Authored by Tom Huston

Something unusual hit the world running this past
spring. Opening at art-house theaters across the western U.S.,
and winning every independent film festival award it was
nominated for, an effects-laden docudrama began stunning viewers
everywhere with its creative confluence of science and
spirituality—and subverting common notions of reality
along the way. “Once in a while a film comes out that can
change the world, and this is one of those films,” avowed
one fan on the film’s website. Said another: “I started
crying in the middle of this movie because it was the first time
in my life I had proof that there were lots of people
who believe like I do.” And its impact is continuing to
spread, as word-of-mouth acclaim brings the movie to new
theaters across the country every week, with an even wider
release slated for this fall. Called
What the #$*! Do We
Know!? (aka What the BLEEP Do We Know!?), this
feature-length film is an ambitious and entertaining attempt to
turn such heady subjects as quantum physics, the nature of God,
and neurochemistry into fun and easily digestible concepts. It
does so through a cleverly edited blend of interview clips, a
dramatic fictional narrative, animated CGI (computer-generated
image) “characters,” and perhaps even more
space-time-warping visual effects than most major Hollywood
blockbusters manage to conjure up.

Starring Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin (Children
of a Lesser God) as Amanda, a professional photographer
whose unfortunate favorite pastime seems to be chain-popping
antidepressants, What the Bleep’s story line is a
simple tale of personal transformation—from self-hatred to
self-acceptance—with some unusual characters offering the
protagonist helpful information along the way. What isn’t simple
about this hybrid documentary’s narrative element is the way
it’s presented: peeking out here and there between bursts of
interview footage and grand CGI tours of quantum and cellular
realms, the plot is initially hard to figure out. Indeed, for at
least the first half hour, the drama may even seem unnecessary
and vaguely reminiscent of a PBS after-school special. The
longer you watch, however, the more What the Bleep’s
complex docudrama blend starts to make sense, and Amanda’s
transformative journey is recognized as the essential meandering
line connecting all the other dots.

Walking through downtown Portland, Oregon, taking pictures
and looking alternately anxious and despondent, the deaf but
lip-reading Amanda finds herself in a number of odd situations
and interacting with some unusual characters. For example,
there’s the basketball-playing, reality-bending whiz kid Duke
Reginald, who comes off as a twelve-year-old version of The
Matrix’s earnest prophet Morpheus, only funnier. He
challenges Amanda to a game of basketball on his “court of
unending possibilities” while explaining to her some
far-out physics facts, such as the notion that material objects
(like her hands and the ball she’s holding) never actually
touch, because nonbonded atoms energetically repel each other
and don’t make physical contact. Indeed, how
“physical” is anything, anyway? When the whiz kid
launches his basketball into the sky, we’re drawn along with it
into outer space where the scene opens onto stunning cosmic
vistas before diving deep into impressive computer-generated
sequences of molecular, atomic, and subatom
ic realms. Here a
disembodied commentator explains that what we perceive as solid
matter is really composed almost entirely of empty space and is
ultimately—proceeding down to the quantum level where
energy bits phase in and out of existence—completely
insubstantial. “The most solid thing you can say about all
this insubstantial matter,” the narrator tells us,
“is that it’s more like a thought—it’s like
a concentrated bit of information.”

Soon after her strange encounter with young Duke Reginald,
Amanda is looking at a subway-platform presentation of the work
of Japan’s Dr. Masaru Emoto, whose experiments purport to
demonstrate the effects of positive or negative thinking on the
formation of either beautiful or unsightly ice crystals in
water, when she meets a mysterious man. “Makes you wonder,
doesn’t it?” he intones. “If thoughts can do that to
water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us.”
That sentence replays itself in Amanda’s mind more than once as
the film progresses, and it turns out to hold the key to her
eventual psychological breakthrough. In fact, the idea that
you create your own reality is the New Age notion lying
at the heart of What the Bleep, the fundamental concept
u
pon which all its other ideas thrive.

