Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., discusses her 1980 remote viewing experiment matching six of ten locations between Michigan and Rome, and distant healing trials where AIDS patients showed significant improvement under compassionate intentions—regardless of religious tradition. Founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973 with Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, she explores consciousness beyond the brain, citing studies like the "Juliet" experiment under sensory deprivation and cross-cultural reincarnation cases. While skepticism persists about gross psychokinesis or weather manipulation, Schlitz argues for ethical, subtle applications of psi-phenomena, warning of potential misuse despite their power to foster connectedness and heal. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest Lead to do good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be across this great land of ours and well beyond.
I'm Art Bell, and this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
Glad to be with you and glad to welcome yet more new affiliates, KWFX in Wichita Falls, Texas.
On down Texas Way, 1290 on the dial.
Welcome W Make That KWTX in Waco, Texas.
1230 on the dial.
Great to be on in Waco, too.
And WCTF in Punta, Georda, Florida.
1580 on the dial.
Welcome to the great growing nearing 500 network.
For all the years I've been on radio, I've wanted to hit the number of 500.
And I'm telling you, we are that close.
Just that close.
In a few moments, I've got a rather bizarre, but for this show, perhaps somewhat normal, story to tell you.
That wouldn't have been all bad because I have hit a deer at 75, you know, 80 miles an hour up there, and it did, you know, it's normal, really, you know, to be going that fast.
And if a deer walks out to hit something like that, this wasn't a deer.
I don't want a lot of people up because it's a remote area, but if you get a lot of people, the neighbors are nosy around here, then it's just going to spread like wildfire.
So I was thinking that if you called a vet and you just sort of explained your situation, that the vet might and ask the vet to keep his or her mouth shut and come out and tell you what you've got on your hands and perhaps even treat it if there's any chance it's still alive.
You said you could almost tell it, you could almost see it breathing, didn't you?
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My wife did.
She put a mirror up to its nose and there was some steam on the mirror.
Well, how much blood and gore from the impact of your car was there?
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There was none.
I think it broke maybe its leg and some ribs or something, but there was no blood or nothing till I cut part of its leg with the hunting knife to get the blood for that blood sample.
Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D. Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and senior scientist at the Complementary Medicine Research Institute at the California Pacific Medical Center, is going to be my guest at the top of the hour, and she's a real heavyweight.
She'll be talking about all kinds of PSI abilities.
So that's actually directly ahead are open lines.
So get ready for that.
Got a kind of an interesting story here from Newfoundland.
Fisherman, Gerald Hackett, apparently is shown in a link we've got on our website examining the remains of an unknown sea creature that washed up near Fortune Bay fishing community of St. Bernard's within the past few days.
The creature has long, matted white fur and a smell even a hardened fisherman had trouble dealing with.
The locals here call it the monster.
Any word yet on the monster?
They ask each other, looking to the sea for some possible answer.
We people have never seen the likes of it before.
Never.
Fishermen mutter the word monster with smirks on their faces.
Grown men with leather for skin and salt water for spit, talking about creatures from the bottom of Fortune Bay.
Monster isn't a word that flows freely from their lips.
Not when there are no youngsters handy.
But what else is there to call it the dead thing that rests on Poultry Beach?
The hare is the biggest puzzle, said Ed Hotter, the fisherman who found it.
What's hare doing on any kind of fish?
Poultry is a stretch of coastline about 20 kilometers west of here, a 40-minute speedboat ride past pods of humpbacks and schools of mackerel.
Hotter 42 has a lone shanty on the beach.
A jackie often stays in to be closer to his cotton flounder nets.
On Saturday, he steered his boat to shore and he spied what he thought was an overturned dory.
Only it wasn't a boat, but a creature.
Measuring about seven meters in length, covered in coarse white hair, the length of an average man's hand, it looked like nothing he'd ever seen before.
It says it weighs three or four tons.
The monster, in quotes, has what appears to be skeletal structure consisting of a backbone ribs, though it's impossible to tell which end is which.
There's no obvious head and only a suggestion of limbs.
Claps of flesh on either side could just as well be ears as fins.
The stench of rot has made the hardest of fishermen there wretched.
No seagulls fly anywhere near it.
So if you want to see the entire story, go to my website, artbell.com.
