Product Description

Gravity sometimes doesn't work.
Some things are both waves and particles. . .at the same time.
Electrons simply disappear . . . all the time.

If the universe is this wild and unpredictable, so full of possibility, why are your thoughts about your own life so limited?

Hundreds of years ago, science and religion split apart; they became antagonists in the great game of explanation and discovery. But science and religion are two sides of the same coin. They both help explain the universe, our place in the great plan and the meaning of our lives. In fact, they can only begin to do that adequately when they work together.

What the Bleep Do We Know?!^TM is a book of amazing science. With the help of more than a dozen research and theoretical scientists, it takes you through the looking glass of quantum physics into a universe that is more bizarre and alive than ever imagined. Then it takes you beyond, into the outer-inner edges of our scientific knowledge of consciousness, perception, body chemistry and brain structure. What is a thought made of? What is reality made of? And most importantly, how does a thought change the nature of reality?

This science leads not just to the material world, but deep into the realm of spirituality. If observation affects the outcome, we aren’t merely part of the universe, but participants in it. If thoughts are more than random neural firings, than consciousness is more than an anatomical accident. A higher power exists, but is it truly out there? Where is the dividing line between out there and in here?

This is not a book of definitive answers. This is a book of mind stretching questions. It is a book that shows you not the path, but the endless possibilities. Do you think you have to go to the same job every day, do the same errands, think the same thoughts, feel the same way? Well, think again.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #285614 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 274 pages

Review

It's hard to easily categorize WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW? DISCOVERING THE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES FOR ALTERING YOUR EVERYDAY REALITY: at once a science book and a self-help and spiritual guide, and based on a movie as well, it tackles the questions of uncertainty, the nature of reality, and how physical, mental and spiritual forces interact in shaping human reality. Don't expect any easy answers here: WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW is an overview of science and spiritual questions which sets out what is known about each, and points the reader in different directions where the outer limits of science and psyche embrace. Any considering the nature of consciousness, intelligence, reality, or attitude adjustment will find this packed with insights and lively discussion which is surprisingly easy to access considering the weight of the matters under review.

(Midwest Book Review )

It's hard to easily categorize WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW? DISCOVERING THE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES FOR ALTERING YOUR EVERYDAY REALITY: at once a science book and a self-help and spiritual guide, and based on a movie as well, it tackles the questions of uncertainty, the nature of reality, and how physical, mental and spiritual forces interact in shaping human reality. Don't expect any easy answers here: WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW is an overview of science and spiritual questions which sets out what is known about each, and points the reader in different directions where the outer limits of science and psyche embrace. Any considering the nature of consciousness, intelligence, reality, or attitude adjustment will find this packed with insights and lively discussion which is surprisingly easy to access considering the weight of the matters under review. (Midwest Book Review )

About the Author
William Arntz, a research physicist and spiritual seeker, created one of the world's most widely used pieces of software. He retired and became interested in uniting his four great passions: leading edge science, spiritual inquiry, filmmaking and computers.

Betsy Chasse freelanced as a Production Manager on over thirty films and produced eight movies before deciding that she wanted to move away from Los Angeles and do something more meaningful with her life.

Mark Vicente is a cinematographer turned director with a special interest in mysterious, reflective and unusual subject matter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What IS a Great Question? Why should we bother? What makes it Great?

Let's say a spaceship lands next to you on the coffee table (does size matter?) and inside is The Universal Book of Everything. And you get to ask one question.What is that question?

This may seem a little silly, but it's worth the effort. Take a minute and think.What would that question be? It can be anything. Go ahead and write it down in a journal.

Now let's say The Book is feeling a little underutilized these days, and you get a bonus question. Think of something that you are just plain curious about. It can be wondering if Elvis is still alive, or where you left your car keys. Something that simply tickles your fancy.Write that down, too.

And by now The Book is feeling a little depleted, and it got to be The Universal Book of Everything by asking questions of everyone and getting real answers. So, the question for you (the answer to which will be added in The Book) is: What is the One Thing you know for sure?

Great QuestionsùThe Can Opener of Consciousness

Aside from the few like Fred Alan Wolf (who we quoted on the opening page), when do we ever get encouraged to ask questions?

And yet, most of those grand discoveries and revelations that our society cherishes came from asking questions. Those things, those answers, that we study in school came from questions. Questions are the precursor, or first cause, in every branch of human knowledge. The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi told his students the path to Enlightenment was summed up in: "Who am I?" The physicist Niels Bohr asked, "How can an electron move from A to B, and never go in between?"

These questions open us up to what we previously didn't know.And they're really the only way to get thereùto the other side of the unknown.