However, before Amanda
gains the mental clarity to recreate
her reality, she must contend with a chaotic Polish wedding that
she’s been hired to photograph. Here the film delves into the
mysteries and mechanics of the human mind, explaining the
function of neurotransmitters through stunning visual effects.
The main focus is the way in which we become chemically
“addicted” to certain varieties of neurotransmitters
based on the emotional experiences they’re associated with.
“If you can’t control your emotional state, you must be
addicted to it,” says one of the frequently shown
interviewees, Dr. Joe Dispenza. Through an entertaining and
sexually charged twenty-three-minute scene, Amanda mingles
clumsily with the wedding guests, taking pictures, having
flashbacks to her own ill-fated marriage, and experiencing
further hallucinatory visions of CGI marvels. This time, rather
than the electric-blue energies of the quantum realm, she sees
multicolored dancing gumdrops—human cells under the
influence of various neurotransmitters. Amanda begins seeing
them at work in everybody, including herself: a room full of
biochemically conditioned people, absorbed by lust, hunger,
rage, and shyness, while apparently oblivious to the impersonal
interplay that’s actually happening between them all on the
deeper level of animated chemicals. Despite its cartoonish feel,
this is perhaps What the Bleep’s most implicating and
thought-provoking scene, confronting viewers with questions
like: Are we really just biological puppets controlled by a
slough of chemicals? And if so, how do we cut the strings?

In the midst of all this activity, popping up constantly to
offer choice commentary on the physics or metaphysics that
parallel whatever situation Amanda finds herself in, are the
medical doctors and scientists, not to mention a 35,000-year-old
channeled entity, who have been interviewed for the
film—and, indeed, are most of the film. Through
the insights of fourteen personalities in total, nearly all of
whom are authors of books with such titles as The Quantum
Brain and Conscious Acts of Creation, Amanda is
fed a wealth of paradigm-shattering information, being somehow
mysteriously attuned to whatever frequency they’re broadcasting
on and subconsciously picking up on their pithy profundities.
“We’re living in a world where all we see is the tip of
the iceberg—the classical tip of an immense quantum
mechanical iceberg,” says physicist John Hagelin of
Maharishi University. Former University of Oregon physics
professor Amit Goswami adds, “You really have to recognize
that even the material world around us—the chairs, the
tables, the rooms, the carpet, camera included—all of
these are nothing but possible movements of
consciousness.”

What all of this eventually leads Amanda to is the
realization that in order to change her life, she needs to
change the way she thinks about it. She needs to
embrace a new worldview, a new paradigm—one in which
quantum physics, biochemistry, mind, emotions, God, and
everything in between are interconnected in a seamless matrix of
infinite potentials that is capable of being radically altered
by thought alone.

As mentioned earlier, What the Bleep has been
very successful for an independent film, and its popularity only
seems to be growing. But why are people converging on
theaters to see it? Why are so many Americans, from Gen-Y teens
to boomers in their late fifties, finding a rather peculiar
documentary that explores the intersection of science and
spirituality so compelling? Could it be simply the fact that
there even is a film depicting the peaceful coexistence
of these typically antithetical worl
ds?

What the Bleep was written, produced, and directed
over a period of three years by a trio of filmmakers from Yelm,
Washington. William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente came
together in 2001, convinced that the Hollywood standard of
“rape, pillage, and plunder” as entertainment wasn’t
the only way to go about pleasing moviegoers. They wanted to
make a spiritually uplifting and scientifically educational
film—one that would appeal to mainstream audiences while
also managing to convey a few key concepts from quantum physics
and biology. “Science has been saying the mind affects
reality for quite some time,” Arntz has said. “This
is the first non-fantasy film that not only says this, but shows
mind/matter interaction, and it does it in a thoroughly
entertaining way.” What the Bleep is undoubtedly
entertaining, and by all accounts it is affecting audiences
profoundly. Yet it is the matter of what exactly “science
has been saying” that many reviewers, myself included,
find questionably represented by the film. And this seems
indicative of a larger confusion in our culture regarding the
actual connections between science and spirituality—a
confusion that has been rampant within the domain of pop
spirituality for over two decades.

All three of What the Bleep’s producers
are students at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (RSE). For
those who aren’t up on the Who’s Who of the New Age,
Ramtha is the aforementioned 35,000-year-old channeled entity
who speaks frequently throughout What the Bleep.
Channeled by former Tacoma, Washington, soccer mom J.Z. Knight
since 1978 (a year after Ramtha first appeared to Knight in her
kitchen one Sunday afternoon), Ramtha—described by his
students as a “master teacher” and
“hierophant,” and always referred to as
“he” despite the gender of his channel—has
been teaching people for over two decades about such classic
subjects as the true history of Atlantis, the nature of reality,
God, past lives, and how to take charge of one’s personal
destiny. But perhaps more than any other New Age authority,
Ramtha has used the hallowed clout of science to support his
spiritual teachings—particularly when it comes to the idea
that we “create our own reality.” This is where
Ramtha sees quantum physics seamlessly merging with his brand of
metaphysics, and he definitely isn’t the only one.

Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics (1975) was the book
that started it all, with Ga
ry Zukav’s Dancing Wu-Li Masters
(1979) appearing shortly thereafter. Countless others
followed throughout the 1980s (for example, Deepak Chopra’s
Quantum Healing) and 1990s (Michael Talbot’s
Holographic Universe), and into the new millennium
(Arnold Mindell’s Quantum Mind and Healing).
All of them are based on the premise that quantum physics
and mysticism, despite being such seemingly disparate
disciplines, actually have much in common. Capra’s book, for
instance, maintains that while quantum physics and mysticism are
completely separate approaches to interpreting reality, both
nevertheless exhibit similar logical paradoxes (wave/particle
duality for one, Zen koans for the other), and both view the
universe as being in a constant state of flux or impermanence.
But many authors go further than merely drawing intriguing
parallels between the two—much further. Quantum
physics and mysticism, these theorists claim, are ultimately
indistinguishable—two equivalent paths leading to
the same exact truth: that at the deepest level of reality, all
is One. The teachings of Ramtha, and the opinions expressed by
the physicists interviewed for What the Bleep, are
clearly of that more extreme brand of “quantum
mysticism.”

The thinking behind this has a number of subtle and complex
variations, but there are two lines of thought that seem favored
in What the Bleep. The first comes from quantum
field
theory and says that certain principles of quantum physics
suggest that the material world, at its most fundamental level,
is actually a limitless sea of energy called the “quantum
vacuum,” which is seething with the potentiality
for all material manifestation. “At that deepest,
subnuclear level of our reality, you and I are
literally one,” says Hagelin midway through the film. And
this underlying and all-pervasive quantum vacuum, the logic
goes, is the same “ground of being” that has been
experientially recognized by mystics throughout the ages as our
own deepest self or consciousness.

The other version of quantum mysticism presented in What
the Bleep, while related to the first, is based on more
traditional concepts from quantum physics and is a little more
complicated. The basic idea is that the most fundamental units
of matter, quanta, can only be considered as clouds of
“probability waves” with an indeterminate location,
until an unspecified act of measurement
“collapses” the waves into a fixed p
article with a
fixed location. And while physicists and philosophers have
carefully debated the finer points of this idea since the
1920s—with a particular focus on what exactly constitutes
the “act of measurement” responsible for the
collapse of the probability wave—the quantum mystics have
seized upon it, ignoring the opposing theories (mechanical
detection, “hidden variables,” etc.) to conclude
that the act of measurement must imply an observation made by
human consciousness. Moreover, they’ve concluded that
if this applies to the quantum micro-world, then it must apply
to the everyday macro-world as well (since any material object,
no matter how big, can be presumably reduced to its quantum
components). “Suppose we ask, Is the moon there when we
are not looking at it?” writes Goswami in his 1993
treatise, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates
the Material World. “To the extent that the moon is
ultimately a quantum object (being composed entirely of quantum
objects), we must say no. . . . Between observations, the moon
also exists as a possibility form in transcendent
potentia.”

In other words, the idea is that when your consciousness
is not perceiving something—like this magazine, or
the room you’re sitting in, or even other
people—then that “thing” loses its
apparent solidity and coherence and dissipates back into an
indeterminate cloud of potential quantum states until you open
your eyes and perceive it again, whereupon it instantly
collapses back into actuality. Needless to say, this is hard for
most of us to wrap our minds around, reminiscent of the old
tree-falling-in-the-forest metaphysical mind-twister. And that’s
probably why many physicists have dismissed it
entirely—including Albert Einstein, who famously remarked,
“I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not
looking at it.”

The implication inherent in both of these versions of
quantum mysticism is that each of us has the potential to affect
the world directly, at its most fundamental level,
through the power of our own consciousness. If we understand
that the universe is a quantum sea of possibilities, then we can
learn to bring certain more desirable possibilities into
existence via nothing more than our conscious intention—no
PhD in physics required. “And therefore, literally,”
says Goswami in What the Bleep, appearing before a CGI
background of wavy blue quantum energy fields, “I
create my own reality.”

