A Film Made by Students of the Teaching It Promotes

What the Bleep Do We Know!? arrived in theaters in 2004 as an unusual hybrid, part scripted drama starring Marlee Matlin as a photographer working through a personal crisis, part documentary interview reel of scientists and philosophers discussing consciousness and quantum mechanics. Its three directors, William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente, were all students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, the Yelm, Washington organization built around JZ Knight's channeling of a being she calls Ramtha. The film's closing credits identify one of its most prominent commentators simply as Ramtha, described there as a thirty five thousand year old mystic and master teacher who speaks through Knight.

The connection produced a backlash once it was widely known. Physicist David Albert of Columbia University said afterward that his interview had been edited to make it appear he endorsed conclusions he does not hold, and mathematician and physicist Peter Woit, reviewing the film on his own blog, called the underlying physics claims a distortion built to support Ramtha's teaching that thought alone can reshape reality. The film was nonetheless a commercial success, held over in theaters for months on word of mouth rather than a wide release, giving Ramtha's School of Enlightenment a far larger audience than its Yelm campus ever reached on its own, though critics and the students who made it disagree sharply about what the audience was actually being taught.