Not only have scientists made cool tools and toys that help us heal, feed, and entertain ourselves, but they have uncovered a lot about how the universe works.

We tend to trust scientists. Certainly they must know more than we do. Maybe we should trust them with the most important questions in life such as Who are we? What is reality? Why are we here?

Perhaps that is why William Arntz, the driving force behind What the Bleep Do We Know!?, a New Age docudrama that purports to query quantum physics for answers to life’s ultimate questions, uses science to give credibility to his movie. So far he has been filling movie theatres with searching souls seeking answers to just these questions.

But this ploy is as deceptive as a Scientologist with a clip board prowling Hollywood Boulevard asking tourists if they want a free personality test.

In reality What the Bleep Do We Know!? seeks converts to Ramtha. Arntz financed, wrote, and is promoting the film. He believes Ramtha is the 35,000 year old “Ascended Master” and “warrior spirit” god of Atlantis who channels himself through JZ Knight.

This is what is deceptive about this movie. It hides behind science. It does not tell its audience the true goal of the film. Nor is it on the official What the Bleep Do We Know!? website. You have to research it, which we did.

We thought our loyal tothesource readers would like to know what we found.

JZ Knight was born Judith Darlene Hampton in, of all places, Roswell, N. M. about the time of the UFO sightings. No, we are not making this up. While in her Tacoma, Washington, kitchen in 1977 she claims to have established spiritual ties with Ramtha. This has been fortunate for Knight. She has leveraged her purported spiritual connection with Ramtha into a multimillion dollar channeling business that includes a publishing company, bookstore, clothing store and catalog operation.

JZ Knight, a Rasputin wanna-be, "channels" Ramtha in the film. It’s amusing and creepy at the same time, kind of like watching Fear Factor while eating dinner.

She has even copyrighted Ramtha. A psychic in Vienna had the audacity to claim in 1992 that Ramtha had also contacted her. She started channeling Ramtha for fun and profit just like Knight does. Knight sued her and won exclusive rights to all of Ramtha’s relayed messages.

Wow. You can copyright a god! And those bioethicists think copyrighting strands of human DNA is controversial.

But back to the film. Amanda (played by Academy Award winning actress Marlee Matlin) is depressed following a divorce. She pops anti-anxiety pills to deal with her pain. As we watch her live her life fourteen “top” scientists and mystics provide play by play commentary. They conclude that her misery is the result of her fighting against the true reality which they tell the audience is the quantum field. If Amanda’s consciousness can only access the quantum field then she can create her own reality and relax in the world she has created. She would no longer be anxious about what is right or wrong. She should learn from Ramtha (we know it’s really JZ Knight) who says in the film, “I do not think you are good. I do not think you are bad. I think you are God.”

The next segment deals with how traditional and oppressive religions use the notion of blasphemy to squash such enlightened and positivistic thought. Knight’s primary message is that each of us is equal to God. We all are god.

Gee, sounds like blasphemy to me!

Finally Amanda understands that the wacky world of the quantum field, not the world in which she is miserable, is "true reality". She is empowered to transform her life by self creation and expression and love vis-à-vis the impersonal and god-making quantum field.

The official What the Bleep Do We Know!? web site refers to its fourteen talking heads --the bevy of scientists and mystics-- as a "modern day Greek Chorus", their "ideas are woven together as a tapestry of truth…adding further emphasis to the film’s underlying concept of the interconnectedness of all things." All were hand-picked by Knight to affirm her belief that "The distinction between science and religion becomes increasingly blurred, since we realize that, in essence, both science and religion describe the same phenomena."

This promotional copy is deceptive. The film blasts religion as "divisive" and "ineffectual" but promotes New Age spirituality as "enlightened" and "unifying". In fact, the ideas expressed in the film by the "mystics" are not organized enough to be considered a religion. The fourteen talking heads have over thirty graduate degrees in various fields of scientific study. There is only one formal degree in religious studies.

But that’s not the worst of it. The scientists themselves are apparently hopelessly confused about the limit and scope of their own disciplines. To understand this, we must take a step back, and look at science historically.