Let's see.
You go to science news and other links.
And if everything is as it should be, when it comes up, yes, let's see.
Actually, I don't see it.
It's supposed to be there somewhere.
I see Utah divers rescue dinosaur footprints.
That's interesting.
And other things, but I don't quite see it yet.
So it's probably there someplace or another.
That's where it's going to be anyway up in the science news, according to Keith.
I just spoke with him.
Interesting stuff going on.
Here's one for you.
It would appear that there's been a UFO sighting, if I can find the darn thing.
As a matter of fact, I put it aside to read as the second item tonight.
And, yeah, here we go.
Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
So up Into that part of the country, we go again.
A radio station there has reported receiving over 200 phone calls since this morning from local people who claim to have seen a UFO in the area last night.
They are describing the object as a hazy green light moving across the sky.
Some witnesses have mentioned that it may have pulsated, changed shades of green, or had a red light on bottom.
The radio station has been in contact with Volk Field, the local Air Force station.
The Air Force did not report any radar contacts, but admitted that they were not actively scanning the sky last night.
Local TV station, WAOW, Channel 9, ABC in Wausau, apparently is going to be covering the story as well, though I'm at work, my emailer says, and will not be able to see it.
I was driving home from work from Wausau, Wisconsin to Stevens Point, Wisconsin last night, but I did not see anything remarkable in the sky.
Nevertheless, 200 people reportedly did, so I thought I'd let you all know about that.
Let's go to the phones, open lines, anything goes till the top of the hour.
If the guy's offering to send me airline tickets to come out there and get this thing, which, of course, yeah, I can see me trying to get that on a United flight, you know.
Yes, I'm not particularly pleased with the direction that we're going.
We seem to be limiting it almost to the oil and gas route, which I acknowledge we need in the short term.
But in the long term, we absolutely have got to have something different than what we've got right now, or not very far down the road, it's all going to be gone, and we're not going to have anymore gas and oil.
And then what?
High prices, wars, all kinds of nasty things begin to happen.
So we need to begin planning now for when we're not going to have it, and we don't seem to be doing that.
But anyway, and I had asked him, made a request before I spoke with her for you to please contact Gordon Michael Scallion because I felt that that's someone you had developed a rapport with because I just felt something really bad was going to happen on your, you know, while you were on vacation.
Well, no, he's not going to do it until, if I remember correctly, gee, what did he say the fall or now the spring I think maybe the spring okay what and then one more thing I'm going to go and watch the launch are you or the detonation whichever it turns out okay what about the guy that um with the time machine oh which guy I've had a lot of guys with time machines um the one that what stole the transformers oh uh well he's disappeared
Well, maybe it's a little bit rare, but not too rare.
So I'll tell you what.
We're coming toward the top of the hour right now.
my command how's that thanks sir all right say good morning to everybody morning everybody right San Francisco all right good night and when we come back we're going to have quite a number of hours ahead I suggest you stay planted in your seat Marilyn Schlitz Dr. Schlitz director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and so much more is going to be my guest a real heavyweight keep it right where you've got it this is
Coast to Coast AM.
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 2nd, 2001.
Coast to Coast AM.
Coast to Coast AM.
Coast to Coast AM.
Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired August 2nd, 2001.
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and senior scientist at the Complementary Medicine Research Institute at the California Pacific Medical Center.
Marilyn received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at Stanford, has published numerous articles on PSI research and psychophysiology, I think that's right.
Cross-cultural healing, consciousness studies, and creativity.
She's conducted research at Stanford University, Science Applications and International Corporation, the Institute for Parapsychology, and the Mind Science Foundation, and in field settings to include the West Indies, South America, the rural U.S., has taught at Trinity University, Stanford University, and Harvard Medical School, has lectured widely, including talks at the United Nations and the Smithsonian Institution.
My Mai, she serves as a member of the Advisory Council for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the NIH, is on the editorial board of alternative therapies and advances in mind-body medicine, serves on the board of directors for Eslin Institute and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is on the scientific program committee for the Tucson Center for Consciousness Studies.
Her primary research interest concerns an examination of the underlying assumptions guiding our modern view of reality.
I guess I was always, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan in the 60s and 70s, and it was a time of rebellion and sort of challenging authority and making assumptions.
