About: Mr. Masaru Emoto
In 1992 “received certification from the Open International University as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine.†(From his own website:
http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/eprofile.html )
From a pro-chiropractic website article regarding the concern of false academic credentials (apparently some chiropractors are concerned that people out there with fake degrees are making them look bad—I can’t blame them) The website:
http://www.chiroweb.com/archives/13/25/27.html
“A colleague determined that there was an 'OUI' in Sri Lanka, but it is called Open International University for complementary medicine, and it is not an accredited medical school.' For an additional fee of $400-US, outstanding students are awarded an M.D. (which is their abbreviation for Masters Degree) or other degrees such as B.Science, or extra credentials. (Parenthetical comment his.)â€
So basically this guy Masaru Emoto bought his “degree†from what is known as a diploma mill.
http://www.wes.org/ewenr/DiplomaMills.htm (read this webpage for a definition of a diploma mill.)
More:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1292240/posts
“Dr. Masaru Emoto is not a scientist. The Open International University is a diploma mill, and the Doctor of Alternative Medicine degrees issued from this institution are worthless… He has not published a single study in a peer-reviewed journal, there's no control groups and no replication whatever.â€
MORE: From a “Guide to Foreign Medical Schoolsâ€
http://www.network54.com/Forum/viewall?forumid=4609&it=38
“Open International University for Complementary Medicines is not a recognized or accredited medical school. Documents related to an Australian course in acupuncture and Qigong "recognized" by OIU state that "outstanding students" who complete the course will be awarded M.D. . . . or other degrees in complementary medicine . . . (Legal Fee US$400 applicable)."
-2001 Nomination for the Bent Spoon Award by the Australian Skeptics Society
"Presented annually to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudo-scientific piffle."
(
http://www.skeptics.com.au/features/spoon/ )
-May 23, 2003 Swift, Online Newsletter of the JREF (James Randi Education Foundation)
" Dr. Emoto might very well believe that he's doing science. But he's not. He does no double-blind procedures, for one thing, which dooms these amateur efforts, right from the beginning. If he were to be blind to which words were being used to influence the water crystals, his search through the results looking for confirmation, would be inconclusive. I'll risk the JREF million-dollar prize on that statement. If Dr. Emoto wants to win the prize, let him agree to perform his tests in a double-blind fashion, and I predict he'll get fuzzy results that prove nothing." - James Randi
(
http://www.randi.org/jr/052303.html )
There was plenty more information about this man. Granted I could also list a number of people who praise his work, but for me it is enough that he was not properly trained as a scientist, evident in the fact that he does not use double blind methods in his testing. So if I when I watch the film, anything they mention related to his work I will be taking with a grain of salt.
The difficulty about doing any kind of research is that there will always be at least two different opinions about things. There are even people out there who believe the Holocaust never happened! When doing research, a person (myself included) will tend to lean towards the views of people who support their own world view. That is why I believe viewing things from a scientific perspective is so important. If done properly, the scientific method will show the truth regardless if it coincides with a person’s world view.
I highly recommend you reading a book called “A Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark†by Carl Sagan:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-9324853-5560745?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Skeptical Views of the Movie itself:
From an article by Michael Shermer, President of the Skeptic's Society, and frequent writer for "Scientific American"
http://skeptic.com/director.html (this website shows his credentials)
" The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as "quantum flapdoodleâ€â€¦. …In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum (Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck's constant (h). "If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically." Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Then what the #$*! is going on here?" – Michael Shermer
(
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0006F4CB-F090-11BE-AD0683414B7F0000 ) read the whole article if you have time—it’s not long.
Another review of the film:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/ramtha/ramtha13.html
One more thing before I end this. Apparently in the movie they interview a woman called JZ Knight. I just did a quick search on her with some of the sources I trust and I came up with this:
“Ramtha is a 35,000 year-old spirit-warrior who appeared in J.Z. Knight’s kitchen in Tacoma, Washington in 1977. Knight claims that she is Ramtha’s channel. She also owns the copyright to Ramtha and conducts sessions in which she pretends to go into a trance and speaks Hollywood’s version of medieval or Elizabethan English in a guttural, husky voice. She has thousands of followers and has made millions of dollars performing as Ramtha at seminars ($1,000 a crack) and at her Ramtha School of Enlightenment, and from the sales of tapes, books, and accessories (Clark and Gallo 1993).â€
http://www.skepdic.com/channel.html
It is important when researching a movie like this to try to uncover the motives for the movie. I remember one day you were talking to me about an alien autopsy movie you had seen. You asked me who would bother to spend the time faking something like that. And I believe your question was answered when we watched that episode of ******** on Alien Abductions. It was clear to see there are a lot of people making money off the idea that aliens are real.
