I am a lover of cinema I believe and this is my opinion that cinema is the highest form of art that there is a glimpse of what’s possible a taste of our divinity a great film is as they say truth 24 times per second now today everybody’s talking about mindfulness meditation everybody’s talking about the importance of learning to be present learning to be in the here and now to let yourself become immersed and enveloped by the power of the esent moment and look conventionalforms of meditation work for many people and I commend these practices as therapies that focus your attention in the here and now but for movie lovers like me I believe the ultimate form of meditation is watching the cinema I believe when you watch movies consciousness meets its own process I believe that when you get immersed in a film and you assume the viewpoint of one of the characters who effectively step outside yourself I also believe that when you watch a film you actually take a journey within right you are the characters and they are you and the content plate of introspection the self searching that happens as the story unfolds on screen is a very powerful almost supernatural experience space time and mind invert and collapse you know a movie may only be empirically 120 minutes two hours by the clock but when you’re inside of the film and you’re looking not at the screen but into the screen time no longer exists you are in a meditative trance and during these moments of complete immersion when you are enveloped in that other world that absolute unmixed attention becomes a form of Prayer you heed to it you submit and surrender to it and you are cleansed because it’s a psychic carwash it D fragments the hard drive it’s like a total immersive flow statement when you come out of the movie oh my god it’s like you’ve been cleansed you’ve had catharsis you’ve experienced the mythological motif you’ve taken the hero’s journey and this my friends is a kind of cosmic baptism it’s like a bath in the ocean of the Holy every time a film envelops you every time you become one with the movie you’ve had a transcendental meditation this is what I believe and this is why when people tell me oh my god you got to get into mindfulness meditation and this and that I tell them it already exists it’s called cinema and on top of that it throws a beautifully patterned story for good measure so not only do you get to meditate you get to go on a fucking journey an ecstatic illumination and pop out on the other side and say thank you I am so glad that movies exist so that’s what I think about cinema as meditation.