So I stop by my family’s house the other day, and go to get the mail. Next to mailbox is a cholla that has nice, dark red blossoms, so I go to take a picture of it. Noticing a bee, I think hey bee+flower=nice photo. Then I notice the bee isn’t moving. Thinking that strange, I lean in real, real close….then gasp and draw away, as a quarter-sized collection of legs shifts languidly. Who ever heard of a green spider? In any case, for some reason, just standing near the thing was kind of creeping me out, whether by it unexpectedly shifting into existence a few centimeters from my eyeball (at least by my perception, in how it perfectly mimicked the green of the cactus and its legs, the needles, and how it seemed to float in midair) or by the fact that I’d never seen its ilk before.

Ok, this commentary is going to be SPOILER-ific if anyone actually cares to go see that Pulse movie I wrote of below, so don’t read it if you want to see it!

I was thinking of (not sure if it’s a Buddhist or yogic thing) the tenet that one way of looking at suffering in the abstract sense is that it is generated by the feeling of separation – whether from one’s own self, or socially, or even separation from an object that one desires – all different levels of the same thing, basically. In Pulse, the invading ghosts drive/cajole/compel (depending on who you ask) people to separate themselves more and more, in effect acting like an external ego that’s imposing itself upon them, going by this idea:
"This compulsive mind constructs a separate sense of self, often called the ego, that's trapped in a world of psychological time, surrounded by other separate selves that threaten its survival. It then invents the spiritual search and other self-improvement schemes as an attempt to escape the trap it has created for itself."

Like the dots in the grad students allegorical program, as much as they're naturally repulsed, they’re also drawn to the ghost as a dark parody of that natural urge towards ‘spirituality’ (no pun intended), except the ghost is no solution, but the trap itself. The ghost is then keeping the person out of the overflowing afterlife-dimension by trapping them in an extreme of ego-separation - forever, in that ‘psychological time’, which leads into this idea, as a contrast:

"...time is merely a creation of the mind, and only the Now exists. When we awaken to our identity with this timeless dimension, the problem with finding a balance between doing and being drops away as the separate self-sense dissolves, and all that's left is simply life living itself."

Pulse, to me, is a twisted version of that ideal (the zen state of contented being, aware of one’s connection to everything being connected). So when the people are driven to an opposite but yet similar version of that zen state – they’re completely separated from everyone, and yet have still lost their sense of self at the point where they submit to the ghost and embrace it - they’re also in a timeless state. But not one that’s focused on a healthy understanding of ‘living by the moment,’ as it were, but one that leaves them trapped in an extreme of mind-creating-time – hence, they’re immortal in a sense, which is exactly what the invading ghosts desire, to keep them out of the afterlife-dimension.

***

Sounds like an intriguing story based on spirals