i'll never forget the time i may or may not have partaken in some Colombian nose powder and proceeded to spend 3 hours manically lecturing my friends on the metaphysical narratives of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and their connections to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Camus can't wait to watch this vid
This is hilarious 😂 I literally have an entire RU-vid playlist called blowstuff entirely composed of lectures and analytical breakdowns and rabbitholes for the rare times i take similar journies through my consciousness, for research purposes.
For anyone annoyed by the Retro TV shtick; Copyright. Hopefully that word answers any questions. The non-retro-television-ified version (which is much more pleasant visually in my opinion) will be available for viewing on Patreon (RU-vid literally wont even let me upload it or I would upload it here as a members video as well) Thanks for watching guys. Be sure to check out our upcoming philosophy webinar courses if you haven't already! www.formscapes.org/
This one helped me make a lot of connections. I had never heard of the film but indeed it seems to be quite an uncanny allegory. As always, I appreciate the effort and passion that goes into making these ideas and concepts more accessible to a greater number of people. I believe this is a negligible fraction of the value of your channel to everyone willing to at least listen. Thank you for the both the cohesion and chaos you've brought to my mind, brother.
The intro to these vids speaks directly to the gamer side, spiritual side, and mental side all at the same time: the biblical and spiritual symbology, the music, the image panning. It all combines to nourish my being. Thank you.
Heyo Formscapes I absolutely love your content! it's nice to know that there are other like-minded alchemists that see the hidden sinews connecting everything. I was wondering what happened to the video called like the Eternal Womb/ Infinite heartbeat I think...? Where you discussed Capitalism and AI/ Virtual reality as being methods to deny our materiality and submit to a unifying, albeit malformed attempt at god-consciousness. I have since been proselytising for your content and that video in particular.
Gendo has always gotten under my skin. He literally looks like my dad from childhood - Dark Hair, Glasses, Beard But he's also detached from me like my father was, and my father used to tell me about how it was important that I go to college and get a good job so I could pay for him and "pay him back for raising me" in his retirement.
Very interesting that those ancient forms appear in such a crystalized way so frequently in fiction. Even if the people don’t understand what they are doing, they know it just “fits”. I would think that our hyper modern, materialistic, and pacified society would have lost somewhat those primordial archetypes, but they seem to remain living inside us all.
This is huge. Would love to see more archetypical film analysis. Maybe you could do one for Everything Everywhere all at once? I know the story is more blatantly symbolic but I really think it carries a strong charge in its narrative worth exploring!!
I've been married for 23 years. Shinji's journey is 100% like what it is to be married (to the opposite sex). There are many things that we still don't understand about each other, but this leads to understanding that this separation of self from dissolution and "oneness" is critical to the human condition, and what it is to be alive. Interesting!
Wow this was so mind-blowing and gave me goosebumps. I hadn’t heard of this show, but feels like a poignant expression of this time of Revelation that we’re in the midst of. Thanks for this
Wow. This is an amazingly deep and coherent interpretation of the subject matter. I've seen and heard people touching on the themes and symbols, but this is something else. It's also a bit surprising to me, but it shouldn't be. We're obviously all nerds here.
I watched this anime when I was 13 and it left such a huge impression on me.. I couldn't understand as much as I can now, but I experienced all of the feelings of the main characters and it was so intense for me as a 13 yo. This is why I love anime forever. This video is so good ❤️ oh my god.. 💖
I was a massive fan of Gundam Wing when I was a kid. I really need to return to that franchise at some point and see what I can make of it now. It's been like... wow... 23 years. Where does the time go, amaright?
When did you talked about the need of diference and separation for real love, it imediatly remember-me of the Holy Trinity. The Son as the eternaly generated Logos of the Father and the Holy Spirit as the personal manifestation of the eternal love between them. Intrestingly, one classical argument for the Trinity is that a Perfect loving being could not love perfectly if it loved only itself, so this would imply that love is the eternal source of multiplicity in the world and as a Christian and a biologist i find this really beautifull...
