The Voice (2008)

Directed by: David Sereda | 180 minutes | documentary

For those who didn’t know yet: if you reverse the word ‘live’ you get ‘evil’. You get this and many other facts in front of you when you watch ‘The Voice’. But before you get answers, a lot of questions are asked. And those are not the most simple and light questions, but questions like “was there consciousness during the Big Bang?” and “was the universe aware that there was a consciousness?”.

These questions seem a bit philosophical, along the lines of “if a tree falls on a desert island and there is no living being to perceive it, does that fall make a sound?”. However, the answers are not sought in philosophy but in biomedical science and spirituality with a touch of religion here and there.

Before an entire battalion of people is interviewed about energy and its perception, it is made clear how bad we are as humanity. There is overcrowding, half of the people live in cities (that’s bad!), more and more people are depressed and there are 1 million people who attempt suicide every year. Fortunately, there is Buddha who, after weeks of meditating under a tree, uttered the reassuring words: “there is suffering”. Leap: Buddhism also believes that if the earth were destroyed, souls would be reborn elsewhere in the universe. And that you can recognize yourself in a flower or in the sound of a waterfall, your consciousness extends beyond yourself. And one’s consciousness is heightened by near-death experiences. And Pythagoras once claimed that every planet has its own music. Like many actively meditating people, they will agree that they hear music in sunlight and nature. Et cetera, et cetera, jump after jump.

A first association with The Voice probably won’t be this informative film, but Frank Sinatra, or maybe even the voice of God. With ‘The Voice’ an attempt was made to convert the voice of people into the voice of the universe, or is it the same? Let this immediately be the shortcoming of the film that has been put together with great enthusiasm: so many different subjects are discussed that at some point you will lose your way. Is it about meditation now? About sighting ghosts? About collective consciousness? About Buddhism and other religions? About auras and chakras? About biophotons? About communicating atoms? ‘The Voice’ makes a lot of small trips with short answers that unfortunately cannot satisfy the big picture.

It is of course also a great challenge to combine spirituality, religion and science to try to give a complete picture of the past, present and future of humanity. Life cannot simply be caught under three hats, or together under one (big) hat.

However, the biggest flaw in ‘The Voice’ is that only people are interviewed who think the same as the director David Sereda. The skeptics and the scientists who have shown the opposite – which is always the case in science – do not get their say. That makes the whole, strangely enough, less credible and, above all, less interesting. And it already has such a small audience. Only people who meditate or are otherwise spiritually inclined will find ‘The Voice’ pleasant enough to watch.