She made quantum leaps with the indie hit ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?!’ Now, JZ Knight, the woman the channels Ramtha, preps for the re-release of the ‘Bleep’ in extended format and hopes to take people farther down the rabbit hole on her world tour
In the amount of time it takes the average person to order a soy latte and walk out of the crowded coffeehouse sipping it—10 minutes and 22 seconds—JZ Knight can reveal why the mind is extraordinary. Well, more or less. Follow along …
First off, know this: “The extraordinary is in you.” From there, consider that God, however you want to say it, is “that which you are.” Given that, then what are the mechanics of the divine mind and what can the divine mind do? Basically, it’s like this: You have to learn the components of “creating a fantastic reality.” Here it might be best to sidestep the full diagnostic summary of what consciousness is and that nobody seems to know what it really is, because when all is said and done—after all that scientific rigor—you will ultimately discover that “everything is alive.”
From there we travel to the idea that there are seven levels of consciousness. Remember the number seven because it will crop up again later. Those seven levels of consciousness are “really equal to frequency” and consciousness and energy are “inextricably combined” in a sense because, well, for example, let’s say you pull an ultraviolet wave out of the light spectrum, “contained within that wave is information.” It’s not that much different than how we receive information via cell phones or television. So every wave has information. Make a note of it. Grab some water. Wipe your brow. Breathe. It’s time to move on to the actual brain …
The brain weighs about three pounds. It’s the size of an organic grapefruit. But …
“We use less than a tenth of our brain.” That said, then what’s going on with all that other latent information being processed in the brain? It’s wise—so wise—to work around this particular question—for now anyway—and just jog toward that über monorail inside the head. The one where you watch how a nerve cell vibrates along one of those seven—ah, that number again—frequencies of consciousness and how it brings that information on that carrier wave to ultimately cause an electrical current in the brain that connects to millions of nerve cells and how—isn’t this cute—all of them interact to present the concept of thought and how we actually get “thought from our consciousness to our brain.”
Go ahead. Scratch your head. It’s meant to be confusing.
Where were we? Ah yes—thought! As a thought forms in the brain, something called “the observer” actually observes it and it becomes “an architectural pattern in which the quantum field itself begins to collapse it into the tiniest piece of matter.” We can go on and on about how sexy subatomic particulars are but that would be so 2004, so just know this: You can create your own day according to the field value of the quantum field swirling around in your head.
The mind, then, is “not the thing that’s in our head … mind is all those included in the field, the field being the reality of the people, places, things, times and events.” So, the mind, cumulative, is “the ground of our reality in which we live in, so that we are at wholeness with life and nature and our world, as well as at wholeness with”—drum roll please—“our God and ourselves and our body.”
And that’s why the mind is extraordinary. More or less …
Things That Go ‘Bleep’ in the Knight
The summer of 2004 ushered in some profound information: Harper’s Index reported that NBC’s parent company, General Electric, would stand to earn $600 million from Iraq’s reconstruction; the spacecraft Cassini transmitted photos revealing details of Saturn’s ice and rock rings; and the pricetag of a “bleepinator,” a curious device for TV broadcasters that “surgically removes indecent words and phrases,” sat just below $10,000. Meanwhile, in movie theaters across the world, there was another sort of “bleep” generating significant buzz. What the Bleep Do We Know!?, an indie film that blended a narrative story with animation and interviews with scientists and spiritual leaders—all for the sake of illuminating the subject of perceived reality and quantum physics—somehow managed to plant itself into the soil of the mainstream and sprout a luscious tree of knowledge whose fruit would be considered both bitter and tasty. The bottom line? Bleep’s popularity spread as quickly as Bush’s approval rating dropped. (The film’s re-release in extended format hits theaters this month. It’s tagline: “Down the Rabbit Hole.”) It didn’t hurt that it nabbed a handful of film fest awards and made an impressive dent at the box office, by indie film standards. But something about the film’s many messages sparked a quantum Woodstock, if you will. It provoked thought. People had spiritual re-awakenings, thanks to much of the film’s quantum 411, enticing, yet often slippery to fully grasp all of the time—or not—and other delicious brain candy: “God” is within, people can create their own reality or the compelling story of Japan’s Dr. Masaru Emoto’s groundbreaking study, “The Hidden Messages in Water,” which documented photographically that different focused intentions, through written and spoken words and music, can "change the water’s expression.” Emoto basically revealed, too, how crystals formed in frozen water showed changes after specific, concentrated thoughts were directed toward them. And what did all this mean? That what you think, matters.
