Introduction

  

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them;

and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers

 

Leonard Bernstein

 

We all know that art is not truth. 

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand

 

Pablo Picasso

 

No work of art captures the sentiments expressed above better than  The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, because it is a film that has two opposite faces at the same time. And while everyone has seen the first, no one has ever fully unmasked the second - until now. In fact, a number of super fans of the movie even go so far as to vehemently deny the possibility that the second face exists at all. They are, in effect, atheists to such a perspective, and hold to their certainty as if it were a religion. But that second face does exist. And if you, dear reader, are willing to follow the many breadcrumbs Kubrick has laid out for us to follow, you will discover something not just about the movie, but more importantly, how to use your own mind. 

One thing must first be understood before we begin is this: do not simply accept “in faith” what I am about to show you. Far from it. Make me earn your trust, through a thorough and careful presentation of all of the evidence I am about to piece together, and all of it in a way that could never have occurred without Kubrick's "intelligent design," including the mistakes. For you, dear reader, are my judge and my jury, and rather than assume I am telling you the truth, I ask you to assume I am wrong in my claims until I can, beyond a shadow of a doubt, convince you otherwise. For only if you disbelieve what I am about to claim can I let the evidence I will present to you to support my claim speak clearly and unambiguously for itself. 

 To begin, Kubrick's masterpiece of modern horror is not just one of the greatest horror movies of all time. It is also an incredibly elaborate game, and a coded message, comprised of two faces. But because that code has never been cracked before now, only one of those face has ever been seen by the public. What makes seeing both of those faces so important is that, more than revealing something about the film that has never been seen before, they are merely a reflection of the nature of our own perceptions, and at least two of the very different ways we are all capable of perceiving reality. 

Of the two versions of perception, one is more scientific, the other more artistic. And a religion is when we conflate the latter for the former, which is exactly what The Shining invites us to do, while 'overlooking' the fact we are doing so. Doing so is what lures us into a maze from which we can't escape, until we notice that what keeps us locked inside that maze is our our own inability to see, let alone admit the existence of, both faces of perception at the same time.

One way of perceiving reality is piece by piece, chopping it into pieces the way we analyze a system like a car motor by distinguishing one part from another. Another way of perceiving reality is holistically,  understanding how each piece is but part of a whole. The former is more logic driven, the latter more artistic, emotional, and intuitive. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig  explores the conflicting nature of these two perceptual perspectives, pointing out how and why we can never get to the truth about life by pursuing answers through only one way of seeing or perceiving. And in Elastic: Unlocking Your Brain's Ability to Embrace Change, Leonard Mlodinow points out that the former can map a course to get from New York to California, but the latter is what develops the steam engine, the airplane, and the motorcycle.

But before we can begin our journey, we need to have some basic understanding of the capsule we will be using to navigate our way through Kubrick's great maze: our own brain.

 

Perception: Three Brains & Two Minds

Before we can start to decrypt Kubrick’s game, we first have to decipher the tool we must rely on to do so: our own brain, which is really three brains, and our own mind, which is really two minds. Rather than relying on ancient sacred instruction manuals about how to use this triune brain and double sided mind of ours, which is like relying on cave paintings to figure out how to do brain surgery, we first need a snapshot of the different parts of our brain and how they operate together.

Like a Russian mytryoshka doll, our brains develop in stages, one enveloping another. The brain we are born with as infants is responsible for tasks like breathing, eating and the fight-or-flight instinct. Known as the “reptilian brain," it is responsible for tasks like breathing, eating and the fight-or-flight instinct. We share it with reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish .Then our child or emotional brain grows up around that.  Known as the limbic system, it deals with unconscious social perception and behaviors. We humans have this part in abundance. Above this is the last part of our brain to develop called the neocortex, otherwise known as the adult or rational brain. Fully forming in our mid-twenties, it promotes goal-related actions and conscious thought, and enables us to read and write and reason.  

Next, we need to understand how we unconsciously use these three brains to process information in the two different ways our mind operates, one like a radio broadcaster and the other like a silent movie. One side logic chops reality into pieces, the way we can atomize this paragraph into sentences, sentences into words, and words into letters. The other side sees in terms of the whole story.  In truth, we do both automatically, but we develop habits of emphasizing a reliance on one and deemphasize the importance of the other. Our computers and AI are designed to excel at the former, demonstrating how heavily our modern world champions and relies on such thinking, but are subordinate to humans at the latter. That’s why we fund science programs, for example, while defunding art programs, even though the cold logic of science led to the ideas and means of facilitating the Holocaust and the latter led to the Renaissance.  

In ancient Greece, these two ways of thinking were reflected in the concepts of "logos" and "mythos," or pure logic and knowledge on the one hand, and myth, mystery, and imagination on the other. Far from being the difference between science and religion, as they are today, the two were always seen as necessary compliments of each other.  Indeed, "imagination is more important than knowledge," as that famed scientist Albert Einstein observed, for "knowledge is limited," but "imagination encircles the world.” One may see reality for what it is, but the other can see its full potential.

