The movie "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" asks a lot of questions, beginning with the title itself. (And yes, that's really the title.)

What is reality? Why are we here? What is our relation to God? And the big one: How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

Special: Lord of the Wind Films (ENLARGE)
Marlee Matlin as Amanda with shaman in still from the movie 'What the Bleep Do We Know?' WHERE IS IT SHOWING? Landmark's Midtown Art, Atlanta, and AMC Barrett Commons 24, Kennesaw.
EMAIL THIS PRINT THIS MOST POPULAR

Just as things got curiouser and curiouser when Alice (of Wonderland) went down her particular rabbit hole, so "What the Bleep" bombards audiences with new ways of viewing the world, combining quantum physics, mysticism, cosmology and self-help techniques. It's like a pinball machine of philosophy, science and religion.

It's so strange that people sometimes just walk out on it, but the low-budget independent film is making a big noise within some circles. It opened Sept. 10 in Atlanta at Landmark's Midtown Art and is now starting its fourth month playing there. Spurred by repeat viewings and word-of-mouth, the same thing has happened in other cities.

"What the Bleep?" weaves together two approaches. In the more traditional storytelling, Marlee Matlin stars as a photographer who is having trouble coping with life and learns new ways to view herself and the world. (This part also is loaded with special effects and even cartoons.) Threaded throughout her story are comments by scientists and mystics, ranging from respected physicists and physicians to JZ Knight, a woman who says she channels a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis named Ramtha.

To try to figure out what the bleep is going on with this strange head trip of a movie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution invited five people from different backgrounds who were interested in the issues. They are:

• Ethel Ware Carter, an Education for Ministry mentor in the Episcopal Church.

• R. Royal Craft, executive director of the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta, an ecumenical membership organization of Christian churches.

• The Rev. Gilbert "Bud" Friend-Jones, senior minister of Atlanta's Central Congregational United Church of Christ.

• The Rev. Paul Gonyea, pastor at Atlanta's Church of Religious Science, a part of the "New Thought" movement, which Gonyea defines as "an open, scientific, non-institutional spiritual way of looking at very old ideas."

• P.V. Rao, a physicist at Emory University's Rollins Research Center and a Hindu.

We watched the movie, then went to Starbucks for a lively discussion. Here are some edited excerpts:

Kloer: Does anybody want to try to sum up what the movie is saying?

Friend-Jones: The title to me is intriguing. It implies a kind of humility or agnosticism: What the bleep do we know? And the movie says we know very little. It seems to me it's a hybrid of quantum mechanics, neurobiology and phenomenology.

Craft: There's been a debate for hundreds of years about this antagonism between science and religion. This movie raises the question: Are science and the origins of religion — the original teachings of spiritual leaders — much closer together than we had thought?

Gonyea: What we're doing here is combining spirituality with science with psychology with philosophy and looking at all those things in relation to religion. To me it showed that we are using science now to catch up to what the great spiritual truths of all the great traditions have been telling us — that we are all one.

Everything is a process. We are all part of that same process and if we extend that from our cellular level to our human level to our community level to our world level to the universal level, that process is what we call God. It's intelligence, it's interconnectedness, it's all knowledge and it's all potential.

Carter: In some ways it was almost a self-improvement movie, which I thought was a little bit of a shortcoming. It was almost Norman Vincent Peale goes New Age. I wish they'd talked more about how we affect other people, rather than how we can improve ourselves.

Kloer: Science plays a huge role in this movie, especially quantum mechanics and cellular biology. Is the science accurate?

Rao: They really tried to present a view of the world that's not normally known to the lay public, quantum physics being the science that explains the microscopic level of the world. Quantum physics says we are all connected. There are many things in the movie that are speculation, but they're based on science we believe to be correct.

Friend-Jones: As the film moves along, it's building a case. So it's using science, it's not learning from science. It's using science to justify a kind of New Age spirituality. Which is fine, but I don't think science takes you there. Otherwise, everyone who's a quantum physicist would be spiritual. They're not.

Kloer: It seems to me that the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of God doesn't fare very well in this movie.

Craft: I disagree. What comes out badly in the movie is traditional organized religion that may not have anything to do with God — the institutions and what they've done. So I think God actually came out pretty well.

Rao: It fits the Hindu tradition much more strongly because we define God as all that exists and more than that. "How big is God?" somebody asks. He's five inches longer than anything you can think of.

Friend-Jones: A very early understanding of God is that he is absolutely unfathomable and unknowable by us. If God overflows and the overflow is creation, then all of creation is an expression of the benefit of the overflow of God. This movie is quite compatible with that view, and that view has persisted as a minority voice down through the ages, mainly through the mystics.

Gonyea: Let me throw in a perspective from a New Thought church, which is really the target audience for this. [If] you come from a unity sense, we cannot be outside of God; we are all individual expressions [of God]. New Thought is basically that God is not separate from us, it is a power and a presence that we are actually an individual expression of. "I am not God, but all I am is God" would be a way to express that.

Kloer: So would this movie fall into the New Thought movement?

Gonyea: Absolutely.

Kloer: Then what does a traditional Christian get out of this movie?

Craft: I don't know how you define a traditional Christian, but some of the experiential parts of spirituality that you saw in the movie have been creeping into mainstream religions in the United States over the last 30 years. I grew up in the Episcopal Church, and you would not have talked about meditation. But now you see yoga classes and centering prayers and meditation.

I've talked to a lot of people who are mainstream Christians and fundamentalist who saw the movie and were very excited about it. I've only met a couple of people who were upset by it. I've seen it four times and there are always one or two people who get up and leave.

Kloer: There's been some controversy because the filmmakers have all been students at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment [a Washington school run by Knight, channeler of Ramtha, that teaches precepts similar to "What the Bleep?"]. It's obviously not a propaganda tool, but there are connections between the movie and the school that the movie doesn't make transparent. Is that a credibility problem?

Gonyea: Here's the question. Does what . . . Knight or Ramtha or whoever say make sense? I don't get caught up between the message and the messenger.

Carter: I disagree with that. I thought [Knight] stood out like a sore thumb.

Kloer: If you accept the reality that the movie sets up, where does an afterlife fit in?

Gonyea: Our position is we don't really know. I don't believe it's this life, then another life. This is just one experience, like seventh-grade second period.

Friend-Jones: In the film, life itself is deconstructed so that cells have lives, atoms have lives. They come into being and they pass away, but they're part of an interwoven continuing network. The network persists. We miss the point if we are thinking about me persisting and living after death.

Craft: About a year ago I was in a room listening to Deepak Chopra talk, and he said that in x number of minutes, every single person in this room will have exchanged molecules [by exhaling and inhaling]. So there's a piece of every single person in this room in each of you.

And all of a sudden this thing about unity and life going on, it made immediate sense, and it scared everybody. So it's not just what happens to me when I die, but what happens to me when I exhale?

On the Web: The movie's main Web site: www.whatthebleep.com.

A discussion forum sponsored by the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta: rccatl.wji.com/tiki-view_forum

.php?forumId=1 (registration required).