When I first read about the movie “What the #$*! Do we know?!” I was rather exited to get the DVD and go see it. Like most people I have been looking for some time to explain the world and my part in it. According to reviews the ‘indie’ film “What the bleep” attempts to explain this by focusing on quantum physics. Oh my. Where the film starts out by simply pointing out some of the extraordinary things that have emerged from the study of matter at a quantum (sub-molecular) level, it goes soon into unscientific (and utterly absurd) extrapolations from quantum physics. One of the movie’s ‘scientists’ begin to claim that discoveries in quantum physics provide proof for a whole range of what I can only call “fantastical New Age claims”. In fact if you examine “how deep the rabbit hole is” it turns out that the whole DVD is a big scam and one long commercial for just another obscure cult.
When looking at the movie, I went from “wow that’s a nice eye-opener”, to “where the hell did they get that crap from”. They constantly try to mix psychology with fysics, biology, math etc. and then try to extrapolate something from that to get to a weird conclusion. Let’s give a few examples.
About 9 minutes into the movie this Dr. Joe Dispenza (who turns out later to be a chiropractor, not expert on the brain) states, that in some experiment they show people an object and then measured (with a CT scan) the activity in the brain. Then they asked the test subject to close their eyes and imagine the same object. Low and behold: the same areas of the brain “light up” as he puts it. According to him “…The truth is, that the brain does not know the difference between what it sees (…) and what it remembers, because the same specific neuronets are firing.”
Whoa, backup buddy. Where did you get that misconception from? As I understand it, many different mental functions share cortical areas to carry out the complexity of their tasks. Thought and speech, for instance, both utilize language areas of the brain. Visions during dreaming that use the visual cortex get reality tested upon waking. If Dispenza is right, than we all live in an imagined world not grounded in reality. But we all clearly know and see that this is not the case! Eyes open, eyes closed, no way to tell the difference, and to think, all this time we thought we could, particularly while driving.
Hell, I can imagine having a naked playmate sitting on my lap, but when I open my eyes, reality is kicking in real fast. So my brain does know the difference – thank you.
Also noted cellular researcher Candice Pert appears for a valuable discussion of hormones, peptides, and neurotransmitters in the brain. But even she wanders out into a field that is now her own and makes this completely bogus statement that is too ridiculous to even consider.
She tells a wonderful fable about the Native Americans not being able to see Columbus’s ships when they were offshore. According to Pert, “We only see what we believe is possible. We match patterns that already exist within ourselves through conditioning.” So supposedly, these seafaring Native Americans couldn’t see the ships because the sailing-ship pattern didn’t match the Native Americans’ dugout-canoe pattern (how far is the concept of a canoe from a sailing ship?).
According to the movie, the local shaman went to the water’s edge day after day and could see ripples in the water made by the ships but not the ships themselves. He was troubled by this and after days of staring, finally saw the ships (maybe because it was the morning they arrived). Of course, no one else in the tribe could “see” the ships until he did.
The story is a bit sketchy since it’s over 500 years old and the Native Americans involved never had a written language. Okay, they could have passed the tale along through oral traditions, but their people and culture were decimated by disease, slavery, intermarriage, and overall mistreatment shortly after the Spaniards arrived. The Native Americans could have related the story to the Spaniards who, of course, were humanitarians and would have wanted to preserve all things Native American; except, there was a language barrier. Yet, somehow, through it all, the tale survived.
So I put it, that a) the story is crap and b) the whole idea of not able to see something because you haven’t seen it before is just bollocks. There was a time when people had never seen a car, let alone heard of it. Did that mean they didn’t see it? Hell no. Maybe they had a hard time explaining what it was. Natives in the Amazone that never saw a plane in their life before, described them as ‘birds that sound like a waterfall’. So they both had the imagination and the intelligence to see and describe something they had never seen before using things they did know as a reference.
But it gets worse even. Like the claims of Dr. Masaru Emoto who was cited in the movie for his photographs of “water”? According to the movie Emoto set out containers of water with various labels—”love and appreciation”, “You Make Me Sick, I Will Kill You”, etc.—affixed to them, then photographed their structure through a microscope the following day.
