Jerome Bixby's Man from Earth

One of my favorite movies is "The Man from Earth." I can watch it over and over. I have even watched it a couple of times in a row. It is no action movie! Almost everything takes place in the main character's living room. It is such a "thinking movie" that it was not a financial success. The premise of the movie is that a professor has resigned and his colleagues throw him a "going away" party at which he reveals to them that he is 14,000 years old. The rest of the movie consists of his telling of that long life as all these "experts" try to prove that it is false. They really reveal their prejudices and their fixed notions of truth. They get emotionally upset at the challenge to the certainties they have from the limited perspective of one short lifetime. I can see it from both the perspective of a short lifetime and the perspective of centuries. I am living this particular lifetime, but I also have memories extending back for centuries. Such memories give me a fundamentally different viewpoint from most people that I know. It is even different from what I held before I began remembering them. In the movie the main character is forced to recant his claim of his age, not because it was false but rather because his friends could not handle its truth. How often is truth softened because people's minds refuse to accept it? In our samsaric existence we so rigidly maintain our illusions! Nevertheless the Buddha showed us a different way!