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CHOICES INTERNATIONAL CARTOON CONTEST FOR FEATURE FILM
How’d you like to be in the movies with your insightful, ironically simplistic, seriously funny, and/or blindingly brilliant cartoons? We’re looking for your unique vision of consciousness, mind-body connection, quantum physics, ego/soul relationship, free will vs. determinism and how can we possibly make better choices in such an unpredictable world.
The winning cartoons will highlight the narrative, animation and documentary styles in the edgy feature film "Choices." There is no entry fee, and if you’re selected, you get credit, a DVD copy of the movie, and be seen by folks all over the world who are trying to figure out how to make choices for bettering their lives and our dear planet.
MORE QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER AS INSPIRATION
What is consciousness?
Determinism vs. Free Will
Do we have free will?
What choices do we have in the outer world (words actions)?
What choices do we have in the inner world (thoughts, beliefs, attitudes)?
If we do have free will, then why do the problems in our lives keep repeating themselves?
What’s the difference between unconscious reaction and conscious response?
How has conditioning influenced our choices (family/social/environmental pressures, neurobiology, developmental, traumas)?
How can we break out of addictive patterns?
To get what we want (health, love, money, creativity, peace, spiritual connection) and move beyond conditioning, how can we learn to choose:
Love over Fear
Heart-Master over Intellect-Servant
Sorrow over Bitterness
Optimism over Pessimism
How can we become aware and listen to the wisdom of different parts of our being (emotional, intuitive, physical, mental, spiritual)?
How can we develop better communication between our personality/ego and our soul?
When can surrender be the best option for happiness?
What does it mean to choose responsibly, being conscious of how we can affect the outside world?
Is consciousness based in the brain or is it a non-local phenomenon? Where is it?
What is the 100th monkey phenomenon and how does this relate to the Field of consciousness?
How does quantum physics fit into our field of consciousness and the choices we make?
SUBMISSION INFO
Submissions should be sent either
1. Electronically in jpg format by email to: dsonn@charter.net. Subject: Choices Cartoon
or
2. Hard copy by mail to: Choices Cartoon, 18212 Kingsport Dr., Malibu CA 90265 USA
If hard copy, write your name on the back.
Do not send originals; no returns will be made.
Your submission must include in a separate document:
Exact spelling of your name the way you want to be credited
Either a written or electronic signature (jpg)
Address
Date
Write on your submission: "I am submitting my Cartoon(s) to Choices Unlimited LLC and agree to the terms stated in CHOICES CARTOON CONTEST FOR FEATURE FILM."
Deadline: DECEMBER 1, 2006
DISCLAIMER
Before submitting, first please take a look at this disclaimer info which needs your agreement:
Images, drawings, words or other creative ideas you provide to us (collectively, "Cartoons") will be treated as non-proprietary and non-confidential. By submitting or transmitting to Choices Unlimited LLC any Cartoons (hard copy or jpg file), you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, transferable, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, disclose, reproduce, amend, modify, adapt, publish, sell, assign, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display any Cartoons in any form, media, or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed, alone or as part of other works, without limitation. You grant us the right to use your Cartoons, and any ideas, concepts or images contained therein, for any purpose including, but not limited to, the development, manufacture, distribution and marketing of "Choices" and its subproducts.
You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all rights in and to any Cartoons you provide. You agree to indemnify us for all claims arising from or related to your Cartoons. You are liable for the accuracy of the information provided to us.
In exchange for granting us these rights, and if we include your Cartoons in any part of "Choices", you will receive credit for the use of the Cartoons and a DVD copy of the film "Choices" as total compensation for these rights.
QUOTES TO USE AS INSPIRATION
Here are some quotes from the film made by doctors, therapists, scientists and big thinkers to put you on track with what we’re launching into the mass media. We're looking to make these oftentimes esoteric or philosophical notions more accessible using cartoons WITHOUT LOTS OF WORDS. Rather, we want visual, situational and/or allegorical cartoons that can get the ideas across at a gut, recognizable and humorous level. Any visual style that makes us think and laugh is welcome (eg. Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, Thurber, The Far Side, Doonesbury, Simpsons, South Park, graphic novels).
