Insights from the movie "Groundhog Day". Again...
An essay on video games, reincarnation and a way to combat the rise of authoritarianism.
Note: I am republishing this article because I mistakenly opened comments only to paid subscribers. I guess I needed a re-do. How fitting. All are welcome to comment.
I grew up in the 70’s and early 80’s in Vestal, NY, a suburb of the town of Binghamton which is best known for being one of the hubs of the State’s university system, a single tall building abandoned for more than a decade because of PCB contamination following a fire and “spiedies”, a kind of submarine sandwich consisting of heavily marinated chunks of various kinds of grilled meat on white bread.
The winters were snowy, bitterly cold and, especially for my parents who grew up in southern India, incompatible with intelligent life. If you didn’t have the money or interest in swishing down icy hills on skis there was very little to do between November and April.
Then, in 1975, something miraculous happened for our family of three. The Oakdale Mall opened in the neighboring town of Johnson City. My parents could browse through department stores like Fowlers, Montgomery Ward and SEARS in a temperature controlled environment. There was a large water fountain, Friendly’s ice cream and an Alladin’s Castle, a video game arcade.
I was about 11 when I stopped throwing pennies into the fountain and started depositing quarters into “Night Driver” one of the original arcade games. It was an expensive proposition for my parents, especially given the fact that even if I managed to earn “bonus” time, the game lasted no more than a couple of minutes.
Saturdays became arcade days. I and my closest friend, whom I will call Aaron, would get a ride from one set of parents in the morning and get picked up at dark. We each had $5 to spend at the arcade, enough for about thirty games. Making games last as long as possible was the goal.
We settled on mastering the game of Asteroids. The player controls a “space ship”, roughly shaped like a tiny triangle on a two dimensional plane and earned points for shooting and destroying the boulders that criss-crossed the screen. Shooting a large asteroid created two medium sized ones. Shooting a medium sized one created two small ones. Hitting a small one removed it from existence. If your ship was struck by an asteroid of any size you “died”.
Compared to today’s video games, Asteroids had a very simple concept but was a challenge to master. The player has five buttons available: rotate right, left, thrust, fire and “hyperspace” a button which allowed you to disappear and reappear somewhere else on the screen, often in a spot where you would be immediately struck.
We chose this game because it offered an extra “life” every 10 thousand points. If you were really good, a single game could last fifteen or twenty minutes. Five bucks could buy eight or ten hours of entertainment. Way cheaper than a ski lift ticket.
The two of us grew up together, at Alladin’s Castle, at school, on the tennis court and at each other’s homes. Aaron was raised Christian. My parents were Hindu. He was curious about Hinduism. I think he was feeling out what he was being taught in Church and Bible study groups.
When we had nothing better to do he would ask very thoughtful questions for a fourteen year old of his best friend. How many Gods do Hindus have? How do you decide who to pray to? What do Hindus believe happens after you die?
I realized that I didn’t have good answers to these questions. We had sculptures and pictures of many Gods in our home. Krishna, Rama, Laxmi, Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Hanuman. I guess that meant there were many Gods.
“Why are there so many? Who’s in charge?”
I didn’t have any sensible answers.
Christianity seemed much more manageable. It was so very easy to understand. Treat people like you wish to be treated. Love each other. Forgive the best that you can. If you fail from time to time, don’t worry, you aren’t perfect. That’s why Jesus came. God sent his only son to die for all the times you fell short. Accept him as your savior and you will be rewarded with an eternity in Heaven where everything you ever wanted would be available to you.
“What happens to Hindus who don’t believe that?”, I asked.
“Well”, said my best friend cautiously, “they will go to Hell.”
Hunh.
“For how long?”, I asked.
“Forever. That’s what the Bible says.”
That didn’t make any sense to me. What about all the people who have never heard of Jesus? They go to hell even though they tried to be nice?
