Reflection N° 73 - Walt Disney's Mistake
Disney was a successful man in everything he undertook, except one thing, although on this occasion he was already dead, or rather, his most ambitious project, to overcome death, in which he failed. We will explain this mistake by means of the Teachings referred to death, reincarnation and plurality of worlds.
Born in Chicago in the beginning of past century, after a short training at a painting school, from the start he dedicated his efforts to cartoons whose spreading began with varied characters. Established in Los Angeles and by his own means, he produced his whole work with hundreds of quite loyal contributors. His characters are known all over the world and reflect the temperament of the average American people. In the matter there is a nice story in broad “Cold War” about the middle of the 70’s. After the worst Soviet rocket crisis in Cuba, Nikita Khruschev paid a friendly official visit to the United States. After typical protocol meetings, American officials offered him to visit whatever he wished in the country: “Cape Canaveral?”. “No, thank you, we have already our giant cosmodrome.” “Colorado Grand Canyon?” “No, thank you; we have much of that; we are the widest nation in the Planet, with fantastic landscapes.” So they were offering a quite complete menu, but not attracting him with an exquisite course. Finally, they asked where he wished to go, to tell the place and it would be a fact. Nikita said, “I want to visit Disneyland and shake hands with Mickey Mouse, the best among Americans. We have nothing like that”. The hosts gaped at him and arranged the trip. After many decades, critics still do not agree if that that the strong man in Soviet Union asked on that occasion was a childish whim or an international leg-pull.
Widespread Disney’s production along with his homonymous company –with new computerized animation techniques, digital system, renewed business frameworks, and specialized professionals– continue to progress in so far as quantity and power are concerned. They have no competitors and their expansion is over all nations. They have no determined style, although first Disney’s drawings –his most conspicuous characteristics– are those of his first stage. Critics place him at the show business and sometimes he has attained the art summit in cooperation with other artists. “Fantasy”, of 1940, is a film where several shorts include well-known symphonic music with different styles of varied authors. About the hell theme, astrally seen, with Modest Mussorgsky’s music, with the image of Satan on the summit of Mount Pele erupting in Martinica, and souls of the condemned going out of their tombs, Master Santiago watched it and commented his intimate entourage that Disney would be counseled by clairvoyants or otherwise he had used drugs because those images were real (Dr Muñoz Soler’s communication).
What problem could Disney have till the end of his life? Immortality. Borges wrote a tale, “The Immortal”, whose ending is painful. In other tale, “Circular ruins”, he deals with a similar subject, reincarnation, with his peculiar style. It is a universal subject, and affects every mortal. It is solved by reincarnation doctrines, but not by Western monotheistic religions. Disney was looking for resurrection, for defeating death. This is impossible, as Master Santiago has properly explained in Lazarus' case, Course “The Becoming”, Teaching “Reincarnation”. Although Gospels refer to resurrection, Master Santiago says this is not possible, and when Jesus went to Lazarus and clairvoyantly saw the intact silver cord of the latter –a cord joining physical body and astral body– Jesus healed him, because if this cord had been broken, even Jesus could not bring him again to life. Immortality can be attained by reincarnation; after a while, the soul is born again as a child in a new body, so it starts again the experience of life.
Recently, medical science has achieved unusual breakthroughs, especially as far as genetic engineering is concerned, but always with a mechanistic conception about life. As early as in Renaissance, wise men would see the human body as a wonderful machine which, as such, with progress could be indefinitely repaired by exchanging its different pieces. Now organs can be exchanged in order to extend life. But to live a long while, like Shangri-la’s Lamas in James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon”, is not immortality.
In those Disney’s days, cryogenics of corpses was in vogue in the United States, by submerging corpses in liquid nitrogen at quite low temperature. Now this technique is used on some organic parts of men and women, which have to be used later; even spermatozoids preserve their fertility after years of being preserved in this way. Much literature and many films develop these horrible novelties. Disney was totally dead and there was no resurrection technique. But death-traffickers were promising to dreamers the preservation of their bodies until the time when the progress of science would permit a sure resurrection practice. It was something like that American character, Frankestein, who was made one part after the other, like a car. But the experience is over and the machine out of order, and Disney’s body naturally started to decay. He was quickly buried and nobody referred to the matter any more. Disney Association goes on to release cartoon films (one of the last, “Ice-Age II”) and also enlarging its entertainment parks.
Why do people worry so much by death to make sometimes mistakes like that of Disney’s cryogenics? It is by ignorance about plurality of worlds, because science advances through old sidetracks. The stage of Pisces is passing by and men refuse to leave behind materialistic dogmas that are blocking the access to new discoveries. When the old world stays quite behind, in shadows of the past, with Aquarius posing and proposing new possibilities, death will stop being a bogeyman, and men will learn how to live and die wisely, naturally.
Fear for death is tied to attachment to possessions, not only economic possessions, but also psychological and spiritual. How many times there are newspapers bringing news about men of great inner gifts and outstanding position in religion, politics and social life, who do not want to die and show degrading human conditions and bad moral example! Or about that poor American girl, Terry Schiavo, who after being in vegetative state for years in Miami, finally was liberated from that terrible astral load. On the occasion of hurricane Katrina and flood of New Orleans, many victims were discovered like that, and abandoned by their caretakers.
In the world plurality conception, death disappears such as it is conceived by monotheistic religions, and becomes transmuted dynamics of states in many dimensions of the Universe. Please, read Courses “The Becoming” and “Theology” in order to understand how life remains in many ways and diverse dimensions. The Master says, death is nothing more than exhaustion for diverse possibilities, which enables man to experience other possibilities.
The beautiful Teaching “Death”, in Course “Sacrifice”, reads:
“One has attained the last mystery, loftiest sorrow and unavoidable Sacrifice because who can overcome old age and death? The poor human being is always sorry as he sees how his years are escaping from his hands, and how quickly the time flees, and despite his efforts, quite few illusions forged in the youth can be fulfilled or, at most, when he starts to enjoy the fruit of his work, his senses grow weaker and ailments of the old age impede him to enjoy mentally the victory. When life has just started, we have to realize that death is knocking on the door.”
“Years of physical decline become years of a long martyrdom in men losing their strength and women losing their beauty. Not everybody has the courage of Frine, who preferred to throw herself to the pyre not to see her beauty declining. Most people wait and wait, grow old and die slowly, and when death comes, even in the advanced old age, death never is welcome.”
“Death is everywhere around. But the individual lives as if he never had to die, as if he was the only being who would deserve to escape from the last law. The mere thought about death is cause of fear in many people: they do not want to hear of it in their presence and avoid any funereal conversation.”
“But how beautiful is the Sacrifice of dying voluntarily, of dying beforehand in order to overcome the painful part of death, which is fear.”
“For him who since his early years has learned to look face to face the last enemy, gradually death loses its mysterious veils; so he succeeds in possessing it beforehand through the Sacrifice of thinking of death.”
“We are told that Cistercian friars daily pick up a shove-full of earth, gradually preparing their tombs. It is good to pick up every day from the mind a shove-full of that moral earth –which are remains of fear and ignorant darkness placed upon it– in order to release the concept about death such as the latter is: a calm dream achieved by the Sacrifice of continuous knowledge.”
José González Muñoz
May, 2006.