Tim Miller

“In passing we should note this curious mark of our age: The only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute”
― Francis A. Schaeffer

“For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“All my life I have had a passionate desire to understand how our universe works. Why are our lives the way they are? Why is there so much suffering in life? Is there a larger intelligence operating in the universe, and if so, toward what end? What is the purpose and project of existence? In our culture's current materialist paradigm that reduces everything to physical matter, these questions are considered beyond the pale of genuine knowledge, and attempts to answer them are seen as being purely speculative enterprises. In my sessions, however, I was given the opportunity to explore these questions in exercises of profound experiential instruction choreographed by a vast intelligence. I was shown things that stunned and transfixed me, was allowed to experience things that completely reframed my understanding of existence.
What philosopher could turn down such an opportunity?
As this journey deepened, I found myself entering a spiraling love affair with this intelligence, a Being so vast I can only describe it using the vocabulary of the Divine even while the sessions themselves were repeatedly demonstrating how limited and childlike our historical conceptions of the Divine have been. I agree with Jonathan Goldman who in speaking of ayahuasca said, "The rituals of the Daime are not meant to be an 'experience,' but rather to provide a chance to interact intimately with a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and spiritual power."* I do not know the limits of this Being and I hesitate to even call it a "Being" at all. As I have experienced it, it is the fabric of existence itself. I think of it as the generative intelligence of our universe, the Mind of the Cosmos-both transcendent source and manifest body of existence, beyond all categories of He or She yet infinitely more than any It.
Knowing that I could sustain the deepest intimacy with this intelligence for only a few hours on any given day and that I had no control over which session would become one of these magical days, I kept driving forward. When the communion opened, it was so intense that at the end of the day I would feel supremely fulfilled and at the same time achingly bereaved because I could not stay with my Beloved.
Everyone must choose a name for the Absolute, a title that approximates its truth, power, and beauty. Though I will use many terms to describe it in this book, in my heart of hearts I call it my Beloved. Once held in her embrace, once dissolved into her radiant splendor, I was hers forever. I will be hers until my last breath and after still. If my description tilts toward the feminine, it is because of two things-the specific story of creation that emerged on this journey and the love that reuniting with this reality awakened within me.”
― Christopher M. Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven

“A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area - a space boundaried and defined by mountains, rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change. Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the in the center of a little cosmos - or a big one, if his intelligence is vast - and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. Native intelligence is what Huck Finn had rafting the Mississippi, what Thoreau had by his pond, what Kerouac had in Desolation Lookout and lost entirely the instant he caught a whiff of any city. But some have it in cities - like the Artful Dodger, picking his way through a crowd of London pockets; like Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums. Sissy Hankshaw had it on freeways, Woody Guthrie in crowds of fruit pickers, Ghandi in jails. Almost everybody has a dab of it wherever he or she feels most at home..”
― David James Duncan, The River Why