The 19th century was so enamored with Newtonian physics that we can refer to it as the Deterministic Century. Many 19th century scientists believed that the entire universe was exclusively mechanistic, basing this belief upon the victory of science in certain, very particular areas where a kind of determinism really did apply. Their error consisted in believing that determinism in a particular aspect of reality meant determinism everywhere.

And so, all too many 19th century scientists came to believe that, because they could predict the motion of the planets, they could predict—with complete, determined certainty—the motion of everything from cats to kings. Clearly, this was a case of intellectual overreaching. Newton’s Law of Gravity did not determine where Newton took his afternoon walk on July 17, 1699, but only that Newton couldn’t take it in the air.

Unfortunately, the dizzying success of Newtonianism produced a host of imitators, each claiming he had discovered deterministic laws in every imaginable area, from politics and biology, to economics and psychology.

Darwin’s determinism emphasized the absolute priority of physical characteristics. Marx’s determinism emphasized that cultural change was the result of class struggle over who controlled the means of production. Freud’s determinism relied on the interplay between psychic structures.

It is not a coincidence that such intellectual overreaching during the Deterministic Century would yield an equally absurd reaction, one that brought us to the opposite extreme—Complete Indeterminism—ushered in by a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.

As scientists in the 20th century began to discover, the universe is not a mere brute material mechanism. Max Planck postulated in 1900 that energy was made up of finite energy parts called quanta and quantum theory was born. Heisenberg, a gifted theoretical mathematician, discovered that the more precisely the position of a quantum of energy is determined the less precisely its momentum is known. Suddenly, it seemed, there was a chink in the armor of classical cause and effect physics. Bohr pointed out that when we study energy in a way that assumes it is a wave we find a wave. When we study energy as a particle we find a particle.

Some scientists have taken from these developments, the wrong conclusion—again, a case of intellectual overreaching. Because we have discovered indeterminism at one particularly-well defined level, the subatomic level, they now declare that there is complete indeterminism everywhere.

Or closer to the theme of the film, some scientists declare that because the way we set up an experiment to measure certain very precise sub-atomic phenomena determines what aspect is measured (energy as a wave or particle), then all reality is determined by the way we look at it.

In both cases, we have intellectual overreaching; the application of what is true at one level of reality to all of reality. If a scientist doubts this, he should stand under a large box of bowling balls suspended over his head by a rope, and have the rope cut. He will soon find that cause and effect continue to work quite well. If that same scientist insists that reality is determined by the way we look at it, then let him “think” that the falling bowling balls are really feathers. In both instances he’ll come out both flatter and wiser.

The film extrapolates from this confusion, announcing that our consciousness determines our reality. Amanda just needs to alter her consciousness and her reality will change. This is the ultimate therapeutic affirmation—each of us is a deity, creating reality just by thinking it.

How Amanda finds acceptance from an impersonal and indifferent unknown reality where she can pretend she is God, but feels anxious and depressed surrounded by people who appear to genuinely love and care for her, is not answered. It makes no psychological sense and is, in fact, emotionally dangerous nonsense.

What the Bleep Do We Know!? opened in theaters this past February to packed houses on the west coast. A nation wide rollout is underway.

Consider yourself warned.

Ramtha Appears to JZ Knight in 1977

JZ Knight describes her first encounter with Ramtha in detail on her website. She traces her first unusual spiritual experiences back to her childhood and high school days. She attributes her difficulty getting along with people to the fact that they didn’t understand her when she told them that God was “more than someone sitting on a cloud judging us”.

Soon after graduating from high school she claims that an entity started appearing to her and she had experiences with UFOs.

But it was in 1977, while JZ was trying to dehydrate food under pyramid shapes in her Tacoma, Washington kitchen, that she had her first encounter with Ramtha. She put a pyramid on her head, wondering what it might do to her brain if it was powerful enough to be able to dehydrate food!

After she put the pyramid on her head, she began to see glitter and light fill the kitchen and then a seven foot tall entity appeared to her who was smiling and had “long fingers and long hands, black dancing eyes.”

