* The Wachowskis explain how Cloud Atlas unplugs people from the Matrix *
AVC: Do you think of Cloud Atlas as being about literal reincarnation? Is it more about the commonality of human experience, or the eternal-recursion concept?
Andy Wachowski says the film is “equal parts spiritual and secular.” Lana adds: “Again, we don’t want to delimit interpretation, and we don’t want to say, ‘We are making this to mean this.’ What we find is that the most interesting art is open to a spectrum of interpretation. We love that in the book, you can have a very secular understanding of something like reincarnation. We have the José Saramago line in there, which says the nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, which go on apportioning themselves throughout all time. This is a very secular understanding of karma. But there are also other things… my brother this week had the sweetest line ever, where he was like, ‘Of course I believe in reincarnation—look at my sister.’ We, in our own lives, reincarnate as well. We have new lives. I’m sure there are people in your life who would see this version of you, as opposed to 20 years ago, and would say, ‘Wow, you’ve changed.’”
AVC: Your films all touch on themes of fascism, oppression, and abuse of power. Is there a reason that dynamic attracts you? Is it more that these are just good traditional story seeds?
Power is something artists have been writing about since The Iliad. Okay, power is a part of the human experience. You see power dynamics trying to be understood in The Iliad, and you see them in The Master. It’s still the same excavation of power. Foucault gave us insight into power in the postmodern world, and now we understand it in a different way than Homer did, but power will be a subject in the human story, I think, as long as we’re human. [Laughs.] And so when we first read David Mitchell’s book, I thought it was an unbelievable examination of incredibly varied perspectives, and also the relationship between the responsibility we have to people we have power over, and the responsibility we have to the people who have power over us. Are we meant to just accept their conventional construct of whatever they imagine the world to be? Or are we obliged in some way to struggle against it? In the reverse, what is the obligation of the person whose life we have power over? Are they obliged to struggle against that conventional relationship? This is stuff of good stories.
There’s really complex ideas in the [Matrix] trilogy. [Laughs.] We think in some ways, it’s the most experimental, complicated trilogy ever made. And it’s frustrating to see people try to will that to not be true. But we know it’s true. And in the same way, people will try to will Cloud Atlas to be rejected. They will call it messy, or complicated, or undecided whether it’s trying to say something New Agey-profound or not. And we’re wrestling with the same things that Dickens and Hugo and David Mitchell and Herman Melville were wrestling with. We’re wrestling with those same ideas, and we’re just trying to do it in a more exciting context than conventionally you are allowed to.
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At times, karma and reincarnation may seem like a vicious cycle that never lets us off the wheel of Samsara. Why do we continue to be reborn? What is being asked of our minds? Our consciousness? Our souls? Or whatever one may call the everpresent energy that travels with us after death. For some people, the concept of repeating lifetimes of suffering, love, pain, and circumstances seems overwhelming and/or repulsive! However, in the book turned movie Cloud Atlas, Dan Mitchell's ability to create characters that represent both the details of a life as well as the overarching impact of a life on others is exquisite and daunting! One theme that runs throughout the movie is the cause and effect of master and slave or master and servant in many variations.
On the other hand, the materialists will have a hard time understanding the message of the film:
As a biologist intrigued by Buddhism, and who is exploring the parallels and convergences between this modern and largely Western science and that ancient and largely Eastern “wisdom tradition,” I find myself increasingly convinced that Kipling was wrong: The twain have met, and for the most part, they get along swimmingly.
Nonetheless, I and many other Buddhist sympathizers part company with traditional Buddhist beliefs when it comes to the doctrine of reincarnation. As we shall see, there is a very limited respect in which reincarnation can in fact be interpreted as consistent with modern biological science, but definitely not in the conventional sense of Buddhism or Hinduism; that is, in which individuals (as opposed to their constituent molecules) are somehow reconstituted, complete with their characteristic personalities, either dragging along or buoyed by their prior actions—i.e., their “karma.” For those of us interested in reconciling Buddhism with science in general and biology in particular, reincarnation remains a troublesome outlier.
