The Chiropractor-Ladder Connection (*Spoilers*)

I know this is really long, but I haven't seen anyone else talking about this yet, so I thought I would. There are bolded section headings you can scan through to help you decide if you'd be interested enough to read it. No offense taken if you decide to pass.

[**Lots of Spoilers**]

The interesting FAQ section for this film tells us that the screenwriter, described as a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, has identified three main influences on the structure of his screenplay, which are listed below. But there is also a fourth influence that is only hinted at in the FAQ description of the drug 'The Ladder' and also hinted at in the movie by the way that important spiritual 'guardian angel' functions are performed for Jacob by a chiropractor. This fourth factor directly influences the structure of Jacob's visionary experience of his 'future', and this post describes what the fourth factor is and how it is reflected in what Jacob experiences. First, the screenwriter's three cited influences are:

1) the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a description of the experiences of the soul at the time of death;

2) the Biblical story of Jacob's ladder (Genesis 28: 10-13) in which Jacob dreams of a ladder connecting Heaven and Earth, with angels ascending and descending on it; and

3) an Oscar-winning short film, "La rivière du hibou", based on Ambrose Bierce's 1890 short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". Set during the Civil War, this is the story of a man who is being executed by being hung from a bridge over a river but has an extended visionary experience in which the rope breaks and drops him into the water, allowing him to escape, see his family, and become lost in a strange wood, uncertain whether he is awake or dreaming -- all of this taking place in the split second before his neck is broken.

It's easy to see how 1) and 3) influence the film, but the role that the 'ladder' image plays isn't as well defined, except to say that the film title is a combination of Jacob's name and the name of the experimental drug, called 'The Ladder' in the film, which provides a "rapid descent straight down to man's most basic instincts". This hints at the existence of another kind of 'ladder' recognized in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which parallels the Biblical version and actually provides a specific context and structure to Jacob's visionary experience of his 'future'. Both Buddhist and Hindu spiritual and medical traditions recognize the existence of a system of energy chakras, subtle energy vortexes that are located at various intervals up the spinal column, from the base of the spine to the top of the head. This combined physical and spiritual/energetic structure of the spine/brain also serves as a kind of 'ladder' that allows consciousness itself to reach from Earth to Heaven.

The Fourth Influence -- The Chakra 'Ladder'
In Eastern spiritual traditions, the chakras are correlated with various levels of consciousness and types of experience, from the basic animal/survival, sexual instincts, and lower emotional states of the lowest chakras, to the higher emotional love/bonding energies of the heart chakra, the faculties of spiritual discernment and personal expression of the throat chakra, the outside-of-space/time psychic perception of the brow or 'third eye' chakra, and the transcendent experience of the nondual crown chakra, representing the 'clear light' of Heaven that Buddhists are taught to recognize at the time of death as their true ultimate identity. (This is the light that Gabriel and Jacob disappear into as they climb the stairs at the end of the film.)

Human Intra-species Predators
All these levels of experience are necessary for a fully human life, but for some people in this reality, the goal of 'becoming fully human' does not yet hold any appeal. What matters to people whose consciousness is focused in the lowest survival, sexual, and power chakras is *dominance* and the opportunity to increase their own power and profit by preying on other, less dominance-focused humans. Such predatory people are unable to reach the higher spiritual states that are accessed through the heart, throat, brow, and crown chakras, and the film shows us that perceiving life from the perspective of the lower chakras alone, without a proper connection with the higher chakras, produces an experience of life as a kind of 'hell realm'. The state created by the drug 'The Ladder' is the most extreme of these negative states, and in Jacob's vision of the future, both he and his fellow soldier Paul describe themselves as "going to hell" or "being in hell".

It is only the fact that the debased consciousness of human predators is so completely disconnected from the fully humane values of the human heart, that makes them capable of treating their fellow human beings as expendable experimental subjects, to be casually sacrificed to advance their own covert political and financial agendas. The drug they are testing, called 'The Ladder' in the film, was apparently designed to focus consciousness exclusively at the base chakra survival level of fear and aggression, but achieved this in a way that completely blocked the higher emotional functions that would normally recognize the existence of emotional bonds and feelings of solidarity with companions. Human predator consciousness only differs from that in the sense that they have enough 3rd chakra control to practice their predation only covertly and usually from a safe distance, while outwardly imitating truly human behavior more or less successfully in public situations.