JZ asked him who he was and the being identified himself as Ramtha the Enlightened One. Ramtha told her that he had come to help her over the ditch of limitation. Then he announced that they would do great work together.

She claims that the magnetic field given off by Ramtha was so great that when her husband-to-be came into the room with a compass he was using to align the pyramids to true north, the needle was spinning around so fast it had become a blur, though he could not see Ramtha himself.

JZ says that she was not sure at first if this being was an angel or a devil but after studying with Ramtha for two years she realized that there was no such thing as God or the devil but there were beings that “lived outside the realm of human perception, and that they only appear to us when we are open enough to see them.”

It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

G.K. Chesterton, “The Oracle of the Dog.” (1923)

Directors Respond to Criticism That Film Conveys Cult Propaganda

Reuters News reports that Matouq M. Matouq, Deputy Prime Minister of Libya, urged Iran to follow Libya's example and comply with the demand of the IAEA to freeze their uranium enrichment programs. "US President George Bush has lifted his country's trade embargo on Libya as a reward for Tripoli's decision to give up weapons of mass destruction. Most of the sanctions were suspended in April, when Libya announced its decision. President Bush has now formally revoked those which remained, dealing with general trade, aviation and importing Libyan oil. Several terrorism-related sanctions remain in place."

o'ver•reach' v. when someone knows one thing and extrapolates it to absolutely everything in the universe

German definition: über-vor-teilung

UberScience; UberReligion

The claims made by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment are grand indeed. Descriptions of their teachings on the RSE website say that they offer a framework that can answer questions not yet answered by the disciplines of science, religion and philosophy.

They believe that the teachings of Ramtha “broaden the scope of human experience far beyond the boundaries set by science and the various religions of the world to this day.”

The eclectic body of work that comprises the “Great Work” of the Ramtha school of thought are designed to “put to the test the statement that we are the Gods responsible for creating our own reality”.

A distinguishing characteristic of the school is the goal of initiating students into the philosophy through exercises given by Ramtha that help students “turn the philosophy into personal experience”. The purpose of doing so is that it “allows the students to begin to experience their own personal truth, their own personal wisdom, and no longer rely on blind faith or someone else’s work.”

The same hard work that is required to get the math or the science right is required to get the theology right. Such discipline is harder than making it up as you go along. Making it up as you go along is a good description of the theology behind What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Paging Dr. Santinover

Dr. Jeffrey Santinover is a “go to guy”. The range and quality of his work positions him as an expert on a variety of topics.

As the author of The Quantum Brain, the directors of the recent film What the Bleep Do We Know!? feature Santinover as one of the scientists explaining the mysteries of quantum physics. But a few years earlier he weighed in on another mysterious phenomenon with his book: Cracking The Bible Code.

“Cracking the Bible Code, is a critical discussion, pro and con, of modern scientific analyses of the ancient tradition of hidden encryptions in the five books of Moses. It is more importantly the story of one of the most significant and invisible figures of the Holocaust, Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, whose rescue of tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis—through two years of face-to-face negotiations with Himmler’s and Eichmann’s chief overseers in Eastern Europe—is almost entirely unknown to the world at large.”

Santionver’s approach to the Bible code controversy is primarily descriptive. Others, such as author Michael Drosnin, (The Bible Code, 1997 and Bible Code II: The Countdown, 2002) take Bible code speculation much further. Although Drosnin denies that Bible codes are always predictive he nevertheless sensationalizes this possibility in his books.

Drosnin claims to have found ELS (equidistant letter sequences) clusters that foretold events such as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He claims other ELS clusters may hold warnings of a world war in 2006 and an atomic holocaust in Israel.

Judging from the popularity of this more speculative genre of Bible code writing, the public appetite for all things “code related” is far from satisfied.

Director Ron Howard and author Dan Brown will likely be banking on the ongoing popularity of secret code themes that claim to unlock hidden truths with the release of the film version of the Da Vinci Code sometime in 2005.

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