MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
Dr. Candace Pert (web site) was a graduate student in her mid-twenties when she discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular bonding site for endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, which she calls our "underlying mechanism for bliss and bonding." This breakthrough presaged a sea change in scientific understanding of human internal communication systems, pointing the way toward the information-based model that is now supplanting the long-dominant structuralist viewpoint.
In the years since, Candace Pert has focused her research on developing non-toxic pharmaceuticals that selectively block receptor sites for the AIDS virus. She has also pursued the threateningly interdisciplinary relationship between the nervous and immune systems, developing documentation of a body-wide communication system mediated by peptide molecules and their receptors, which she perceives to be the biochemical basis of emotion and the potential key to many of the most challenging diseases of our time.
Dr. Pert was awarded her Ph.D. in pharmacology, with distinction, in 1974, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Pert conducted a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins from 1974-1975. After 1975, she held a variety of research positions with the National Institutes of Health, and until 1987, served as Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Dr. Pert is an internationally recognized pharmacologist who has published over 250 scientific articles on peptides and their receptors and the role of these neuropeptides in the immune system. She has an international reputation in the field of neuropeptide and receptor pharmacology, and chemical neuroanatomy. She has lectured worldwide on these and other subjects, including her theories on emotions and mind-body communication. Dr. Pert holds a number of patents for modified peptides in the treatment of psoriasis, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, stroke, and head trauma. One of these, Peptide T, is currently in a Phase II trial in San Francisco for the treatment of AIDS and neuroAIDS.
Her best-selling book, Molecules of Emotion is noteworthy both as an insider's history of the changing scientific paradigm and as one woman's journey of growth and understanding.
SPIRITUAL TEACHERS, MYSTICS AND SCHOLARS
Ramtha. (
www.ramtha.com) One of the great enigmas that scientists have studied in the last decade is Ramtha, a mystic, philosopher, master teacher and hierophant. His partnership with American woman JZ Knight, his channel, still baffles scholars. Results of their studies point to a decidedly non-local phenomenon and were presented at a conference titled In Search of the Self The Role of Consciousness in the Construction of Reality on February 8 and 9, 1997. At this gathering scholars from faculties of Quantum Physics, Parapsychology, Anthropology, Sociology and Theology who had studied Knight for two years, presented their findings.
Using a sophisticated polygraph, noted parapsychologists Ian Wickramasekera and Stanley Krippner of Saybrook Graduate School repeatedly observed that while JZ Knight is channeling Ramtha, the readings of her brain-wave activity shift to delta, and that the lower cerebellum operates her body which talks, walks, eats, drinks and dances while Ramtha teaches about the mystery of mind over matter.
Through a coherent system of thought that unifies scientific knowledge with esoteric knowledge of spirit, his students study biology, neurophysiology, neurochemistry and quantum physics. Like Bohm he declares that consciousness is the ground of all being. In his own lifetime 35,000 years ago he learned to separate his consciousness from his body, raise its frequency and eventually take it with him. He has been one of the few human beings to become an eyewitness to the seen, and, the unseen.
Miceal Ledwith, Ph.D. was Professor of Systematic Theology for sixteen years at Maynooth College in Ireland and subsequently served for ten years as President of the University.
He was a member of the International Theological Commission, a small group of theologians of international standing, charged with advising the Holy See on theological matters. He also served as Chairman of the Committee of Heads of the Irish Universities and as a member of the governing Bureau of the Conference of European University Presidents (CRE).
He has lectured extensively throughout Europe, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and North America. His forthcoming books are entitled The Message Whose Time Has Come Again and The Ascent to God: The Souls Journey Within.
About the Interviews, Interviewees
and Content of the Film
The people who were interviewed in What the #$*! Do We Know?! were chosen based on a number of criteria: books theyd written that were read by the filmmakers, lectures and presentations that theyd given which had been attended by various of the filmmakers, and recommendations by others in the experts respective fields. Ultimately, we chose these people to interview because their professional work was germane to the topics being addressed in the film. Still, the filmmakers do not necessarily support each and every statement made by all the interviewees.
By the same token, its also true that the people themselves who were interviewed in the film do not completely agree with each and every statement made in the film. Many professional perspectives are presented. The filmmakers chose to represent them all in the film, but it could never be possible in a film or, perhaps, in life! to get a group of 14 extraordinary people such as these to agree completely on a single cosmological view.
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
- Niels Bohr
Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Consciousness is the basis of all life and the field of all possibilities. Its nature is to expand and unfold its full potential. The impulse to evolve is thus inherent in the very nature of life.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
- Albert Einstein, in The New Convergence
There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.
- Stephen W. Hawking
How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become-to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.
- Confucius
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
- John Maynard Keynes
No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.
- J.S. Bell
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
- James Joyce, Ulysses
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.
- Carl Jung
Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
- Stephen W. Hawking
When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it - always.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Know thyself.
- Socrates
The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
- Niels Bohr
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
- Archibald MacLeish
...perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, and having seen it, to find one in himself.
- Plato
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness, in a descending spiral of destruction. The chain reaction of evil must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate, sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth
home. My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.
- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences
Knowledge is structured in consciousness. The process of education takes place in the field of consciousness; the prerequisite to complete education is therefore the full development of consciousness -- enlightenment. Knowledge is not the basis of enlightenment, enlightenment is the basis of knowledge.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Although each of us obviously inhabits a separate physical body, the laboratory data from a hundred years of parapsychology research strongly indicate that there is no separation in consciousness.
- Russell Targ
Do you remember how electrical currents and "unseen waves" were laughed at? The knowledge about man is still in its infancy.
- Albert Einstein
Reality is not only stranger than we suppose but stranger than we can suppose.
- J. B. S. Haldane
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the law of the universe will be simpler.
- H.D. Thoreau
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
- Lewis Carroll
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
- Carl Gustav Jung
...the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Curiouser and curiouser!
- Lewis Carroll
I have yet to meet a single person from our culture, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences and continues to subscribe to the materialistic monism of Western science.
- Albert Einstein
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend upon the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.
- Albert Einstein
Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
- Copernicus
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
- Galileo Galilei
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- Albert Einstein
There is only one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, that is an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Albert Einstein
The universe on a very basic level could be a vast web of particles which remain in contact with one another over distance, and in no time.
- R. Nadeau and M. Kafatos
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
- Winston Churchill
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity...and I'm not sure about the universe.
- Albert Einstein
We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
- T. S. Eliot
The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!
- Lord Byron
If I could take all your words away and give you but a sparse few, they would be: I now know, I am absolute, I am complete, I am God, I am. If there were no other words but these, you would no longer be limited to this plane.
- Ramtha
Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.
- Claude Bernard
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
- William James
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
- Giordano Bruno
There is no reality in the absence of observation.
- The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
- Democritus of Abdera
I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.
- Albert Einstein