Movie: What the #$*! Do We Know!?

Taking the Quantum Leap... Too Far?
Not Just a Movie Review of What the Bleep Do We Know!?

by Tom Huston

Something unusual hit the world running spring 2004. 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 subatomic 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 upon 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 worlds?

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 Gary 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 particle 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 article, 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 Schrödinger, 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—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 religion 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 tenuous 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.