Devils tearing your life away: Jacob's Ladder

The demons in Jacob's Ladder look like the demonic paintings of William Blake. This is an original, terrifying movie. I picked it up by accident because the plot interested me. But I didn't know what I was in for. I was struck by the same feeling I had when I watched The Descent for the first time. It was a sleeper and barely made a blip on the radar in terms of gross. It's looks like it's the same with Jacob's Ladder.



Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam war veteran, a mentally unstable one at that. A bayonet pierces his side during the war, but his consciousness soldiered on in some unfamiliar mode. Has he died? We don't know for sure. Horned creatures begin to terrorize him. Interesting territory is explored. Just how is our consciousness going to adjust after death? Do we have any idea? Are we going to notice? Assuming we don't have a good clue because we're really old. How long will it take for our consciousness to catch up, to realize it's dead, assuming there is a hereafter, and if there is, there's a limbo, a no man's land, not quite Heaven, but not quite Hell. It's almost like the long, swift sucking sensation you get when you go down a steep water slide, or maybe the feeling you get when you just clear the edge of a gigantic waterfall: you're no longer on the river; but you're not where the waterfall meets the water down below.

That's sort of where Jocob might be. Little things begin to break through. He swears he sees a lizard-like tail squirm beneath a homeless man. Hideous faces that look like melting wax roam slowly just behind passing car windows. During a scene, Jacob's chiropractor quotes the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:

Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: 'the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'

Jacob's Ladder is what Jacob is supposed to be on, the ladder being a meeting place between Heaven and Hell. But 'the Ladder' also has another meaning: it was an experimental drug given to American soldiers during Vietnam, and without their knowing. The drug made a short-cut to a person's urge for primal rage. It's a ladder leading down to that part of the psyche. New revelations about the drug shed light on the mystery of Jacob's alleged death!

An outrageous chimera

I'd like to talk about C.S. Lewis' argument against Naturalism in chapter 3 of his book Miracles. It's an argument that God used to save my faith; in fact, the book itself I credit with making Christianity as a whole more sensible. It's impact on my life is incalculable. I can't help but resort to lines of reasoning in this book when in times of intellectual doubt or even spiritual despair. There's a charm about it that lures you, almost like the perfume of a beautiful woman wafting your nostrils as she thoughtlessly passes you by.  The prose are down to earth and yet you find, latching onto it, a fiery dialectic and a stealth rhetoric, that sneaks in through the trapdoor of my prejudices like a ninja.  

Perhaps the most telling and obvious and believable fact about our experience of the world is that contact with a spiritual realm of any sort is close to nil. That bump in the night our scientific minds quickly render a natural fluke. Tales of ghosts we greet with justified suspicion but with a curious fascination, and we marshal forward the best case we can to salvage what just might be a glimpse into that aspect of reality which would be the indisputable proof that Nature isn't all there is. But at the end of the day, our reason is left unsatisfied, and our imagination is left wanting more, thinking that even if the proof could sate, the banality of it threatens to make it uninteresting. If there's anything I'd like to believe more, it's that the spiritual world outshines the physical, like going to an actual Pearl Jam concert outshines listening to a live bootleg on my ipod.

All Lewis tries to do in the chapter is prove that something we do everyday, something as intimate as breathing, is enough to sound the death knell for Naturalism: Reasoning. How can something so obvious escape the notice of the mass of philosophers, or maybe not escape their notice: it's significance is just a chameleon and they lack the eyes to see Reasoning's distinct character. Notice what I've written so far. You see the words strung together in (I hope) a meaningful way in order to illicit my intended point, a point I hope to be rational, and that sufficient attention to the flow of the argument could end in the persuasion of your mind, a faculty driven by reason. But notice these strange mystical concepts I'm using: mind, reason, rational, faculty. Aren't these concepts homeless stragglers in the Naturalistic Universe's ghetto? But in my imagination, don't these concepts incessantly try to find a home, as frantically as the fly in a frenzy on the windowsill, beating in a fury against the window pane, seeing the promised land, and yet shoved back by some impermeable, transparent barrier? How can any of this mishmash of words, phrases, concepts, and sentences be anything more meaningful than a vomit, a sneeze, a cough, an ulcer, if they weren't guided along by something behind, more than, other than mere matter? Would we have any reason to trust it? Wouldn't all our so called reasons be just as vulnerable to such a suspicion? The naturalist slits his own throat. He gives an account of how the brain got to where it is today, but the account takes away any credentials the brain might have to tell us anything rational about what the world might really be like. It's like the definitive volume formulating the airtight case there is no such thing as language, or books, or proofs! It's an enraged pacifist conquering neighboring lands in the name of pacifism!

Our brain must have some sort of mystical capacity to rip through the fabric of mere Nature in every act of reasoning. It must be straddling two lands, foreign to each other, like the voice in a radio is to the radio.  It must link up to, be in constant contact with, rub shoulders with, this other reality. It must be free of this sticky spider web of causality, this incessant procession of dominoes; it has to differ from it in kind. If it lacks this capacity, our language is stripped of rationality. How does Nature account for rationality? What story can it tell us? That evolution gives us the illusion of rationality so we can survive? But even in that account, we're left with the illusion of rationality, and in that case, what reason do we have to believe that evolution gives us this, or even that evolution is true?