Aaron explained that that was the reason for mission trips, to teach people about the life of Jesus Christ and offer them the greatest gift—salvation.
“You really believe that you will reincarnate after you die, Madhava? You’re telling me that you could come back as a frog or a fly? What would be the point?”
Once again, I didn’t have any good answers. I simply didn’t know how it all worked. The Christian view certainly seemed much more sensible and hopeful for that matter. It was the idea of Hell that didn’t make sense to me. An eternity of punishment for a lifetime of actions? If there were a hell, I would never know about it until I died. How can anyone know whether there really was a hell or whether this was a form of manipulation?
It wasn’t a matter of much concern to my best buddy. Why worry about such things if you accept Christ in your heart? It’s a free ticket to heaven. Problem solved.
We got through high school unscathed from injury and drugs. We both managed to do pretty well in school. The arcade remained a major distraction for us. I eventually mastered the game of Asteroids. One Saturday afternoon, I put a token in the game and amassed 1.3 million points. It took over three and a half hours and in that time I collected about eighty extra “lives”. I was hungry and I had to pee but the game rolled on.
A small group kids were gathered around. I ended up turning over the game to one of them for 50 cents. I don’t know how many points they ended up earning or how long that game lasted. I played for most of the afternoon. I ended up a quarter ahead and I never had to see the “GAME OVER” message flash in front of me. I didn’t care whose initials would be left on the “high score board” that would be left on the screen until the machine was powered down that night.
In my mind I finally beat the game.
I never played arcade games with the same kind of determination again. There were more interesting and important things happening. SATs, Tennis. GIRLS. The arcade was fun, and it was time to move on.
Gaming took a backseat in our lives, but our discussions about religion and ontology have continued to this day. These are the most important topics to me, because if we want to liberate ourselves and each other we will necessarily have to agree about how it all works.
We have to agree about how it all works. Why? Because when groups of people disagree about the nature of reality, origin and destiny they end up going to war with each other, sooner or later.
The challenge we have is that we will never know whether there is a hell, heaven, an endless cycle of reincarnation or neither. It’s my hope that we will all eventually agree about that. Not knowing is, in fact, the magic of this life experience. Knowing that we cannot know for sure, how should we proceed?
Groundhog Day
I was 25 years old when I returned from the ice pack north of Greenland where I was the junior member of a team of scientists doing work for the Office of Naval Research. It was a heady, life-changing experience. A few weeks after my return to the lower 48 I decided that I wanted to do something else with my life. I began preparing to apply to medical school.
The next fall my cousin introduced me to a wandering ascetic, who went by the name Swami Atmananda, who she and her husband often hosted. He was, in my estimation, twice my age, but he had a youthful heart and countenance. We took an instant liking to each other. He appreciated the sacrifice I was making by changing paths at a time in life when, by traditional Indian standards, I should have been getting married and planning a family. He was curious about my adventure to the Arctic. He too loved adventures.
Having just made a big decision about my future, I asked him about his decision to avoid “karmic entanglements” in the material world and choose a peripatetic life of contemplation, dependent on donations and the good will of kind hearted people like my cousin and her husband. He explained it this way:
“I was in my teens when I felt I had to make a decision. Do what was necessary to obtain the education required to contribute to society so that I could have a life like everyone else, or choose a different path, one without such comforts, security and social acceptance. One without such obligations. It was not easy, nor was it extremely difficult. It requires listening to your heart first and then to all the other voices, including the one in your mind…”
“But that’s a lot to give up so early in life”, I said. “You took quite a risk!”.
He looked me in the eye and said matter-of-factly, “it was a risk either way…”
Later that evening while a few conversations were happening over dinner simultaneously someone asked me about my favorite movies.
“I have a few. But that new movie Groundhog Day was one of the best I have seen in a while.”