Use these quotes as guidelines for the cartoon themes:
Choices we make are not just feelings and attitudes and emotions that stay in our cranium somewhere north of our clavicles, they penetrate the body. It’s accurate to say that they push our organ systems around. Every major system in the body reflects the choices we make in terms of belief systems, attitudes, emotions and so on. These are more than feelings. They are feelings, but they penetrate the body, and they make huge differences in how the immune system and the cardio-vascular system and probably every other system in the body respond. – Larry Dossey M.D.
The idea that comes from Buddhism that there is no self that there is nothing to make a choice is interesting. I found it amusing though that people who take that position have made a choice to take that position. I don’t see anyway you can avoid the idea of the centrality of choice in their life. – Larry Dossey M.D.
How do you go from pessimism to optimism? Basically its learning to have a dialogue with yourself, you imagine yourself in a situation in which you would normally respond in a pessimistic, negative way, you give yourself permission to imagine responding in an optimistic upbeat positive way, you do this over and over again individually and in groups and then in real life you find it - what do you know? You are beginning to actually do this when you are faced with these kinds of situations in real life. This sounds gimmicky to pessimist. They don’t like these techniques. They say things like you are trying to put rose colored glasses on me, you are trying to fix me. I don’t need to be fixed. And so what we see, particularly in American man, is that you can only get them to go along with these methods when there is some window of opportunity. And man in our culture that usually comes after a significant illness. That’s why so many of these techniques are used in recovery phases from illnesses such as heart attack and so on. – Larry Dossey M.D.
I think, optimism is generally hard to come by and very difficult to sustain without some connection to a sense of a higher power. Because everybody dies. So far the statistics are quite convincing. So, one needs something beyond just optimism during this life to carry one through. So, what might death look like? I think it is the certainty that for me comes out of the implications of studies in consciousness which look at how consciousness acts beyond the body. Studies in distant healing show us that there is something about us that’s not confined to the brain and body, this is always - this is always gone by a term throughout history that’s related to the notion of the soul, something that is not identified with the brain and body. – Larry Dossey M.D.
One chooses not to be bitter one chooses to transform and make a gift of it and I think one may choose sorrow instead of bitterness. Sorrow recognizes one's own suffering and the people who are suffering. Sorrow recognizes the condition of the world, but bitterness doesn’t, sorrow is not a toxin, bitterness is a toxin. And bitterness is a contraction, sorrow extends one to others. – Deena Metzger
If you do not know what choices you’re making, you’re creating your experiences unconsciously. That’s why it is a good idea to become aware of what choices you’re making, so that you can begin to create your experiences consciously. So that you can create the life that you want to create. When you create your experiences unconsciously, when you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, when you react the way you’ve always reacted, you create as strongly and as powerfully as when you choose your choices carefully, and you can always tell the consequences of an unconscious choice because they hurt, they are painful. – Gary Zukav
When you blame other people, when you can't stop thinking critically, when you can't stop contributing to the world, except through your anger, then you have encountered a part of your personality which you are going to heal because those are the parts of your personality that are keeping you from moving into your fullest potential. – Gary Zukav
The alignment of your personality with your soul and that’s where choice comes in, that’s where your choice comes in to your life, not your attempts to change other people. But your determination to find the frightened parts of yourself and to change with your own volition those parts, to heal those parts. – Gary Zukav
Surrender means giving yourself to what the Universe wants. But, not as a limp rag not as a doormat to the world, not as a one who is a victim. But, as a powerful, loving, creative, compassionate spirit walking on this earth, with as much awareness as you can bring to your life. Awareness of your pain; awareness of what needs to be changed in you. And changing it. And in that context, surrender. Surrender to the reality, that at each moment your life is as it needs to be, given the wisdom of the choices that you have made. – Gary Zukav
