Halos

We saw 'Into Great Silence' last night. Good movie, long, be prepared for that. Very sensitively done, the filmmaker let the movie rise from the film process, its less preconceived aesthetically and appears very organic. It is a glimpse into the lives of the monks in the Carthusian Order based in the French Alps, the well defined, contemplative life.

Wouldn't all religions if practiced to perfection, bring a person to the same understanding? Words and descriptions might even fall away at that point.

I like halos in sacred art, surrounding the heads of saints and the enlightened. In the film there are scenes of rain drops falling into water. So you see the plunk and the radiating circle wave that the drop makes in the water, very halo like.

So the halo is this unseen radiance of the saints' mind state and understanding, and probably much more, but at least these things, pure, holy, realized, and beyond.

Rainbows are halo like. Halos are circular, circles are continuous. So there's the notion of an ongoing continuity into perpetuity. This is how we want to think of the sacred, it goes beyond mortality.