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CANOVA SIGNS FILM DEAL FOR POPE ANNALISA

Will partner with Oscar winning BLACK SWAN Production Executives

Los Angeles, April 20, 2012- Trimountaine Publishing is pleased to announce that Peter Canova, author of THE FIRST SOULS TRILOGY has entered into an agreement to produce a film adaptation of the trilogy’s multi-award winning first novel, POPE ANNALISA.

Mr. Canova will co-produce the film with Phoenix Pictures’ Vice-President of Production Doug McKay and Director of Development Ali Toukan under an independent umbrella.

Canova is an author and national speaker on subjects such as ancient spiritual traditions, quantum physics, and new paradigms of reality. His visionary novel concerns an African nun who rises to the papacy in a near future world headed for annihilation. Pope Annalisa is a page turning thriller with an inspirational message about the transcendent human spirit that has gained an international following of enthusiastic readers.

McKay’s previous credits include work as a Production Executive on such films as the Oscar winning BLACK SWAN (directed by Darren Aronofsky); SHUTTER ISLAND (directed by Martin Scorsese), ZODIAC (directed by David Fincher); MISS POTTER(starring Renee Zellweger); RESURRECTING THE CHAMP(starring Samuel L. Jackson); LICENSE TO WED (starring Robin Williams); SHANGHAI (starring John Cusack); PATHFINDER (directed by Marcus Nispel) and ALL THE KING’S MEN (starring Sean Penn and written and directed by Steve Zaillian).

McKay is currently producing a number of projects including WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING, starring Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks and Chris Rock, which is set to be released nationwide by LionsGate on May 18, 2012. McKay is also producing Ray Bradbury’s DANDELION WINE; the Kip Williams-written-and-directed THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER and FORTY LASHES LESS ONE, written by Elmore Leonard.

Ali Toukan’s primary focus is developing and packaging feature films. His current projects are Ray Bradbury’s DANDELION WINE; Kip Williams-written-and-directed THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER, and FORTY LASHES LESS ONE, written by Elmore Leonard. He was a production executive on WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING and BLACK SWAN.

Steve Allen

media@SteveAllen.net 661.255.8283

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True God of All Things seen and unseen,
breathe Thy spirit into me.
Let me tell a story to break the stony hearts of men–
that Thou may enter their shattered prisons,
and fill the crevices of their sorrow,
and drain the swamps of their fear,
and lift them from shadow to dwell in truth.

Let me translate Thy Love into a language
they will understand for all time.
Allow me a poem of eternal beauty
that will open the hearts of men,
and draw them closer to Thee,
and show them they are of Thy realm,
and assure them that Thou dwelleth in them.

O Lord, let me tell a story, frozen in eternal beauty,
for all generations to come, that will break the iron hearts of men.

                                                                    Peter Canova 2009

In keeping with the notion of intermediary forces, Gnostics believed the creator of the material world was not the One True God, but an inferior force, generated from, but too far removed from the Source, to create perfection. Think of how videos or CD’s degrade in clarity with each successive copy and you have the general idea behind this notion. Thus we have the genesis of the rampant flaws and evil evident on the material plane of existence. The goal of the Gnostic was attaining the spiritual knowledge necessary to overcome these limiting forces that intervened between humanity and the True God at the root of all things.

Far fetched? Much needless conflict has occurred over the nature of God. This is puzzling. The “monotheistic” religions recognize god-like intermediary forces and the “polytheistic” religions ultimately acknowledge that one Supreme Being manifested all the sub-deities. These religions ascribe differing names to the intermediary forces, but they all hold that unseen intelligences play a great role in human life.  Significantly, most religions also recognize that the various non-material powers are not entirely beneficial to human development. Thus we have the concepts of devils, jinns, and evil spirits—in other words, retardant forces.

Gnostics and their myths accounted for the fact that the further the manifested forces were from the Source, the more “shadow” they contained.  This shadow gave rise to the creator god and the distinction between him and the ‘hidden” True God.The two gods are a symbolic of the dichotomy between the flawed material world and the perfection we are always told that God truly represents.

Continued on the next blog

The Source—call it God, the One, the Monad—permeates everything. Therefore, the fall was an act of conscious self-limitation, a dispersing of one Universal Consciousness into the appearance of many limited points of view. Limitation means ignorance of the whole, and ignorance is a form of shadow. So, shadow and error were inherent in human experience. This is why one often hears the world described as an illusion by offshoots of this tradition, illusion meaning that human consciousness is separated from the reality of its oneness not in fact but by misperception.

Central in this collective story is the recognition that the universe, both seen and unseen, was shaped by intelligent forces. In physics, we have gravity, electro-magnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. These unseen forces shape our physical world. But, according to the ancient wisdom, even these energies were controlled by higher forces that affected the human soul (the psyche) as well. Natural law had a mathematical precision; the psychic world of the mind and soul was chaotic, seemingly subject to random chance and full of suffering. It was order and chaos, good and evil, side by side. How is this duality possible when even the scientist and the religious believer instinctively sense a unity behind all things? The scientist searches for the holy grail of a grand unified field theory to unite all the natural forces. The religious person seeks God, and if God is everything, how can a loving god be the source of all the evil in the world? What kind of god toys with us by tempting us into evil with the gift of free will? More on this next time.

This world is full of challenges. Life is a story of our desires and the opposition to those desires. Opposition may come from other people or from circumstances and events, but I have never met a person who did not face obstacles, adversity, and suffering in their life. Indeed, as humans, we are defined by the degree to which we overcome these challenges. At the end of the day, life is really a personal school or boot camp we attend for growth. Our journey is the stuff of art, the core of religion, and the object of scientific inquiry.

This is the reality of the world. Why is it so? Why isn’t Earth the easy paradise symbolized by Eden? Why is the material world different from the heaven so many of our religions envision, a beneficent place where earthly cares are shed?    A tradition exists that directly addresses the questions above. As I pursued spiritual matters throughout the course of my life, it became apparent to me that certain threads interconnected the course of human spiritual history. From India and Asia, through Persia and on into the Middle East and Europe, echoes of a universal wisdom appear in multifold traditions from Hinduism to Buddhism, Manichaeism, Greek philosophy, the Mediterranean mystery schools, and ultimately the three Abrahamic religions.   See the Video and Articles links for more information.