And so I had the opportunity to go to an undergraduate program at Wayne State University.
And the curriculum was really around the idea of revolutions in thought.
So we really looked at the ways in which our model of reality changes, you know, every hundred years or now it's been accelerating so that the worldview is changing more rapidly.
But the idea that what we assume to be hard and fast rules about the nature of reality have actually changed over time.
And that excited me.
I thought, hmm, you know, we may be capable of many more things than the dominant worldview allows for.
So that got me interested in things like parapsychology and the study of remote viewing.
These were ideas that I thought serious scientists were looking at with rigor, and yet they were things that didn't fit within the dominant view of what was possible.
Well, you know, when I entered this field and I sort of slid from the kind of show I was doing a decade, over a decade ago now, well over a decade, into this kind of a program, I would have to be considered a gigantic skeptic.
I mean, I was really a big skeptic.
Fascinated, but a big skeptic.
Over the years, I've talked to so many remote viewers, had so much to do with that whole original group that was in the government program, that I have become a believer.
I've just seen too much, and I know too much, and I know that it's real.
But how anybody can view over an infinite distance, whether it be on the way to the moon or in Russia or anywhere else in the world, either an object or even a person and come back with accurate information, how that happens still to some degree eludes me.
Oh, I would say I'm an open-minded skeptic about overall issues related to consciousness.
The remote viewing data, I think, are highly compelling.
I mean, I agree with you that I worked in the early SRI program, in the remote viewing program, and had the opportunity to do a number of experiments over the years, all the way up until a couple of years ago.
We tried to design the experiments so that rather than separating ourselves and studying some subject out there, we thought it probably would be a good idea to learn a little bit about the phenomenon ourselves.
So we designed the experiment so that the experimenters could actually be the participants in the study.
And then we had to take extra precautions to make sure that we ruled out all the things that people might say, like cheating or errors.
The one experiment that I referred to was done in 1980.
And it was done between Michigan and Rome, Italy.
So it was Detroit and Rome.
And what happened in that experiment is that the outbound person collected 40 geographical locations or target sites.
And we then agreed that on 10 separate days, he would visit one of those sites randomly selected from the pool.
And I would describe my impressions of where he was at that time.
We then collected all of my impressions and his 10 sites and mixed them all up so that they were in a random order.
And we presented them to five judges, five objective people who weren't part of the experiment.
And their goal was to evaluate it to see whether we were just like, you know, if you look at clouds and somebody says, I see a seahorse, everybody sees a seahorse.
For example, one day the impression was of a strong depth of field, little blue lights, things shooting up in the air, wanted to say an airport, then said there were holes in the ground and sort of standing back From the scene.
As it turns out, the outbound person had randomly selected the Rome International Airport and he was standing in a field where there were holes in the ground where clandestine diggers had been digging for Roman coins.
So we got the holes, we got the little blue lights, we got the thing shooting up in the air, the strong depth of the field would be the runway, and said airport.
So it was really very easy for the judges to then match that.
And actually, Hal Putoff has told me that our experiment happened at exactly the right time in terms of the SRI program because, you know, there were some doubts, and suddenly an independent person had come in and replicated this and published it in a peer-reviewed journal.
And it gave them a big boost in their program.
And it was about that time that I got involved as a consultant for the SRI program.
Yeah, I think of this skit by Monty Python about Ann Elk and having a theory.
You know, my theory is, but what we're learning is that there is a whole new model of science that's emerging.
And it's about complexity and self-organization and nonlinear dynamics and quantum mechanics and non-locality.
All these things, I think, are converging to suggest that consciousness and the physical world are engaged in ways we hadn't understood before.
And that perhaps our consciousness is able to actually cause changes in the physical world or to engage in the physical world in ways that aren't strictly cause and effect in the ways we've understood them before.
You know, you think about, you mentioned my background in anthropology.
If you look around the world, people believe that they have practitioners in their communities who are able to cause changes in the physical condition of a person, even at a distance.
Well, what we tried to do is keep a skeptical attitude and bring it into a laboratory setting.
So we set up a series of experiments.
We actually created a model of healing.
I did this work at the Mind Science Foundation initially and now at the Institute of Noetic Sciences where we were interested in looking at the possibility that, for example, you and I might participate in an experiment and I would monitor your physiology, say your heart rate, for example.
