Pirates of the Caribbean
For me, The Pirates of the Carribean series has been very inspiring and amusing because I have see many parallels to the work of human transformation and the plot in the stories. As long as you promise to remember that I just made this up from my experience with various schools of thought, I will offer you a brief sketch of my impressions:
The heroine of the tale, Elizabeth Swann, represents for me "Inspiration" the kind of breath taking beauty that launches ships, starts wars, makes babies....etc... The lovable scoundrel, Jack Sparrow, represents Possibility. Note: if anything is possible, it would mean that anything honorable or dishonorable is possible: good or evil. Jack would agree. He hardly seems to know which end of the spectrum he is playing on, most of the time.
The third hero is Will Turner: he is in my analogy: the Will to Turn: Transformation. Here is the power to turn the caterpillar to a butterfly, or a maybe even a pirate into a savior. Yes, Jack Sparrow does have an unpredictable tendency to save Inspiration and Transformation throughout all three movies. Could it be that possibility is ultimately on our side ina basically friendly universe?
The pirates, are often unsavory, but usually authentic. They are genuine thieves and murderers, etc... They are not a pretty sight. On the other hand, the spit and polish men of the EAst India Company sure do LOOK GOOD>
However, not all that smells of roses is a flower. Sometimes you just have perfume on a dung heap....in a uniform. It is harder to see through the facade. Jack says in the first movie: you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest...with an honest man, you never know.
The pirates at least, are free....at least until they are caught. The members of the Established Order are caught whether they are free or not. They trap people into a living death, one in which they are trapped in as well. The pirates only die once.
It takes alot of audacity, apreference for the unconventional, and a considerable disregard for the Comfort Zone to be a pirate.
In the third movie, the pirates are desperate to keep both their lives and their freedom in a showdown with the EAst India trading company...KNowingthey are vastly outnumbered, they dare to free Calypso. Calypso is the woman mystic aboard the pirate ship, the Black Pearl. She is also the divine goddess of the sea trapped in human form.
This is an analogy, in my eyes, for the divine power in each of us which lies coiled and repressed at thebase of our spine.
The Eastern religious traditions all this divine energy , the kundalini.
To releast the kundalini, onemust be very desperate indeed. Sheis even more unpredictable than Jack! She is true, raw human spirituality. Unleashed, she is a terrible force to be reckoned with. She brings enlightenment and power...at the price of self sacrifice.
What does it take for the human conversation to take onthe liberation ofhumanspiriatulity? WE all shudder to think of it and resist it with all of our might. Those of us who are pushed to the end of our world by the "Established Order", by the way things should be, sometimes dare to take the leap. (I personally like the encounter with Calypso and the collapse into enlightenment described by Eckhart Tolle in his first book, The Power of Now).
The final battle is horrific. The Black Pearl takes on the gloomy ghost ship of the subconscious Past: the Flying Dutchman. AT the helm is the bitter and cynical and cruel Davy Jones. The ghost ship is aligned to the Established ORder's entire fleet.
The Black Pearl takes them both on...aided by the liberated Calypso. Will (Transformation), POssibilty (Jack ) and Inspiration (Elizabeth) all fight with her. In the end, the heroic and noble Will lays downs his life for Love of Inspiration and the entire Past is healed and transformed. Once the Subconscious Past is healed, the energy that opposed the Pearl, now is aligned with the Pearl and together they defeat the Established ORder of shoulds and re-establish the freedom of the high seas.
The entire pirate fleet goes beserk with joy.
Note carefully, lunatics, fanatics, criminals and saints all occupy the world beyond the ordinary. It is amazing how they are commonly lumped together as "Those Pirates To Be Feared". Someone living in the illusion called Ordinary might have a difficult time distinguishing one outlaw from another. Fear does blind a person and bindthem to their own filters on reality.
Inthe very end, we learnthat death does not destroy (this is actually the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be transformed, but notdestroyed). Those who can standin the face of any circumstance shall see their Word fulfilled. It's never over when it's over. And it is just a story after all.
Hmmm. Well, I choose to sing with the beautiful Elizabeth Swann, "Tis the pirates' life for me" Yo ho me hearties, Yo ho.
Elizabeth Keller