Nonetheless, a kind of bottom-line, bare-bones reincarnation does take place in the literal recycling of atoms and molecules, fundamental to the biological (and Buddhist) acknowledgment that “individuals” do not have intrinsic existence, separated and distinct from the rest of the world. But this is a far cry from the more traditional understanding of reincarnation, East and West, whereby not just atoms and molecules but some—typically unspecified—aspect of an individual is reborn into a different body, yet mystically still constituting an ineffable, nonmaterial component derived from his or her prior life (rather, lives): a soul.
It is unthinkable for traditional Buddhists, and indeed for most followers of the Abrahamic Big Three, to deny the existence of souls. But it is equally unthinkable, I assert, for any scientist to accept the existence of something that is immaterial, eternal, immeasurable, and also complexly and indelibly associated with each of us, distinct from one another. When I die, my carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and so forth will be recycled into other creatures, other components of this planet and the universe (and ditto for you) … But I cannot accept the fairy tale that I, like some sparkly Tinkerbell, will in any meaningful holistic sense be reborn, reincarnated, inserted, or in any way incorporated into a new, temporary body, and not only that, but that the outcome—the precise kind of body “I” will next inhabit—is a direct (karmic) consequence of how well or poorly I have lived my life.
“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies,” we are told by a futuristic, grammar-challenged shaman in Mitchell’s bold, time-bending-book, “an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul.” I don’t believe this for a moment, and I bet that deep in your heart (notice, I didn’t write “your soul”!), I bet you don’t either. Nor should you. We all know that many “things” that are immaterial nonetheless exist: love, beauty, hate, suffering, fear, hope, etc. But the existence of a soul—mine, yours, that of the Buddha or Charles Darwin—is an extraordinary and altogether different assertion. As Carl Sagan emphasized, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and such evidence is wholly lacking.
“The” Buddhist attitude toward reincarnation is diverse and—I must add, at the risk of seeming unkind—muddled. Buddhism typically maintains an account of the soul’s rebirth that differs from the prevailing Hindu view, which posits a pervasive, worldwide, irreversible, and permanent atman. By contrast, the Buddhist perspective involves anatman, the explicit absence of any concrete “self.” Add to this the fact that according to Buddhist thinking, anitya (impermanence) is also universal, and the notion of a distinct and unchanging self that is transmitted from a dead or dying body into a new one is simply not tenable. Instead, the Buddha described a process analogous to a sequence in which successive candles are lit by the flame of a preceding one; as a result, the flames are causally linked, forming a continuing stream, but they are not identical.
Nonetheless, many Buddhists claim, for example, that especially enlightened practitioners can remember their “past lives,” and they quote various Buddhist texts (sutras) to buttress their position. But as far as I’m concerned, sutra-slinging warrants no more intellectual or scientific respect than does bible-beating.
On the other hand, I am rather partial to the notion that we “birth our future” by what we do, just as from a strictly evolutionary perspective, our present—the genetic makeup that (albeit temporarily) helps give rise to our “selves”—was birthed by what our ancestors did or didn’t do. Call it a kind of reincarnation if you must. I prefer to celebrate it as natural selection.
No one swims outside the gene pool. What each of us identifies as “our self” is only a temporary collection of genes drawn from a much vaster, shared genome, destined to dissolve back into that gargantuan, universal melting pot, and whose physical substance is shared with all matter, nonliving as well as living. Think of an eddy in a stream, not really existing independently, all by itself, but rather a temporary arrangement of “passing-through stuff,” given a name for the time being, and sometimes called “bison” or “oak tree”—or “person.” This is not news to the modern biologist, nor to the practicing Buddhist, two seemingly distinct perspectives that originate very differently yet coalesce remarkably in outlook and insight.
Just don’t confuse myth-making and poetry, à la Cloud Atlas, with scientific fact.
David Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book is Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2012).
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