photo credit: Canon in 2D
What if :
You could down one tiny pill and access your entire brain, not just the 10% (supposedly) that the average human employs? Could within moments, without guidance from anything deeper, tap into a pristine level of intensely focused mental energy?
photo credit: me and the sysop
Well Limitless (2011), directed by Neil Burger, presents just that possibility. Here’s Netflix’s synopsis:
With his writing career dragging and his girlfriend casting him off, Eddie Morra’s life turns around when he takes a drug that provides astonishing mental focus — but its deadly side effects threaten his future.
I’m not setting out to write a review of the film (it’s mediocre), but rather, share how we can find the teachings of yoga embedded popular films.
Shortly after Eddie (Bradley Cooper) takes the pill — NZT — its effects become apparent: he has limitless access to every iota of information his senses have ever transported to his brain. When this dawns on him (talk about waking up!), his voiceover issues what I have selected as our next Cinema Sutra:
Cinema Sutra 2:1
“Suddenly I knew exactly what I needed to do”
For which we can draw a direct parallel to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1:20, in which he describes prajna as one way to Samadhi.
Prajna: A flash of illumination. Whatever you focus on, you have complete understanding. There is nothing unknown to you.
Fine print that should have been on the NZT bottle: Patanjali describes that this heightened level of intelligence happens as a result of regular practice. Not a sudden hit from a pill…or an endorphin-laced physical practice.
photo credit: Brooks Elliott
Eddie must have walked out of the room when the cautionary commercial came on the tv. He falls in love with the drug, as do others. He is soon brimming with not only knowledge, but the ability to speak any language he has ever heard, including hubris. Witness our next Sutra:
Cinema Sutra 2:2
“I knew everything about everything”
Poor Eddie. For him, knowing everything is nothing more than a cool party trick (and a sure thing on the stock market). Would he have brushed up on his yoga studies, he’d have gleaned the true value of:
Smrti: memory, retentive power; the ability to retain our life experiences. There is nothing that we have ever read, said, seen, or done that we don’t remember.
Fine print worth reading: with smrti, we remember what is important, we hold on to the highest goal of life.
It’s not about the ecstasy (in either form) of the moment, Eddie. Feeling ecstatic is, well, it is ecstatic. It can make you utter:
Cinema Sutra 2:3
“I don’t have delusions of grandeur, I have an actual recipe for grandeur.”
So does yoga (the Tantra tradition in particular). Difference being, yoga’s recipe is not empty. It is… limitless.
“Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come, but the better they are.”
-Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write, 1938
photo credit: irina slutsky
At the end of Limitless, Eddie’s girl asks, “All this energy of yours, all this focus, has been a drug?” It reminded me that we can feel such energy in yoga’s “NZT” too — its instant hit of a powerful, perhaps ecstatic, vinyasa-induced highs. But what’s the shelf life, the half life?
(Ducking for cover from tossed foam yoga blocks!)
How about it, yogis — What’s your drug, er, practice of choice? Do you seek a recipe packed with immediate sensation or a more tranquil, unstimulated “time-release” yoga approach to limitless potential?
