Tag: Presence

Suspend your conditioned disbelief and open your mind to the possibility that you’ve been shortsighted from the start. Now, try to imagine a world far beyond your understanding. Why am I instructing you to do this? Because that’s the reality of this world. It’s the reality of the world we’ve all been born into.

Vision Statement:

Human beings have historically relied on their limited physical perceptions to find reason and make sense of the world around them. This ‘making sense of things’ has given rise to the amassment of a vast database of accepted knowledge in every field of study which has piqued the curiosity of mankind since the beginning of time. Our need to label and categorize each new discovery and experience, and subsequently place it in the appropriate field of study, has often led to disputes between the various ologies. Notoriously, theology, philosophy, sociology and the physical and theoretical sciences, have been judged as incompatible, incomparable, and even adversarial in their belief systems. This disunifying categorization of ideas has invariably led to one blind spot after another, one war of ideology after another, and yes, one battered and bruised ego after another. But can one belief system ever completely negate another? I think not. And even if the human race could unanimously agree on which belief system we should follow, how could we ever know if we’re heading toward the purest or truest perception of reality. Third Eye from the Sun will seek to blur the boundaries between ideologies. The film will question the commonly accepted ‘sensible’ nature of reality. It is likely that human beings will never fully unravel the mysteries of the Universe, let alone understand how consciousness affects our perception of what is actually happening here. Can the energy fields emitted by collective consciousness be captured and contained to be selectively deployed as curing agents for the existential threats we humans are currently facing? I don’t know for sure, but intuition is telling me that this fringe ideology is worth a thorough exploration.

Synopsis:

Maynard Otto Barrett, a discredited and disillusioned quantum physicist, finds himself ostracized by family, friends and associates because he’s been increasingly outspoken about his nonconventional theories concerning the nature of human consciousness. As a boy, Maynard’s favorite relative, and the person who introduced him to the wonders of physics and philosophy in the first place, was his mother’s brother, Uncle Neil. Maynard would visit his uncle’s house out on the marshes whenever he was given permission by his mother, but it was only on rare occasions that she would grant him that permission because she didn’t trust her brother’s judgment. Cindy Barrett knew her older brother Neil was always getting completely wrapped up in his crazy experiments and she feared her little boy would be easily influenced by his madcap imaginings. As any good son would, Maynard tried to assuage his mother’s worries about the time he was spending with Uncle Neil, but the more time he spent with him, the more apparent his intrigue became and the less convincing his arguments were. His uncle’s strange stories and ideas were indeed unrealistic, but Maynard truly enjoyed the way he felt when he was hanging out with Uncle Neil in his ad-hoc laboratory. There, he felt like the world was a magical place. A place where anything could happen at any given time.

Maynard’s father had never shown much interest in his son, or anything else for that matter, so when he abandoned Cindy and Maynard just after the boy’s seventh birthday, Uncle Neil became the one and only male role model in young Maynard’s life. Uncle Neil taught his nephew everything he’d learned through a lifetime of studying physics and metaphysics, but the most important thing he taught him was how to think for himself. At ten years old, when his mother informed him that they would be moving away from the rural coastline of southern Georgia to look for better employment opportunities in Atlanta, Maynard rebelled. At first, he tried to reason with her, telling her that they were doing just fine in Shellman Bluff, but he knew how unreasonable that sounded, so his second strategy was to go to his uncle and ask him to talk to his mother. Neil knew his sister well. He knew that when she made a decision to do something, there was really no point in trying to talk her out of it. Maynard and his mom never made it to Atlanta. Instead, they settled in the city of Athens, where Cindy found work at the University of Georgia, the college that Maynard would attend for the first four years of his undergraduate studies. When they first arrived in Athens, Maynard and his mom talked often about returning to Shellman Bluff, at least to visit Uncle Neil, but within months they were both so caught up in building new lives for themselves that they only rarely mentioned his name, and when they did, it was with a nostalgic reverence that left them both shaking their heads in wonder. In the isolated social environment of Shellman Bluff, Uncle Neil’s outlandish ideas had seemed fairly rational, but in the brightly lit and intellectually progressive city of Athens, those same ideas seemed to be completely delusional.

During his graduate studies at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, Maynard attempted to contact his Uncle Neil a couple of times through the mail but never received a response. The last time Maynard had seen or heard from him was the day he and his mom drove out of Shellman Bluff heading for Athens. His uncle had always been an off-the-grid kind of guy. As far as Maynard knew, he had never owned a cell phone and he mistrusted the government to the point of paranoia, so it was understandable that it was difficult to contact him. Every time that Maynard thought about driving north to check on Uncle Neil, something would keep him from it. Years went by, and life went on. Maynard earned a PhD in quantum physics, minoring in philosophy from MIT. He was forty-three, married and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and his world seemed to be spiraling out of control. For the past twenty years his internal thoughts had been waging war with every exterior source of knowledge that he’d been introduced to during his studies. In both his professional and his personal life Maynard felt like an imposter. He was losing touch with everything that had ever mattered to him, which now included an estranged wife and two children of his own. When he took an honest look back at his life, he realized that the day he said goodbye to Uncle Neil was the day that he had stopped considering the unlimited possibilities of life and had started instead to imagine only the limitations.

Maynard knew that it was time to return to Shellman Bluff. He’d concluded that the only way he could untangle the mess he’d made of things was to return to his uncle’s laboratory to see for himself if the man he knew as Uncle Neil was legitimately insane or simply misunderstood by society. He had no idea whether his uncle was alive or dead, but he knew this journey was likely to change his long-held perceptions about everything and everyone. Against all opposition and inquisition, Maynard leaves Cambridge and heads for Shellman Bluff and his uncle’s home in the marsh. What he discovers there is so far outside the boundaries of his previous experience that it makes him not only question his own sanity, but it leads him down a pathway and into an alternative reality from which he may never return.