The 'Third Eye' Injection
There are many moments in the film that reflect chakra connections. The most memorable is probably the one in which a sinister-looking, eyeless/blind 'doctor' at the nightmare version of a hospital (maybe morgue) inserts the needle of a large syringe at the location of Jacob's brow chakra or 'third eye'. This is the chakra whose outside-of-space/time energetic function is able to carry his consciousness forward into a projected, imagined, symbolic future, constructed on the basis of memories. This flow of imagery activates all the various energetic levels of his being during the period in which his consciousness prepares for its transition by ascending the 'ladder' of the chakras, right before his death. The opening and closing scenes of the film establish the 'objective' timeline which begins with the two helicopters apparently delivering the mind-altering drug, (concealed in food, according to 'the chemist'), right before the soldiers begin to exhibit their physical symptoms and the violence breaks out. The objective timeline ends when medical intervention to repair Jacob's bayonet wound is not able to save his life and he dies, still in the jungles of Vietnam.

The Neck Adjustment - Lucid Dreaming Connection
In an earlier scene, before this timeline is clear, we see what seems to be a sudden 'flashback' memory of the moment when some fellow soldiers finally find Jacob in the jungle, after he was bayonetted. This jump in time is apparently triggered when Louis the chiropractor cracks Jacob's neck. Jacob asks him "What did you do?" And Louis the guardian angel (probably taking the form of Jacob's actual former chiropractor) says "I had to get in there. It's a deep adjustment." In Tibetan Buddhist kundalini yoga, the properly engaged energy of the throat chakra, where Louis' energy adjustment took place, is used to achieve lucid dreaming states, which might be a pretty accurate way to describe the gradual awakening that Jacob experiences during the dream-like vision of his 'future' that his consciousness generates, as depicted over the course of the film.

'Third Eye' Access to 'The Akashic Library'
The activation of the 'third eye' as described earlier, can also release consciousness from its purely personal perspective, allowing it to become aware of anything that has energetic ties to its own experience, such as the facts communicated by the recruited chemist and his desire to try to undo the harm that was done. This also explains Jacob's ability to become aware of the fact that his fellow soldiers -- most or all of them probably in the same state of inter-dimensional consciousness that Jacob is experiencing -- are also in the process of recognizing what happened to them and are struggling with their sense of being powerless to correct the injustice.

'Angels' and 'Demons'
At the same time, the purpose of the projected imagery of Jacob's 'future' life is not to enmesh him further in his past attachments, but to encourage him to mentally and emotionally release those. Paraphrasing Meister Eckhart, Louis gives the clear and simple explanation that energetic forces working to release him from attachments to past experience will be seen by Jacob as 'demons' as long as he is determined to resist the transition from life to death, but will be recognized as 'angels' as soon as he realizes that he must let go.
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The Chiropractor-Guardian Angel Connection
As a chiropractor, it is Louis' responsibility to restore the proper function and flow of energy along Jacob's spinal column, and if you factor in the consciousness aspect of the chakras (and the angelic nature of this visionary version of Louis), this would include removing any energy blockages and restoring the connections between the lower and higher chakras, encouraging the upward movement of energy and preventing Jacob's consciousness from becoming trapped in the purely instinctive 'hell realms' of fear and aggression. This process of helping to ease Jacob's transition 'up the energetic ladder' of the chakra system, would be an essential part of Louis' function as 'guardian angel', a role that Jacob intuitively senses that Louis is playing.

After Louis rescues Jacob from being trussed up and immobile in the hospital, he works on him and makes it possible for him to walk on his own again -- to move forward. Before that, Jacob says "I was in hell". After that, Jacob makes contact with 'the chemist', learns what happened to his unit, and has a visual memory that reveals the man who stabbed him with the bayonet was a fellow American soldier. This is the point when Jacob takes a cab to Brooklyn where his former wife lives. Significantly, we see that he is now wearing his army shirt and dog tags, suggesting that the transitional function of his vision of the 'future' is coming to an end and he is ready to leave it behind. He tells the cabbie "This is all the money I have. Take me home please." The doorman recognizes him, he enters the apartment, smiles over some family photos on the piano, sits down on the sofa and lets go. His heart beat slows, then stops, and then he hears the faint music that draws him to meet his son Gabriel again on the stairs. Gabriel first comforts Jacob as a parent comforts a child, and then leads him up into the light.

1st Survival Chakra & 2nd Sexual Chakra
Jacob's memories of combat and his hallucinations of feeling threatened in the sinister hospital are associated with the activity of the lowest survival chakra energies (1st base chakra) where everything in life is perceived as being nothing more than physical matter, subject to injury, decay, and inevitable destruction and consciousness is focused on looking for threats, expecting attacks, and fighting for your life. Jezzie's appearances in Jacob's visions are clearly connected with the sexual energies (2nd chakra), especially in the scene on the dance floor when Jacob sees a reptilian creature (a frightening perception of the impersonal force of the instincts) twining itself around her entranced body. I see that as a good example of a 'demon' whose function is to encourage Jacob to let go of any of his instinctive desires that are not properly connected to higher emotional heart values. Jezzie also shows moments of tenderness for Jacob, but when he stops his forward momentum ("for two weeks") and doesn't respond to her encouragement to 'get outside…do something', her energy turns 'demonic' enough ("Anybody *HOME*?!) to scare him out of his stupor. The phone then immediately rings and puts him in touch with his fellow soldiers, which moves him forward again in his process.

