<em>What the bleep are we buying? by Alexandra Gill
<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060222.BLEEP22/TPStory/?query=" target="new">The Globe & Mail</a> (Canada)  22 Feb 06</em>

It started as a cult film, but now comes the sequel and along with it a whole industry, brought to you by the followers of a 35,000-year-old warrior, writes ALEXANDRA GILL

VANCOUVER -- 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."

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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 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.

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