[*]JZ Knight/Ramtha appears frequently in the film. In the film, she appears to be a scientist or spiritual teacher of some kind. By the end of the film, during the credits, she is identified as the spirit "Ramtha" who is being "channeled" by "JZ Knight." The three people who wrote, directed, and produced the movie are students of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. Knight was born Judith Darlene Hampton in Roswell, N.M. The spirit, Ramtha, who she claims to channel, is "a 35,000 year-old warrior spirit from the lost continent of Atlantis and one of the Ascended Masters." (Knight speaks with an accent because English is not Ramtha's first language.)
[*]John Hagelin was the head of the 1993 Transcendental Meditation project in Washington, DC. (The Washington TM study was mentioned in the film, but Hagelin was never identified as one of its authors.) He is chairman of the Physics Department at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The University was founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who vaulted to fame after becoming the spiritual advisor to the Beatles.
[*]Amit Goswami, Ph.D. "One of the rare scientists that do not leave out consciousness in explaining quantum physics." [1] (
http://www.beyondtheordinary.net/amitgoswami.shtml) He appears in What is Enlightenment magazine, authored the book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (ISBN 0874777984), and has worked with Deepak Chopra.
[*]Candace Pert wrote the book Molecules of Emotion in 1997 (foreword written by Deepak Chopra) where she espoused views very similar to those of the film. Some aspects of the film appeared to be based on her book. For example, the first ten minutes of the movie can be summarized by a quote from pages 146-148 of Molecules of Emotion where she writes:
There is no objective reality! ... Emotions are constantly regulating what we experience as "reality." The decision about what sensory information travels to your brain and what gets filtered depends on what signals the receptors are receiving from the peptides ... For example, when the tall European ships first approached the early Native Americans, it was such an "impossible" vision in their reality that their highly-filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to "see" the ships.
Another point in the movie can be well summarized by page 285, where she writes:
The tendency to ignore emotions is oldthink, a remnant of the still-reigning paradigm that keeps us focused on the material level of health, the physicality of it. But the emotions are a key element in the self-care because they allow us to enter into the bodymind's conversation. By getting in touch with our emotions, both by listening to them and by directing them through the psychosomatic network, we gain access to the healing wisdom that is everyone's natural biological right.
[*]Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D recently wrote The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time. (Interesting note: he says he is also known by the name "Captain Quantum"?a name which is mentioned briefly in the film, though without reference to Wolf.) He also appears in videos, including Shamanic Physics: "Fred Alan Wolf discusses his efforts to explain shamanic realities in terms of modern physics. He suggests that shamans interact with parallel universes and are able to enter into the world of the dead." [2] (
http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2fwolf.html)
Most of the other scientists appearing in the movie have similar New Age beliefs and affiliations, with one notable exception:
Dr. David Albert, a philosopher of physics and professor at Columbia University, speaks frequently throughout the movie. While it may appear as though he supports the ideas that are presented in the movie, according to a Popular Science article, he is "outraged at the final product." [3] (
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,20967,699379,00.html) The article states that Dr. Albert granted the filmmakers a near-four hour interview, which was then edited and incorperated into the film in such a way that misrepresented his views that quantum mechanics is not related to consciousness or spirituality. In the article, Dr. Albert also expresses his feelings of gullibility after having been "taken" by the filmmakers.