Psychedelic Adventure

Sean Penn's Into The Wild Movie

Into the Wild is a 2007 American film based on the real life adventures of Christopher McCandless. It was directed by Sean Penn, who also wrote the screenplay, and stars Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker, Vince Vaughn, Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Stewart, and Hal Holbrook.

Into the Wild recounts the true story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a student-athlete at Emory University, as told by his sympathetic sister, Carine McCandless (Jena Malone). In rejection of a materialist, conventional life, and of his parents Walt McCandless (William Hurt) and Billie McCandless (Marcia Gay Harden), who McCandless perceives as having betrayed him, McCandless destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donates $24,000 (nearly his entire savings) to Oxfam, and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well-used but reliable Datsun toward his ultimate goal: Alaska and, alone, to test himself and experience the wilds of nature. He does not tell his family what he is doing or where he is going and does not communicate with them thereafter, leaving them to become increasingly anxious and eventually desperate.

Along the way his automobile is caught in a flash flood and he abandons it to hitchhike after burning what remains of his dwindling cash supply at the side of Lake Mead, Arizona. He then creates a new name: Alexander Supertramp. Along his travels, he encounters a hippie couple Jan Burres (Catherine Keener) and Rainey (Brian H. Dierker). As McCandless continues his travels, he decides to work on a farm owned by Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn). However he is forced to leave after Westerberg is arrested for satellite piracy. McCandless then goes up at the Colorado River and when he is told that he may not go down by kayak without a license, he acquires a Perception Sundance 12 open-water kayak and, followed by the river police, paddles downriver eventually all the way into Mexico. There his kayak is lost in a sandstorm and he crosses back into the United States. Unable to easily hitchhike, he starts traveling via freight train to Los Angeles. Not long after arriving, however, he starts feeling "corrupted" by modern civilization and decides to leave. Later, McCandless is forced to switch his travelling method back to hitchhiking due to rough security.

McCandless then arrives at a hippie commune, Slab City and encounters Jan and Rainey again. At the commune, he meets Tracy Tatro (Kristen Stewart), who becomes attracted to McCandless. McCandless decides to continue his goal for Alaska, much to everyone's sadness. McCandless then encounters a retired but lonely leather worker, Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook) in Salton City, California. After spending several months with Franz, McCandless decides to leave for Alaska and Franz gives him gear to use. Franz offers to adopt McCandless as his grandchild, but McCandless tells him that they should discuss this after McCandless returns from Alaska and Franz becomes extremely saddened by his departure.

Nearly two years after leaving his family, McCandless crosses a stream in a remote area of Alaska and sets up camp in an abandoned Fairbanks Transit bus, the "Magic Bus", used as a shelter for moose hunters. Initially McCandless is exhilarated by the isolation, the beauty of nature around and the thrill of living off the land as the spring thaw arrives. He hunts and gathers, and reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts. However life becomes harder; his supplies start to run out and although he kills a moose the meat is spoiled by flies and maggots. He realizes that nature is also harsh and uncaring. Ultimately on his journey of self-discovery, he concludes that true happiness can also be found in sharing, and in the joy of realization seeks to return from the wild to his friends and family.

However, to his despair McCandless finds that the stream that he crossed has become a violent torrent and he cannot return; he is trapped by nature. He is forced to return to the Magic Bus but now as a prisoner; having previously insisted on being self-sufficient he is no longer in control of his fate and can only hope for help from the outside. As his supplies run out, he is forced to gather and eat roots and plants. He has a book to help him to distinguish edible from inedible, but he confuses similar plants and is poisoned. He slowly and painfully starves. In his final hours, he continues to document his process of self-realization and accepts his fate, as he imagines his friends and family for a final time.

The epilogue occurs two weeks after his death when his body is found by moose hunters. The movie ends with a picture of him, found undeveloped in his camera from before he died. It tells that his sister carried his ashes from Alaska to the eastern seaboard by plane with the ashes in her backpack.

It premiered during the second edition of the Rome Film Feast. The film premiered outside of Fairbanks, Alaska on September 3, 2007, and the film was given a limited release on September 21, before a wide release on October 19.

"...but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things."

