I AM – By Carlos Juan (CJ) Mendez

In this deep, insightful documentary, Hollywood Comedy director Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Bruce Almighty, Nutty Professor) films & recounts his experiences after having a bad bike accident that left him with a concussion and damage to his frontal lobe. He had to spend lots of time in bed & recovery. Others with this condition were led to depression & suicide. When left with nothing but your health, you contemplate life in many other ways. He realized it’s not about money, fame & fortune, everything he had already attained, and new lessons were learned from a new perspective. He decided to use the time to try to find out more about what’s wrong with our world and what we can do about it. He meets with spiritual philosophers & leaders & shows how even as kids we go to school to learn to compete & be number one. We’re conditioned to grow so we can consume more which equals good, since good is the measure of life. Everything is an advertisement & money equals happiness. Accumulation seems key, but this is all a big mental illness & how lots of it creates emptiness & loneliness. He found himself in his big house with nothing but his health. Everything didn’t mean anything anymore. He realized this isn’t the natural rhythm of life which equals happiness.

So what is it? What’s wrong with our world? What can we do to fix it?

Our economy is a monster, a huge machine that we created & not a natural force of nature. And what is it for? It all makes you think. It’s as if we’re trained to be greedy, aggressive & violent, to separate yours & mine. We’re taught that’s the nature of life, evolution, survival of the fittest. Yet, we experience shock after shock to prove that we got it all wrong and that and that the true natural state of who we are is love, not war. We come together in life after disaster since compassion & empathy are key & our human basic nature is to cooperate. Cooperation is of the highest value & domination is of the lowest. Even in the animal jungle their nature is cooperation & democracy. Like a flock of birds in the air or school of fish in the ocean all moving together in unison, they actually decide together so fast we can’t even see it but not one single bird or fish is taking the lead, they are all agreeing as one. Also, he touches on the “Butterfly Effect” and how whatever happens on one side of the globe affects the other. Our DNA is very close to many animals on this earth & we’re all related. WE ARE ONE.

We learn that sympathy is actually our strongest instinct in human nature & this is also something to Darwin stressed in his studies (aside from his theory of evolution & survival of fittest), but one of the key points that everyone chose to ignore in his teachings as we were brought up because we don’t honor sympathy & they didn’t want us to focus on that. Society and those in control wanted us to focus on the competition, not our true empathic nature.

The truth of who we are is that we are because we belong. I AM.

We have what’s called the mirror neuron, when we see & feel what you see in others. For instance, you see someone get hurt on TV & you feel that pain in a way. And evolution has been hard wired for a compassionate response & a need to serve others more than ourselves. But some have what’s called the selfish gene & attitude that has been embedded & taught to them when sympathy is actually our strongest instinct in human nature. Our hearts rule. Scientifically, more information goes from your heart to your brain than from your brain to your heart. Compassion, love, and gratitude are key.

Then, Tom did a test with yogurt. A scientist hooked up electrodes to Tom & also to the yogurt. Tom’s thoughts were affecting the yogurt’s neurons & if he thought about something painful or stressful, the yogurt would react. It was pretty insane to see, but it shows that even in simple state, the yogurt is aware & alive. Think about it, it has water, cultures & bacteria as well. It’s a celled organism. It reminded me of a study I read about where a doctor put electrodes onto a plant & someone came into the room with fire & the plant reacted. And when the fire was removed from the room, the plant calmed down. The fact is that we’re all connected on many levels we will never even see or comprehend naturally. And our argon atoms (what we exhale) stays in the air & becomes part of the whole, the ether, the other layer of unseen, interconnected energy in our world. Think Star Trek on an invisible biological & cellular level.

Our mission on this earth, and what Tom was trying to portray in this documentary is to bring consciousness & awareness & perception to others. Until people all start thinking on the same level, to cooperate as one, there will always be separation, negativity & misunderstanding. This all seems so basic & elementary, but it’s deeper than we think and we’re far off our path.

Towards the end of the documentary, Tom ends up selling everything big he had… the big house, the private jet and fancy car. He now lives in a modest home in California, bikes to work and takes commercial flights. In the end reminds us that the need for personal property beyond our means is a mental illness. Nothing in nature takes more than it needs and only love & cooperation will save our world.

I AM. WE ARE. ONE

http://iamthedoc.com/

“Competition as we know it is dead. Collaboration is the new competition. It’s about working with each other, not against. Together we all win.” – Rich German“

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part in time & space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts & feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires & to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures & the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure & the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” – Albert Einsten