As a result, the film spawned many questions from moviegoers: Who are we? Where do we come from? What is our purpose? Nestled in between the scientific theories and Bleep’s central story arc, which found actress Marlee Matlin searching for life’s deeper meaning, were the bons mots of Ramtha. And that’s where JZ Knight comes in.
Ramtha is considered to be the 35,000-year-old being/ascended master who pilgrimaged to Atlantis through what is now Mexico. Known as a Lemurian—Lemuria is a lost continent in the Pacific—“at the age of 14,” the Web site ramtha.com states, “he became a conqueror who freed his people from Atlantean tyranny. Ramtha, it says, became the greatest of all warriors ... he feared nothing.” Many joined his crusade over the span of 63 years. The site also notes: “Traces of this march can be found in the remnants of ancient traditions: the great warrior was later to become ‘Rama’ of the Hindu religion, the first god of the people of India.”
Knight, a woman with stunning, piercing blue-eyes and blond hair, has been channeling Ramtha since 1977. She lives in Yelm, Wash., and sits at the helm of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (RSE), which boasts about 3,000 students. Knight, who has toured all over the world in the past, is about embark on another world tour, making public speaking appearances in events dubbed “The Extraordinary Mind.”
The whole Ramtha thing is, of course, one of the things that has made Knight both influential and controversial. Influential because, well, how many people say they can channel a 35,000-year-old being? (Only one, it seems.) Controversial because, well, how can one claim to channel a 35,000-year-old being?
For Knight, it wasn’t so much a claim as it was something that just was. “He appeared in my kitchen in Tacoma, Wash., at 2:39 on a Sunday afternoon in 1977,” Knight says jovially.
At ramtha.com, she describes first seeing Ramtha as a seven-foot tall entity who was “as big as life and the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.” He had appeared to her, specifically, to help her over “the ditch of limitation.” From there she found herself immersed in the entity’s teachings—understanding God, debunking the concept of the devil, accepting that there are beings that live outside the realm of human perception, quantum mechanics and much more. Within two years, Knight says that Ramtha began teaching her how to leave her body and channel him. Knight also reveals that before having ever shared Ramtha’s insights, there had been no term for channeling. She says Ramtha coined it. As far as actually channeling Ramtha, Knight says that the closest thing she could relate it to in those early days was a near-death experience.
“I thought, ‘Yes, ah, I am going through this tunnel and I am hitting that wall and these are my spirits,” Knight now says, “and I really had a near-death experience but my body wasn’t in a coma, and in a deep part [of my brain] there was Ramtha manipulating the body. It’s a near-death experience. It’s the greatest thing I can explain to what channeling really is.”
She once said that Ramtha wears her body. “I have loaned it to him and he wrinkles it differently than I do …”
This must have been an interesting turn of events. Back in ’77. Knight had been a housewife “making cherry pies” and being a homeroom mother. She had two children and had been engaged to a dentist. Life wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t considered ultra extraordinary. She was born in Roswell, N.M., in a one-room shack. Her mother was a cotton picker. The family was poor. Now she was suddenly supposed to channel for people?
Her life would never be the same.
Once the ’80s hit, Knight’s relationship with Ramtha—and herself—strengthened. It lead to the creation of RSE in Yelm. The school’s mission, in part, was designed to offer its students the tools and the knowledge to “tap into the power of the mind and explore our human potential” and to embrace “knowledge that allows [students] to expand their truth and broaden the boundaries imposed on them by society and convention.” The curriculum is based on Ramtha’s insights—from ancient teachings to quantum physics. By the time the late-’80s rolled around, Ramtha’s popularity had soared, thanks, in part, to the New Age movement.
“Ramtha was an icon in the ’80s,” Knight tells me. “Shirley MacLaine—a lot of people—wrote about him. It went like wildfire across the country.”
The amount of time Knight channels Ramtha today varies. She channels many times during the month at RSE. The duration can be an hour, or less, sometimes 12, or more. Knight says it can take up to a day and half to regain her bearings, and that she accumulates a great deal of water during the channeling process.
