The Tao of Quentin Tarantino

BY HARV BISHOP

Let’s cut to the chase. Life is a casino and shit happens.

That’s essentially the Tao of writer/director Quentin Tarantino who is both lionized and reviled for his thoughtful and violent films.

New Thought’s dictum that there are no accidents, that our consciousness creates everything we encounter in life via the Law of Attraction, cuts directly against Tarantino’s world-weary view. It should not because there is something important in Tarantino’s understanding of things.

What if we have the ability to create some parts of our lives through thought causation, but not every thing? What if randomness and life’s messiness create the very fluidity that allows our minds to (sometimes, but not always) influence the odds in our favor? Chaos magicians believe that’s how things work.

Richard Newby, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, distilled Tarantino’s preoccupation with the randomness of life using the example of the Pulp Fiction scene where John Travolta’s Vincent Vega meets his end because he is in the wrong place, having just emerged from the toilet, at the wrong time. This bad guy is stopped cold not because he is doing bad things, but just because shit happens. Newby says Tarantino is always looking at the balance of random acts and karma. In Pulp Fiction, the hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson believes he survives narrow scrapes because of divine intervention, a view Newby says, the film doesn’t support. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tips the scales towards karma in Newby’s view.

It is this consistent theme of Tarantino’s that I think is essential to understanding how he rewrites history in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where the Manson family murders are turned inside out. (Spoiler warnings)

In this film a series of small twists changes everything on that infamous night. The one-time TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), now on a downhill slide, is drinking heavily and goes out into the street to vent at the noisy junk car the Manson folks are idling in. The family members then turn to their rage to Dalton and his house.  Dalton’s house is where his friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a former special forces soldier and stuntman, is hanging out having dropped acid for the first time. The essential question the film asks is what if the family members had entered the wrong house where circumstances would end very badly for them?

Some critics attacked this as a stretch, an unwarranted fairy tale ending. But is it?

There’s already quirky randomness in the actual events. Sharon Tate and husband Roman Polanski just happened to be living in the home of Terry Melcher a rock music record producer and son of Doris Day, whom Manson blamed for his failed music career. The LaBiancas, a couple killed the following night, were chosen completely at random. Steve McQueen, the actor known as the “king of cool,” was due to be at Tate’s home the night of the killings. McQueen, then married, connected with a random woman earlier that caught his eye and they called it night, an indiscretion that likely saved his life.

It’s in horrific instances like these where I argue the New Age belief there are no victims is indefensible. It is a salve to make one feel safe in a sometimes unsafe world. Give me Tarantino’s Tao of Randomness. At least that is not a horrible fate inextricably drawn to victims by their consciousness.

But there is something more to all this than cold randomness. Is our only choice between total randomness or the divine intervention embraced by Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction?

Chaos Magick points to a third way.

Randomness and accidents may be part of reality, yes, but, according to Chaos Magick it also creates the flexible field on which we can sometimes use our minds to load the dice in our favor as events unfold.

We’ve all had situations like McQueen’s. Maybe we leave later for work missing an accident or we make a choice to do some small thing that leads to meeting the love of our life. You may remember the movie Sliding Doors where making a subway or not leads to two completely different realities for star Gwyneth Paltrow. Virtually everything that happens in our lives can be traced to small, seemingly insignificant choices.

The Kybalian is one historic New Thoughtesque work that treats this phenomenon as a mystery  worthy of respect rather than glibly explaining it via the Law of Attraction. In a too brief summary, Walter Atkinson comes close to the Buddhist view that everything can be followed back through a web of complex and interdependent causes that go beyond any one individual.

So where does intention fit into this puzzle?

I think our very mental model of the Law of Attraction leads us astray.

We often use the outdated metaphor of a magnet inexorably drawing iron filings to it at all times. Those filings (our good and bad experiences) may be pretty and shiny or jagged and spiky.

New science suggests different pictures and metaphors.

I would argue there may be no single Law of Attraction, but that it is an umbrella term for differently expressed but interrelated phenomena.