~ Christopher McCandless

Reference : Into The Wild ~ Wikipedia

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Panspermia : We Are The Aliens Documentary

Cosmic ૐ Oneness Aliens , Cosmology 0 Comments

The idea that life on Earth came from another planet has been around as a modern scientific theory since the 1960s when it was proposed by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. At the time they were ridiculed for their idea – known as 'Panspermia'. But now, with growing evidence, it's back in vogue and even being studied by NASA.

We meet the scientists on a mission to get to the bottom of the beginnings of life on Earth - from the team in Texas who are lovingly building a robotic submarine called DEPTHX to explore a moon of Jupiter, to Southern India where they are investigating a mysterious red rain which fell for two months in 2001. According to local scientist Godfrey Louis, the rain contains biological cells unlike any he had seen before – with no DNA and the ability to replicate at 300°C. Louis has come to the conclusion that the cells are extraterrestrial in origin.

Could all this really be proof that 'We Are The Aliens' ?

Panspermia : Its own origins and evolution ...

The idea that the seeds of life are ubiquitous throughout the cosmos goes back to Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher. In the 1800s, French chemist Louis Pasteur proposed that spontaneous generation of life could not have occurred on Earth. British physicist Lord Kelvin and others jumped on Pasteur's bandwagon and suggested that life might have come from space.

But modern-day panspermia advocates have been the Rodney Dangerfields of science.

In fact, just two leading researchers carry the bulk of the panspermia torch. The renowned Sir Fred Hoyle, known for his studies of star structure and the origin of the chemical elements in stars, has worked with Chandra Wickramasinghe over the past three decades to pioneer the modern theory of panspermia.

In the 1970s, Wickramasinghe and Hoyle found what they say are traces of life in the dust around distant stars. The duo then broadened the panspermia theory, arguing that a continual rain of life altering stuff from space, including germs that arrive in cycles related to solar activity has affected the course of evolution. The seeds, they say, are still coming.

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Peyote : The Last Of The Medicine Men Movie

Cosmic ૐ Oneness Documentaries , Entheogens 0 Comments

An investigation into the dramatic and mysterious world of the Huichol of Mexico – where perhaps the most traditional community of North America gave Benedict Allen the rare privilege of ritually taking their peyote, the hallucinogenic cacti, to bring him at last “face-to-face” with the gods.

One of Britain's leading adventurers, Benedict Allen, is particularly known for his television programmes - occasionally made with the help of a film crew but more typically without. He paved the way for the current generation of TV adventurers.

Uniquely in television, his philosophy is to genuinely immerse himself in extreme or alien environments, going alone and learning from indigenous people. As The Sunday Times put it: “Filming whatever actually happens, without all the hidden paraphernalia of a film crew, and whether in danger or lonely or undergoing various exotic rituals, he has effectively taken the viewers’ experience of adventure as far as it can go.”

However, most of his more challenging journeys – depicted in his first five books – in fact took place before he began filming his exploits. “I belonged to the last generation that might pass through a wilderness for months on end and not encounter a single person of my own culture. It was a privileged time: never in all those years can I remember coming across a single other foreigner, whilst out on a trek.” Such isolation seems inconceivable today.

Reference : Benedict Allen

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Retrospective : The Making of Pink Floyd's The Wall

Cosmic ૐ Oneness David Gilmour , Documentaries 0 Comments

"Retrospective" is an exclusive 45 minute retrospective documentary of interviews with Roger Waters, Alan Parker, Gerald Scarfe, Peter Biziou, Alan Marshall and James Guthrie about the making of the hugely successful album "The Wall"...

This documentary looks at the conception, design and live shows of The Wall performed by Pink Floyd in 1980 and 1981. It features in-depth 1980s era interviews with Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason and shows footage of The Wall performed at Earl's Court in 1980. It also features archival footage of the Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd and discusses how David Gilmour was brought into the band to initially augment their live shows when Syd became unreliable due to his drug problem and how Gilmour ultimately replaced him. A short retrospective of Pink Floyd post-Syd in included. The documentary also discusses is how Roger Waters' concept of The Wall came about and how Pink Floyd, the band, were on the verge of breaking up while performing The Wall concerts. Included are interviews with Mark Fisher (stage designer), Jonathan Park (stage designer), Gerald Scarfe (animation designer and director) and Bob Geldof and Alan Parker in relation to the making of The Wall Movie.