Mortimer: I guess we should start with your new book, Beyond The Bleep: The Definitive Unauthorized Guide To What The Bleep Do We Know!? I watched the movie and enjoyed it inasmuch as it surpassed my expectations, however, I didn’t find it as mind-blowing as it had been hyped up to be. What compelled you to write an unauthorised guide to the film, and is there anything in there for a Gen-X nihilist such as myself, raised on the likes of Philip K. Dick?

Chica: If Disinfo had not contacted me to write this book, I never would have even bothered to see the movie - or gotten to read the wonderful books by the scientists interviewed in the film. I am so glad that I did! The ideas and the work of these scientists are the most interesting aspect of the “Bleep” phenomenon. I really admire the film’s co-director and financier for his courage in putting up $5 million of his own money to put these ideas up on the screen. The film treats the viewer like a thoughtful, sensitive person, rather than as a bloodthirsty ignoramus, as so much entertainment tends to do. Although What The Bleep Do We Know!? may not be the greatest production from an artistic perspective, the ideas it explores are the most vital and interesting ones around - such as asking the question of how reality works. What The Bleep Do We Know!? is probably the only theatrically-released feature length motion picture that has ever attempted to explain quantum physics and it is certainly worthwhile for that reason, alone. Many other fascinating things are discussed, such as the idea that we can become addicted to the brain chemicals associated with certain emotional states. Many people went to see the movie several times because there was so much going on that they wanted to go back to catch the bits they missed. The film can barely scratch the surface of the many subjects it raises, due to the constraints of the feature film format. This has led some science writers to excoriate the film, which I think is really unfair. It’s great that a commercial film has spurred people’s interest in science. The book I wrote about it is a synopsis of the competing quantum physics theories and neuroscience ideas presented in the film, for people who may not have the time or money to buy some 20 books on these subjects. I also look at the social forces at work in the staggeringly disparate reactions the film has received. That the filmmakers got the film made at all - let alone seen in movie theatres and turning a handy profit - with no distribution deal and after being totally trashed by the critics is absolutely amazing. Their grass roots marketing tactics could serve as a lesson for all independent producers. It’s interesting that you bring up Gen-X nihilism because the film is such a product of Boomer ideology, especially of the Human Potential Movement and the belief that you can transform yourself and your world. Gen-Xers could benefit from considering some of the revolutionary ideas championed by their Boomer elders. If it weren’t for the Boomers, the world today would be like Ozzie and Harriet on methamphetamine...uh, come to think of it - the Bushonian world has sort of ended up like that, anyway! (No wonder Gen-Xers are so cynical!)

Mortimer: It was that whole Boomer ideology that almost killed the deal for me. I find it very difficult to take seriously anything with a tie-dyed, New Age subtext. Blind optimism seems creepy to me, in the sense that it’s the kind of thing modern employers try to instil in their workforce to increase productivity. That said and done, I think the film was very worthwhile since it concentrated on the individual.

Chica: Yeah, most of the film’s critics are Gen-Xers who have zero tolerance for that pap. But at the end of the day, it’s your choice if you want to succumb to resignation and despair or choose another way to react to what life hands you. Why get mad at old Hippies for reminding you that you can step out of your familiar, safe zone of cynicism and do something wonderful in your life? This reminds me of an incredible course I took while I was at Brown University called “Hedonism and Ambition in American Civilization.” When my friends and I signed up for it, we thought it was going to be some variation on “Underwater Basket Weaving”, i.e., a totally bogus course that you wouldn’t even need to show up to in order to pass. It ended up being about how all revolutionary, subculture movements in America have ended up being subsumed into the juggernaut of the dominant consumerist mass culture. From the Hippies to Hip Hop - all the way back to the American Revolution, itself. Everything just becomes a fashion statement and just more shit to buy - unless your 30-second attention span allows you to remember what these movements were all originally about.

Mortimer: The film struck me as an attempt to conjoin theories of metaphysics, neurochemistry and quantum mechanics into a format that is comprehensible to the general public. Despite achieving this, I still felt that - as the movie progressed - it biased slightly towards a monotheist interpretation of reality. Do you think this was a deliberate attempt by the filmmakers to instil a more open perception on certain sections of the god-fearing populace? I’m thinking in terms of a reality hack here, where someone is brought towards a new viewpoint by appealing to their sensibilities.

Chica: Actually, I thought the film’s treatment of religion and Catholicism, specifically was pretty rough. I don’t think the filmmakers won any new friends among the god-fearing with that tack. What I saw the film promoting was a very specific New Age corruption of the ancient mystical quest to merge oneself with the divine. The corruption comes from mistaking your ego for “you” and by conflating materialist values with spirituality. Ideas like “you are God” and “you create your own reality” can be wildly misinterpreted and misapplied, when not fully understood.