As Mitch Horowitz points out, most manifestations come through “regular channels.” That is they don’t materialize out of thin air, but instead are a product of intuition, fortuitous meetings with helpful people, and lucky breaks. Being at the right place at the right time may be connected to ESP according to Horowitz, and New Thought pioneer Claude Bristol.

David Spangler (who inspired Michael Bernard Beckwith and Nirvana Gayle) says manifestation results from synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences as defined by Carl Jung.  Synchronicities, Spangler says can be encouraged but not dictated.  The historian Gary Lachman refers to mind power as a kind of “directed synchronicity.”

Health manifestations may have less to do with ESP and the like and be more connected to unknown factors related to the placebo effect and mind-body connection.

There are other interesting takes related to Quantum physics, and the sheer mystery of anomalous phenomenon that seem to violate the rules of conventional science but that’s a subject for another time. The larger point here is that a simple magnet metaphor doesn’t get at the multiple factors in play with manifestation practices. Nor does it account for practices that sometimes work and sometimes don’t even for the most accomplished practitioners.

No matter how and by what means these practices do work (and we ultimately do not know), there is an emerging  theory among chaos magicians and the New Thought physics researcher and musician Sky Nelson that manifestation practices are limited by the very thing that makes them possible: the flux and indeterminate nature of events and life itself. The evolutionary flux leaves things flexible enough for the mind to have an impact and at the same time it makes some events more probable than others. So any magickal or New Thought metaphysical practice can nudge the odds for favorable synchronicities, but is never a gilt-edged guarantee of results.

Including probability in our metaphysical worldview does not mean everything is random and meaningless. As Einstein famously said “God does not play dice with the universe.” The answer here would be the universe is sort of a dice game, but the dice are sometimes loaded by our actions.

Dean Radin’s experiments show that intention can determine the path of laboratory measurements that would otherwise be random.

In his book, Living in Flow, Nelson uses the metaphor of a tree with many branches and fruit. As we make choices, combined with focus and passion, some branches become heavier and the fruit more developed, while others wither and become less probable to develop. External circumstances can also shift the impact on branches and fruit maturing.

To return to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the greater and lesser choices made by Cliff and Rick shift the probabilities in their favor in the end sequence. Two obvious ones are Cliff’s service as a one time Green Beret or Rick learning to use a flamethrower for a cheesy action film. As Priscilla Page writes on the BirthMovesDeath website, absent those factors they likely wouldn’t have survived the final twists of the story. Small details in Tarantino’s epic become highly significant at key moments just as it does in all our lives.

The chaos magician Gordon White brilliantly dissects the role of probabilities in manifestation practices in his book The Chaos Protocols. He even argues that at some level all prayers are answered. In an example I’ll sanitize a bit he asks what happened if a person engaged in manifestation practices for a date before hitting the clubs and came home without getting anyone’s attention. Was that prayer answered? He says yes, but given circumstances perhaps the hapless daters odds went from 1 in 100 to 1 in 25.

Do games of chance and Tarantino’s precarious twists of fate have as much to teach us about mind metaphysics as The Secret?

I think so and it suggests two critical life practices.  First, don’t leave the essential small bets out of your metaphysical practices. If your goal is a million dollars, what are the small steps that will make that manifestation more likely to happen? Pray and act on those too in addition to your big goal. Second, stay alert and flexible and act and adapt to changing circumstances. There can be many paths to a goal or different forms a goal can take. Diane and I set a goal of living in Europe for a year. We did but it looked nothing like our original plans. In fact, in our early research, a travel agent laughed when we gave her our small budget. To top it off we came home from Europe with more money than when we left.

Bruce Lee is portrayed (albeit controversially) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so it is fitting to close with his wisdom.

“Truth is living and, therefore, changing.

‘What is’ is constantly moving and constantly changing. If one is anchored to a particular view, one will not be able to follow the swift movement of ‘what is.’”

– Bruce Lee, (The Tao of Jeet Kune Do).