Emotions are not just something that happen to us; they can be conscious choices. People can develop, and I don’t mean it’s way down the road and all that hard. They can develop the ability to consciously choose what they want to feel, and even though we’ll have emotional reactions, and we’ll find ourselves feeling things that are not what we want to feel, we’ll have the ability, and already do, to shift that more quickly; to say, this is not what I really want to feel right now, and move it without all the drama. - Howard Martin
The late Mark Twain quote, "I’ve had a lot of tragedy happen in my life, and least half of it actually happened." It’s – we project into this. The guy in the traffic jam, he’s late for the meeting, so he thinks he’s going to get fired, you know; he thinks he’s in big trouble. So you begin to project these worse case scenarios when you can create a pattern interrupt in that, and you go; wait a minute, I don’t really know that. - Howard Martin
They can call it higher self. They can call it a soul. They can call it a spirit. There’s a lot of names for it, but what I think they’re all referring to it as some non-local intelligence that we’re connected to that’s larger than the simple, you know, mental, emotional constructs that we have in the physical brain. - Howard Martin
I do believe it’s just a great powerful and dynamic intelligence, and that is we learn to access it more and plan a joint mentorship or partnership between heart and brain. That’s when we really are operating at our maximum efficiency. That’s when we make choices that are going to be really good for us and for other people as well. – Howard Martin
Consciousness is a product of a very complex neuronal circuit and it's not - quite likely that the kind of causation involved will not be simple collision of billiard balls, it won’t be Newtonian mechanics but it's extremely complicated electro-chemical processes. Now, the question then arises, well, what about freewill? And the problem about freewill is very simple.... The problem of freewill arises because we have a conflict between two views, neither of which it seems possible for us to give up. On the one hand it looks like human actions are against like any other actions and our is causally determined as any other actions such as are earthquakes or more of a tidal waves that are all causally determined. For the more it looks like the brain is a human organ like any other and it ought to be as determined as the liver or the heart. So, on the one hand we have the whole world picture that makes all freewill impossible, everything is determined, but on the other hand we have an experience, we have the experience of making up our own mind to do something and we cannot do that without presupposing that we have a genuine choice. – John Searles
Free will is essentially the ability to make conscious decisions in the gap,where the antecedents of the action or the decision are not causally sufficient to determine that particular action or decision. – John Searles
You know, I don’t even know what it means to be in the now. See there is no such thing as now, and there is what we call now strictly speaking is an infinitely small dividing section between the past and the futures like the edge of the table hasn’t got any dimensions. But in our experience, the experience present includes element of the past and the future. So as my experiences go on I’m using my previous experiences to coordinate my present and future behavior. So what we have is not an instantaneous present. We have an extended present and it extends in both directions, both past and forward. – John Searles
On day one, Gods creates the Physics, there is no consciousness there. So world of Zombies, we can imagine a world of Zombies, intrinsically, structurally, just like our world, no conscious experience. Our world isn’t like that our world has consciousness but that suggest there needed to be something else to enter our world, to make us conscious, over and above the Physics. – David Chalmers
The world is more holistic and entangled place than Classical Physics thought it was. On the other hand the idea that the world is holistic and entangled, that’s not very far from common sense. So I’m not sure that aspect of Quantum Mechanics will be overturning common sense. It is overturning a certain kind of over simplified science, you know, Quantum Mechanics has been around for 100 years, it hasn’t really transformed our world view yet. It hasn’t happened by now, I’m not sure it’s going to happen. – David Chalmers
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Thanks for your creative contribution to the better understanding of who we are and can become!
David Sonnenschein
Stuart Geltner
Choices Unlimited LLC
http://sonicstrategies.com
http://sonicstrategies.com/cartoon_contest_CHOICES.htm
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