Samadhi, Part 2: the film that seeks the truth all traditions share, beyond thought

A group of blind men feel their way around an elephant. The one holding a leg swears it is a tree; the one gripping the tail, a rope; the one leaning on its flank, a wall. The old parable opens the second part of Samadhi, a documentary series by director Daniel Schmidt, and sums up the film's thesis: the great spiritual traditions each describe, from their own angle, the same reality, and that reality does not fit inside thought.

The Spanish version, No es lo que piensas, was released by the director himself on the AwakenTheWorldFilm channel, narrated by Santiago Rafael Pascual. The channel offers English subtitles (turn on CC in the player). It runs 70 minutes, built from contemplative images, music and few words.

One truth, many languages

The starting point is the perennial philosophy, the idea that every religion holds the same mystical core. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, devoted a book to it and saw its shortest formula in the Sanskrit tat tvam asi, "thou art that": the ātman, the eternal self, would be one with Brahman, the principle of everything. Rumi, Plotinus, the Gospel of Thomas, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, the Lakota leader Black Elk and Ramana Maharshi appear as voices of the same intuition. Even the Tower of Babel becomes a metaphor: the gate to the divine would be the thinking mind itself.

What the film calls samadhi

Samadhi is a Sanskrit term from yoga: the eighth limb of the path described by Patañjali and the last factor of the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. The film uses the word for its highest degree, nirvikalpa samadhi, in which all the activity of seeking and doing ceases. To speak of what cannot be described, it compares the threshold of samadhi to the event horizon of a black hole, Zen's "gateless gate", beyond which no self passes. The layers that, in the Upanishads, cover the ātman appear as mirrors: body, mind, vital energy, wisdom and bliss.

Faith is not belief

The clearest passage separates the two words. Belief would be accepting an idea for comfort; faith, staying in not-knowing and welcoming whatever rises from the unconscious. Nisargadatta Maharaj sums up the relation between the absolute and the relative: "Wisdom is knowing I am nothing; love is knowing I am everything." The film ends as an invitation to silence and meditation, not as doctrine.

Watch with care

Everything here is spiritual teaching. The black hole comparison is a poetic image, and the claim that every object has a singularity at its centre comes with no reference to any study. The perennial philosophy, for its part, is a philosophical position, not a consensus among historians of religion, who also point to what sets the traditions apart. The film is free and is sustained by donations and sales of a high-definition copy.

It is worth watching for its rare synthesis of sources and for its slow pace, which asks of the viewer the same silence it talks about.