Have you seen?

I Managed to get hold of a DVD yesterday ( second hand ) entitled - What the bleep, down the rabbit hole. Its a 5 disc quantum version. All about the nature of reality.
Haven't had a chance to see any of it yet.
Anybody on KFD seen it or know anything about it ?

Hi Stephen!

The first time I watched that movie, when it came out, I couldn't make it all the way through

Then last year it was presented in one of my classes. I was so insulted (being a bit dramatic here ) that I decided to do some research, because it seemed like there must be something coherently and more or less intentionally wrong with the movie--- rather than it being merely accidentally ridiculous.

Sure enough, it turned out that the movie was made by members of a new age group (cult? I don't use the term lightly...) known as Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. The odd blond lady who talks lots of strange "The Secret" style nonsense in the movie, it turns out, is Ramtha... or at least, the human channel of the entity Ramtha... some of the scientists quoted are her students... some of the other scientists were furious with how their quotes were edited to make it seem like they were saying things about quantum mechanics and consciousness that were the opposite of what they had actually been saying... one of the key stories in the movie, about how supposedly Indians couldn't even see Columbus' ships (literally couldn't see them!!!) until their Shaman neurolinguistically reprogrammed them to "see" them was so preposterous that I almost vomited. It was precisely when I shut the movie off the first time. Anyhow, a bit of googling turned up the truth on that story, which makes me think the filmmakers either knew it was BS but left it in (cuz it pushed their agenda) or were completely remiss in not fact-checking it. Either way, bad.

I would recommend just getting some good, solid books on physics and neurobiology if you're interested in that sort of thing.

But obviously I'm not biased in any way here (notice the wink...)
So YMMV!
-Jake

I've seen that movie and I agree with Jake's interpretation. Better to read about the real stuff of science. The movie is rather, um, starry eyed

Smoke some grass right before seeing it and it's wonderful.

jack

"Smoke some grass right before seeing it and it's wonderful.

jack"

So is "Waking Life", with or without. Now *there's* a cool philosophical mind-trip movie.

No. I wouldn't dismiss it. Just knowing a little bit about it and how it's also associated with "The Secret" reminded me of the Buddhist Geeks interview with Jeffrey Martin, where he specifically says that that sector of the self help book movement led him to researching enlightenment, or what he's come to call Non-symbolic Consciousness. You can listen to or read the interview right here. If you read it, though, there is an actually significant typo that says "the subjects that were able to produce those effects were feeling far between", which should have been recorded "were few and far between".

www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/07/bg-224-the...bolic-consciousness/

This is fascinating stuff - I think it may be legitimate. But since there's so many skeptics out there perhaps someone wants to look into Dr. Jeffery Martin there. Its on my list but I have alot of stuff to do before hand.

How is all that connected, limbisail? I'm curious about your comment. Can you elaborate?

Legitimate research (seemingly very very fruitful research) inspired by the successful practices of just such stuff, The Secret, The Field, The Intention Experiment - things' ideas' in the same realm as those in What the Bleep - manifesting, law of attraction, and other stuff I can't recall right now.

I'd be really happy to stick around for this discussion over the next week or so - I think it might be very interesting or at least disillusioning - but I'm starting a 10 day self retreat right now... and I'll just be posting all about that

That's a very wide net you've cast

Have a great retreat!

Just watched the first 20 minutes and had to turn it off. Alarm bells started ringing when i noticed that some of the interviewees are not
named and just have a black board with equations on it in the back ground, making them out to be scientific bigwigs.
There maybe a genuine message in there some where but its done in such a flaky way that it cannot be taken seriously.

Ha, I don't recommend that at all. In fact I'd say You can't be serious.

I just became interested in these things recently and I intend to check a lot of it out. I saw What the Bleep a few years ago and didn't take it serious, and The Secret as well, but recently I've talked to a few people who have me thinking twice about it and this Ramtha school of enlightenment has come up in the book I'm reading called Evolve Your Brain by Joseph Dispenza. It may well be genuine and I'm going to stick my nose into it.

I would really love to have a discussion here about this and to kick it off let's examine this claim of "real science".

I'm not so sure if the claim that the natives literally could not see the european ships is so far fetched. Reaching back into the annals of rigorous peer reviewed science (in this case part scientific speculation) there we can grab a copy of Julian Jayne's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". He posits that before our modern consciousness (consciousness as a process of purely linguistic mechanisms) we lived in a "bicameral" state in which the right hemisphere of the brain in a way enslaved the left hemisphere of the brain and this was responsible for all social organization - it was the survival mechanism at a time when humanity existed in numerous small cabals or tribes. Life in these societies was a perfect bliss and meaning in which everyone hallucinated the voice of God which would tell them what to do and when to do it.

What I find curious about this and What the Bleep is that in the book Jaynes stipulates that the reason the Europeans were able to just march right on in to the indigenous cities and take the gold off their buildings and walk away is that shamans who were responsible for communicating the will of God for all the tribes inhabitants to hallucinate actually thought that the white men were gods.

Quite similar to the idea that the tribesmen literally couldn't see the ships coming to them. Sure, maybe they could literally have seen the white guys walking off with their gold, or could they have? What is real and not real here? Perhaps they saw the ships but who's to say that they actually remembered them five minutes later? That's tantamount to not seeing them at all. It's quite plausible that they couldn't see the ships, or didn't think the ships were worth seeing (though that doesn't really say what it was like when they didn't mind the ships at all) until their shamans said so.

This book is that it was written in the 70's and ever since the ideas have yet to be taken serious issue against, albeit they are only a speculation. But this is a real point, I think. "Real science" is a phenomenal field. There's so much going on in many different small specific fields of study, but not many people are going around connecting the dots, and there's even less people on the vanguard of what is therefore (as there is rather scarce connecting between the fields) very alternative inquisitiveness.

And the idea that some of the scientists were furious at how they were quoted. lol. "furious"? You have got to be kidding me, as if their peers, for their purposes, would be duped by a little video.

I saw "What the Bleep" about seven years ago and found it fun and provocative. I would caution against taking it seriously, though, as its purported foundation in science is bogus.

There will always be people who believe in some particular worldview and would like to share it with others, possibly out of altruism, possibly out of a need to make a living. Such folks often justify their claims by pointing out that "you can't prove me wrong." And they are right, of course. We can't prove, for example, that The Secret is a fantasy, or that there is no Father God, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not rule the universe. Still, some explanations are simpler and more plausible than others. My suggestion is to let Occam's Razor be your guide in formulating hypotheses about how things work. Expressed as a commandment, Occam's Razor would be something like "Thou shalt not unnecessarily propagate assumptions." In other words, given two competing ways to explain something, the simpler of the two is probably more accurate. If, for example, you can explain the workings of the world without positing either The Secret or The Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's a safe bet to do so. Everything gets so much simpler when things are simple.

@limbicsail: I agree with you that it's good to connect the dots between the disciplines. I also think that if we make a clear distinction between science and speculation, our new connections will be more useful. Science is neither infallible nor complete, but it is based in observable phenomena rather than fantasy or wishful thinking. And good science is always willing to be proven wrong...