Everybody stopped talking. I went on:
“I think the writers and producers were very insightful in attempting to tell a story of a soul’s journey through multiple lifetimes, each one being the day that Bill Murray’s character wakes up into over and over again”
Apparently Groundhog Day was a movie that Swami-ji spoke of quite frequently too, for the same reasons.
The 1993 film with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell was billed as different kind of romcom. Murray plays the role of a weather correspondent for a local station in Pittsburg who was assigned to cover the emergence of Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog in Punxsutawney, PA who, in the tradition of Groundhog day, predicts the length of the winter season on February 2 of each year.
Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), is an arrogant, middle aged man who is dissatisfied with his career trajectory and annoyed about covering such nonsense. He, a camera man (played by Chris Elliot) and his new producer (Andie MacDowell) make the trip to the town of Punxsutawney to find a community excited about the day of national attention they get once a year. Their good spirits and endearing attitude drive Murray’s character to a deeper state of contempt for the small-minded town folk.
Connors has a dreadful start to Groundhog day the next morning, having to avoid an elderly panhandler on the street and then meeting an annoying high school classmate, Ned Ryerson, on his way to the town square where the jubilant townies gather to celebrate the meaningless event. Moments after extricating himself from the encounter with his forgettable classmate who became a pushy insurance salesman, he puts his foot into a deep pothole filled with icy water. By the time he ends up at the shoot in the center of town he makes it clear that he would like nothing better than to get the hell out of there.
Per usual he treats his coworkers with low grade contempt and gives an uninspired introduction to the segment. Things get even worse. The area gets hit with a massive snow storm making roads impassable. Phil Connors and his team are forced to stay an extra night in Punxsutawney.
The next morning, Connors wakes up and is immediately annoyed. His clock radio begins playing the same Sonny and Cher tune followed by the identical commentary from the DJ’s that was on the air 24 hours earlier—they were mistakenly replaying the recorded segment from the day before. Obviously the kind of error a podunk radio station would make regularly.
But then he peeks out the window. Astonishingly all the snow dumped by the blizzard the day before has vanished. Phil seems to be reliving the most annoying day of his life all over again. He is the butt of a fascinating cosmic joke where only he and nobody else knows that day is on repeat.
Still trying to make sense of what is happening, he makes his way to town square like he did 24 hours earlier, ignoring the panhandler, encountering the same annoying childhood friend and, of course, putting his foot into the same pothole again. By the time he encounters his film team he is half way out of his mind.
This is where the script writers (Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin) show their brilliance. What would you do if you knew you were living the same day over and over again but no one else did?
A few clarifications. Phil Connors’ predicament has some fundamental differences from the conventional perspective of reincarnation. First, those who subscribe to a reincarnation theory believe that everybody is reincarnating, not just them. Second, there is no way for anyone to know with certainty that this is the case. Murray’s character, on the other hand, eventually comes to realize that this is unequivocally happening. Third, Murray is able to remember everything each time he relives that single day over and over. Memories of past lives lived, if there were any, are generally not available to us.
Note: There is very convincing evidence that some children can, in fact, remember a past life. See the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson and my rationale for reincarnation here.
For these reasons, Bill Murray’s character is not reincarnating as much as he is playing a video game, over and over. Everybody else in his “nightmare” are somehow stuck repeating the same day again and again without any knowledge that this happening to them. One might call everybody else “NPCs”, non-playing characters, who are part of a simulation built for the “player” who solely possesses a deeper understanding of the situation at hand.
In that sense, this life experience for someone like me who now believes in reincarnation is quite similar to Phil Connors’. I however have no recollection of a past life, and I, like Connors, fully appreciate the fact that there is no way to prove what is really happening so it is understandable that others would disagree or be uncommitted to a perspective.
Phil Connors’ soul evolution, if you will, proceeds through three distinct stages.
First, after seeking medical and psychiatric evaluation which frustratingly goes nowhere because follow-up appointments are not possible, he ponders his predicament over a few cocktails at a bowling alley with a few locals and asks aloud,
“What would you do if there were no tomorrow?”
