:: November/December 2004 Volume 3/Number 6

Spirituality at 24 Frames per Second:

By Bob Belinoff

The film business, perhaps more than any other outside of organized religion and science, has always felt comfortable dealing with the unseen world. This comfort has something to do with the nature of the film industry; it produces a magical product built out of celluloid and light in a co- creative process, based on suffering, serendipity, faith, chaos and connections in high places.

The two highest grossing films last year were both tied to spirituality: “The Passion” and the “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy. From “It’s a Wonderful Life” to “Groundhog Day” Hollywood has long played a powerful role in exposing us to new ideas about the value of goodness and the inter-connectedness of all things.

Now the traditional religious costume epic is being replaced by a new breed of spirituality film. It involves science and uses fiction and non-fiction movie making to tell compelling stories about new scientific discoveries and the value of ancient wisdom.

Yoga stands at the nexus of this movement. Yoga is a science, an ancient system uniting mind body and spirit. Yoga is about unity and the physics of flow. The universe has a flow to it, when we align with it, we embrace the power of the universe, we “embody” universal truths. We find our lives in synch, connected to something larger as well as one another. Yogis are at one with the universe, inseparable from their eco system, their neighborhood or each other – exactly the way quantum science views the world.

As a result western science is helping prove what Yoga and Vedic literature has long told us about the body and the mind. Primarily that there is no body and mind. It’s a bodymind. To understand the implications of new paradigms in science and the wisdom of the Vedas is to have incredible power over your life. The result is, as molecular researcher Candice Pert tells us, that “each of us is a dynamic system with a constant potential for change in which self-healing is the norm rather than the miraculous.”
The fact is your thoughts of love or anger can change the shape of crystals in a glass of water or the shape of your body at a cellular level. The fact is everyone has the same chemistry and physiology for combating pain, manifesting intentions, creating bliss and even achieving higher consciousness.

This is the pure potentiality that Deepak Chopra has helped to explain - and which more and more scientists have been explaining to each other. Now a whole bunch of scientists are explaining it to the general public in a surprise hit independent film called “What the Bleep.” And other films, like the recent “I (Heart) The Huckabees” are taking a different track with some of the same higher consciousness and interconnectedness conclusions.

David O. Russell’s “Huckabees” is a wacky philosophical exercise in changing the landscape of what most people consider everyday reality. Both films ask us to leave linear thought and traditional consciousness behind.
“What the Bleep” (also known as “What the #$*!”) uses humor, romance, drama, animation and respected establishment fuzzy-haired scientists to prove that what mystics have been telling us for thousands of years is true - that power, influence, and information exists in an invisible domain, an alternate reality, which is available to us at any time. To practice yoga is to understand this to be true. But others saw it as fuzzy thinking. Now science is bringing “fuzzy” thinking into focus and telling us it is fact.
“Bleep” is important because entertainment/science films like this - and there are more of them coming – speak to a broad public and may be able to open doors to the kind of discussions that dramatically change society. To go against the supposed body, mind, spirit separation is transformative as anyone who practices yoga regularly knows. To do so as a society is revolutionary.
Here’s why. The entire western approach to healthcare is based on the separation of mind and body (not to mention spirit). Western medicine views the body as a machine, which it places in the hands of the doctor/mechanic to take apart and fix. More than half of the U.S. economy is based on this idea.

America’s healthcare bill is 1.7 trillion dollars a year. Most of it going toward high tech diagnostics, expensive surgeries, prescription drugs and a complex and usually bungling bureaucracy. Drug companies don’t want you to know about the wisdom or the power or the very existence of the bodymind. But the very scientific disciplines these drug companies employ may now be beginning to turn on them.
In the film “What the Bleep” quantum physicists, neurobiologists and molecular biologists explain how thoughts are “things” with power to manifest change in the body and in the world. The body, we learn is wholly linked to mind through emotions and neuropeptides. Hard core, university based research scientists tell us that all reality is non-local, that invisible forces structure space and hold the world together and the endless pursuit of right answers is not nearly as important as sitting still and watching the relationship between things.

“What the Bleep” opened to highly dubious expectations. Initially no one wanted to distribute it. It opened on one screen in Yelm, Washington on February 6, 2004. Instead of sinking like a stone, it caught fire, has recouped it’s 5 million dollar production and marketing costs and is currently grossing around $600,000 a week in 114 theaters coast to coast, playing in seven theaters in the LA area. People want to hear what it has to say. And, word has it other film makers are sitting in front of their plasma screens right now editing the next generation of “Bleep”.
One of “Bleeps” three directors, William Arntz says, “This film is getting everyone out of their metaphysical closets…when we get to a theater, I say look around everyone here is your sister and brother.”

