Altered States (Dr. Eddie Jessup)

Category: Movie Role: Dr. Eddie Jessup From: Altered States

What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist god per se. It is the self, the individual mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth. At least I know where the self is. It’s in our own minds. It’s a form of human energy. Our atoms are six billion years old. We’ve got six billion years of memory in our minds. Memory is energy! It doesn’t disappear – it’s still in there. There’s a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses. There has to be. And I’m telling you, it’s in the god-damned limbic system…. I’m a man in search of his true self. How archetypically American can you get? Everybody’s looking for their true selves. We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we dispensed with God, we’ve got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life….Well, I think that that true self, that original self, that first self is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate. And I’m going to find the fucker.