It’s a fascinating idea. However, it seems that the majority
of quantum physicists see no need for the injection of human
consciousness into the mathematical formalisms that form the
basis of their science. As Ken Wilber pointed out twenty years
ago, even the founding fathers of quantum
physics/mechanics—Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner
Heisenberg, Erwin Schr?dinger, Sir Arthur Eddington, et
al.—who were all self-proclaimed mystics,
strongly rejected the notion that mysticism and physics were
describing the same realm. The attempt to unify them is, in the
words of Planck, “founded on a misunderstanding, or, more
precisely, on a confusion of the images of religion with
scientific statements. Needless to say, the result makes no
sense at all.” Eddington was even more explicit: “We
should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of
differential equations. That fiasco at any rate must be avoided.
However much the ramifications of physics may be extended by
further scientific discovery, they cannot from their very nature
[impinge upon] the background in which they have their
being.”

And there’s the crux of the confusion. Quantum physics deals
with the abstract, symbolic analysis of the physical
world—space, time, matter, and energy&
mdash;even down to
the subtlest level, the quantum vacuum. Mysticism deals with the
direct apprehension of the transcendent Source of all those
things. The former is a mathematical system involving intensive
intellectual study, and the latter is a spiritual discipline
involving the transcendence of the intellectual mind altogether.
It’s apparently only a very loose interpretation of physics, and
a looser interpretation of mysticism, that allows for their
surprising convergence—and opens the door to the even
wilder idea that by drinking some of this quantum mystical brew,
you’ll be able to create your own reality.

“I wake up in the morning and I consciously create my
day the way I want it to happen,” says Dispenza, a
longtime student of Ramtha, during one of his many appearances
in What the Bleep. In the film, after Amanda
experiences her radical breakthrough into a positive new world,
most of the interviewees chime in to explain the mechanics
behind such a transformation—all presenting variations on
the theme of creating one’s ideal reality through the power of
thought and intention. However, the degree to which
“creating your reality” is taken literally
varies widely among the interviewees, from Stanford professor
William Tiller’s idea that, upon realizing the
interconnectedness of all things, we should take responsibility
for our effects on the world, to Dispenza’s notion of literally
“consciously designing our destiny” to suit our own
desires by “infecting the quantum field.” It’s this
latter use of quantum–physical reality creation that begs
questioning—if only because it represents, again, that
peculiar confluence of physics and mysticism, and appears to
also contradict the very nature of mysticism itself. Mystical
practice is traditionally aimed toward the mind-shattering
revelation that there is actually only one reality and
one self, and this revelation is said to liberate the
individual from his or her attachment to personal desires. So if
we’re pursuing the manifestation of our desires by consciously
manipulating the quantum field, and thereby attempting to
re-create reality itself in our own image, how spiritual can
that be, really?

In any case, it is understandable that so many people would
feel a need to, as Wilber has put it, “rest their souls on
the findings of physics.” In our postmodern and scientific
age, what is the most obvious direction for a spiritually
seeking soul to turn in search of Truth (with a capital T) after
traditional mythic re
ligion has been seen through and left
behind? Why, it’s toward science, surely, with its claim to
universal truth and its mathematical certainty to ten decimal
places about the inner logic of space and time. Having our
spiritual beliefs backed by science lends them some degree of
legitimacy, however t
enuous the connection. Moreover, it seems
to make those beliefs more easily defensible against the preying
guards of scientific authority—that is, the skeptics and
scientific materialists of our era—both when encountering
such adversaries in the world at large and when the same
materialist doubts arise in our own minds.

So maybe the widespread popularity of quantum mysticism, and its latest offspring, What the Bleep, is pointing not just to our cultural propensity to be enamored by the amazing insights and innovations of science but to our innate fear of scientific materialism, which seeks, by definition, to squelch soul or spirit wherever it finds it. That we should even feel the need to overcome the doubt of the scientific materialist worldview indicates how all-pervasive it actually is, and how thoroughly steeped in it most of us are. In fact, the very need to base our belief in the transcendental Divine on the findings of science seems indicative of the strange spiritual desert in which we currently find ourselves, and in which humanity possibly has been lost since modern science first arose to trump religion centuries ago. Having left the world of myth, dogma, and superstition behind, we leapt into the wider embrace of science, logic, and rationality. But the scientific paradigm also has its limits, and despite the insistence of those who claim otherwise, perhaps what humanity needs now is a higher worldview: one that understands the miracles of science to be merely the modern expression of an ever-evolving Mystery, which only reveals—each time it is glimpsed—how little we really do know.