The photos revealed structures amazingly related to the labels. For example, “love and appreciation” had a beautiful snowflake form while “You Make Me Sick, I Will Kill You” had an ugly disjointed appearance. The movie then states humans are “90% water” and if a label can alter water just imagine what it can do to people!
Well, If that 90% claim were true, there would be no way we could so much as stand up. Instead, to be more exact: newborns have around 78%, 1-year-olds around 65%, adult men about 60%, and adult women around 55%. No way near that 90%. And it’s just these kind mistakes – where they don’t get the facts parted from fiction – that make the movie go astray.
What they forget to mention about the “water experiment”, is that the photos were actually taken of frozen water drops also known as ice. Not water itself. What it also neglects to mention is, that Emoto’s claims have never been independently tested by a reputable science group nor has been subjected to double blind testing: the standard procedure for eliminating experimenter bias.
Double blind tests aside, there’s not even an indication that any of the data points have been repeated. There’s also no evidence that the results are uniform within the same water drop. Heck, It’s even unclear whether the photographed crystals were the only structure present or were part of some larger pattern.
Anyway; a lot of additional bits and pieces of quantum theory are presented in the film, including: superposition theories, direction of time, Boehm’s implicate order, information theory, and others.
Most viewers – like me – have no time, let alone the science background knowledge, to evaluate the validity of such claims. I just took the time cause I do not like to accept anyone’s word just like that.
It is just like the Quantum theory is used to punctuate religious and political sound bites, such as this one from psychologist Jeffrey Satinover: “Materialism strips people of responsibility; quantum physics puts it squarely in your lap.”
It sounds like so truth maybe. But what kind of a claim is that anyway?
Then there is this thing about consciousness, depression and addictions. That really caught me.
If we are free to choose any thought or feeling we want. Why would we choose to be depressed? Why don’t we just snap out of it and think happier thoughts? Why would we need drugs?
Dispenza (again: he is a chiropractor, so he definitely is an expert in this area) tells us that since we can’t stop feeling and thinking, and an addiction is “something we cannot stop,” then bad thoughts (or depressions) are just an addiction.
How this works? Well, Candice Pert states that if cells are over stimulated by neurotransmitters they adjust though a process called down regulation (which is true). Next Dispenza tells us that this is the cause of lifelong problems, since the down regulation is passed on in cell division. So we are used to thinking in same patterns and stimulations, hence we keep being who we are.
Nice. There is just one problem with his theory. Brain cells, unlike other cells in the body, do not divide. So there is nothing to pass on.
What I read about it and understand of it , addictive processes and habits of thought and feeling are both carried out by chemical signaling between neurons. The major difference is that in addiction reward circuits in the brain are hijacked and distorted by rapid elevation of chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins due to drugs injected into the body. There is growing evidence that genes play a role in determining a person’s vulnerability to addiction.
Another stunning an blatant lie in the movie: the so-called “Maharishi Effect.” In 1993, 4,000 meditators gathered in Washington, D.C. under the direction of physicist John Hagelin. Hagelin predicted in advance that the meditations would drive down the violent crime rate in the city by 25 percent that summer. Despite the fact that the murder rate actually rose, Hagelin announced a year later that his analysis proved that the violent crime rate fell just as he had predicted (in fact the violent crime rate in Washington DC was higher in 1993 than any of the previous 30 years). In his recent book he states that the meditators “function essentially as a ‘washing machine’ for the entire society.”
As with Emoto’s work, there has been no replication by other scientists, no control groups, and no publications in reputable peer reviewed scientific journals to confirm the Maharishi Effect.
The end of the film meanders into speculation about god. Knight tells us that Ramtha has arrived to free you from the gods who determine good and evil and punish you in the process. You can have it anyway you want. You are god. You can return to those wonderful days of childhood when the world really seemed centered around you and was created by your fantasies.
Well, the movies ask you – no urges – to go and see for yourself “how deep the rabbit hole goes”.
Well, if you do go down that rabbit hole, you find stuff that you will not like. Like who is behind the film’s agenda, and its questionable use of supposed experts.
Let’s look at facts: at least one scientist prominently interviewed in the film now says his words were taken out of context.
