For a while now, I have had a lot of people tell me that I needed to see the movie “What the Bleep do We Know?”. Last night, I finally got around to seeing it. It was neat seeing theoretical scientists as well as spiritual people talking about perceptions of the world and how we can change things. The concepts shown were very intriguing.
It was neat seeing all these concepts in one place, and to someone that has not seen them before, I think it may be very dramatic. The movie postulated many things using quantum level theories. This introduced a concept of “what if” into our every day beliefs, or current paradigm. In effect it created a new paradigm based on possibilities.
The bottom line to what it was putting across had to do with our concepts, perceptions, and beliefs. It said that everything we see is based on what we believe to be real. For instance, if you see a flashing light, and there is no source of it, you might think that this was not real. Quantum thinking tells us that it was real, and that what else we are seeing in the reality we are in may not be. Confusing? Probably.
Look at it this way. When Columbus came to the new world, the people he met (since called Indians) did not see the ships he said here in. They had never seen ships like this, not did they have any concept of it, so they did not see them. A Shaman of the tribe noticed however, that the flow of the water was being disturbed. In tracing this disturbance to the source, he finally opened his mind and saw the ships. He then told the others of the tribe, and they were then able to see these ships, but only after they had been given a concept of what they were.
The idea that we see only what we perceive is not a new one. I was introduced to it in a 1963 science fiction novel (where else?) titles “The Dreaming Earth” by John Brunner (1934 - 1995). The plot had to do with the main character trying to find out why people were disappearing from the planet earth. You see, this earth which existed in our future was overpopulated with famine and all the other problems that go along with it. The hero soon found that the people that were disappearing had been taking a certain illegal drug called Happy Dreams. They wanted to drop out from this society that they were born into because it was so bad. The drug gave them images of grassy fields and pleasant surroundings.
Eventually, the hero found that the drug changed people’s perceptions but not like the drugs we have today. They didn’t just make them high, they allowed them to perceive different things, like a different dimension. Eventually, people got enough of the drug so that their perceptions changed permanently, and they then lived in the world that they now perceived. When that happened, they literally and physically disappeared from the perceptions of ‘normal’ people, people who lived in this overpopulated world. The ones whose perceptions changed, found themselves in a lush, wonderful world with all the other people whose perceptions had changed. To them, the world they had been in had disappeared and they were now in this new one, almost as if they went into another dimension. This was someplace where they could build a better society. You see, the people that turned to drugs here were not those that just wanted to get high all the time. These were the ones that really couldn’t live with society as it had become, and wanted to make something new and better. They didn’t want to become lazy bums, they wanted to build a wonderful world.
Now, the movie didn’t suggest that we all become druggies and fade out, but it did tell us that the world is what we perceive it to be. We can perceive it to be a good world, or a bad one. In this, we make judgments. We perceive as good or bad by overlaying our judgments on things. Why must something be good or bad?
Another thought to our perception bases things in quantum physics. For example, I am sitting next to a wall. This was is solid, or at least I perceive it to be. (And if I beat my head against it long enough I’ll perceive either a headache or a hole in the wall, probably the latter.) But this wall is made up of atoms.
What are atoms? Well, they are tiny things that look surprisingly like a solar system. You have a center piece called a neutron (similar to a sun) that has a lot of things called electrons orbiting around it (just like planets). These atoms comprise everything there is, including you and me. No, if we want to go further, we travel to the subatomic level where we find that these atoms are comprised of (are you ready for this?), atoms. How do we know that one of these atoms isn’t a solar system with intelligent life on it whose birth and death occur so quickly that we can’t comprehend it?
I believe it was CBS newsman Walter Cronkite who I heard talk about the macrocosm of the universe. He was talking with some scientist during coverage of one of the manned moon flights. He brought in the possibility that our solar system and universe may simply be a small atomic part of some grander, larger universe. He mentioned that it could be “a speck of dust in a policeman’s uniform”.
Ok, now to go one step farther, if we look at our solar system, and galaxy, and universe, what is there mostly? Space. (Yes, yes, I know, the final frontier. Or maybe not. J ) when we sink down to the atomic level, what do we find in an atom? Space. If we go farther, to the subatomic level, we find more space. So, now if I look at this wall next to me, it is really just made up of space. Could I pass my hand through it if I changes my perceptions of it, and truly believed it? I think I’ll refrain firm banging my head on it as a test. J
One other thing the film showed was the effect thoughts have on water. They talked about the work of this Japanese scientist. He took some type of pictures of water (and I’m not sure if we are talking water molecules or what, but probably molecules). In a before picture, the water molecule was some nondescript form. The water was then blesses by a Buddhist priest. The after photo showed it to have a nice form.
In other pictures, he took containers of water, which he labeled. One was labeled ‘the chi of love’. Another was ‘peace’. The third was ‘I will make you ill if you drink me’. The ‘love’ and ‘peace’ molecules were formed like some pretty snowflake, but definitely having a form. The ‘ill’ one was yellowish and unformed. The point of this was to show what our thoughts can do to water. Now, if you consider that 90% of our chemical makeup is water, what do you think our thoughts do to us?
We’ve all had the times where we haven’t liked ourselves that well. Maybe we were too fat. We looked in the mirror and told out reflection that we hate how it looks. We have been told forever that we need to love ourselves. Only then can we truly love others. In telling our reflection that we hate it, we tell ourselves that we are ugly. In doing this, we reform ourselves to be ugly. If we love ourselves, we take that positive energy with us wherever we go. It makes a difference in who and how we are. It changes how we are perceived by others, and in doing so changes their energies. In this way, we actually take steps to reforming the world into a better place. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for anyway?
Like I said, the concepts are interesting. Some of them may be new, but most are not. This is however, the first time I have seen them in one place for consumption by the general populace in a form that they could easily view. I will admit that to me, some of it was a little slow and boring. Like I said, I have seen these concepts before. For those that have never though about things like this, it could be like getting hit in the head with a two by four.
So, what do you perceive things to be?