The original definition of the word “avatar,” as used in Hindu religion and philosophy is a manifestation or incarnation of the divine. That is, it is a description of a visible form taken on by God, or one of the aspects of God. An avatar is evidence of God in this world but it manifests as only one of the many, many aspects of the divine Being. In today’s culture of video games, however, the term “avatar” has become a synonym for a proxy. When one plays a video game, he sends his proxy or “avatar” into the cyber-world to wage combat.
At first glance, it would appear that James Cameron’s film “Avatar” uses the word in its current cultural context of a proxy for an individual human being. Since human beings cannot breathe the atmosphere of the planet Pandora, they breed avatars, creatures with the genetic make-up of the tall, blue Pandorans but without brains. Human beings direct the blue avatars remotely, using their will power while in a trance-like state of suspended animation inside a flotation tank. Each avatar becomes the proxy of the human being who is controlling it. This represents a cinematic response to “The Matrix” movies, in which the movies’ characters directed their alter egos in a dream-like world while actually being in a coma-like state, plugged into a giant super-computer.
If we look more closely at “Avatar,” though, the planet Pandora takes on all the qualities of the astral realms described in Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi.” Colors are infinitely more subtle and varied. Movements are far more buoyant, as if taking place on a planet with much lower gravity than Earth. All the creatures possess the ability to fly, or sky-jump, or at least hitch a ride on a magnificent flying creature. Sounds and presumably scents are much more vivid and harmonious than on the grosser planet Earth. As the story line proceeds, the finer native intelligence of the Pandorans is clearly contrasted with the brutish, material-driven reasoning of the earth visitors. The earthlings are shown to be destroyers where the Pandorans are worshipers of a Creation in which God is present in every smallest part. The pantheist heaven of Pandora is painted in marked contrast to the earth-bound, objectivist dualism of the barbarian visitor’s perceived reality, and at the deeply satisfying end of the movie, the lead character is re-born as a Pandoran. Thus, his avatar essentially becomes his Pandoran (read astral) body.
This entire myth can be seen as an allegory of the relations between an astral world (Pandora) and a physical one (Earth.) In Chapter 43 of his “Autobiography,” Yogananda describes the wondrous astral and causal worlds that man occupies in the afterlife even as he belongs to the physical body in each passing incarnation. According to Yogananda, when one dies, one is instantly reborn in an astral body and upon the death, much later of that infinitely subtler body, one returns to Earth for one’s next physical incarnation. This formulation closely matches the experiences of many people who have reported their near-death experiences.
The cycle of rebirth repeats itself until such time as one has worked out all of one’s physical karma and has no further need to return to Earth for another lifetime. Henceforth, one will dwell in the astral realm, traveling from time to time to the even more subtle causal realm above the astral world until all of one’s “astral karma” has been worked out. It is all a grand project for the soul to grow gradually ever closer to the One-ness of God, until at last it has been completely absorbed into the Ultimate or the One. Yogananda’s description of the order of the cosmos and of the human soul in three successively higher casings, the physical body, the astral body and the causal body, is extraordinarily compelling and closely matches the vivid descriptions to be found in “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
I am strongly drawn emotionally to this wondrous and strange explanation of the cycles of life and death and to the nature of the astral afterlife. It is, I believe, what James Cameron has depicted mythically and so beautifully in “Avatar,” the most vivid depiction of an afterlife ever achieved on film. “Avatar” is not the first film to present an allegory of the shedding of the physical body and the donning of an astral body at death; it is merely the best one. Earlier films such as “Cocoon” and “Ghost” showed the lighter astral body emerging from the physical one. In “Cocoon,” the characgters are not depicted as dead; they are merely old. When they have a group encounter with a magical lake, they are rejuvenated as beings of light in a fountain of youth. Although death is never presented directly in the film, on a subconscious level one could interpret the movie allegorically to be saying that death is the act of diving into an unknown and mysterious pool form which one emerges victorious a s a re-invigorated being of light. A space ship is conveniently waiting to transport the group upwards into the astral realms. At the beginning of “Ghost,” one is presented with the simulation of the uncorking of the human soul when Patrick Swayze’spirit or astral body is released from the casing of his physical body.at the moment of death. Both films present us with a visualization of the process of death, but only “Avatar” goes so far as to portray an entire awaiting astral world.
Bird of Spirit 
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