And I would be in another room and at random times throughout a session, I would attempt to influence your physiology.
I might attempt to arouse you, excite your physiology, so that we'd see a difference in your physiology when I'm intending for you as compared to control conditions.
Well, what we found in a series of 13 experiments was that it appears that one person can influence another person's physiology even at a distance and even under double-blind conditions.
What this suggested to us is that there is sort of a proof of principle that these distant healers are actually able to cause changes in another person.
We then moved it into another sphere, which is clinical studies.
In other words, we're finding significant differences in autonomic nervous system activity when a person is being intended for as compared to the control conditions.
It doesn't work every time, but let me just give you an example of why this is important and relevant.
Please.
We just completed a couple of studies.
This was done under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Targ, and she and our team of colleagues through the Institute of Noetic Sciences and California Pacific Medical Center were interested in whether distant healers could influence AIDS patients.
So this was a group of patients that, in terms of our Western medical knowledge, weren't doing too well at the time when we initiated the study.
To help them, to increase their healing potential, to increase their immune system's response to the virus, to decrease the number of days in hospital, to decrease the number of visits to the doctor, to decrease the number of secondary infections.
All these things that we would say are healing responses.
And what we found in both a pilot study and a confirmation study was that people were significantly healthier if they were in the distant healing group, even if they didn't know they were in the distant healing group.
So in other words, that if everybody got standard care and one group got a little booster, which is this distant healing intention, they appear to do better under randomized double-blind conditions.
Do you think it makes any difference in practical effect whether you call it prayer and what you do in fact is prayer or whether you do remote healing, which is almost really remote influencing?
I think it's an empirical question that we haven't gotten enough data yet to answer.
In the experiment with the AIDS patients, for example, we used healers from every tradition you can imagine.
We had Carmelite nuns, Buddhist monks, we had shaman, we had Wiccans, we had fundamentalist Christians, we had and our goal was really to try and cross the various traditions with the idea that if you can hold a compassionate intention for the well-being of another person, that probably provides a bridge across the various agendas or programs or belief systems.
Did you know that the institute that Marilyn Schlitz heads, the Institute of Nomadic Sciences, was founded by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, one of the Apollo astronauts.
Just a little fact for you.
Good morning.
We're talking about things that you can't see, touch, or understand unless you listen awfully carefully, and even then, you may not be so sure.
Stay right where you are.
It all continues.
Back now to Dr. Marilyn Schlitz.
Doctor, so there would be two possibilities then, at least, and one would be that those who pray to God are actually accessing this non-local force that's out there, that I think remote viewers call it, and or the other way around, it may well be that remote viewers are accessing their information through what, in reality, is a God force.
Either one of those possibilities are there, aren't they?
I mean, I think that there are different things going on, and I wouldn't Want to say that we are trying to deconstruct all of religion and belief in God through these experiments.
This is just a tiny little glimpse into a tiny aspect of what is being revealed about the whole.
There are a couple of very interesting studies that involve cardiology patients.
For example, one done here in San Francisco with patients coming in and either they were randomized into either a prayed-for group or a non-prayed for group.
And what they found is that the outcome measures on a variety of different health variables was much better for the prayed for group.
We just participated in a study, this is through the Institute of Noetic Sciences, that we helped to conduct a study through Duke University through their medical school on another cardiologist, Mitch Krukoff, who did what he calls the mantra study.
And this is what involves using, he calls them noetic interventions.
These are therapeutic touch, guided imagery, and distant prayer.
And all of the people would come into the hospital in a cardiac emergency.
And they would agree to participate in the study.
And what that meant is that they would be randomized into one of four arms.
Either they would get standard cardiology Western medicine alone, or they would get that plus one of these noetic interventions.
And what he found is that in all cases, the noetic interventions were better than standard care alone.
And the group that stood out were the prayed-for group, which suggests that there's something very powerful about holding a compassionate, positive image for another person.
I think it's probably a mixture of different things going on.
But certainly if you as the receiver, and I would invite everybody listening that we know you're having back pains, that if they just intend and hold a positive thought for your back, we can just see if your back feels better by the end of the evening.
But is that about people sending something to you, or is that about you being responsive in the same way you would if you were doing a remote viewing trial?