There's got to be something more.

Waiting for News

In 1972 Hiroo Onodaa, a lieutenant in the Japanese army, finally surrendered to allied forces on the island of Lubang.  The Japanese stationed Onodaa on the Philippine island to conduct guerilla warfare operations against arriving American forces.  Unfortunately for Onodaa, news never came of Japan's defeat; consequently, he spent an additional three decades evading others in an attempt to fulfill his mission.  Oddly, today I find myself wondering if I am Onodaa.

In the 14th century John Wycliffe and other founders of the Protestant Church split from the Catholic Church in protest over issues involving papal indulgences.  Of course this split led to a schism that still exists today within the Universal Church.  The battle lines were drawn regarding: works based salvation, the necessity of a priest for forgiveness, and the existence of purgatory.

To the first I discovered I was wrong, to the second that there is perhaps biblical support, and to the third that my understanding of purgatory was twisted.  I'd like to write on each of these later, but for now I am left to wonder: Is the war over?

Did Jesus say we were gods?

The main verses are John 10:34-36:

³⁴Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods'^[a]? ³⁵If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken— ³⁶what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'?

On the face of it, it looks like Jesus is saying they were gods. If they were gods, why is it blasphemy that Christ calls Himself the Son of God? Seems like a good argument. If it's blasphemy for Christ to call Himself the Son of God, then it's blasphemy for the Jews to say they were gods. So, if Christ is blasphemous, so are the Jews. But I don't think the Jews are gods and I do think Christ is making another kind of argument.

1. One thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is talking to Jews, the most fiercly monotheistic people next to the Muslims. With that in mind, 'gods' has got to mean something else.

2. Jesus is alluding to Psalm 82: human judges are called gods. From this, it looks like Jesus is using a kind of rhetoric. If they have no problem calling human judges gods, why can't Christ claim to be the Son of God?

3. It looks like they were called gods because they were judges that decided the life and death of people. They aren't gods in the sense of being divine, because later on in the Psalm it says that they'll one day die and that they're mere men.

4. Some scholars think Asaph (the author of the Psalm) was using irony. Remember, the judges in the Pslam were unjust. So to call them gods is ironical. It was almost an implicit insult. This sheds new light on what Jesus might have meant when He made the allusion. Since the Jews knew the Bible inside and out, they would have known exactly what He meant, which is this: what God called the unjust judges in irony, Christ is in reality. This is the interpretation I lean toward.

So, in context, the main point is about Christ's diety instead of man's.

This is my first opinion of this.

Solzhenitsyn gave me cancer

I do not have it yet; however, I imagine I will be thinking it thirty years from now.  For those not aquatinted with the works of The Novelist, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, he is a majestic man of words.  A mathematician by education, he was serving as an artillery officer in the Red Army during the Second World War when he was arrested for a political crime and sentenced to eight years in the gulags of Siberia.  His crime? He insulted the "leader" of our red ally in a private letter with his friend.

(I wonder why people fear Obama's request that others send the email addresses of his detractors to the White House?  Regardless, I digress.)

After surviving the eight years of siberian, hard labor, he lived in exile within Russia.  But, in his incarceration he learned two things: the vile happenings of the soviet prison system and the saving power of Jesus Christ.  Fortunately for us all, he wrote about them both.

Solzhenitsyn does not hit the reader over the head with the message of salvation; however, in his fictional characters he allows us to observe how the true men around him behaved and how the Baptists, through their beautiful spirit, brought him to the Logos.

But, The Novelist does not write about Christ alone, or even predominately, instead he writes of beauty and brotherly love; He writes of joy in a warm bowl of soup; He speaks of happiness in four ounces of daily bread; and he speaks of the lovely power of a cigarette.  All-the-while we we trudge through the circles of the Siberian hells: first to last; one novel after another.  And via these hells he gives me knew knowledge, like how to eat my food to best appreciate what I have, and awakens in me latent longings long suppressed: Like a love for Christ and cigarettes.

Come and See

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" ~ Gandhi

So the acolyte of peace is quoted as saying, and although in it there lies a truth, I believe it ignores the history that surrounds us.  I wonder if the Russian soldiers, shipped-off to the gulags of Siberia for betraying their country by surrendering to the Germans, would agree after witnessing the hero's treatment given to American P.O.W.s?  Regardless, today I am more interested in the kernel of truth the quotation contains.  I am led there via one of the greatest movies my eyes have witnessed: Come and See.


Created and filmed in Soviet Russia, the film chronicles the life of a young man as he prepares to join the Belorussian resistance to the German invasion of World War Two.  The film opens with the young man and his friend digging in the ground in an attempt to discover some abandoned rifles.  A rifle is a requirement for anyone attempting to join the partisans.  Afterwards, he finds his treasure and returns home and begins his journey into his dream world: that of a soldier.  Unfortunately, he finds out a truth learned throughout time, through the blood and suffering of countless billions: war is a nightmare.  I shall not go into the specifics of what he beholds, but needless to say he is changed.  What was once a lad with a perpetual smile and soft face, becomes the painting of Dorian Gray.


Perhaps Gandhi was not 100 percent accurate in what he said; however, the truth of his statement I found within the film.  So, Come and See the hell.