3rd Power Chakra
In another scene, after Jacob is bayonetted, medics come to pick him up and observe that his intestines are hanging out. This area, below the navel, is the location of the 3rd power chakra, whose energies in Tibetan kundalini yoga are used in the 'inner fire' practice called tummo in which Tibetan monks have been documented to sit lightly clothed in the snow and raise the temperature of their body's surface by as much as 17 degrees. Back in Jacob's vision of the future, he makes sense of this experience of distorted heat/cold perception by imagining that he suddenly runs a life-threateningly high temperature and must be immersed in an ice-filled bathtub to save his life. Tummo is part of the spiritual practice of raising the kundalini energy up through the chakras to burn away any impediments to achieving a state of enlightenment. In Jacob's case, he is raising his energy in the same way in preparation for his transition out of this life, at which time a Tibetan Buddhist is trained to use visualization and prayer to encourage his consciousness to project out of the body through the top of the head, at the 7th crown chakra, where it is directed into the higher spiritual realms.

On a more mundane level, the whole plot line of the soldiers wanting to hold the Army accountable for illegally exposing them to the experimental drug, people important to the case being blown up in cars, the government lying to the lawyer to discredit the soldiers, the lawyer showing himself to be cynical, uncaring, focused on money, and later angrily refusing to take the case, the soldiers being followed and watched, Jacob being kidnapped, threatened, and thrown out of a car, the soldiers being frightened and giving up, the unequal nature of the power struggle between corrupt powerful institutions and innocent but apparently powerless victims, even the fake Santa Claus who pretends to be helping Jacob while actually stealing his wallet -- this is all the territory of the lower emotional 3rd chakra where people focused on dominating others victimize each other and ultimately rely on 1st chakra violence to "win".

It's not possible to escape this kind of experience by engaging it on its own level. That only feeds and prolongs the destruction. As Paul and Jacob leave their meeting, before Paul's car is blown up, we see in the background two boxers sparring with each other which is a good symbolic representation of the limited nature of the mindset at this level. The only way to escape this dimension of experience is to raise the level at which your consciousness is focused to the spiritual dimension of the heart chakra, to attract more balanced, emotionally supportive people and values into your life. From that foundation, justice begins to come within reach. Thinking about Gabriel or looking at his photo is the way that Jacob achieves this transition to the heart level during his visionary experience.

4th Heart Chakra
Following the 3rd chakra fever and ice scene, we segue to a much milder scene in which Jacob is in bed with his former wife who likes to have the window open at night. Jacob is cold and gets up and closes it, but the exchange between them is a low-key and basically caring one, which reflects the emotionally committed, loving energies of his 4th heart chakra. Even when Jacob tells her that he was dreaming that he was living with another woman, and he was "burning from ice", their exchange has an easy, teasing quality and she calmly replies "See what happens when you cheat on me, even in your mind?" This is followed by an equally caring encounter with Gabriel and the other two kids, even though Jacob and Sarah were about to make love when Gabriel wandered in and interrupted them, asking to be tucked back in bed. For those focused at the 4th chakra heart level, the loving, nurturing support and understanding of the heart have priority over (but certainly don't exclude) 2nd chakra lower instinctive urges.

5th, 6th & 7th Higher Spiritual Energy Chakras
We've already covered the 5th throat chakra's connection with lucid dreaming, the 6th 'third eye' chakra's ability to go beyond space/time limitations and access information, and the fact that Tibetan Buddhists aim to project their consciousness out of the 7th crown chakra (top of the head) at death. The appearances of Jacob's guardian angel Louis and of his deceased child Gabriel evoke loving 4th chakra energies and also carry higher spiritual energies and powers (remember that 'Louis' is an angel and Gabriel is already familiar with the realm of spirit and both their energies reflect that higher dimension). This helps Jacob to experience the level of love and trust that he needs in order to let go of his fears and attachments and follow Gabriel up the symbolic internal 'ladder' that will take him out of his earthly life and into the 'clear light' of heaven.

So to sum up, Jacob's experience of his 'future' is a kind of dream of life, which his consciousness generates in order to lead him on an upward progression through the chakras, gradually leaving his instinctive fears and lower emotions behind and awakening to higher states where he is able to look at his life through the eyes of the love he has for his ex-wife and family, for his reliable friend, healer, and guardian angel Louis, and especially for his lost and regained son, his own personal version of the angelic messenger of God, Gabriel.