“Huckabees” deals with many of the same issues as “Bleep” without the scientists, and represents in many ways, an even bolder leap into the interconnected world that yogis operate in moment to moment. For while Bleep is an independent, self financed out of left field hit, Huckabees is a bona fide big studio gamblel raising big time spiritual questions about invisible forces and the meaning of life.

It is no surprise that Huckabees writer/director, David O. Russell studied with Tibetan scholar Robert Thurman and that “Bleep’s” Arntz studied with Ramptha a 30,000 year old warrior channeled by J.Z. Knight.

The tenants of quantum physics validate much of the Upanishads and other ancient wisdom. To follow these tenants – and social, and economic policies, national priorities and programs do ultimately follow science – necessitates profound changes in the way we view, cause and effect, our impact on the environment, each other and the way we pursue health and treat disease. And more and more the popular culture is making the case for change.
The media leads this change process much as visualization and intention lead the bodymind. Ideas get introduced, they are battered about, they hang around in the distance, and gradually get incorporated into our plans, programs, products and priorities. Ayurveda and other forms of alternative health care are becoming increasingly integrated into western medicine because of the rise of practices like yoga and the spread of ideas through both traditional and alternative media.

This means the growing popularity of theatrical documentaries combined with niche cable television channels, pay per view venues and DVD subscriber clubs may be giving us all, unencumbered by commerce, or politics, an unparalleled opportunity to have a discussion about big ideas.

“The Great Year” is a film about such a big idea. If we subscribed to the premise of this 46 minute documentary, we would understand that there is in fact, as the Buddhists tell us, a great wheel and we have a place on that wheel, and we are now exactly where we are supposed to be.
“The Great Year” is narrated by James Earl Jones and has an original score and 18 minutes of exquisitely rendered animation. The movie is a detailed and enormously professional explanation of a 24,000 year cycle that is recalled in literally hundreds of disparate ancient cultures including the Hindu Vedas. The message behind the film may be the beginning of a whole new way to look at time, history and the wisdom of ancient cultures. It is already causing a stir in the scientific and astronomical community and once again scientists are beginning to question long held assumptions and their own current data.

The Great Year was produced by Walter Crutenden in Newport Beach. Walter put together a kind of scientific archeological, interdisciplinary team most of whom had never made a movie before, and didn’t really see themselves as being in the movie business. It was an act of science and love.

Walter, who practices Kriya Yoga, had become increasingly suspicious that the myths of a great cycle described by so many lost cultures had something in common. He believed they all described similar cycles of cataclysmic destruction and golden age re-birth, all of which were tied to complex and coordinated movements involving the precession of the equinox and its cause. He found his explanation for the unexplained movements of these cycles in a book called Holy Science by Sri Ykteswar, written in 1894. He and his production partner Geoff Patino created an institute to study the matter, spent two years meeting with scientists, then set about to make their explanation a piece of visual communication for a mass audience more and more inclined to consider cycles of cataclysm and re-birth as a part of a deep spiritual connection to the universe.
The Mayans, many Native American tribes a well as other cultures have long looked to the year 2012 as a turning point in a great wheel of cosmic time. Native American spirituality, for the first time ever, was introduced recently into presidential politics. In the third Presidential Debate John Kerry talked about a blessing he received from Native Americans who “have a special kind of connection to a higher being.” It is no surprise that the first Native American Television Network, NATN, is now in development.

The Great Year is distributed by the spiritual Cinema Circle, one of a growing number of DVD clubs catering to niche and mass markets for films that might not otherwise be seen in theaters or on television. For 21$ a month subscribers receive 3-5 features and short subjects on a DVD. The club, begun in March, 2004 by producer Steven Simon already has 9,000 subscribers. “Some of the best movies made every year,” says founder Simon “go virtually unseen. Major distributors won’t touch the most heartfelt soul satisfying films because they don’t think there’s enough money in it for them and even independent distributors often over look quality films.”

Simon should know. He’s been involved in over 25 Hollywood productions, including “Eclectic Horseman”, “Somewhere in Time” and Academy Award winning “What Dreams May Come.”

The story of the clubs’ origins illustrate how filmmaking in Hollywood is enough to drive even an accomplished Hollywood filmmaker to a nunnery, or at least a year long spiritual retreat and ultimately to the growing spiritual community of Ashland Oregon. That’s where Simon settled after several soul wrenching bouts with standard Hollywood movie making doctrine.

In Ashland, surrounded by neighbors like Neal Daniel Walsh, James Twyman, and Jeanne Houston, Simon started over. With others he helped found the Institute for Spiritual Entertainment. The Institute uses interactive and on-line courses, intensive workshops and film festivals to help nurture what it calls a “global spiritual entertainment community.”

