Stanley Kubrick died on this date 13 years ago. His art continues to echo through our brains, flesh and bones.

Kubrick took cinema into cosmic realms that altered the collective consciousness of a generation. For many of us, a Kubrick film was like some new drug or a profound mystical transmission from a brilliant seer or shaman.

When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released to theaters in 1968, multitudes of young heads, like myself, prepared for screenings as one might a Native American peyote ritual or a Ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon.

The ceremony began and we fumbled for tickets and struggled to find our way down the cinema’s darkened pathway, for we had eaten sacraments far more powerful than a bucket of buttered popcorn, in my case, it was shards of crystalline mescaline. We had come prepared, knowing that Kubrick’s vision, projected upon the screen, shapely as a mandala and rich in the language of dreams, had the potential to change/upheave our lives, a breakthrough we yearned for with all the urgency of Rumi crying out in the chilly night for Shams - we were a generation caught between the sucking void of the past and the grand magical expectation that with the right combinations of music, drugs and art, our lives would be perceived for what they are: Sacred and HUGE.

Steven Spielberg, a disciple of Kubrick’s, discusses the the teachings of Master Stanley.