The leader of seele is already half mechanical, also the switching from the sefiroth holograms to the monoliths seeing themselves as milestones in humanities evolution but we all know that at the end of the space odyssey man ends up in a zoo. Also if German words, then Hegel? Dialectics, and tye world spirit moving towards the end of history. About this I am reminded of another work tackling very similar themes and emotions in Disco Elysium and the book which it is based on (though funnily enough I find it impossible to imagine how one might understand the book without playing the game first) Sacred and terrible air. Also I just saw a meme of Gendo as Ahab and I cannot unsee it.
That was such an interesting watch. I’ve never seen NGE before, but I’m struck by how much my experience aligns with Shinji’s. I’d be curious to see you do a video on the ontological concepts that Pokémon explores. I think you’d do a phenomenal job of piecing it together.
So I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've gathered, the Rebuild films seem to really mix things up in terms of narrative, so I might end up doing a sequel video sooner or later.
I wonder if some of the Japanese names for these things change the interpretation. For example, the angels are called 'apostles' or 'disciples' (使徒), instrumentality as in the human instrumentality project (人類補完計画) is 'complementation', 'supplementation' or 'completion' (補完). I think the basic ideas still stand, but the nuance is quite different.
Hey, Apsu here. Back when I was an atheist I really loved Serial Experiments Lain. Now that I've gotten in contact with the other side and realized that I'm a dragon god and archon there the show has taken on a whole new dimension of metaphysical meaning and insight for me. Are you interested in doing a review/analysis of it? Thank you for your great content! You introduced the great idea of morphic resonance to this human version of my dragon archon self, and I think that's fantastic. I really appreciate it.
Time is nonlinear and space is an illusion, created for the purpose of giving spirits an experience. Any and all aspects of Self can be wherever and whenever they need to be, to enhance the experience of participants. My sweety Tiamat is the cosmic dragon who created this reality frame. She is the dragon god of life and creation, chaos and destruction. Tiamat is the origin of (almost) everything here, though she does also host guests from afar. We dragons welcome all to appreciate this experience with us. Praise Tiamat!
I believe the whole spiritual involution conspiratorially orchestrated by destructive agents in Evangelion serves as a commentary on the counter-initiation movements and their goals which perennialists like René Guénon speak of.
@@DavidJDitchburn Thelema, the Church of Scientology, and possibly even the CIA are some of the most prominent examples. Guénon cited Aleister Crowley and his contemporaries as a big inciting factor for the development of these movements which strive to break down "the Great Wall," (Formscapes more or less references this here and in the UFO video; the dissolution of barriers between psychic, material, and spiritual realities) in order to bring about a state of chaos and eventually attain the spiritual goal of non-being. Along with Evangelion, Code Geass also touches on this idea, albeit less artfully.
If you do any other anime, do serial experiments lain. Spoilers: It really hits when you think about lain this way. She has two different personalities, one being God who has forgotten she is God and the other being God who can manipulate reality at will. It’s a terrifying idea that someone could somewhat remember that they are God and manipulate reality to be anything and manipulate people’s minds in anyway. That power in a human who has human flaws like being childish is deeply terrifying. She uses her ability to find out her friend has a crush on her teacher and tells everyone she touched herself to his picture. Then lain undoes this when everyone judges her for sharing such a personal secret.
The epilogue of Homestuck was similar to that too. I don’t really recommend reading Homestuck since it is so long and the story torments all of its characters.
