We're also told that when Columbus came to America, the natives literally couldn't see his ships. They couldn't think outside the box of Indian life. And in a subway that seems like one of many conceits borrowed from the "Matrix" movies (whose metaphor has similarly been borrowed by David Icke, the British author who says the world is controlled by lizard men), the heroine learns that you can see chi energy particles of love, that they've been captured in photographs of water blessed by Buddhists. At this juncture Matlin hears a voice in her ear: "Makes you wonder, doesn't it?" It's Quark, the greedy alien from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"! Actually, it's the guy who plays him, Armin Shimerman, as one of several mysterious strangers guiding her to the truth.

The impression left from sitting through a screening of "What the Bleep" is that a lot of people enjoy hearing their griping about religious fundamentalists reflected back to them, backed by science. There's also plenty of stroking of lefty values; Ramtha has declared that all world religions have in common "the suppression of women," adding, with the brashness surely fashionable in the 33rd century B.C., "No woman who had an abortion has sinned against God. Fuck all those assholes who tell you that." On the other hand, papers from Knight's 1992 divorce case with Jeffrey Knight hint that Ramtha is an ancient homophobe, who allegedly declared that AIDS was Mother Nature's way of "getting rid of" homosexuality and told Jeffrey Knight he should reject modern medicine and overcome the disease using the school's breathing techniques, according to court testimony. Tom Szimhart, a "deprogrammer" who testified on behalf of Knight's husband (who eventually died of the disease) called the Ramtha school a cult with an anti-scientific bent.

The "backward" religion of Christianity, Ramtha explains in the movie, doesn't appreciate how the parables of Jesus are explained by photon waves and probability -- just as creationists suggest that the latest archaeological science can explain Noah's Ark and a very young Grand Canyon. The cumulative effect of "What the Bleep" -- whose co-director, Betsy Chasse, produced the evangelical teen comedy "Extreme Days" (2000) -- makes you wonder if it isn't as fundamentalist as the Christianity and Islam that Ramtha inveighs against.

Even the father of the Isn't the Universe Amazing genre, the late Sagan, called Ramtha out. He opened his 1997 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by asking why, if Ramtha is 35,000 years old, he gives us only "banal homilies" (sample: "I have come to help you over the ditch ... It is called the ditch of limitation") instead of telling us, say, about the currency, technology, social order and use of birth control in prehistoric Lemuria -- a country popularized by Madame Blavatsky, the turn-of-the-20th-century psychic. Sagan's argument, which couldn't be further from the movie's, is that science has exposed so many natural wonders, there's no need to gild the lily with gray aliens, telepaths and the spirits of Cro-Magnon shoguns roaming the Evergreen State.

Needless to say the book isn't on the film's reading list, which instead suggests reading the works of Ramtha.

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