Samadhi, Part 1: Daniel Schmidt's film on Maya and the illusion of a separate self

What if meditation, prayer and yoga, as most people practice them, did more to reinforce the ego than to dissolve it? That is the provocation with which Daniel Schmidt opens Samadhi, the film series that began with Maya, la ilusión del yo, an hour of images of India, animation and continuous narration about the Sanskrit word that gives the project its name.

The film is by Daniel Schmidt, also the maker of Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds; he directs, writes, edits and narrates the original version, and this Spanish version, narrated by Santiago Rafael Pascual, was published by the director's own channel.

The forgetting called Maya

In yoga, samadhi is the final stage of practice, complete absorption. Schmidt defines it as awakening from identification with a separate self. What blocks that awakening is Maya, the illusion that we are only the character society and biology handed us. For him, the ego is an impulse to repeat: energy always returns to the path it has already traveled, good or bad. That is why the usual spiritual search, which wants to be calmer, more enlightened, more awake, would be just one more form of desire.

From Plato's cave to Descartes

The film weaves together references from West and East. The prisoners in Plato's cave, who mistake shadows for reality, become an image of our thoughts. Descartes and the Buddha both start from radical doubt but, in Schmidt's reading, the French philosopher stopped at thought while the Buddha went further. Sisyphus, pushing his rock forever, illustrates the self's struggle against the world; the Zen saying about chopping wood before and after enlightenment shows that all that changes is inner resistance.

The outer world as a mirror

The second half widens the argument: wars on terror, disease or hunger would be wars against ourselves, and only inner change would bring the outer world into alignment. There is also a long esoteric reading of Thoth, of the serpent guarding knowledge and of Metatron's cube.

Caveats

This is the director's personal vision, not the teaching of any school. Schmidt combines Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, Egyptian mythology and Kabbalah into a single narrative, and asserts that cancer, hunger and terrorism keep rising without presenting data. The project is funded by donations from the public.

Why watch

For the clarity with which it sets out a difficult idea: that awakening is not adding something to oneself but noticing what one already is before thought. The first part ends on a question: what remains when the illusory self falls away?