It’s All Too Much

The protagonist of Waking Life floats through various scenarios of dreams and half wakefulness’s, both aware and unaware of the state he’s in. He expresses a feeling that he is being prepared for something big. Through the storyline, it is suggested that he may very well be dead. Or is he yet to become truly awake? While in our own western cultured brains we see this as a sad thing, it is implied in the film that death is in fact no sadder than life. Or rather, life is just as sad as death. We have been taught since very young that life and death are separate occurrences, as is understandable in our linear concept of time. This film entertains the idea that life and death are interconnected, that perhaps this is what our dreams are. In this sense, death is not a sad occurrence, because it is not the end. This is how and why some cultures believe in reincarnation.

The process and the end result are one. You can’t have one without the other, nor can you realise one without the other. In Waking Life, the main character is at once living, dying and being born. He is everywhere at once. In this sense, everything matters. And if everything matters, then everything doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who he is talking with, or what they are discussing, or when, where or why. He already knows and he has yet to know at once. The film may seem to end in a stagnated endless loop of dream after dream, but when one learns to sit back and enjoy the ride, the more one realises there is to know, to quote George Harrison, “see all without looking”.

As one man said in the film, “to say Yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence.” In this sense, he is saying that all existence is the yes, and the act of acknowledging so. This is akin to the God concept Spinoza has in which all is God, and God is all, therefore all it holy, i.e. yes. This is what faith is, the act of surrendering to the eternal existence of yes. This is to say that yes is the eternal existence and the acknowledgement of such. This is to say that the eternal existence is subjectively self-evident. This concept throughout history and throughout peoples has been called by numerous different names. Most call it love, Spinoza calls it God, Buddhists call it Nirvana, or perhaps more accurately, the process of achieving Nirvana.

There is a Beatles song that I think more or less perfectly conveys what I am trying to say here, and so I leave you now with “It’s All Too Much” by George Harrison:

“

It's all too much / When I look into your eyes / Your love in there for
me / And the more I go inside / The more there is to see / It's all too much for
me to take / The love that's shining all around you / Everywhere it's like what
you make for us to take / It's all too much / Floating down the stream of time /
From life to life with me / Makes no difference where you are / Or where you'd
like to be / It's all too much for me to take / The love that's shining all
around here / All the world is birthday cake / So take a piece but not too much
/ Sail me on a silver sun / Where I know that I am free / Show me that I'm
everywhere and get me home for tea / It's all too much for me to take / There's
plenty there for everybody / The more you give the more you get / The more it
is, it's too much / It's all too much for me to see / The love that's shining
all around you / The more I learn the less I know / But what I do is all too
much for me to take / The love that's shining all around you / Everywhere it's
what you make for us to take / It's all too much / It's much, it's much / It's
too much / Ah! It's too much / you are too much, ah! / We are dead, ah! / Too
much, too much, too much...”