William Arntz

How does one change one's state to a higher state? And part of that is the emotions. So you say, well, there are certain emotions. I get angry all the time. You have to step back and say, what's that anger really doing for me? Well, it's separating me from people I care about. And again, how do you figure that out? That's where you have a mentor, you have a guide, or maybe you just have something. You watch a movie and suddenly it comes. But that's the whole self discovery journey. Then you say, well look, I'm just not going to go down that road. The next time someone does something that pisses me off, you know, I'm just going to smile. I'll put a smile on my face, wait till they leave, and I'll go out and kick a tree or something. And then that's the process.

It really hit me hard when I was making What the Bleep Do We Know?, and it was in the early phases of it. I was telling some friends of mine who were not really into all the stuff about it, and they all got very intrigued. They were like, 'Wow, that is really interesting.' I talked a little bit about the quantum things that were so bizarre, and people were really intrigued. I just got the sense that there were millions of people out there who really wanted to hear this stuff. That was a bit of a surprise to me, that I got that perception so clearly. Once I got it, I was like, 'Oh, okay, there is a calling for it, and I am going to do it.' There were points while making the film, which was quite difficult, that I kind of thought about stopping. Then I would think about these millions of people out there who were pulling, and I was like, okay, I am not going to throw in the towel.

I knew once I got started, I was like, 'Oh, this is it.' I knew this was it because I would sit down to write, start, and boom, boom, boom, it just happened. So I knew when I did it that this was it, and it ended up being 85% of it. So, what we did was we started playing it in Yelm, where the Rompa School was, and we knew people would show up for that. After about a month of it being sold out, we called the theater in Portland and said, 'Hey, why don't you show the film there?' Then we went to all the yoga stores, all the health food stores, and left flyers. We also did what I called seed screenings, getting influential people to see the film. Finally, it opened in Baghdad, and there was a line around the block. It was sold out Friday night, sold out Saturday night, sold out Sunday night. Part of my strategy was like a fire, you don't want to expand it too quickly. We let it bake there for a month, then moved it to the suburbs, and it kept growing. You start on something, and you just keep at it.

The science in What the Bleep, a lot of it was that what you perceive out there is just what you're perceiving. It's not necessarily what is. Then there was the physics that basically objects never touch. You just get closer and the electromagnetic fields around the atoms repel each other, and that's what you feel. You don't actually feel the ball hit you. Then you get into the quantum, where basically, is it a wave or is it a particle? It appears this way, but if you're not looking, it's diffuse. That electron is in many places until you observe it. There's a famous line where Fred Alan Wolf goes, it's not what's out there out there, it's what's in here in here. You think that reality is just sitting out there waiting for you to partake of it. But a lot of the science, and this is also cognitive science, is saying no, you're putting all this together in your brain, and your brain is assembling it all in a certain way based on what everyone else says. But you could put it together differently. We had a lot of that in the film to get people to say that the thing we take for reality out there is a construct of the brain. It's to back off from the idea of, I know what the world is, I know what it's like. It's to say we're living in a mystery.

Another big part was that in the film we talk about being addicted to emotions, and that because of the way peptides get created due to your emotions. You're angry, it creates certain peptides, and they dock with the cells, and that's the same mechanism that people get addicted to opium. It is an addiction type thing. You can get addicted or you do get addicted to your emotions. Now people will say, 'You habitually get angry,' but he took it and said, 'No, no, no. It's not habitually, it is habitually, but you're addicted to it. You want the rush from those emotions, and so you keep going back to it.' Once you realize that, the next step is, 'Well, what are these emotions doing for me and for everyone else? Are they good or bad emotions?' There was a whole thing of looking at one's emotions, which everyone on the spiritual path does. But there was the idea of using that science to really kick people into taking a hard look at their repetitive emotions and realizing that they're addicted to them. There are also ones where there's a payoff, like victimization. People go into the victim thing, oh poor me. So there are certain payoffs that you get for negative emotions.

I just started doing something. So my wife, dear Dre, said, you know, you walk around often with a scowl on your face. I'm like, really? And she goes, yeah. So we were at this thing for the film festival yesterday and it was early in the morning and I got up and I didn't get much sleep and there was a way in which I didn't really feel like going. So this is all set up for Mr. Grumpy Post, right? So I just got this notion that I was just going to put, at first I called it a stupid smile on my face. I refined that a little. I call it now the mindless smile. I was just going to smile. Just a mindless smile. Mindless because I'm not really thinking anything. I'm not smiling because of anything. It's just an arbitrary mindless smile. And I did that and I got to tell you, I had a much better day and people were really nice to me. It was different. So now that's my new thing, the mindless smile for no apparent reason. Why not? Dre was telling me, my wife was telling me, that they've done studies that if you just smile, you will feel better. The good news is, it is that simple. You want to feel better, just smile.

