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One day in 1976, JZ Knight, a housewife from Tacoma, Wash., was in her kitchen playing around with pyramids. She and her husband, a dentist, were avid campers. They had heard that placing food underneath a pyramid would make it dehydrate faster and be easier to pack.

"Maybe it will help me with my brain," Knight joked, placing the pyramid over her head.

When she lifted it off, the kitchen hallway had disappeared. In front of her stood a gorgeous man, nearly eight feet tall and glowing.

"Beloved lady," the creature said. "My name is Ramtha, the Enlightened One, and I've come to help you over the ditch."

What the bleep?

Well, for the next two years, Ramtha -- who claims to be a 35,000-year-old spirit warrior from the lost continent of Atlantis -- would visit Knight in the afternoons, when her kids were off at school. Sitting on her couch, he would tell her stories about his heroic past life in a long-forgotten but highly advanced civilization, and how he had learned to transcend his earthly body.

"He would raise his body's frequency until it vibrated faster and faster and disappeared like the wind," explains Mike Wright, the manager of products sales and services at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment in Yelm, Wash., a small mountainside community 50 miles south of Seattle where thousands of students have flocked since 1988 to learn how they might manifest a similar out-of-body experience.

"It's kind of like this fan over here," says Wright, a guest speaker at last summer's Prophet's Conference, a three-day seminar at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where 600 seekers gathered to explore the mysteries of quantum physics, consciousness and other wild connections discussed in last year's surprise hit film What the #$*! Do We Know!? (commonly referred to as What the Bleep) .

"If you turn it on just a little bit, you can see the blades," Wright continues, as all eyes turn to the fan whirring beside him on stage. "But when you crank it up, you'll notice that you can no longer see the blades. They're in a higher state of frequency."

Unfortunately, Knight (who claims that Ramtha began using her body as a channel shortly after that fateful encounter in her kitchen) had to cancel her appearance at the conference.

"I appreciate that you're disappointed or upset or angry. Perhaps you can take a moment to turn your wishes and thoughts her way," Wright tells the audience.

It wouldn't be the first time this controversial sect leader, whose acolytes have included the Hollywood actresses Shirley MacLaine and Linda Evans, has been embroiled in a scandal. There was the time in the late eighties when Knight withdrew from public view amid a barrage of allegations that Ramtha had pressured some students to purchase the horses she raised on her ranch. Then there was the time that Ramtha, predicting a coming catastrophe, had encouraged his students to move to Yelm, where Knight's French-style chateau and school is based on a $2-million (U.S.) compound protected by spiked gates. Hundreds did, and following his instructions, built poorly constructed underground bunkers that were infested by mice.

But what the bleep, you might be wondering, does all this New Age stuff have to do a little independent film that was so successful -- the fourth best-selling documentary of all time, according to the promotional materials? And now there is a sequel -- What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole was released on Friday in Toronto and Vancouver. An extended 2½-hour version of the original, it features the same dramatized story about a depressed photographer (played by Marlee Matlin), more slick animation and new interviews with unidentified scientists and mystics. Next fall, a five-hour boxed set will be released on DVD.

Although never explicitly stated, the three filmmakers who directed, produced and wrote the movie are all devout students of Ramtha. And that throaty blond dame in the film, the one featured alongside scientists, mystics and philosophers that aren't identified until the final credits roll? That was Knight, telling the audience that they are all gods and they can create whatever reality they want. Well, it wasn't actually Knight doing the talking. It was Ramtha, who apparently borrowed her body for the interview.

"I recognize that there's a certain level of discomfort with the idea of somebody talking through another biological unit," says Mark Vicente, one of the film's three directors, along with Betsy Chasse and software billionaire William Arntz, who financed the $5-million film.

"When we take information from other people, it's important to attribute where those ideas came from," says Vicente in a recent phone interview. "I know some people said it hurt the film's credibility tremendously, but I thought Ramtha was immensely entertaining."

The lack of disclosure about the film's close connections to a group that some experts consider a cult certainly didn't hurt its sales. Released in 2004, the film opened at a single theatre in Yelm, rolling out slowly and gathering speed through a word-of-mouth marketing campaign aimed at yoga studios, holistic health-care centres, fans of Wayne Dyer or Deepak Chopra and members of New Thought churches such as the Unitarian Universalist and Bahai faith. After selling out small theatres for months, it was finally picked up for distribution by Samuel Goldwyn Co.

