Dear Friends, I would like to share some thoughts regarding the potential power the media has to become a force for good in the world. Below is an article I wrote for the Hollywood Reporter last year that appeared in their Millennium issue. A Russian spy once told me that Communism was brought down by Dallas - the soap opera. We met by chance on the street in London. He knew me from a Moscow conference during the Gorbachev era. I had vaguely suspected that this "intellectual" was KGB. Now we could talk freely about why the Wall came down and the Soviet empire crumbled.

"It wasn't politics or the nuclear race or any kind of ideological war," he said. "It was TV. Once the people saw J.R.'s Cadillac, once they absorbed week after week all those mansions and beautiful clothes, the end was inevitable." He sounded serious, but could Communism really have been destroyed by glamour?

Hollywood almost takes for granted that it exerts global power, yet its influence is mysterious and hazy. Dallas was about much more than nouveau-riche style. Hollywood's greatest achievement is to seep into the unconscious of the world, and it has never done it more widely than now. I can go to the remotest outback in India, Guatemala, or Malaysia, and what will I see? Huddled people sitting in the dark watching seven-year-old reruns of All My Children (or Baywatch or Top Gun) in front of a battered television. Every moment they spend has a ghostly but huge influence.

There are ten influences that give me great hope for the future, and I measure all TV, movies, and music by them. Whatever is coming at me in the dark, I want it to arouse a sense of 1. Freedom, 2. Inspiration, 3. Love, 4. Laughter and joy, 5. Hidden potential waiting to blossom, 6. Unfulfilled need, 7. Nurturement, 8. Education, 9. Compassion, 10. Truth. I don't have to respond on all ten levels, just one. They are all qualities of the soul. They are the seeds Hollywood alone can plant, because whatever the word "spiritual" means, it isn't superficial, and it isn't just a matter of words. At then end of The Matrix, when Neo stops the bullets in mid-air and sees through the illusion of happiness created by the monstrous machines, a chill went up our collective spine. What he had seen through wasn't just the Matrix but the Maya. At that moment everything was a dream, not just the movie. For an instant we participated in a theater of the soul.

Hollywood's great potential is to fill unspoken needs, above all the need to transcend. To shape the unconscious isn't sheer manipulation (although that is always a danger and calls for a serious sense of responsibility). Everyone is hungry to be part of the theater of the soul. Critics too often view Hollywood as raw technology and money. Certainly the current technology is phenomenal, but digital images aren't what get us past the Maya. Audience meets image at a deep level where all the qualities of love, compassion, truth, and above all freedom hold sway. In the dark we will always seek the light; that is the real bottom line. Despite the chaotic pressures and enormous greed that has always stained Hollywood, its visionaries are attuned at this deeper level. I don't see anyone else who wields such untold power -- or must live up to it. All my children now means the world. If a KGB agent can see this so clearly, surely the rest of us have to.

Love,

Deepak Chopra