Saturday, April 02, 2005
I will now tell you something true, or, rather, something factual. As I was going over my notes on Emoto's water "experiments" as described in What the [Bleep] Do We Know !?, Kathryn came running into the house, into my office, rather excited. "It's snowing," she said breathlessly. I glanced out the window and saw that, indeed, large white particles were falling from the sky. This was not just a few white flakes, but a heavy shower. And there was then, no fooling, a chill along my spine. I got up and went to the front porch. I saw that the snow had changed over to sleet, apparently, and I raised my arms into it and said, "And now it's going to stop." And it did, completely, within seconds. I looked up at the sky and saw that a small black cloud was passing on eastward, the cloud that had obviously produced the icefall. I felt deeply, physically, ill, and went back to my office, reading over what I'd written about Emoto's photographs immediately before Kathryn entered my office.
Sounds pretty creepy, doesn't it? I said something like, "Well, the universe is going to have to do more than that to get my attention." I was litearlly shaking at that point. But I finished my entry on the film. And I allowed the initial weirdness of the event to percolate in my mind, looking at it not as someone who needs to believe, but as rationally as I could. Did my actions regarding the film and Emoto's ice crystals cause an alteration in the universe, some manipulation of the quantum foam meant to impress something upon me? No. I was writing about ice and bad science, and ice fell from the sky. This is well within the bounds of Jungian synchronicity, but there's nothing genuinely mystical about it. Even Jung would have not said that a causual connection existed here. It was a coincidence, albiet a meaningful coincidence, at least meaningful to me. It was somewhat significantly less so to Spooky, who was surprised at my physical reaction. It would mean nothing at all to Jennifer.
Our weather has been very unstable since yesterday. Cold air coming down from the northwest to collide with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. Whether it was hail or sleet, what fell from the sky was a perfectly natural, probably inevitable consequence of climate. It would have happened even if I'd been writing about kangaroos or the French Revolution, and it would have seemed a little odd, because the weather's been mostly warm until today, but it would have not been that meaningful coincidence. It would have just been a mild oddness. It was improbable that I would be writing what I was when it happened, but improbable things happen with great regularity. Improbable doesn't mean impossible, it only means "less likely than statistically more probable things."
I put it out of my mind and went back to work. But I thought I'd write the whole thing down here. It's an example of me almost misinterpreting a perfectly natural event in a way where I become the agent responsible for that event, which would, of course, have made me a pretty important person. It makes us feel good to think such things, no matter how outlandish they might be.
Anyway...
My thanks to Chris Walsh for this article on the connection between the Ramtha cult and What the [Bleep] Do We Know !?. If the whole Ramtha thing is a mystery to you, have a look at this.
Also, it's worth noting, at least to me it's worth noting, that one of the men interviwed in the film, a psychologist and physicist named Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, is also the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth and " supports reparative therapy for homosexuality."
There's something I want to stress. More than anything, I am criticizing this film for lying, for misleading, for manipulating, for promoting mysticism as science. At this point, it's impossible for me to deny that the makers of What the [Bleep] Do We Know !? have done these things, and that they've probably done them knowingly, regardless of whether or not some parts of the film might be worthy of consideration on some level. They might have done otherwise. They might have communicated the wonders of quantum mechanics without lying to us. But, personally, I don't think that was ever their goal.
If I had enough Twinkies, I could rule the world...
4:41 PM
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