To date, What the Bleep has been released in 15 countries and has grossed more than $12-million (U.S.). It has sold more than one-million copies on DVD, inspired hundreds of worldwide study groups and spawned a growing cottage industry that includes a paperback ( The Little Book of Bleeps), a hardcover workbook ( What the Bleep Do We Know!? Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality), trademarked apparel (T-shirts, baseball caps, necklaces, scarves) and last summer's six-city conference tour.

"People wanted more," says Vicente, who is now making a fictional film based on some of Ramtha's ideas. "And they really wanted more science."

Some critics said there wasn't much credible science in the film to begin with. "I despise [the film] because it distorts science to fit its own agenda, it is full of half-truths and misleading analogies, and some of its so-called scientific claims are downright lies," declared physicist Simon Singh, author of Big Bang, in a Guardian newspaper opinion piece.

If you are able to follow the movie's talking heads without getting totally confused, the filmmakers seem to be suggesting that the principles of subatomic quantum physics can be applied to the wider world, making it subject to the influence of human observers. Hence, if we can learn to connect to this mysterious field of energy that seems to unite all things and manipulate our thoughts properly, we can shape not just our own health and happiness, but the structure of concrete matter such as ice crystals, crime rates and maybe even world peace.

These wild leaps of unproven logic make most classically trained scientists dismiss the film as ridiculous. But even more disturbing are some of the so-called experts who are being interviewed alongside more trustworthy authorities. (The latter group includes David Albert, director of the MA program in the philosophical foundations of physics at Columbia University, Fred Alan Wolf, author of Taking the Quantum Leap and several other well-known books that popularize the new physics, and Candace Pert, a pharmacologist researching "new paradigm" healing at the Georgetown University Medical School, where she is a professor of physiology and biophysics.) These experts appear, but along with Joseph Dispenza, the chiropractor who suggests you can rewire your neural networks and create your own reality just by thinking about it when you wake up in the morning, who is also a master teacher at Ramtha's school.

Also a Ramtha school teacher is Miceal Ledwith, a former Catholic priest who claims in the film that there is no such thing as good or bad. Then there's John Hagelin, a former two-time U.S. presidential candidate for the Natural Law Party, now director at the Maharishi University of Management where he and his filmmaker pal David Lynch promote world peace through transcendental meditation. In 1993, Hagelin claimed that he and 4,000 followers helped reduce the rate of violent crime in Washington by meditating together and wishing it to happen.

And there's Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist, physicist, author ( The Quantum Brain) and one of the world's leading advocates of reparative therapy for homosexuals.

"The film's intent is not to convert anyone, but to get people to think," says Vicente. By not revealing the identities of the speakers until the end of the film, he says it allows viewers to listen to what they're hearing without prejudging it.

"Then at the end, they have this inductive surprise. They say 'Oh, the person who sounded like a mystic was a scientist.' "

Joe Szimhart, a cult intervention specialist who has counselled dozens of former Ramtha members, says the film is a glitzy recruitment tool.

"Most people will think it's just a silly film. But it will attract those who are already part of the New Age movement. And there's a huge market for that sort of thinking," he says, referring to fans of author Deepak Chopra or media magnate Oprah Winfrey.

And even though Szimhart says there's no danger in watching the movie, he would argue that it does legitimize some dangerous beliefs to those who already believe them.

"It feels like a celebration, while most of the time they just hear criticism," says Szimhart, who recommends the book How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn for the naive or uninitiated who find themselves fascinated by the film's ideas.

The film's premise -- that human beings are part of some sort of cosmic, impersonal intelligence or energy, but just not completely tuned into it -- is hardly new. Szimhart says it goes to the New Thought movement of the late 19th century and its early religious leaders.

"It's extremely seductive," says Szimhart, who once belonged to a New Age sect called Church Universal and Triumphant. "It taps into our innate narcissism by saying it's all about you. The cosmos cares about you. It might. I don't know. But these groups say they do know that.

"And the danger is that the product they're selling -- cosmic consciousness -- is an illusion. Groups like Ramtha and transcendental meditation are saying they can help the person release some sort of potential within themselves, but there's no evidence of that."

Szimhart, who now does counselling at a psychiatric emergency hospital in Pennsylvania, says he has seen the damage first-hand.

"A lot of the people I've helped out of TM and the Ramtha group have ruined their lives. They've divorced or relocated or invested a lot of money in these courses. When they finally wake up and realize they've just spent the last five or 10 years on something that isn't real, there can be a lot of recovery problems."

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