How to Suffer … In 10 Easy Steps: Discover, Embrace and Own the Mechanics of Misery [Arntz, William] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. How to Suffer … In 10 Easy Steps: Discover, Embrace and Own the Mechanics of Misery

What the Bleep Do We Know!? (stylized as What tнē #$*! D̄ө ωΣ (k)πow!? and What the #$*! Do We Know!?) is a 2004 American pseudo-scientific film that posits a spiritual connection between quantum physics and consciousness (as part of a belief system known as quantum mysticism). The plot follows the fictional story of a photographer, using documentary-style interviews and computer-animated graphics, as she encounters emotional and existential obstacles in her life and begins to consider the idea that individual and group consciousness can influence the material world. Her experiences are offered by the creators to illustrate the film's scientifically unsupported ideas. Bleep was conceived and its production funded by William Arntz, who serves as co-director along with Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente; all three were students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. A moderately low-budget independent film, it was promoted using viral marketing methods and opened in art-house theaters in the western United States, winning several independent film awards before being picked up by a major distributor and eventually grossing over $10 million. The 2004 theatrical release was succeeded by a substantially changed, extended home media version in 2006. The film has been described as an example of quantum mysticism, and has been criticized for both misrepresenting science and containing pseudoscience. While many of its interviewees and subjects are professional scientists in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology, one of them has noted that the film quotes him out of context.

Well, my purpose seems to be taking wisdom and knowledge from people who know better than me and being able to put that out there in a way that people understand and enjoy. My secondary purpose seems to be to make people laugh. It is one of my favorite things in the whole world. If I can do both at the same time, that is great. It really hit me hard when I was making What the Bleep Do We Know?, and it was in the early phases of it. I was telling some friends of mine who were not really into all the stuff about it, and they all got very intrigued. They were like, 'Wow, that is really interesting.' I talked a little bit about the quantum things that were so bizarre, and people were really intrigued. I just got the sense that there were millions of people out there who really wanted to hear this stuff. That was a bit of a surprise to me, that I got that perception so clearly. Once I got it, I was like, 'Oh, okay, there is a calling for it, and I am going to do it.'

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It started off as a tiny little documentary, maybe a 50,000 dollar documentary, and it was based around Rompa's teachings because I was at the Rompa school at that point. I was just going to edit things from what he says and put some B roll on it, a little music, and call it a day. Once I started getting into it, I essentially got carried away. RTA's teachings at that time were very much about creating your own reality. That was one of the center parts of it, that you create your reality. He was saying it over and over, and he used a lot of the quantum physics to back that up, saying that when you observe, the observer changes what you observe. Therefore, if you observe yourself being successful, if that is what you want, then you will be successful. A lot of the teachings were like that. My theory is he did a lot of the science stuff just to get people's minds going, just to get people thinking out of the spaced out new age thing that was happening. That's where you have a mentor, you have a guide, or maybe you just have something. You watch a movie and suddenly it comes. But that's the whole self discovery journey.

I'll tell you one thing. One thing is not to compare your purpose with anyone else's. That's a big one because especially in this modern society, oh my God, it's the famous people. Apparently there were statistics where people under 30 were asked what they want to do, what's their purpose, and some ridiculously high number, the majority, said I want to be an influencer. Good Lord. So there's that notion that my purpose has to be really grand. It has to move mountains. It has to get me a million people on TikTok. And the purpose might very well be for someone to take care of your mom because she's getting older. That could be it. To basically put it on a sliding scale with everyone else and everything and what society is telling you, that's not it. For some people, just having a wonderful family. And society, we have all these little things and that's where it's so easy to get knocked off your purpose. Now, if you're into conspiracy type stuff, you might say, well, that's why society does that. They want to knock you off your purpose so they can then pull all the levers and get you to do what they want you to do. But the thing is, don't compare yourself to what other people or society says to do. You just do what you're drawn to do. And if people don't like it, then just ignore them.

There's a certain spirit where you just say, 'This may not work, but I'm going to do it anyway.' There's a sense when you're doing something that it may not work, but you do it anyway. Whatever I was really into, I would just go do it, and I didn't care what anyone else thought, because often people would just say, 'You're crazy.' When I started doing What the Bleep, I talked to people in the movie industry, and they all just rolled their eyes. Before that, I had written software and had computer companies, which is where I got the money to make the movie, and they were like, 'Oh yeah, another Silicon Valley nerd who thinks he can make movies,' and they just rolled their eyes. I was like, 'Okay, whatever,' and I just went on. I didn't care what other people thought. We got What the Bleep done, and of course, we showed it to distributors, but no one would distribute the film, so we did it ourselves. No distributor would touch it. At that point, it was like, 'Well, I guess we're going to distribute it ourselves.'

The biggest challenge to keep me on my purpose, the greatest challenge, was not giving up because there were times I wrote ten scripts for What the Bleep. Every script, I would get inspired, and I would write it. I would think, 'This is it. We're done.' Then I would show it to the two people I made the film with, Mark and Betsy, and they would be like, 'I don't think so. I don't know. I don't think so.' This went on for a year. After a year of not being able to figure it out, Mark and I were doing, 'Oh, well, what do we know?' At some point, someone said that, and then someone said, 'Let's call the movie that.' We had a big laugh over it and thought, 'Haha, that's so funny. Yeah, let's call the movie What the Do We Know?' We figured we'd come to our senses, but we never did. That's how that happened. It was the frustration of not knowing how we were going to make this thing work. Finally, it started coming together, and then I sat down in ten days and wrote the script. That was it. Done. It was like a year and a half of prep work. There were points while making the film, which was quite difficult, that I kind of thought about stopping. Then I would think about these millions of people out there who were pulling, and I was like, okay, I am not going to throw in the towel.