Mortimer: I agree, the occult writer Gerald Suster once told me that he thought New Age was just softened down and tarted up Christianity, and I’m inclined to agree with him. The film’s Ramtha connection was wholly unnecessary, wasn’t it? I mean, so much of the movie seemed like one of those corporate industrials, the kind that companies show you on your first day of employment - How To Lift A Box Correctly, or How Not To Get Run Over By A Forklift Truck. To finish the film off with that whole Ramtha philosophy just seemed transparent and left me highly suspicious that I was being sold a cult.

Chica: The scientist interviews were the strongest aspect of the film. In my opinion, the dramatizations were amateur and the Ramtha association hurt the film. However, it is important to understand that almost all the scientists interviewed have spoken at the Ramtha School or else their books are part of the Ramtha curriculum, so Ramtha might not be the worst thing in the world, just perhaps not my own cup of tea. It seemed to me that almost everything that came out of Ramtha’s mouth during the film was a non-grammatical non-sequitur. It reminded me of the psychopathic speech patterns analyzed in Mark Crispin Miller’s “The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder”. And how fake is Ramtha's accent? I can’t distinguish quite how bad and wrong it is but it must totally grate on British ears.

Mortimer: You have a reputation for being a cognitive gymnast - exploring subculture, conspiracy theories and areas of thought that are far from comfortable or conventional. Have you always been drawn towards such subject matters or was there a specific event in your life that set you off down that path?

Chica: I grew up in several countries, speaking several languages so I saw at a young age how living in only one country and speaking only one language can limit one’s understanding of what’s going on in the world. Being half-Brazilian gave me a Third World perspective on American realpolitik - a view that was starkly different from the average American’s perception of their country as the ultimate bastion of goodness.

Mortimer: Yeah, Tim Leary said that migration was the key to evolution. When one considers that less than 23% of Americans own passports it’s not difficult to determine why the culture is infantile and self-absorbed. What I really want to know, though, is how you became a real life Dana Scully?

Chica: A very seminal event in my life happened when I was 14 years old and living in São Paulo. My neighbor and I witnessed a UFO, appearing at first as a tiny light at the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, which descended to about 2,000 feet in altitude - directly down over our heads. Needless to say, this was an absolutely terrifying perspective from which to view an aircraft. This thing was silent, shaped like a flashlight and it broke all the rules of physics that I had ever been taught. This happened in the sky over a city of around 15 million people. We watched it hover right in the middle of the flight path of domestic airliners towards the city’s airport for 45 minutes. The next day, someone from school told me that their mother had seen the same object from her penthouse, 10 miles away from where I was. That this was not front page news the next day outraged me. What I took away from the experience was that my entire civilization was a continuum of lies: The physics being taught was not the whole story. The news on TV was not the whole story.

Mortimer: Over the years that we’ve corresponded you appear to have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the areas you explore. Certainly the likes of Ong’s Hat and the Montauk Project can make for uncomfortable study to anyone of an unbalanced mental disposition. Now, I’m not implying that you’re slightly crazy, but I know from my own experiences of studying occultism - and the short period where I explored psychedelics - that one seems to go through periods of lying fallow; where a mental grounding is not only necessary but wholly required in order to digest any new perceptions of reality achieved. Is your love/hate relationship with the esoteric an aspect of this, or do you just get sick of dealing with the high percentage of lunatics that are drawn towards such fringe interests?

Chica: A lot of sweet, sensitive, independent-minded and perhaps gullible people are attracted to these time travel legends - as well as lunatics. I do regret wasting so much time on that stuff because it could be used to discredit me. I was just trying to get to the root of how reality works and due to my total mistrust of mainstream information, I probably ended up going a bit overboard in that direction. I was also green as to how disinformation works and now realize that I was a useful idiot in its propagation. However, I have interviewed enough octogenarian ex-government scientists to think it possible that teleportation has been achieved.

Mortimer: Tell me about your dealings with Joseph Matheny. I don’t know much about the guy - as nothing he has done has particularly impressed me - but I get the impression there are aspects about him that have you switching between intrigue and disgust.

Chica: I did not know that there were people who would invest all of their time and energy into lying non-stop about absolutely everything. It was spooky and revolting to understand that.

Mortimer: I suppose anyone who can keep a hoax like Incunabula/Ong’s Hat going for more than ten years has got to have a predisposition for compulsive lying...and quite possibly a screw loose.

Chica: I'll just let dead dogs lie.

Mortimer: One of the things that will probably surprise my readers is that you have an academic interest in fine wines, expressing that you’d like to get more involved in the area of tasting and possibly even write a book on the subject. Now, personally I couldn’t tell you the difference between a cheap Merlot and good Cabernet Sauvignon (but then I think Champagne is just Cava with a huge price tag). Is wine one of those subjects that helps keep you grounded when you’re not out looking for tantric hippy physicists from some obscure techno-psychic commune?