And the Institute of Noetic Sciences was really born out of that vision of exploration.
It came when Edgar was the pilot who was responsible for the little shuttle that went between the Apollo capsule and the moon.
So his job was to take the crew over to the moon, walk around there, do the data collection they did, get back in, and on the way home, his job was done, so he got to have the window seat.
And in this position, he was able to look out and to see Earth from the vantage point of deep space.
And he had an overwhelming epiphany.
You know, he saw awe and wonder, and suddenly all of his training as an MIT-trained engineer mastering the physical world seemed inadequate to understand the possibilities of life.
Yeah, I've heard many stories from Edgar, and it's just remarkable.
And all of the things that you asked me at the beginning how I got into all this.
Well, the way I got into it was I was doing an internship with a psychophysiologist, and one day he handed me a book called Psychic Exploration by Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut.
That was in 1977.
And I now work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences that Edgar Mitchell founded, and I never applied for my job.
It came to me.
So it's kind of a wonderful, circuitous thing about Edgar's journey and my journey being intertwined in this magical way.
And I think he's done remarkable things for helping us to see ourselves differently and certainly to see the Earth differently.
There's somebody I talked to recently who called it the overview effect.
But being that far away from the Earth and looking at the Earth in that way, from that distance, appears to have an effect on people that is hard to quantify.
Edgar tells stories about landing on these aircraft carriers in the ocean and how stressful it is to land on one of those as compared to how stressful it was to land on the moon where you had a big target.
And I thought, wow, this guy really has nerves of steel.
And then combine that very pragmatic, rational scientist who was able and confident enough in Western scientific technology to take him to the moon and to come back and to realize that that's not the full story and that really reality may be something much more complex than just the physical.
They talk about the two tails of the probability distribution in statistics, so you either get hitting or missing in these kinds of experiments, and what he got was significant missing, actually.
He got less hits than expected on the basis of chance.
But he got statistically less hits.
So he ended up with a statistical experiment, a statistically significant experiment, which suggested that there was some maybe inhibitory effect of trying to send from a long distance like that.
It appears that way, but we don't really have the data to say for sure.
Because Ed's experiment is the only one that's been done from outer space as best I know.
And even if we talk about the circumference of the Earth, there are only a couple of studies that attempted it, and none of them sort of with the current level of sophistication that we're capable of today.
So I would really love to see somebody do a systematic study of distance as it relates to psi and the psi signal.
Well, if, for example, the problem was that the Earth, in effect, was in the way.
In other words, the Moon was not at the horizon, then one would have to imagine that an experiment from one side of the Earth to the other would have the same difficulty.
Well, Dean Radin, who I think you've had on your show.
Dean Radin is a scientist who has been working on parapsychology and developing very interesting games that are also experiments that we have on the website.
So if people want to check it out, it's www.noetic.org.
In terms of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, we are many things, and I'd love to fill you in on some of that.
But the experiments in particular are opportunities for people to explore their own telepathic ability or their own precognitive ability.
And you can actually get a score that shows how well you did compared to everybody else.
We've had millions of trials.
By the end of this month, the experiment will be a year old.
And we expect to have collected more than 4 million trials.
And the results are showing some very interesting patterns about the role of belief, for example.
People who believe more in psi or psychic abilities or telepathy or remote viewing do better in these kinds of experiments than people who don't.
So, you know, that makes sense, but it's really nice to see it empirically established, not only in laboratory studies, but now these online experiments.
No, I haven't, but we were just talking about it yesterday as something that we're building a lab at the Institute of Nuatic Sciences that we'll have done in about three months.
And we also will be debuting a whole series of new experiments that will be online probably about September 1st.
And these are, it's called the Field of Dreams, and it's a beautiful set of experiments that are fairly contemplative.
It gives you an opportunity to relax and engage in some beautiful imagery and some beautiful sounds.
And at the same time, to see if you can use your consciousness to engage the physical world in ways that we can measure and we can actually help us in collecting data.
I mean, it's an attempt to really try and engage people in a way that's current and that's exciting and Interesting and also that has the potential to learn because we're interested in the possibility of training these capacities.
You know, and we've found a number of people that stand out.
