In “Avatar,” director James Cameron has created a divine-infused world in which God is everywhere evident, in every wind-blown seed, leaf, tree and life form. Can there be any doubt that Pandora is a stand-in for the entire cosmos? This pantheistic world is inspiring and causes us to remember shamelessly our regrettable tendency to forget and ignore the evidence of God that so thoroughly surrounds us everywhere on planet Earth. As everyone knows by now, the plot of “Avatar” follows a barbarian, albeit thoroughly modern tribe of human beings as they invade and colonize pristine Pandora to rob it of every extractable mineral resource, causing the destruction of its divine centerpiece, the enormous “Tree of Life.” It is as if Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, had proceeded to fell the entire tree. Living according to the base passions of maya, the ego-driven humans have fallen away from God, whom they think of as a wholly separate entity, if they think of Him at all.
It was astonishing to me that some conservative Christians attacked the movie as presenting a pagan view of God as One with his Creation. In their view, our universe is a fallen world, created by God but separated by God’s will from its Creator as a punishment for Adam’s original sin. When Adam took a bite of the apple, they would have us believe, not only were he and Eve forced to leave the garden of Eden, but the entire material world they were given to inhabit was cast aside by God.
The Hindu and Buddhist concept of maya, on the other hand, is thoroughly pantheistic. Maya is an illusory or perhaps fallen world of duality but, perhaps paradoxically, it is nevertheless real, divine and One with its Creator. Early forms of Christianity made room for this pantheistic spiritual viewpoint and figures such as St. Francis of Assisi no doubt embraced it. In the Eastern conceptualization of maya, the human invaders of Pandora would be seen as thoroughly ego-driven and ignorant, their destructive actions a form of sociopathic madness directed inadvertently against themselves as well as against God.
Yet it is perfectly possible to reconcile the biblical story of Adam and Eve with the doctrine of maya. One could interpret Genesis by saying that when Adam and Eve fell from God’s grace, they lost their God-given perception of One-ness with their Creator, while still having one foot in the divine realms. We often like to say that we are ‘in this world but not of it,’ which is to say that we are all creatures of God but we dwell in the dualistic manifestations of maya and we have lost our own sense of our nonetheless very real unity with our Creator. In other words, our condition is one of forgetfulness of God rather than of actual separation from God. “Avatar” does not have to be perceived as a pagan story. Instead, it is a parable of the human condition: that human souls (represented by the Pandorans) are essentially connected to God but, except in the example of a few enlightened souls on Earth, we are not able to pierce the veil of illusion and perceive our unity with Him. When the human hero of “Avatar” is re-born as a Pandoran, he is achieving, if not enlightenment, then at least a giant step in his spiritual evolution.
Bird of Spirit 
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