Chica: My interest in wine is not as academic as it is professional. I traded investment wine for five and a half years. All day, I haggled with the toughest, richest businesspeople in America, so it was a great course in the “real world” but I grew weary of the 60-hour work week and being tethered to the computer by my headset for 11 hours per day, so I resigned last Fall. I acquired a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of wine. It’s a pretty fun subject. I think I may write a book about how you can find inexpensive wine that has all the great characteristics of the stuff that only hedge fund managers can afford. I would also love to build a website and partner with an order fulfillment operation to ship these great affordable wines, but it would take a lot of work to put that all together.

Mortimer: Back to your book, Beyond The Bleep, my copy arrived a couple of days ago and in Chapter One you mention that many reviewers of the film found it easier to be disparaging rather than take the film’s fascinating ideas into consideration. Now, I appreciate how someone may dislike the movie for its New Age cheesy undertones, however, I concur with you that What The Bleep Do We Know!? certainly explored some fascinating concepts in its attempt to amalgamate spirituality and science. Why do you think people have such an aversion to unifying these ideas? For example: Aleister Crowley seemed to have suffered the same fate a century ago for advocating “The Method of Science, The Aim of Religion,” although his provocative character possibly didn’t help.

Chica: The ways different people react to the fusing of spirituality with science has everything to do with the beliefs with which they were raised. When you start getting down to the brass tacks of reality, as this movie does, it’s pretty scary and confronting for many people. All kinds of modalities have been concocted over the years to cope with the unknowable. Who and what are we? What is reality all about? These are probably unanswerable questions, that have historically been relegated to the domain of religion, where if you just believe A), you’ll be “saved,” etc. This kind of faith is just as evident in scientific materialism; the difference being that if you just believe that everything is an arbitrary accident, then you don’t have to take responsibility for anything because within the mechanistic confines of determinism, you have no freedom at all - which is paradoxically freeing - at least, morally. Myself, I was raised atheist although I am a lapsed atheist or rather, a spiritualist with an atheist background. Because I was never personally damaged by the Church, I harbor no personal grudge towards it. I was actually a bit offended by the way the Church was treated in the film.

Mortimer: It seems to me that the deeper scientists explore quantum theory the more it begins to sound like white man’s magic. Are we at a crossroads in our evolution where inevitably spirituality and science must feed off each other in order to explain this concept we call reality? Films like The Matrix, for example, (crap though it was) seem to have at least instilled a huge question mark in the minds of the general populace.

Chica: The dialogue between the spiritual and the logical, in other words, the right brain and left are certainly the crossroads in my own evolution and that of many other people. However, the rise of some radical religious movements around the world would suggest that plenty of people will fight tooth and nail not to go there - or allow anyone else do so.

Mortimer: I agree, but we should perhaps not forget the rise of some radical scientific movements either. I mean, one of the things that comes across strongly in your book is the amount of bitching that seems to go on in the scientific community between Quantum theorists.

Chica: Indeed. One of the most disturbing discoveries I made while writing this book was how many impediments there are to real science ever getting done. Big business, squabbles over government funding and people’s egos are the enemies of truth.

Mortimer: I had a friend once who after a series of particularly bad acid trips came out of them with a whole new obsession for Quantum Mechanics. Now the interesting thing is that he told me he had very little understanding of mathematics prior to his LSD phase, and yet this guy went on to achieve a BSc Honours Degree in the subject at University. What surprised me, however, was how unyielding he was in even entertaining the notion that the human nervous system might be an instrument with its own editing software and reality filters. To him mathematics was the fundamental language of the universe and to bring perception into it was simply foolish (despite failing to realise that languages such as mathematics are based solely on human perception in the first place). This told me two things: (1) his experiences with LSD had affected his perception of reality so profoundly that he came back yearning for a world of calculated certainty; and (2) his denunciation of the Roman Catholic belief system he was raised on had merely been replaced by an equally bigoted viewpoint of how life, the universe and everything would one day be explained by some grand unified theory. Do you think, therefore, that the reason why Science and Religion have thus far failed to meet halfway on anything at all is more down to the similarities of their proponents rather than their differences? In your book, for example (and from my own experience of dealing with predominantly left brained primates), some of these Scientists seem almost as dogmatic as any fundamentalist Xtain, Muslim or Zionist.

Chica: Absolutely. Jeffrey Satinover, a totally brilliant man, although I do not agree with all of his views (he is one of the most controversial scientists interviewed in the film, for his role as an “ex-gay movement” advisor and anti-pornography activist) says that when you’re trying to describe the indescribable, it really boils down to a matter of taste, whether you prefer religious motifs or scientific ones. He says the only camp deserving of fierce opposition, which includes as many scientific materialists as religious fundamentalists, is the one that allows for itself no serious possibility that it might be wrong.

Chica's new book, Beyond the Bleep: The Definitive Unauthorized Guide To What The Bleep Do We Know!?, is published by The Disinformation Company Ltd and is available from Amazon priced $9.95.

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