One: The Movie

Friday night Pauline and I spent a lovely evening together. We haven't had too much opportunity to spend a lot of time together lately so that made our night out especially enjoyable. We went to see 'One: The Movie' in the UDistrict and afterwards enjoyed sushi at Blue C Sushi in Fremont. 'One' was an interesting and thought provoking documentary (see www.onethemovie.org). The filmakers (completely new to filmaking) were three guys who came up with a list of 20 questions on the oneness of everything, the nature of God and the meaning of Life, etc. (full list of questions available on their website). It was interesting to hear people like Thich Naht Hanh, Robert Thurman, Deepak Chopra, Thomas Keating, Ram Das and others respond to some of these question. I was a little disappointed that there was only snippets from the interviews with these great spiritual people. I would have liked hearing their responses to more of the questions.

While I really enjoyed watching the documentary, the content didn't strike me as powerfully as 'What the Bleep Do We Know?' when I first saw that last year. Some of the information in that was new to me and the presentation was very powerful. The content of One was somewhat familiar to me. It has come up a lot in the classes on Tibetan Buddhism that I have been attending almost weekly for about the last ten months. What I did come away with from 'One' is a number of people who's work I'd like to read, for example Robert Thurman. He's Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University. He's a former Buddhist monk and a close friend of the Dalai Lama. (He's also the father of the actress Uma Thurman!) Riane Eisler, Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev were impressive and I inspired to investigate their work.

All-in-all, worth seeing. I'm particularly keen to see the DVD when it's released. Hopefully it will have the extended interviews.