"We are prisoners of our own subjectivity."

Reflecting on how art interacts with our ceaseless thinking minds

Still from Past Lives

This is Mohnish Soundararajan, a filmmaker in Portland, Oregon, the director and screenwriter of the upcoming ‘Monochrome’, and a member of Desert Island Studios. ‘Reflections’ is a magazine-style newsletter where I reflect on film, books, human nature, life, the mystery of who we are, and everything beyond. These reflections are spoken orally into a microphone, interview-style. They’ve been edited and reworked for clarity, length, and fun. Enjoy.

Reflection: on how art influences our thinking minds

“One of the things I've been thinking about for a while has been the difference between experiencing something and thinking your way through it.

When you think through something—you're lost in the fog of thought. You're lost in the fog of discursive thinking; you're lost in the fog of ideas, of who you should be—concepts layered over the reality of life.

And so you see the world, yes—but everything is filtered through the prism of your own ideas. Filtered through the prism of your own concepts. Filtered through your own sentences. Filtered through your own linguistic models that are coagulated in your head.

We’re all different, of course, but one of the things we all share is that we're very much in our heads.

We're just in our fucking heads, all day.

Our heads are so linear in how they think, and how they see the world, and how they see things. And what it becomes is this giant wall between us in our heads vs us actually experiencing the world.

One of the reasons I love art, one of the reasons I love music, and one of the reasons I love film, is because art gets you into the mode of experience. It gets you into the mode of experiencing, it gets you into the mode of the world beyond thought, the world beyond right and wrong judgments, the world beyond ideas of how you think the world should be.

And what's really interesting is that for a lot of us—if we've practiced any mindfulness meditation—we all have a sense of this. (And if you haven't, then the idea that there's a reality beyond our perceptions can be kind of surprising and strange and shocking the first time you encounter it).

But one of the things that I've realized is that when you see a tree, we have this idea of what a tree is, we have the word of what a tree is, we have our past associations of what a tree is, and we layer that onto the tree itself.

But that has nothing to do with the tree. The tree is simply a tree. It's simply what it is.

It has nothing to do with the long litany of ideas that I have in my head about it.

One of the things that I love to say over and over again is: we are prisoners of our own subjectivity.

And I think that when we watch art, one of the reasons it's so rewarding and so lovely to sit back and watch a movie, so lovely to connect with a lover, or a friend, to receive a hug, is because we're moving beyond the realm of thought, beyond the realm of our prison-like minds, and we're moving into pure experience.

And so when I see a movie, and I’m in the theater, one of the things that I think about is: damn, I'm actually in my head still. We're all kind of addicted to our heads, we're all addicted to our own thinking, and one of the things that I try to do—reliably—is when I'm in the theater, is to just experience it.

Just experience the movie. Don’t be a film critic, don’t analyze. Don’t be smart. Just feel it.

Obviously, thinking is still happening—a character might do something on screen, and then you sort of think about it, and a little bit of thinking is part of the process of watching a movie.

(I mean: even after you watch a movie, there's this big moment where everyone gets together and we’re all like, well, what was that all about? What did that mean? And you reduce an irreducible experience of three hours or two hours into a couple sentences or into a long, half-baked monologue you say to your friends.)

But I think the thing with art that makes it so valuable is that we're stuck in our heads all day. We think about our goals, we're thinking about the dishes, we're thinking about very linear things. We're thinking about: I need to get this done, I need to get that done, and art reminds us that there is a world beyond our goals, there is a world beyond the little things we need to get done, there is a world beyond our recursive problems that we rehearse in our minds over and over again. And beyond that is just pure, fresh experience.

And I think the more that you watch art, the more your psyche is rebalanced. The thinker meets the experiencer, and both shake hands.

Thinking, obviously, is invaluable; instrumental, even. It is one of the best parts of being a person; it is a facility that I love within myself, and cherish, and use to the fullest extent. So much of life, of conversation, of everything, isn’t possible without thinking. But I also think experience is why we're here.

It's what makes the world beautiful—and I think connecting into that is important because it connects us back to the energy of life; into the energy of being alive.”

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