Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice” is an incredible film. The film successfully captures a shred of the absolute: the truth of the unending process of living and dying. A central image of the film – a dead tree over the ocean – captures the idea: the flow of the unitary reality interrupted by the crystallized individual form which necessarily mediates experience of that unitary reality.

If a gift isn’t a sacrifice, it isn’t much of a gift. Just so with life: we can only experience it by our having undergone separation from the whole, relinquishing the comfort of absolute acceptance and union.