Director – Michael Jay Tucker
Genre – mystic, essay
Duration – 7 minutes 35 seconds
Country –
Language – English
Year – 2018
SYNOPSIS : This video is a sort of meditation on the nature of religious experience—something I’ve never had, personally, and suspect I never will. But an acquaintance of mine, who suffers (if suffer is the right word) from temporal lobe epilepsy, believes she has. When she has a seizure, she feels she is genuinely in the presence of the divine.As a good rationalist, I naturally interpret this as evidence that religion is simply a biological and cultural phenomenon. Perhaps there is, as some socio-biologists suggest, a part of the brain meant to generate feelings of awe and the sublime, and with good reason. A shared religion can unite a community in ways that mere force can never match. Thus, I, the cynic, can dismiss faith as merely the product of a pre-modern order, when humans endured the terrors of the Veldt and the Savanna…nature red in tooth and claw.But, even so, I also wonder if my acquaintance is not in a strange way gifted. During her seizures, she feels an overwhelming sense of de-familiarization. Objects and forces no longer match their simple definitions in the dictionary. Yet, in the long run, that could be a serious advantage. Already, we confront more and more entities that do not lend themselves to easy characterization.In which case I, not she, am handicapped… limited…like some eyeless creature from the cavern, attempting in my desperation to understand the concept of Dawn.Ratings
DMOFF AWARD –
Official Selection August 2018