I came across this website:
http://www.phys.uregina.ca/pss/?q=node/7#comment-5
where some Canadian physics students were discussing the film. One wrote:
“So after a little bit of digging I learned that yes, in fact, this movie was completely financed, filmed, produced, and directed by a cult. The cult being led by the person most interviewed in the movie, a woman named J. Z. Knight who believes she is channeling some long-dead Seer of Atlantis.â€
I tried to confirm this, but have yet been able to. According to the film’s website, the film is a “Lord of the Winds Films, LLC†production. However, that company does not have it’s own website (which is unusual for a production company), and I see no evidence of this company even existing other than in the credits of the film. In the list of credits, J.Z. Knight is listed as the first person given “Special Thanks†which is a pretty good indicator that she was heavily involved in the film.
One thing I did notice, while on the film’s website is that they have a link to “products†which takes you to a website where they sell t-shirts and hats that promote the film. The company that sells the t-shirts is a company that sells a lot of new age mumbo jumbo quackery including fung shui products.
http://www.serenityhealth.com
Another thing that I noticed was that the company sells Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa incense. This is (was) my favorite incense. Somehow, though I never noticed (until just now!) the name on the label “Satya Sai Baba.†If you don’t know who Sai Baba is, do a little research. He is a con artist who has millions of followers who believe he is a reincarnation of god. He proves his powers by simple sleight of hand magic tricks (has been caught on video doing them.) He also is accused by many of sexually abusing his followers (men and children.) Just go to Google and type in “Sai Baba sexual abuse†He is truly a horrible person who has many people convinced he is god. I’m never buying that incense again.
Now, on to J.Z. Knight: I mentioned her briefly in my last email but just wanted to point out a couple of things about her from her own website.
http://www.ramtha.com/html/aboutus/about-jz.stm early on in this incredibly long bio, she says “It is just a fact that we use less than a tenth of our brain.†This is a comment that a lot of psychics like to throw out as a way to persuade people that they have powers. I assume by implying that they as psychics are capable of using parts of the unused portion of their brain. Well, the whole 10 percent of the brain is a myth.
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm So right off the bat, this woman comes out swinging with bad science.
Further down her same bio she starts talking about her past lives. “This particular area of the world 35,000 years ago had a thriving spiritual civilization that went back even further to the time of dinosaurs, and that we had very intelligent people who lived or coexisted with reptilian beings.†Again, more examples of bad science. Scientists have proven through evolution that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed. Humans did not begin to evolve until after the dinosaurs were gone. This woman is just making things up at this point.
Knight goes on to further discuss her experiences when encountering “Rathma,†she says: “I would have the sense that somebody was standing beside me, or I would have dreams where I would take a nap and I would get paralyzed and I couldn’t wake up. And I would be in a room where I couldn’t see and I could hear conversations going on. I also had extraordinary experiences with UFOs.†This is a classic textbook example of sleep paralysis.
From the Stanford University website:
http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/paralysis.html
“Sleep paralysis consists of a period of inability to perform voluntary movements either at sleep onset (called hypnogogic or predormital form) or upon awakening (called hypnopompic or postdormtal form)†Symptoms including: “A complaint of inability to move the trunk or limbs at sleep onset or upon awakening, Presence of brief episodes of partial or complete skeletal muscle paralysis, Episodes can be associated with hypnagogic hallucinations or dream-like mentation (act or use of the brain)â€
And from this page:
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/S_P2.html#hall
“…there may be some people who experience full-blown hallucinations during sleep paralysis in which they not only have vivid and complex imaginative experiences but are also convinced that these experiences have objective external sources. Such people are unlikely to describe their experience as one of sleep paralysis but perhaps as one of demon possession or alien abduction.“
Clearly this woman is suffering from this not uncommon condition, and instead of researching it, and discovering what was going on in her head/body, she has let herself believe her hallucinations—in fact, she has let them grow.
There is plenty of detail about this woman that you can read yourself in her bio (again at this website:
http://www.ramtha.com/html/aboutus/about-jz.stm ) One final thing I would like to point out is that this woman is a business school dropout. She has no science background or training.
If this film does indeed focus a lot of time on her, then just from what I have read on her (and from her) I would be very skeptical about much of the film. And going back to my original statement about the motivation of the film, I just want to point out that this woman, though deluded (if she really believes in what she says,) is very smart, and good at promoting her school and her world view, and is doing so through this film. Perhaps after all, she did learned something from business school before she dropped out.
I forgot to add a couple of details I wanted to point out from Knight's bio webpage:
http://www.ramtha.com/html/aboutus/about-jz.stm
At one point she says " We are not a cult" She also writes "The veracity of this phenomenon points to the truth of Ramtha's message. This is an important point to consider because the advance of science has developed tests and equipment that can scrutinize this phenomenon and study it from a physiological, neurological, and psychological point of view. Scientific techniques now exist to study the phenomenon of channeling by JZ Knight and to rule out the possibility of fraud."
I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to why she needs to state that her organization is not a cult and that she is not a fraud on her website.
Just a quick note. I found another reference to the connection of that bizzare woman J.Z. Knight and the film. It turns out that the three directors are students of Knight's Ramtha School of Enlightenment in Yelm, Washington. Check out this review of the movie from the magazine, Skeptical Inquirer
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-09/review.html )
Hope you find this info helpful.