Why ask a Great Question? Asking a Great Question is an invitation to an adventure, a journey of discovery. It's thrilling to set out on a new adventure; there's the bliss of freedom, the freedom to explore new territory.

So why don't we ask these questions? Because asking questions opens the door to chaos, to the unknown and unpredictable. The minute you ask a question you truly don't know the answer to, you open yourself up to a field of all possibilities. Are you willing to receive an answer you may not like or agree with? What if it makes you uncomfortable, or carries you outside the zone of safety and security you've built for yourself?

What if the answer isn't what you want to hear!? It doesn't take muscles; it takes bravery to ask a question. Now let's consider what makes a question Great. A Great Question doesn't have to come from a philosophy book, or be about Life's Big Issues. A Great Question for you might be, "What would happen if I decided to go back to college and get a degree in a new field?" or "Should I listen to that voice that keeps telling me to go to California or China?" or "Is it possible to discover what is inside a neutrino?" Asking any of these questions and thousands of others could change the direction of your life. That's what a Great Question is: one that can change the direction of your life.

So, once again, why don't we ask them? Most people would rather stay in the safety of the known than go looking for trouble. Even if they crash right into a question, more than likely they will run away from it, stick their head in the sand or quickly get busy doing something else.

For most of us, it takes a serious crisis to bring on the Great Questions: a life-threatening illness, the death of someone close, failure of a business or a marriage, a repeated, even addictive behavior pattern you just can't seem to shake, or loneliness that seems unendurable for one more day. At times like those, Great Questions come boiling up from the depths of our being like hot lava. These questions are not intellectual exercises, but cries of the soul. "Why me? Why him? What have I done wrong? After this, is life truly worth living? How could God allow this to happen?"

If we could muster up the same kind of passion to ask ourselves a Great Question about our lives now, when there is no immediate crisis, who knows what could happen?

As Dr.Wolf said, asking a Great Question can open up new ways of being in the world. It can be a catalyst for transformation. Growing. Outgrowing. Moving on.

The Joy of Questions

Remember when you were five years old and you kept asking, "Why?" Your parents may have thought, after a while, that you were doing it simply to drive them crazy, but you really wanted to know! What happened to that five-year-old? Can you remember the five-year-old who was you? Can you feel what it was like? This is important, because when you were five, you loved being in the mystery. You loved wanting to figure things out. You loved the journey. Each day was filled with new discoveries and new questions.

So what is the difference between then and now? Good question!

The fun and joy of life are in the journey. In our culture, we've been conditioned to look at "not knowing" as something unacceptable and bad; it's some kind of failure. In order to pass the test, we have to know the answers. But even when it comes to factual knowledge about concrete things, what science doesn't know far exceeds what it does. Many of the greatest scientists have looked into the mystery of the universe and of life on our planet, and have frankly said, "We know very little. Mostly we have a lot of questions." This is certainly true of the outstanding thinkers we interviewed. In the words of author Terence McKenna,"As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes."

It's even more difficult to come up with a clear-cut answer to "What is the meaning and purpose of my life?" The answer to Great Questions like this can only emerge from the journey of living.And we can only arrive at it by the road of not knowingù or maybe we should say, not-yet-knowing. If we always think we know the answer, how will we grow? What will we ever be open to learn?

A university professor visited Zen master Nan-in to inquire about Zen. But instead of listening to the master, the scholar kept going on and on about his own ideas. After listening for some time, Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The tea flowed over the sides of the cup, filled the saucer, spilled onto the man's pants and onto the floor.

"Don't you see that the cup is full?" the professor exploded. "You can't get any more in!"

"Just so," replied Nan-in calmly. "And like this cup, you are full of your own ideas and opinions. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

Emptying the cup means making room for Great Questions. It means being open, reconditioning ourselves so that we can accept, for the time being, not knowing. Out of that a greater knowing will dawn.

IT'S OK NOT TO KNOW THE ANSWER

A little while ago my sixteen-year-old niece sent me a long email. The gist of it was, "Life sucks. I see my dad coming home from work every day totally bummed out. I don't want to get trapped in the rat race, but I don't see any hope of avoiding it. Is this what life is about? What's the point? I might as well just shoot myself and die." "Christina," I wrote back, "you might not think this is a great response, but I'm proud of you. I can't tell you that you are going to solve your dilemma and find The
Answer. I know you want answersùbut sometimes life doesn't provide them right away. But you are asking the
right questions, and that is important."
ùWILL

You're in Distinguished Company

People have been asking Great Questions for thousands of years. There have always been men and women who gazed at the stars and wondered at the vast mystery of it all, or who looked at the way people around them were living and thought, "Isn't there more to life than this?"