The response comes quickly from his new found drinking buddies.
“Anything you wanted! No hell to pay, no hangovers!”
It didn’t take long before Phil was driving under the influence in a car chase with the cops, playing chicken with a train and ending up in jail. Once again he wakes up in his room on Groundhog Day without any consequences but with a new understanding about the situation he is in. Everyone in this wacky time warp is unaware of what transpired. Everyone but him. It’s a super power.
The question is, how does one choose to use it?
Self-serving by nature, he uses it to manipulate others. He approaches a few women, learns the details of their lives and in subsequent iterations, seduces them into one-night stands.
Phil Connors is learning how to play the game.
He turns his attention to Rita (Andie MacDowell). Despite multiple attempts Phil cannot close the deal. Rita is able to sense that she is being manipulated. A long sequence of Groundhog Days end with harsh slaps to the face. But in his many repeated attempts to score with Rita, he learns much about her, her desire to appreciate and help others, her inexplicable ability to find true happiness in simple things. Phil Connors falls in love with the one person he cannot have.
What is the point of life if you can never attain what you want the most? He next falls into a great depression, wanting to end his life. Sadly it is not possible. Multiple attempts at suicide land him back in his bed, waking to “I got you babe”. Connors is driven into boredom. He picks up details of the lives of the “NPCs” in his endlessly repeating day.
He realizes what he needs most is friendship, Rita’s friendship. He wants someone else to understand what he is going through. He wants someone to believe him. Phil probably realizes for the first time in his life that he needs compassion more than anything else. Rita provides it. At the end of yet another day spent getting to know a remarkable Phil Connors for the first time (again), Rita acknowledges that he is in a unique position, one that has benefits that he has yet to explore.
And then something shifts.
Accepting the fact that there is no conceivable way out of this endless cycle, Phil Connors decides that he is going to help and not manipulate. He decides that he isn’t going to squeak by doing the bare minimum—he’s going to apply himself with utmost care and attention to every moment in the day. He’s going to find happiness within the constraints that he is under.
He gives all his money to the panhandler, buys every insurance policy available from Ned Ryerson, delivers a poignant reminder to his TV audience that there is much beauty in a lustrous, long winter. He saves a man from choking, fixes a flat tire and catches a child who would have fallen from a tree. He does this day after day, knowing that the next day won’t be any different, except that he has gotten a little better at helping.
Phil Connors realizes that real happiness and satisfaction can be found in serving others regardless if there is any payback or not. It wasn’t about the points any more. He turned the worst day of his life into the happiest. Phil had finally beaten the game.
That’s when he finally woke up on the next day, February 3rd, a changed man.
The Takeaway
To those of you who recognize that things aren’t as they seem, that there are powerful actors and interests who have been building systems and institutions which deplete our prosperity and keep us in endless conflict, the central question becomes what are we to do? What is the solution?
I have heard many good ideas, but there is little chance that they will ever take root in a population that is divided over politics, scientific understanding, religion, trust in media, etc. Transformative ideas will be regarded with suspicion if they are proposed by those with whom you disagree on other matters.
We have to agree about how it all works first. We can disagree about all the aforementioned things but if we can agree that we are, in fact, transcendent souls that are repeating lifetimes on this Earth, it would be our best shot at fixing things. We don’t have to know we are reincarnating, we just have to believe it.
Why?
Imagine a world where everyone behaved as if that was how it worked. Wouldn’t the overwhelming majority of us end up, sooner or later, where Phil Connors did? Wouldn’t we agree that the world would be appreciably better if that happened?
If that doesn’t resonate with you, consider this. What if there were a select group of people who not only knew that we were all reincarnating but had discovered ways of orchestrating the circumstances of their next life? They could ensure that they would be endowed with wealth and power and more importantly re-taught the secret knowledge that only the select group possessed. Imagine how such a group could manipulate everyone else over generations, especially if nobody else was aware of this.
