Flight from Death ~ The Quest for Immortality

I woke last night in a thunderstorm, started some work and somehow found myself on Netflix.  One movie cover caught my eye.  An alabaster sculpture of an angel collapsed on a rectangular column or alter made me recall instantly the beautiful shores and woods of Gabriola Island, BC where I first viewed the film Flight from Death ~ The Quest for Immortality.

I was attending a gathering of holistic learning centers just weeks after my youngest was born.  The trip had been planned almost a year before and I couldn't get out of it.  I found myself in the eerily beautiful Northwest, that had always struck some chord of loneliness within, intensely missing my family, feeling alone in a strange dark land surrounded by the water.

"Human beings find themselves in quite the predicament.  We have the mental capacity to ponder the infinite, seemingly capable of anything, yet housed in the heart pumping, breath gasping, decaying body, we are godly, yet creaturely..."  This film draws much from the work of Ernest Becker's Denial of Death and is a must see.  It has hauntingly beautiful cinematography, silence and space between deep thinkers pondering the human condition, being an apparent fluke of survivalism and evolution, positioning us at once for greatness and great sorrow.

There is a book or project floating out there for me that is much related to the subject matter of this documentary, Becker's work and my own search for meaning amid madness or at least happenstance...  no matter your view towards this life and an afterlife, this documentary is well worth seeing.

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi398919193/
Flight from Death ~ The Quest for Immortality

Other related film suggestions: The God Who Wasn't There and The Atheism Tapes

Future article/book from Conan Malone:  Coming Out: An Atheist in the Closet, The Story of a Catholic, Pagan, Buddhist, Agnostic, Humanist