Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese TV animation series produced in 1998. It brought a sensation to the animation industry and is a masterpiece that anyone knows if you are an enthusiast. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is a 2001 animated movie that has been on everyone’s lip. It is as good as the TV series masterpiece.
This film illustrates the nature of mankind who becomes confused between borders of reality and unreality – the truth and the falseness. It makes audiences think about whether the world they are living is the real world.
The story is about Spike, a bounty hunter who chases down criminals in a future world, and Vincent, a terrorist who has lost his memory and has only been left with rage after having been abused in a military experiment, going back and forth. Vincent is in confusion as he has lost his past and thus, his identity. He tries to escape the hell he lives in, with a means of demolishing the world. Without any return and purpose, he tries to prove that this world is illusionary through innocent ‘destruction.’ He uses a nano machine virus that permeates the human body and destroys brain cells; thus, the infected people get a hallucination that they are seeing the most beautiful butterfly in the world. The director intentionally borrowed ‘The Butterfly Dream’ of Chuang Tzu and used a butterfly as a symbolic medium to distinguish between the real world and the illusionary world. Through the words of Vincent, the director tells audiences that the reality that we believe to be the reality might not be so.
“Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly. And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking. Which was the real – the butterfly or the man? At waking, Chuang Tzu had to think whether the butterfly in the dream is Chuang Tzu himself or his self is in a dream and the butterfly is dreaming.”
Not only Vincent, but all of the characters in the film are portrayed as wanderers who do not have a clear answer about the self. The setting is the future but their detailed backgrounds are depicted extremely realistically. The characters that look unrealistic actually portray how we are in our life. Through such scenes, the film continuously throws a question at us: “Is what you believe to be yourself real?”
Every one of us lives believing that the illusionary self is our self. When we become confused about the identity of that self, we start to think that the world, in which the self lives, might not be real. Actually, the image that we define as ‘our self’ is based on the information of the life we have lived. That is also the past that is no longer existent in the present; and thus it is the non-existing false information. We should know that the real self that originally existed remains when we break free from the false self. The real self would live in the real world and never be confused between borders of the reality and the false reality. We seem to live an ordinary life. However, why do we always feel void and fear? The reason would probably be that we are living in the illusionary world holding the self that is false. As Chuang Tzu realized after waking from the dream; if there is not ‘the false I’, I become a butterfly and a butterfly become ‘I’: you would reach the state of ‘Objects and Myself as One.’
The film has a slightly ambiguous development of story with symbols and analogies. After the ending credit goes up, the screen ends with this straightforward question, “Are you living in the real world?”
Here, I would like to introduce a writing of teacher Woo Myung, who well explains about the world in which we are living, what the truth is, what the falseness is, and Chuang Tzu’s ‘The Butterfly Dream,’ in the hope that you can realize why you are false through this precise answer.
Man Does Not Live in the World, He Is Not True but False so He Is Dead
From the beginning, the world was created complete; it is already enlightened and has life. Because man is not born in this world, he is not born in the complete world. The source of all creation is the great Universe. This existence is the Creator and the source; namely, it is the sky before the sky that exists before everything came forth.
Let’s imagine for a moment that we are this existence. From this existence where absolutely nothing exists, gas came forth and exploded into a fireball. The fireball cooled into solid matter, which became the stars in the sky. From the infinite Universe’s point of view, the stars and the Universe are one; the star is the Universe and the Universe is the star. Everything that exists in the Universe is one with the Universe. If, like the Universe, one does not have false minds, then the individual is the whole and the whole is the individual. Everything is one; whether or not there is physical form, everything is oneness itself.
Everything that has been created is the Universe itself, the complete existence; thus, all things are without death. Even if the physical form disappears, the soul of that form is Truth. It is the eternal, never-dying immortal. That sol does not dies because it is an individual entity that is one with the Universe that is Truth. The source of the Universe is Energy and God, and all forms are manifestations of this existence. The shape and form of this existence is everything in the world.
Man, however, is not born in the world. He lives in his own mind: a shadow, a copy, of the real world. Hence, he is not complete and lives inside his illusionary mind. He is dead because his mind world is false and not real. Truth is the world and falseness is one’s own mind that has taken pictures of the world. If one copies the world and lives inside what he has copied, he is not living in the world but in a picture – neither the world he lives in nor he himself living in that non-existing world exist.
– from Stop Living In This Land, Go To The Everlasting World Of Happiness, Live There Forever