“The most incredible thing, if you can visualize this possibility,” she says, “is that I have a loss of time. I mean those 12 hours I will never get back again. And there was one time—I don’t recall the year that it was—that out of 365 days, I channeled 180 days, so essentially I did not have a year—so much in and out from this time. I made a joke that it’s just now that I am listening to ’80s music. I am always a fashion behind. I really am. I go around wearing something and say, ‘This is great,’ and people look at me and go, ‘Well, elsewhere.’”
Elsewhere, her life bloomed. She enjoyed the growing number of students attending RSE, many of whom came—and continue to come—for eight-day sessions. (Curiously, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently spoke in Santa Cruz, visited RSE. Knight says he’s “a fabulous man.”) The ranch RSE sat on grew, and so did the town of Yelm, whose economy enjoyed a boost from RSE’s popularity. And, like any growing enterprise, over the years, Knight gave back to the community—more than $1 million to graduating high school seniors. She also sponsored students abroad and, in an ironic move, once donated funds to a Christian church group in Africa.
Still, she has her critics. Once the fervor of the ’80s New Age died down, some claimed RSE was a cult. Headlines weren’t pretty. Some wrote that Knight was a demon, “the daughter of Satan.” Scientists craving proof that Knight was indeed channeling Ramtha, barked. Then, in the summer of 1996, Knight opened her doors wide. She welcomed scientists, religious experts, psychologists and sociologists from around the world to RSE. These included some heady folks, among them Dr. Stanley Krippner of Saybrook Institute Graduate School. He studied Knight and the school for an entire year and conducted a plethora of psychological and physiological tests. The results? Krippner found Knight’s autonomic nervous system responses were so dramatic that “the scientists categorically ruled out any possibility of conscious fakery, schizophrenia or multiple personality disorders.”
“They put me through a battery of neurological tests,” Knight says. “I was hooked up to these monitors and there was a very sophisticated lie detector test, which had very sophisticated channels— nine channels on it. They thought I was going to go into a trance and I told them I am going to leave my body and Ramtha is going to come into the lower cerebellum. And they said, ‘yeah, yeah’ … And in a matter of seconds, I was gone so fast that when the Ram (Ramtha) came in, the calibrations of the computer went down and they had to recalibrate. They had already established my baseline—eyes open, eyes closed—quite a few times. When the Ram came in, he was in the deepest part of Delta … and everything changed so dramatically. My heartbeat dropped to 63 (bpm) and then flashed back up to 183 beats per minute and stayed there the entire time he was there. It was so dramatic that they thought there was something wrong. Then he left. They tested me two more times. What they said in a huge news conference was that, ‘We can’t say that that was Ramtha because we don’t have his social security number’—that’s a quip of course, ‘but that was not JZ Knight. Nobody can be in that deep a state; be lucid. Nobody can even attempt to fraud that.’ So, they said I wasn’t a fraud and after that, nobody called me a fraud.”
Truth is, some skeptics did. And still do. But ever since What the Bleep!?, a film whose concept originally sprang from RSE, fewer people were convinced that Knight was a fake. More were just intrigued with the ideas Ramtha, and Knight for that matter, were sharing.
It’s All Inside of You
“The extraordinary is in you,” Knight tells me again when I ask her to expound upon a few things people need to know most about today.
“Today?” she laughs, “You mean here [in America]; the land of the red and blue? You know, there are about 90 million of us in this country that are neither one of those [state colors] and hopefully this show that’s coming up, I can speak a little more forthrightly about it. Listen: What people need to know is that God is in them, however they want to define that. And if they want to define that as super-mind or super-conscious, that is fine. We shouldn’t be afraid of a God that is the source of life and that God shouldn’t be so insecure as to be threatened by our thought processes. I think we need to give up, somewhere, our religious addictions to guilt and shame and inadequacy, because I think it leads to a whole plethora of insecure people filled with lack and remorse and not feeling good about their bodies and their life, or their goals. People need to know that that [God] force is in them.”
Knight is easy on the ears, her voice the kind that would work well on radio. She also has boundless enthusiasm—it could fuel a rocket ship, the mechanics of which, I suspect, she would be just as comfortable deciphering. Frankly, whether or not you believe what she is sharing, the fact is: Whatever she says, often sounds inviting.
