, much wisdom can be learned from its liberating, deeper meaning.

In the movie, Freddy Krueger was a serial killer who haunted people in their dreams. In these nightmares, he was able to hurt and even kill his frightened victims. The ones who survived would wake up to real life with gashes and wounds from his violent attacks — that is, if they were alive to wake up. Freddy would only be able to attack when they fell asleep, hence the reason the characters in the movie continued to keep themselves awake. By the end of the movie, though, protagonist Nancy Thompson finally figured out a way to destroy Freddy Krueger once and for all. She realized he could only harm her when she believed he was real. He was only a character in her dream world — he wasn’t real — so when she woke up to this truth, she was finally able to rob him of all his power over her.

In our actual lives, Freddy Krueger comprises the destructive, neurotic aspects of our mind. We all have these aspects in one form or another, lurking deep within our unconscious mind, and much like Freddy, they are waiting for us to fall asleep so they can bring chaos into our lives.

The Buddha said, “No one can harm you, not even your worst enemy, as much as your own untrained mind.” This statement is exactly what the ending to the movie is implying. Just as Nancy realized Freddy wasn’t real and was finally able to defeat him, so too can we realize that our thoughts are no more than dreams passing through our minds. They are not as real as we’d like to believe, and only when we fall asleep by losing awareness can they bring harm to our lives. But if we can instead see our thoughts as passing dreams that cannot actually hurt us, we may find we can liberate ourselves from them.

Thanks, Wes Craven, for your profound Buddhist insight. Rest in peace.

Another great movie with wisdom is A Beautiful Mind, which is based on a true story about a mathematical genius named John Forbes Nash, Jr. Throughout the movie, we are introduced to important people in John’s life, including his former college roommate Charles, his beloved niece Marcee, and William Parcher, a mysterious Department of Defense agent. (Please stop reading this chapter here if you’ve never seen this movie. There will be spoilers.) Eventually, John realizes these three are not actually real, but only figments of his imagination; John is in fact schizophrenic, and these three characters never actually existed.

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