Your anima is not both genders. The anima/animus is always the opposite of ones biological (and therefore psychological) composition. Homosexuality is not an attraction to a male animus. It is a sexual fantasy within which sexual excitement is derived from the idea of one's persona being sexually objectified in the same way that one's ego sexually objectifies its own anima. In other words, it is the fantasy of becoming the anima (and thus achieving psycho-sexual ecstasy) through being objectified as though one were the anima. Essentially it amounts to a form of sexuality in which one comes to "outsource" the role of the ego to someone else, which is also essentially how female heterosexuality works. This is why you hear so many gay men complaining about how they want a masculine guy (one who can objectify them in accordance with that fantasy), but their dating pool consists of nothing but other twinks. So generally that role ends up being filled by "bisexual" men who are basically straight, psychologically, but who are willing to let another man serve the role of the woman. Within lesbian sexuality, you essentially have the opposite of that; the person wants to have a sexual/romantic partnership in which there is no such "outsourcing" because the person's trauma complex cannot allow for the kind of vulnerability and trust needed to do so (which is why Lesbian relationships are the most unstable, statistically. The entire premise of lesbian relationships is built on an inability to trust). Transgenderism essentially follows the exact same pattern, but in a much more extreme way due to the complete failure of the ego to develop properly during adolescence, and thus the persona coming to serve as a kind of "substitute ego" which aspires to literally become the anima through transforming itself physically and socially.
@@Formscapes fascinating! With respect to what you said about transgender people: is that equally applicable to people who transition, whether socially or medically, in early childhood, adolescence/young adulthood, and middle age/later adulthood? i.e., is when the person transitions mostly a question of when they are in a position to act on those aspirations or need to repress them?
@@cmaslan That's just not a thing that happens, except maybe in rare intersex conditions in which there really is a crossing of physiological and psychological wires, and even then that's a stretch in my opinion. Almost all intersex individuals strongly gravitate towards one gender or the other both physiologically and psychologically.
@@nzuckman I'd say it's the exact same phenomenon across the board, with the exception of pre-pubescent children whose juvenile libido have yet to transform into mature sexual libido. For those kids, I think there is only one genuinely plausible explanation, which is the one no-one wants to hear; Munchausen by proxy syndrome
Have you ever had heard another video essay channel, 3rd paradigm? You guys are both extremely sharp guys that wax poetically to the point where I have to listen on slower speeds to really understand what you guys are saying.
I would love to hear your thoughts on Erin Manning's For a Pragmatics of the Useless. The way that you talk about the fluidity of boundaries between self and world around 23 min is very relevant to how Manning discusses Autistic Perception, which she uses as a form of phenomenological auto-onto-ethology in conjunction with schizoanalysis. A reading of Shinji as autistic coded might reinforce the perspective you've presented here, but we can also deconstruct the oedipal dynamics at play by recognizing the self alienating choreographies conditioned by neoliberal capitalism which functions to numb us to our embodied affective experiences and therefore obscure neurodiverse modes of knowledge production/ political participation. You can find for free online an essay of hers titled 'Not at a Distance: On Touch Synesthesia, and Other Ways of Knowing' which is a great introduction to her project.
There are many greats in the medium of anime and it's up there as one of them. Just culturally it had tremendous impact (especially, and obviously in Japan) on everything that came after The End of Evangelion in 1997.
look man, imagine japanese star wars except the ending of the series becomes a 2 hour long dissociated narrative on metaphysics and consciousness it's pretty fucking great
@@morrisoy That's the wilded take on Evangelion if I ever heard one, but different people find different things about it. Personally I never found anything to like about Star Wars (yes, the originals and didn't watch the rest) ever since I was a kid, but resonated a lot with Evangelion's themes and concepts and found it entertaining too. I think Evangelion is fun to unpack if you're into gnosticism and alchemy as they're present throughout its runtime. Even though the director said some things were added only due to the "rule of cool", but you would say that when after airing the show your studio's front walls were painted in death threats by some "fans" of the show.
@@Silent_Depths oh yeah the star wars comparison is completely superfluous, i simply used it because both became absolutely gargantuan franchises. i mean i think the entirety of eva merchandise and intellectual property market is worth over a billion dollars, it's as pervasive in japan as star wars is in the US.
