7) Dream Telepathy: Worldviews in Collision, Worldviews in Metamorphosis and Peter Weir's film "The Last Wave"

In addition to the need for positive technology, and confronting the specter of science, it has been another story about dreams that has aided my insight--Peter Weir's film "The Last Wave" (1977). Weir's film is the story of worldviews in collision and worldviews in metamorphosis; specifically the refusal of the dominant European culture to accept the sacred places, traditions and concept of the dreamtime.

In this film Richard Chamberlain protrays a lawyer defending several aboriginals accused of murdering a member of their tribe for stealing sacred objects. Throughout the film Chamberlain is haunted by strange prophetic dreams that he fails to understand. Toward the end of the film, Chamberlain is faced with a giant tital wave, which is how the film ends. I had always thought this ending meant that Chamberlain had not understood his dreams in time to perceive this prophecy of disaster. Chelsea Malone, one of my students in the fall of 2003, finally gave me the answer to this film's ending.

"A wave can bring two different outcomes. A wave can bring something new to shore and expose it to the world. Or it can submerge something and take it away from existence" (Malone, 2003).

I had never understood the wave as bringing something new to shore as a metaphor of personal transformation. This insight allowed me to reflect on the meaning of my own telepathic dream, that while my inquiry into its operational mechanism led me to this confrontation with the shadow consequences of a science of consciousness--Michael Persinger's mind-control device--averting its creation will require our own personal transformation.

More specifically, the methods and actions that we must engage in to prevent us from creating this mind-control device (see blogs #4 and #5 of this series) will necessitate a transpersonal evolution or metamorphosis in humankind's ethical responsibility to resist creating this knowledge and its technical application. Within the last 60 years this has been expressed as the need for "humanistic ethics," "humanistic science," "a science of transcendence," and "the technocratic society and its youthful oposition" (Roszak, 1969). In sum we need to acknowledge my criticisms of a science of consciousness and the need to reclaim humankind's capacity for communion. Thereby recognizing our personal consciousness as a reflection of our geomantic earthmind and the psychic ecolutionary connection to plants and anomals as the transpersonal response to our increasingly technologized culture and human arrogance.

References

Malone, Chelsea. (2003). Personal comment.

Roszak, Theodore. (1969). The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. Garden Cith, New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday.

Weir, Peter. (1977). The Last Wave. Santa Monica, CA: Rhino Records, Inc.