Rather than taking a path of service, these select groups instead master the art of manipulation. Phil Connors could only do so much in a single day. Manipulating others had limited, short term rewards for him. What treasures would be available to the ultra powerful over decades or centuries? Why not join an elite cult that knows how to play a system that has no eternal punishment for doing ghastly things?
There would be no end to the fleecing of our health and prosperity through endless calamities and wars that consolidate power and wealth into the hands of those who engineer these tragedies. The only way to stop the process would be if the rest of us dropped our differences and came together in non-compliance with their agenda.
Peace seekers us are considered naive by the establishment. Constraints on military spending is a no-go in politics. Those who have attempted to bring messages of peace and solidarity have always been the biggest threat to the ultra powerful.
And they get gunned down. The ultra powerful depend on fear and separation to manipulate.
Where are the video games that award points for cooperating with other players and not destroying them?
Are violent games more entertaining to our children or are they being programmed to think that they are from a young age?
How do we know that we only live once?
Is there any real benefit to remaining agnostic around this question?
How would a centralized authority hellbent on acquiring more control regard a population that began to act out of an understanding that death was not the end and that we are all connected in ways that transcend our ethnicity, political affiliation and socioeconomic status?
One does not have to surrender their belief about heaven and hell to realize that our job cannot be to mete out justice. We will never all agree about how that should look like. That would separate us. Our job is to come and stand together in peaceful non-compliance. That’s the most efficient way to stop this madness. That’s when the real solutions will appear.
What are your thoughts?
Please leave your comments.
In the old days, I was a liberal Democrat, and my comrades believed in social welfare and promoted a strong central government that could take care of us all. Part of that ethos was living in service to others as a good in itself.
Then the Liberal Establishment became co-opted, wandered off into a world of worshiping The Science (TM) and burying CO2 and shunning people who are guilty of microaggressions.
Now I am a pen-wielding warrior for freedom and my comrades are libertarian capitalists who see individual competition as the highest guide to life.
I'm grateful for friends like Madhava who retain the spirit of service, compassion, and cooperation, even as we take a stand against the mad megalomaniacs who are using medical deception in their bid to take over the world.
Hi Madhava! Lovely article, and very interesting to read the bit about Groundhog Day. I never saw that movie.
I second the belief that acting “as if” reincarnation and karma as real can change one’s perspective dramatically on the world. Everyone we meet becomes someone whom we have met before- which creates a curiosity that heightens the interaction. Every meeting becomes also a reminder that we have karma with that person.
One of the ways I’ve come around to acting “as if” something is real is what I call the “carpenter entering a new house” analogy:
For the average person who doesn’t know how buildings are built: when they enter a new house, they notice the things for which they have pre-existing concepts: the colors, familiar smells, the types of furniture.
But when the carpenter or builder enters a new house, they notice specifics: how it was built (timber frame? ICF? Steel load bearing beams? ) They can picture in their mind the steps necessary to build the structure - because they have the concepts already in mind.
The same analogy can be made for any type of speciality: clothing construction. Silicon chip design. Identifying physical maladies.
Back to reincarnation and karma: if one takes the time to work with the ideas of reincarnation and karma, thinking them through in a organized fashion, then when an opportunity arises, such as meeting a new person, the concepts are available. (“Oh! This is someone whom I have met before. We have pre-existing karma. I wonder what it is? What am I going to do to make this meeting as beneficial as possible for both of us?”)
One of the ideas described by Steiner about why reincarnation was removed from Christian theology (Council of Nicaea 325 AD) is that there was a certain wisdom to causing people to believe they had to work really hard in one life…personally, I think this was greatly distorted by the subsequent ideas of confession/absolution as removing sin.
The standard Gospels reference the reincarnation of Elijah as John the Baptist in a couple of places. I’m not sure how that is interpreted within Christian churches now.
Great to read your piece, as always.