“There is compelling evidence that we create our reality,” Knight goes on. “If people want to change their reality, all they have to do is change their minds. If guilt presents them, then change your mind about where guilt comes from. No longer believe in something where the emotional outcome is guilt. Do away with it. If you think you are going to offend God, do away with a god that you would offend, because the God that we love is created in all of space. It’s the Milky Way. It’s all of the fabulous nebula out there. It is every bit of life and we could not have ever offended that. We only offend ourselves by thinking so small.”
Not thinking “small” is such a big issue for Knight that she will hardly stops for a breath.
“Stop living your life through famous people. Stop living your life through programming. Stop living your life through anybody else and start living it for you. Joy is attainable when we just do it for ourselves. And if you feel a little guilty about that, then stop living for that thing you think is important enough not to allow you to have joy for yourself. That’s silly and foolish. Life is a gift. It’s our most valuable asset. It’s a treasure. It’s wonderful. We change the way we see the world and all the people in it and we start to see they are a reflection of ourselves. The moment we change, we’ll see it differently and that we are going to have a fabulous life, exactly what we are supposed to have. We are never going to offend that which is the ground of all being. How are we going to do that?”
When the topic of the conversation swerves to the subject of relationships, Knight doesn’t struggle for words.
“Listen—let me put it in this context,” Knight adds. “If we are all divine people, and we are going to start with that premise, and we are going to make known the unknown, and that if we can logically show that we can create our own reality—and we all want to know that that would be the final truth, rather than a philosophy—then reality is really based upon the mystery of what we are. We are the greatest mystery that’s going on.”
What’s interesting to note about Knight is that many of the spiritual sandwiches she invites you to nosh on arrive with a high-calorie cosmic condiment—creamy, deep-textured internal stuff. It’s almost as if every subject—in this case, relationships—comes pre-loaded with a prologue to a grander, meatier ta da moment.
“We have to find out what it is within our neuro nets that cause us to be addicted to our emotions,” Knight adds, “and why we are doing that, and why, with these people, we fill these addictions. And why there is no resolution to that. We first find out about ourselves. We can only see in other people what we are. And we are only attracted to people because of some figment that they are an addiction—a need in us for our own chemistry. And the reason that people take drugs is to emulate the chemistry that is already inside of us. In one sense we are addicted to sex—we call it love, then we call it a relationship—whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing wrong with it. It means a chemical that our brain is releasing. We get high off these morphemic touches and we feel good from the dopamine when somebody touches us. That sensation has many names to it, but the most important thing is when they don’t last … The truth is that when we have discovered ourselves and discovered why we are compelled to do what we need to do because of our addiction, what it means is the next relationship is broader because you have become broader. And you are bringing in the broader incarnations of love. And it will extend in the gray areas that were in the former relationship when that person started acting out who they were, which wasn’t what you thought they were to be.
“So,” Knight says, “when people are ignorant about their chemistry, they always find themselves in relationships regardless of the face and the body—it’s the same relationship that started years ago when we had that one relationship—it was like the first hit and it was so powerful and it scored and we wanted everything after that to be like that. So we’ve really replaced those models with different models for us to keep up the same feeling.”
Some of this is documented in Bleep. In an unconventional turn, film critic Roger Ebert expressed his fondness for the film, actually singling out Ramtha/Knight as one of the only things he could savor in the cinematic quantum soup. Now that the film is being released with additional footage from scientists and spiritual leaders, Knight suddenly finds herself embarking on a public speaking tour, emphasizing the extraordinary mind. Her latest tour is not all due to the Bleep phenomenon. RSE is growing. And there are Ramtha’s teachings to share. On her travels, Knight, who turns 60 in March, will tackle numerous topics and remain true to the concepts of the Ramtha school, which aspires to “make known the unknown.”
“Making known the unknown is actually a quintessential evolution in our life,” Knight says. “We are not born to the circumstance, we’re born to begin the circumstance. And then to go beyond it—and transcend beyond it. And what we have lived with is the dominance—for thousands of years—of religious dogma; the thought of God being out there and people being punished down here. And some people don’t even know why they are punished. And sometimes I tell people, ‘Listen, religion is the study of God that, unfortunately, millions have suffered under its study and its absolute conclusions. It doesn’t mean it’s God.’ And the sooner that we get over that guilt, the freer we are to get back to enjoy God, science, dinner, shopping, health, joy … and the future.”
Knight laughs. “Understand?”
Please. Piece of cake.
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