The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas: A Pilgrimage to The Oracle Lake
by Michael Wiese
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Actor: Glenn Mullin, Khenpo Tashi, Steve DanczDirector: Michael Wiese
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-08-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Michael Wiese Productions
DVD Reviews of The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas: A Pilgrimage to The Oracle Lake
DVD Review: Pilgrimage as Initiation
Summary: 4 Stars
Pilgrimage as Initiation: The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas
Look at the true-life arc of development experienced by Steve Dancz, narrator of The Sacred Sites of the Dailai Lamas, a Michael Wiese documentary which demonstrates the inestimable advantages of timeless pilgrimage over trendy tourism. For Dancz, an accomplished composer, traveling to Tibet was a long-held dream come true, with its sonorous chanting, chiming bells, and bass-below-bass horns providing a veritable home-coming. When one of his Mentor-guides indicated a well-preserved, ages-old sea-spiral fossil in the same outdoor site where incense spiraled upward, earth and sky were wed. And when Dancz played a water-filled singing bowl in the Marketplace, it resonated with shimmering visual and aural fore-shadowing of the Lake itself. Beautiful.
The trials and physical demands of this group pilgrimage to the 16,000-ft.-plus Oracle Lake were brutal at times, the sort of purifying ordeals typical of many Initiatory paths to wholeness. Soon after accessing the Lake, (after visiting a plethora of holy locales, any one worthy of pilgrimage) these altitude-challenged devotees were assaulted by a hailstorm. Fitting, since the I Ching's Hexagram # 29 speaks of the orienting, sustaining reliability of frozen waters: when they melt, you are left with the solid mastery within despite the formlessness without.
Dancz may have intuited this, as he fared relatively well in the punishing climes, even receiving a vision: "As the winds blew across the Lake, it created a shape like an hourglass, but with the sand flowing up rather than down ~ a reminder for me of the fallacy of time." Timelessness, liminal space, an opening to the Eternal Zero Source.
For me, that image triggers something else of Indigenous value: the notion that prescribed, doctrinaire teachings need not be handed down from hierarchical institutions; Revelation can also rise up from Nature, to re-orient and inform. The Loa of Voudon rise up the ceremonial center-post (poteau mitan) from the waters, the dance of the Hula " raises and spreads the Light." This Earth-based reverence begins to bring a female balancing element to thousands of years of dominating patriarchal religions.
It is some measure of the Dalai Lamas' balance of yin and yang that they are able to read the depths of a Lake, even a yang-located mountain-high one. There is another I Ching Hexagram, # 31, that includes "the Lake on top of the Mountain," meaning "Reflection," but in this case, because of its heightened, liminal location, Reflection of the Divine. There is also a note of relative humility when the summit of a mountain is yin, carved out to contain water, rather than yang, jutting boldly upward into the sky. A site of such receptivity counsels "opening the self to receive great teachings." Indeed the case here.
While this film is composed such that the access to Oracle Lake is in every sense its high point, there is a sweet aftermath. Because Dancz has been our narrator, we've been invited to identify with him, from his early dream of Tibet to his sense of Spiritual home-coming. Thus it is quietly thrilling to glimpse the delighted expression on his face during their descent when they visit the cave and chapel of the great poet, yogi, and musical composer, Milarepa. Late in his life, the much-beloved mystic promised that "anyone who even hears his name, even once, will receive an instant blessing, and will not be reborn in a lesser state for the next seven life-times." As a musician himself, of refined sensibilities and sacred inclination, this must have resonated deeply within Dancz ~ how wonderful
Description of The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas: A Pilgrimage to The Oracle Lake
Studio: Passion River Films Release Date: 10/25/2011 Run time: 113 minutesBestsellers in DVD
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