 In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig  explores the conflicting nature of these two perspectives, pointing out how and why we can never get to the truth about life by pursuing answers through only one way of seeing, thinking, and perceiving. In fact, experiments done with split brain patients, whose left and right hemispheres were severed to control seizures, showed that without both, making decisions can be more difficult or even impossible. And in Elastic: Unlocking Your Brain's Ability to Embrace Change, Leonard Mlodinow explains how the logic of one can map a course to get from New York to California, but the creativity of the other is what develops the steam engine and the airplane, the car and the motorcycle. And only curiosity can get us to make one that will allow us to travel the other. One writes as mechanically as the Gutenberg printing press, the other as musically as Shakespeare.

Either perspective alone can leave us locked inside of a box of thinking, one that operates as a comfort zone feathered with likeminded “believers” who all perceive reality in the same light as ourselves. Such comfort zones have all the duality of a church. From the more logical and literal perspective, a church is the physical building itself, Pirsig points out.  From the more creative and imaginative perspective, a church is not the building itself but the people who subscribe to what is preached inside of that building. Our logical half likes the literal and strives to nail everything to the letter of the law, while our imaginative side likes metaphors and likes to turn everything into a helium balloon. One wears cement boots, the other has its head in the clouds. Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe. Both are needed for a sense of balance and proportion.

Reinforced by our attachment and need for approval of those who perceive the world as we do, as much for a sense of community as for safety in numbers, we form the habit of only looking at the world, and ourselves, through the stain glass windows of our collective “church” from then on.   Doing so effects every part of the nerve cells in our brains, from soma to synapse, altering its dimensions. Like a muscle, our brains respond to stimulus in our environment. And studies show that the less exposure we have to diversity, the more the nerve cells in our brain begin to atrophy, while the greater diversity we are exposed to, the more our nerve cells grow. Like our heart, so the brain contracts and expands in response to conformity and novelty.

While being shaped by its environment as a whole, each part of the brain also interacts with the others. The cortex, with its more refined intellectual functions, attempts to coordinate with the limbic system, with its more emotional functions. Relying more on one without the other is what leaves us feeling forever empty, for doing so only provides us with half of an experience. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's story Ethan Brand, for example, the main character searches for the unpardonable sin. Emotionally starved by his hyper focus on this intellectual pursuit, his dismay leads him to throw himself into his fiery kiln. When his remains are discovered, all that is left is his charred rib cage forming the prison bars that, like a dead hand, encircle his cold marble heart. In a metaphorical sense, his unpardonable sin was building a temple of ideas that became a tombed for his own heart.

All of this has to be understood first, because the maze that Kubrick created in The Shining, which he invites us to "come and play" inside of, exists wholly within these dimensions. And once we understand that, we can use such understanding as much needed compass to navigate between the two faces in the film, so we can see how both are merely a reflection of ourselves. 

 

The Two Faces of the Mirror Mind

Below, the conflicting nature of the two different ways of perceiving reality is captured in a single image. First found on an anonymous German postcard in 1888, this image will serve as our compass.  In 1890, a later version of that image was found on an advertisement for the Anchor Buggy Company. In 1915, yet another version of the image was published by William Ely Hill in a humor magazine with the title “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law.”  

The image, which has become famous among Psychology 101 students for illustrating the plasticity of human perception, is a black and white drawing of a woman’s face. Depending on interpretation, the face you see is either one of a young and beautiful woman, with a delicate chin line and an elegant headpiece, or that of an old woman with a large bulbous nose and a protruding chin. That image can be seen below. 

 

This famous image is designed to operate as an optical illusion. Of the different types of optical illusions, the image above is an example of an illusion based on perspective. Perspective illusions exploit the ways in which our brains can construct three dimensional images out of two-dimensional input.

Like light, so everything around us is both a wave and a particle, with the picture on the postcard reflecting the idea that human perception is inherently dualistic. In the same way, the image also reflects the harmony of opposites. The problem is that, in the same way our limitations make it difficult to see both the wave and the particle of light at the same time, so we see must force our mind’s eye to see more than one face on the postcard at a time. Worse still is the fact that for many of our political, scientific, and theistic religions, those two faces are labeled as God and the devil. And because we are nurtured to see such opposites as being mutually exclusive from each other, people fight over whether they see the Virgin Mary or a Wicked Witch. And often they do so fully unaware of how, more than anything else, their emotional experience with one blinds them from seeing, and sometimes even just admitting the possibility of, the other.

This denial is exactly the same one that leads some fans of The Shining to deny the existence of the second face to the film. But as the evidence will clearly and unambiguously illustrate, there is. And once you see it, you’ll wonder why you never saw it before.