More on "Knowing," starring Nicholas Cage

I have more to say regarding Knowing. Only if you've seen this movie will you fully appreciate what follows.

To whet your appetite: The Whisper People

I believe the Whisper People are not angels of the Lord God, who is (for the most part) the Protector of G-20 Values and Privileges (truth be told). Two reasons:

• The world is not supposed to end as depicted in the movie - that is, without a Tribulation or a Second Coming of Jesus.

• Angels would not need a space ship which utilizes a magnetic propulsion system. More likely, their vessel would move by divine power and instantly.

When the ship rises into the sky, we see a large number of small, smooth black pebbles also rising - but only for a distance of about 10 feet. Koestler is standing in an area, just below the rising ship, which is heavily blanketed with these pebbles. They rise up and then stop, as if frozen in place.

I believe they had a heavy iron content which was attracted by the magnetic field of the rising ship. Then they reached a point where the earth's gravitational pull on their mass exactly matched the strength of the ship's magnetic field - which is why they appeared to be frozen in place. Then as the ship rose further, its magnetic field's effect on the pebbles decreased to the point where the pebbles simply fell back to earth.

Seeing those pebbles rise made me realize the spaceships weren't "divinely" propelled or moved by the Will of God. A technology which generated a magnetic field was involved. Therefore, I had to dismiss the Whisper People as Angels of the Lord.

So who uses ships like that?

To merely claim that aliens use ships like that isn't specific enough. For mere aliens would not have known Diana Weyland's status after she died in a traffic accident. As a Buddhist, my knee-jerk answer would have been "Bodhisattvas." But that covers a lot of territory - I'm a Bodhisattva but I don't fly around in space ships.

However, since there are 52 stages of Bodhisattva practice, I suppose those in the upper stages would have ready access to that kind of flying technology. And those in the highest stages wouldn't need ships at all but would be capable of traveling from point A to point B without traversing any of the points in between. [Presumably, they would be capable of using such transcendental powers to take Caleb and Abby with them - that is, without using a ship.]

Chapter Seven of the Lotus Sutra tells us who uses ships like that:

QUOTE:

At that time the five hundred ten thousand million brahma kings, accompanied by their palaces...journeyed together to the northwestern region [of the universe]...

:UNQUOTE.

A Brahma king is the highly spiritually-evolved ruler of a sizable segment of a galaxy - a shape shifter capable of manifesting himself in more than one body. That is, those four Whisper People in the movie were really four manifestations of one Brahma king. More to the point: All of the Whisper People in the numerous "space ships" (that is, palaces) which we saw leaving earth were manifestations on one Brahma king - the One that rules our particular portion of the galaxy.

The story

In the autumn of 2009, Professor Koestler comes into possession of a sheet of paper. This is completely covered with row after row of apparently patternless," hand-written digits which aren't punctuated or grouped in any way; they're more like one huge run-on sentence. This sheet had been prepared 50 years earlier by a girl, to whom these numbers had been channeled, then buried in a time capsule during the dedication ceremony of her new elementary school.

Koestler transcribed these numbers onto a white board at his home and, by hunch and trial and error, learned their significance by circling arbitrary groups of them with a magic marker and then punching into his computer those numbers in each group which he assumed to represent a date. His computer search showed that on each date in his circled strings of numbers, somewhere on earth there was a disaster with the number of fatalities being equal to the remaining numbers in that circled string.

Koestler noticed, however, that an appreciable number of digits on his white board couldn't be included in a circle assuming only dates and fatalities being represented. Only later does it hit him, those remaining digits represent the GPS coordinates of the disaster sites.  Before this realization, he noticed three groups of numbers at the bottom of the sheet which show dates within the upcoming week during which three more disasters are to occur.

The last three disasters were to be:

• A jetliner crash which Dr. Koestler was intended to witness (and did, through no conscious decision of his own to be at the predicted location). In fact, it's only when he actually arrives at that location that it hits him: Each group of digits, when properly grouped into a circled series, predicts not only date and number of fatalities but also lists location by latitude and longitude (expressed in decimals).

• A subway train derailment, of which he was almost a victim. Though he intentionally went to the general vicinity of this event (now knowing its lat and long) just before it happened, he ended up being in the midst of that accident only after being chased from street level by the police.

• The end of the world, which he ended up learning the cause of but lamented, "What good does it do to know of impending disaster but not be able to do anything about it?" [The "good" of knowing was a present to Dr. Koester, which would benefit him in this life and in other lives to follow.]

Dr. Koestler's son Caleb had been chosen, with a handful of other children around the world, to be saved and to start over again. They are whisked away to an earth-like planet in palaces by the Whisper People before a giant solar flare destroys all life on earth.

It's interesting to note that Caleb and Abby weren't perfect - Abby was mildly dyslexic and Caleb wore (though didn't "need") a hearing aid to compensate for a mild case of aphasia. They were not chosen for their perfection but for their karmic attraction to each other and to the others in the group of the saved (my best guess, about 100). This attraction, which could be perceived by a Brahma king, would ensure the cooperation needed to make the best go of it in the new world.

Of those who weren't saved

What about the billions of people who were incinerated in the solar flare? Was their extinction due to their bad karma or sinfulness? As Diana Weyland pointed out: "What difference does it make, we all die in the end anyway?"

Exactly! And that includes stars and planets. It was earth's karma to have the life scorched off of it by the sun, "whose" karma it was to spit out that killer flare. As for the people of earth who died, it was their karma to be there but not necessarily as punishment. Even the good can die horrible deaths, but in a Buddhist context that simply means they had to be here to do what they had to do and the merciful suddenness of their "premature" deaths served to expiate a huge portion of their karmic debt.

But there were those who didn't die in the fire [nobody ever really dies]:

QUOTE:

When living beings witness the end of a kalpa

and all is consumed in a great fire,

this, my land, remains safe and tranquil,

constantly filled with heavenly and human beings...

where living beings enjoy themselves at ease.

:UNQUOTE *

The "land" referred to is the realm superimposed on our physical landscape which is where the Buddha dwells and teaches. And which is where all practicing Buddhists aspire to be, minus those who intentionally wish to end up in hell in order to preach to and save the unenlightened and long-suffering hell-dwellers.

Final comments

I was highly sensitized in advance to what Knowing had to say. Twenty years of Buddhist practice and reading the Lotus Sutra aloud over 80 times will do that. I'll say more about Knowing at some future date, hopefully before October 19, 2009 (the date the world is supposed to end, remember?).

Steven Searle was a candidate for U.S. President in 2008:

"Maybe I'm guilty of reading too much into what many reviewers claim is at best a mediocre film. Or maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill. But...I don't think so" - Steve.

Founder of The Best Party Available

* Lotus Sutra, 16^th chapter, translated by Burton Watson

Contact me: bpa_cinc@yahoo.com

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