The ancient Greek philosophers pondered and discussed the Great Questions. Some, like Socrates and Plato, asked, "What is Beauty? What is Goodness? What is Justice? What is the best way to govern a society? What people are fit to be rulers?" Religious teachers, mystics and spiritual masters like Buddha, Lao Tse, Jesus, Muhammad, St. Francis, Meister Eckhardt, Apollonius of Tyana and many more, in all the world's traditions, have asked Great Questions.

People with scientific minds have always asked questions. How does it work? What's inside? Are things really the way they seem? Where does the universe come from? Is the Earth the center of the solar system? Are there laws and patterns that underlie what happens in daily life? What's the connection between my body and my mind?

For the great scientists of history, these questions elicit a passion to understand that goes way beyond curiosity. They're not just curiousùthey need to know!

When Albert Einstein was a boy, he asked himself: "What happens if I'm riding my bicycle at the speed of light and I switch on my bike lightùwill it come on?" He nearly drove himself crazy asking himself that for ten years, but out of that resolute pursuit came the relativity theory. This is a great example of asking a question and hanging with it for years, in the unknown, until he came up with a completely different view of reality.

Paradigm Busting

One of the great things about science is its assumption that what it thinks it knows today will probably be proven wrong tomorrow. The theories of yesterday have served as platforms to climb higher, as Sir Isaac Newton meant when he said, "If I have been privileged to see farther than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants."

It's only by asking questions, challenging the assumptions and the "truths" taken for granted at any given time, that science progresses. What if that turned out to be true about our personal lives, our individual growth and progress? Guess what? ...

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Customer Reviews

Really good Physics, then Some Other Stuff
I'm a physicist, or at least that's what my college diploma says. So it was with great interest that I picked up this book. I found it very interesting. I also found that there were great parts that I simply skipped.

First the good parts. The descriptions of quantum physics, told here without mathematics are as good as I've read anywhere. Some of the stranger effects like the ability of the electron to change orbits in an atom instantly, travelling faster than the speed of light, is very well described. So is the discussion that (and to a certain extent continues) split the physicists into two camps when quantum theeory was developed.

The other part of the book that I skipped is when they seem to get very involved with trying to relate physics with religion, specifically the new age religions involved with chanelling the 'thoughts' of a 'priest' from 35,000 years ago.

I think the physics descriptions so good that I'll recommend the book. I just skipped the new age cult stuff.

It's all about possibility...
There will always be skeptics, especially when the topics raised are so controversial. But I would also say to these skeptics that they're missing the point of this entire book and film: possibilitiy. The point is to challenge our minds, to explore the possibilities.

Some critics have focused on the segment where it's stated that the brain doesn't recognize the difference between a real object and the thought of that object. Of course most of us know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. That's not the point here. What we should consider after hearing a statement like this how amazing the human brain is and perhaps study it further.

I know many hard-core scientists shy away from "New Age" ideas and the types of possibiliites presented here. But what this book intends to show is that science and spirituality can be compatible and that an open mind can lead to growth on many levels.

Check out the official "What the Bleep" web site. They recommend books on every topic mentioned in the film. And by the way, only 2 of the scientists in the film/book are associated with Ramtha. And you don't have to believe everything you read or hear in order to find this book (and film) fascinating.

So what's the worst that can come of this? People begin to ask questions and start reading more about science and spirituality. Sounds like a healthy education to me.

A Work of Art and Science
I love this book because it is not only thought-provoking and paradigm-shattering (and how I love exploring new paradigms!), but it is a beautiful work of art in itself. The watermark backgrounds, the illustrations and the celestial colors make this book a sensory delight. The sidebar quotes and interesting juxtapositions of art and text make this book easy and pleasurable to peruse without actually having to sit down and read to enjoy it.

This book is full of thought-provoking ideas about the nature of reality, spirituality and quantum physics. Of particular interest was a segment about the studies done by Dr. Masaru Emoto and outlined in his book "The Hidden Messages of Water", which demonstrates that thought and intention change the characteristics of the water itself.

There are many quotes from respected physicists peppered throughout the book, as well as the movie the book is derived from. I found the movie to be more entertaining, but the book is great for just picking up to ponder an idea. You can open the book anywhere and find interesting ideas to think about without necessarily reading it cover to cover.

I'm glad to see this melding of science and spirituality begin to hit the mainstream. We've always known intuitively that they cannot exist separately. To me, this is the only way life makes sense.

The discovery by scientists years ago that the observor of an experiment actually influenced the outcome of that experiment was only the beginning of a radical change in our collective understanding of the workings of consciousness. This book and movie demonstrate very powerfully that thoughts and beliefs shape the reality we experience, both individually and collectively.