David Albert, a professor at the Columbia University physics department, has accused the filmmakers of warping his ideas to fit a spiritual agenda. “I don’t think it’s quite right to say I was ‘tricked’ into appearing,” he said in a statement reposted by a critic on “What the Bleep’s” Internet forum, “but it is certainly the case that I was edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views about the matters the movie discusses. I am, indeed, profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness. Moreover, I explained all that, at great length, on camera, to the producers of the film … Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed.”
“I certainly do not subscribe to the ‘Ramtha School on Enlightenment,’ whatever that is!” he finished.
According to research from the magazine “Salon” two other key subjects in the film are not fully identified: a theologian called Ledwith and a mysterious woman identified only as Judy “JZ” Knight.
Knight’s role as the voice of Ramtha is the most striking,Two other on-screen experts are not identified as Ramtha associates: Dr. Joe Dispenza, chiropractor and mystic, listed as a student on the Ramtha Web site; and a man identified only as “Dr. Micheal Ledwith.”
Ledwith (at one time Monsignor Michael Ledwith) was once on track to be the next archbishop of Dublin, but the theologian stepped down as president of Maynooth College in 1994, after a complaint that he had sexually harassed a young seminarian. It was later revealed that Ledwith had allegedly paid an six-figure sum to a man who accused him of sexual abuse.
Ledwith has maintained his innocence but left Ireland for the more placid confines of Monterey, Calif. On the “Bleep” Web site, Ledwith’s relationship with the Catholic Church is only alluded to in a claim that he was once “charged with advising the Holy See on theological matters,” but he is not identified as ever having been a priest, or even as a lecturer at the Ramtha school. According to a Ramtha Web site, Ledwith has joined “Ramtha’s core of appointed teachers.”
So there you have it: most of the filmmakers and the people starring in it are linked to the ‘Ramtha School on Enlightenment’.
And when we find out what that is about, we can throw out any credibility whatsoever that the movie might have appeared to offer.
Ramtha is a 35,000 year-old spirit-warrior who appeared in J.Z. Knight’s kitchen in Tacoma, Washington in 1977. Knight claims that she is Ramtha’s channel. She also owns the copyright to Ramtha and conducts sessions in which she pretends to go into a trance and speaks Hollywood’s version of Elizabethan English in a guttural, husky voice.
In her normal mode, Knight speaks the plain talk of her native Roswell, N.M. Ramtha, said to have conquered the continent neighboring Atlantis. Her Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, on a $2 million compound based in Yelm, Wash., boasts followers — including celebrities like actress Shirley MacLaine (who attended Knight’s seminars in the late ’80s) and “Dynasty” star Linda Evans — willing to pay up to $1,600 for a seminar.
Funding for the $5 million “Bleep,” according to various published interviews with the film’s creators, comes not from Ramtha but the software fortunes of director Arntz, who designed the job-management application AutoSys. Now popular in Unix environments, the program sold for more than $14 million in 1995. (Eerily, the startup money for AutoSys was also of Atlantean origin, or so the original investor claimed. A 1999 piece in Wired by David Diamond described the life and suicide of Frederick Lenz III, a guru in his own right, who called himself not Ramtha but Rama. The software mogul told those who rendezvoused with Rama that he’d taught meditation classes on Atlantis. Later, Lenz said his students were bent on his murder, and he plunged himself into the waters of Long Island Sound with a $30,000 watch on his wrist and 150 tabs of Valium in his bloodstream.)
Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment had previously promoted itself in its own films, but those had a lower budget. One was “Bleep” director Mark Vicente’s 2002 “Where Angels Fear to Thread.” Its trailer (available here) introduces Ramtha in the fashion of “Lord of the Rings,” swinging a blade and raising a goblet to “the challenge of being an individual.”
So there you have it. A movie that has very little patience for Enlightenment concepts like measurable results and scientific proof. In the new science of “Bleep,” symbolized by disembodied equations and CG bubbles flying at us like stars at warp speed, we’re past all that.
Rabbit hole you say? I call it a manure hole.
(Note: some excerpts have been been taken from “Salon” and various other websites and sources, that can easily be Googled).