Simon and others then founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle. This month’s Circle selection includes a documentary feature about Ayurveda another about the mystical origins of Chaco Canyon, and an urbane tale of karma shot on the streets of Calcutta.

The Spiritual Cinema Circle expects to double its subscriber base this year while an even more science and consciousness specific DVD club debuted in September – The Visionary DVD Club. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico this club is offering science and ancient wisdom in the form of taped conference speaker presentations, a kind of bare bones production video form of the audio cassette recordings often available at conferences and workshops.
Because there is nothing visual going on but speakers and presentations the videos are quite compelling documents – a case made by an expert uninterrupted by “B” roll or dramatizations. For $20 month subscribers get to hear directly form people like Frijof Capra speaking on the tao of physics, futurist Barbara Hubbard Marx on conscious evolution, Vasant Lad on Ayurveda and physicist Amit Goswami reprising his Quantum Physics debut from “What the Bleep.”

And what about the American families’ media mainstay, the tube? Television has been the great disappointment of the moving image age. And it maintains this dubious distinction when it comes to advancing the cause of our interconnectedness and personal power.

Clearly transformation is not what ABC and Spike TV mean by “reality” programming. Even the Discovery Channels pay little but token attention to issues that threatens to alienate high pay healthcare advertisers. And, all things being connected, somewhere in almost every cable and broadcast channel chain of income is a pharmaceutical company with a vested interest in keeping viewers dependent on a pill or manufactured help from the outside.
But there are exceptions. Some cable channels, especially the less watched ones that come bundled free on Comcast or Dish or those available through Video on Demand tell a different story. The Oxygen Channel continues to host Los Angeles yoga teacher Steve Ross’s INHALE Yoga class.
And then there’s The Wisdom Channel. Striving to go mainstream Wisdom already finds itself in nearly 7 million homes across the country – available in Los Angeles through Comcast on channel 143. With its video on demand component it can reach ten million homes and is on a tear to build its video on demand base. The Wisdom family includes television, radio and internet programming and deals almost exclusively in enlightenment and sustainability issues, targeting holistic thinkers, cultural creatives and others ready to take the leap.

Programming Director Linda Rachael says the old New Age movement of the 70’s is becoming more cohesive with baby boomers and women leading the way. “Wisdom wants to shape that future” Rachel says, “especially in the integrated media and in environmental issues.” Right now channel surfers and others kind of “stumble” on the station, but viewers stay, and come back for a substantial amount of new science and ancient wisdom – with yoga instruction among its most sought after programming options.

Wisdom offers two yoga programs: “Wai Lana Yoga” and “Great Yoga Teachers” which is produced in Los Angeles by Lou Volpano and friends - all of whom practice yoga.
All this talk of science, spirituality and film is not to say that anyone with a Cannon XL2 and a prayer now has a shot at pitching a spiritual film in Hollywood. To say the words “spiritual” and “film” in the same sentence is still the kiss of death after which there may be no life for a first time film maker. It’s a long road to hoe, even for accomplished producers, as Stephen Simon can attest.
For those who go it alone, developing and producing a film out of your own pocket and God’s good graces is nothing if not the ultimate test of faith. And even those who do sell a show to the Spiritual Cinema Circle or the Wisdom Channel will be lucky to recoup their production expenses based on the deal.

The lure, however, of connecting a higher calling to a wider audience with the intention of shedding light on our purpose and our place is hard to resist, and many are taking their chances. Phillipe Caland broke the mold with his recent independent film “Hollywood Buddha”, which gives us the most honest look at Hollywood hypocrisy since Robert Altman’s“The Player”.

The truth is a small army of film makers in every city is trying to weave spirituality into their fascination for the moving image. There is in Hollywood something called the Spiritual Film Festival, festival creator Tory Berger claims to have the names and addresses of over 5,000 spiritual film makers on his rolodex. #$*!!

Mass market science and spirit. This is a door Bill Moyers helped open many years ago on PBS. The series he created called “Healing and the Mind” brought us Dr. Dean Ornish introducing many Americans to yoga for the first time, Jon Kabat-Zinn on meditation for health, Dr. David Eisenberg on the healing power of breath and Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen on visualization and cancer treatment. Seeds were planted. And western medicine is different for it today.
Now the new sciences are once again planting seeds, and the new media is helping to nurture their growth. The implications, this time, if they take root, are not just for the body, but like yoga, applied in practice they recognize a new bodymind to go along with spirit - and can affect every aspect of our being. Something to think about next time you go to the movies.

Next Issue: Spirituality and Film Part 2. Traditional films about spirituality and the east, like “Kumbh Mela” opening in LA in January and shown here.

Bob Belinoff is a Los Angeles based documentary film-maker and can be reached at bob@digitalwkshop.com.

 

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