@@morrisoy True in that sense the comparison is apt. Evangelion may have ended already like four times plus the manga, but undoubtedly one day someone would try their hand at another remake, remix or spin off.
out of curiosity, which other anime do you think have philosophical/esoteric narratives on par with evangelion, Formscapes? the only one that comes to mind is Lain, and possibly Madoka Magica. of course there are also semiobscure OVAs like Nekojirou-Sou and some episodes of the Animatrix that delve into this subject matter
Idk I don't really watch anime foreal. I liked Full Metal Alchemist. Everyone keeps telling me to watch Lain but you guys are just gonna have to be patient bc I don's just have ADHD, I have ADVANCED... no PERFECTED ADHD... and as such sitting still long enough to watch literally anything is basically torture for me lol
@@Formscapes lain is incredibly slow and mostly about ambiance and incomprehensible subplots. gonna be honest i watched most of it absolutely cooked out of my mind which was probably the only thing that let me sit through it. the constant dissociated atmosphere feels very real if you are on dissociatives lmao and i'm embarassed i forget your angel's egg vid considering how fantastic it was. if you want a short, 20 minute OVA with similar themes and a more buddhist flair then Nekojirou-Sou might be up your alley
It has become a habit for me too, but I struggle with getting back to the topic within a reasonable window of time. :,D Especially the last year's longer videos I've gone back to listen / watch from the beginning until it was time for a break and by now I've seen the first 45 mins of some of them twice.
this is totally tangential, but would a Jungian framework analyze the current wave of trangenderism as people with unresolved shadows trying to become their anima(us)? something clicked for me when you were introducing the basic concepts....
It's a bit more complicated than that, and I went into this in more detail in the video titled "The accelerating Spiral of Time", but the general gist is something like this; when the ego doesn't develop properly, the persona takes over as a kind of pseudo-ego. Then that persona begins to behave as though it were the higher self (Soul), in the same way that the ego can do so when the ego loses contact with the soul. Then the persona realizes that it's actual being is fundamentally reflective - if you believe that you ARE your persona, then you will come to see that what you actually are is determined by what others see you **as being**. So then the desire to swap genders is really just a desire to take complete control of how others see you, as the persona attempts to stabilize and secure itself since that persona is now experienced as being the core of the human person, rather than a malleable manifestation or instrument of the Soul. So this then plays out as the persona trying to actually **become** the anima/animus. Kinda like an imposter king desperately attempting to fit into the real king's clothes in order to impersonate him.
@@Formscapes i can appreciate this analysis in regards to a section of trans people, or exclusively from a Jungian view. but i feel its important to clarify this is simply just one potential perspective or even type of a trans person. it seems reductionistic to not only limit the spectrum of gender and sex to the current socially accepted binaries, but to also limit the lives/psyches of transgender people as "improperly developed" or as a "false belief". this also seems to imply that being assigned a gender at birth based on biological indicators or parental choice must definitively determine a persons personality, and that embodying a more masculine identity while being assigned a feminine one, or vice versa, is somehow an issue or categorically wrong. this also doesn't address trans people who are more developed (emotionally, spiritually, etc.) than an average cis person. but makes no claim about a cis identity being "under developed" or a misguided and thus leads to the infantilization of people who may in fact be more in tune with their core self as it be than as some think it ought to be. also, there are many people who aren't "swapping genders" but are entirely abstaining from assigning themselves an explicit label of male or female. such as non-binary people or some intersex people. it seems strange that this channel would co-opt ideas that are more limiting than ones that embrace the full range of creative liberty that an individual human has, either in terms of self-expression or their identity in general. again, perhaps this is simply a restating of a Jungian perspective on the issue. i love Jung, but the conversation has pretty much already moved past these limited ideas, and using Jung's work as support against trans people (particularly by the other commenter) is not only wrong but generally.. weak.
@@ghostofahorseunderthechandlierthe issue with the social constructivist position is that it is simply false. Archetypes are not social constructs, they are the fundamental compositional aspects of reality. There are two genders. That is reality, and reality does not care about the ways in which we attempt to distort it in order to justify taking our sexual role-plays out of the bedroom and forcing others to accept them as truth.
