Common Ground: Cinematic Satori

December 2005

Cinematic Satori

A Movie Asks Some Contemporary Sages the All-or-Nothing Question

by Mark R. Williams

Early one morning, three years ago, Ward Powers woke up with a buzz. He suddenly felt the urge to make a movie about “oneness.” A 45-year-old Detroit lawyer, Powers had been living a comfortable life and minding his own business; he knew nothing about filmmaking. So he had to wonder: “Why me?”

“It was more an impulse about oneness than a vision or revelation,” he recalls. Following the impulse, this future producer-director asked for help from his cousin and best friend, likewise novices. He bought a mail-order video camera and started compiling a list of questions: easy stuff like “Describe God” and “What happens after death?” His plan was to interview some ordinary people and some extraordinary sages, record the answers, and see if a film would emerge. The result is ONE: The Movie, a refreshingly innocent collection of wise and wry comments about the human condition. It opens this month in the Bay Area.

Powers started out doing street interviews with average Americans and a few eccentrics from Times Square to Middle America to Fisherman’s Wharf. Along the way, he met a slew of characters like “Ron the Silver Man” and “Dragonfly, the Woodstock Fairy” whose words of wisdom and befuddlement are judiciously interspersed throughout. He also contacted several renowned metaphysical sages including Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hahn, Riane Eisler, and Robert Thurman who signed on to the project. Nearly every faith is represented in the film, and there’s a harmony in their message.

“Indian yogis, rabbis, imams, priests and monks, Buddhist nuns, Native American medicine men all came forward,” said Powers “Oneness — on the power of that energy alone, they let us in.” Even the normally inaccessible Deepak Chopra opened his door. Others stepped forward to help at just the right time with equipment, advice, and even a musical score provided by the Dalai Lama. Powers now had the wind in his sails.

“Immediately, you could feel there was something else behind [the filmmakers] that was pushing them in this whole venture,” recalls Sufi mystic and Marin-resident Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, one of the film’s more lucidly perceptive voices. “There was an innocence in the questions and a chemistry that worked — an idea that wanted to become a film — and it was bigger than them.”

Viewers get to watch Powers’ personal filmmaking journey, which began with an innocence bordering on naiveté. Can one really talk about “oneness” on film without slipping into parody? But Powers avoids the pitfalls, opening the interviews with Sister Eveleen in full Irish brogue: “Growth entails healing. Most people have been hurt fairly seriously and must do their healing first.”

Then ONE cuts to a modern-day Everyman, alone and dejected, lying in a fleabag hotel room. He listens to depressing news of child abductions and terrorism. The bedside clock radio shows 9:11, and he reaches over to smother it with his pillow. The image changes: we’re now in the studio of a blustery Christian talk-show host, who implores listeners to fall on their knees and accept salvation. Cut to a “summer solstice” picnic of Michigan atheists, who scoff at anything spiritual (“God is make-believe, a fairy tale for adults”). This is the film’s first lesson: oneness is not about being the same.

Powers is exploring the ever-illusive “meaning of life,” but not all his questions are metaphysical: “Why is there so much poverty and suffering in the world?” “When is war justifiable?” A sagacious rabbi bemoans humanity’s plight: “The world is fractured, and we have no alternative but to feel lots of pain.” Everyman listens intently, then flees his seedy surroundings distraught, but finally emerging from his shell. He spots a small child sitting quietly, a mirror of his own lost innocence.

What keeps us from feeling oneness with others? Materialism, greed, selfishness and, above all, fear, which lies at the heart of separation. But what are we all so afraid of? Mostly others. Fear lies at the root of our violent culture, of aggression and war. “The ruthless will prevail. It’s kill or be killed,” one man declares. There is also the fear of ourselves, of our dark, shadow side, the fear of knowing who we are, making mistakes, and our lack of worthiness. One homeless teen, struggling with the question about his “one wish for the world,” finally despairs: “I don’t think I’m worth it. That’s the truth.” He cannot even muster a dream for humanity.

Everyman enters a café and hears a man on TV preaching the politics of fear. He grabs the remote and switches channels: it’s Deepak Chopra speaking insightfully: “Our dualistic thinking leads to ignorance, and we institutionalize it in organized religion. And then we go to war.”

A delightfully vibrant yogi asks: “Why are certain people willing to shed their own lives just to cause a little misery to someone else? Something must be making them so desperate to do it.”

“There is great iniquity in the world,” says Chopra.

What is the way out of this separation and fear? For filmmaker Powers it lies in a single word: Compassion. Everyman roams the grim streets and sees a down-and-outer rummaging in a dumpster. He clutches the man’s arm in a gesture of empathy and unity. The cloud of despair around him is beginning to lift. To achieve oneness, we must heal ourselves and show compassion for others, be vulnerable and really feel their pain. But this won’t be easy because so many people tune out the world’s problems by staring at the television or computer screen.

“Most people can be bought off fairly easily,” says Franciscan Richard Rohr. “There’s no ground or center, and whatever the dominant consciousness tells us to believe, we by-and-large believe. The Romans did the same thing with bread and circuses.”

Yet global unity might prevail because oneness is such a basic part of life’s tapestry. “It’s a hundred percent fact that we’re all one,” insists one frenetic interviewee. “If you were standing on the moon looking back, you would see one Earth without any of the divisions or strife.”

The paradox of oneness lies in multiplicity. Each person on the planet is unique and distinct, but we need to value differences instead of fearing them. A good start is seeing the divine spark in others and in ourselves. Father Thomas Keating, a leading Catholic contemplative, says: “Finally you realize that you and the Other (capital O) are one, always have been and always will be.”

Arguably, the film’s most inspiring aspect is Ward Powers’ own personal journey — how he took a huge idea and ran with it.

“Something about me being an unlikely candidate plays into the real meaning of oneness — that it lives in unlikely places and doesn’t come from the top down. And how the universe supported me. I took some chances, and there was a net under the high wire.”

ONE makes its West Coast debut in Larkspur on December 9 at 7pm at the Lark Theater. A two-week run begins with a special event featuring Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, futurist Barbara Marx-Hubbard, and the filmmakers. Other screenings: Act 1&2 (Berkeley) and Landmark’s Lumiere Theater (San Francisco), December 9-23; Sebastopol Cinemas (Sebastopol) and Petaluma Boulevard Cinemas (Petaluma), December 16-25. For further details visit Onethemovie.org

Mark R. Williams is the author of In Search of Lemuria—The Lost Pacific Continent in Legend, Myth and Imagination.

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