Zen-Haven May 11 2013
Sean Penn’s film, 21 Grams, is a brilliant piece about sin and redemption and the journey through the human shadow.
It’s a dark and foreboding film but it is deeply moving; his co-actors, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts, are brilliant. It is said that the human body loses 21 grams in weight at death and there is a wonderful line in the script when Penn asks, “How much does a human’s love weigh?”
Some think that perhaps the human soul has weight, and that the 21 grams is the etheric or the soul leaving the body. I don’t know if that is right or not. Certainly, the etheric is composed of light, and photons have no mass, so I’d say the etheric is weightless.
Then again, maybe our memories have a weight or perhaps the 21 grams idea is just one of those endearing urban myths that was suggested by someone years ago, and then passed around to where it eventually entered into our lexicon of ideas as fact.
In the olden days, it was thought that memories are stored in various specific parts of the brain. This came from early neurosurgery that found that memories could be evoked by electrically stimulating various areas of the brain.