And so, now with our lab at the IONS campus, we have this beautiful 200-acre campus in northern California that is also an educational retreat center.
And so, we're interested in really looking at what are those capacities in our culture that we think are important to develop, but which are not being developed by the educational system, for example.
And how can we begin to cultivate them?
So things like intuition, extended perception.
These are very important things that may help us to expand who we are.
And so we're interested not only in studying these, but learning from what we gain in our research in ways that we can develop some training for that.
Doctor, would it be your view that with regard to human ability in this area, it is increasing presently, simply being explored more presently, or perhaps even decreasing?
In other words, is it a developing thing in human beings or a thing slowly being forgotten?
I mean, the science fiction for the last 20 years, really, has been about our evolving capacities towards something.
As we rely more and more on technology, we have more opportunity for us to expand our psyche.
I actually think we could make the opposite argument, that in the past we've had to rely on these abilities.
Today we have mass communication.
We don't really need it.
On the other hand, our consciousness is changing.
Our brains are changing.
And if we cultivate these abilities, just like if we would learn to cultivate love instead of hate and wisdom instead of simply just knowledge, we might become better people.
Well, then if you feel that way, then you're going to hate my next question.
If I can be in a room opposite of yours and my heartbeat can be monitored, and you can change or speed up, let's say, my heartbeat, then who's to say that if you wanted to do it and you were good enough at what you did, you couldn't increase my heartbeat to the point that it became dangerous and even eventually fatal for me?
And well, we're in agreement on that, and our solution to that problem has been that we are looking at ways in which you can maybe begin to shield yourself from these kinds of influences.
You know, we are limited because we have a small field and limited resources dedicated to it.
But the data that we've collected so far suggests that if people are able to imagine, for example, a protective shield around themselves, that in formal experiments, you instruct the subject to resist the influence, and then other people are instructed to be open to the influence.
Yeah, so this suggests that we have some control over, it's not like we're just victims out there.
But I think, again, if you look at the cross-cultural literature, I mean, we can't deny things like sorcery any more than, and oftentimes in these cultures, the sorcerer and the healer are the same people.
Doctor, if you were the target of a remote viewer, if you personally were the target of a remote viewer and you had not been told of it, would you be aware of it?
If you were the target of a remote influencer and you suddenly felt a flutter in your chest as your heartbeat speeded up, do you think you'd be aware that that was going on?
Our experiments suggest that conscious guessing doesn't work in these experiments.
For example, I did a couple of experiments when I was at Stanford, and also I was working at the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at Science Applications International Corporation, which was the successor to the SRI program.
It's the same thing for lie detector because it's a measure of autonomic activity.
And so we set up these experiments to look at staring.
The idea that people have this experience of driving in their car and they feel somebody might be looking at them and they look over and sure enough the person is staring at them.
So the question was, is that just due to heightened peripheral vision?
You know, people are just seeing out of the corners of their eyes?
Or is there some subtle exchange of information that goes on between two people that's nonsensory?
So the only way to measure that was to take it into the lab.
So we set up this experiment where, you know, you'd come in and we'd monitor your autonomic nervous system activity.
And I would have a healer, say, in another room, staring at your image via closed-circuit television.
And so when he's staring at you, the idea is to get your attention.
And in the control conditions, the idea is to do nothing and for you to be at your normal physiological level.
In order to make sure that we didn't have some kind of artifact, we made sure that we had equal numbers of staring, non-staring periods at the beginning of the experiment as at the end of the experiment.
And we used a random schedule all the way through and took many precautions.
And at the end of the day, actually the end of many days, we found significant differences in the average amount of autonomic nervous system activity when the person is being stared at by a closed-circuit television as compared to the control conditions.
Now if you ask the person, this was my point, if you ask the person to guess when they're being stared at, they didn't do well.
They weren't able to consciously discern when they were being stared at, but their unconscious nervous system told them right away.
So it's interesting.
And then there's just another follow-up to that set of experiments.
And that is that I had a colleague who is a card-carrying member of the skeptical community.
And he's also a professional magician as well as a Ph.D. experimental psychologist.
His name is Richard Wiseman, and he works in England.
And he had done these same experiments, a little different, but basically the same, and he found no significant differences.
In other words, he was finding that there was no evidence for some kind of psi effect.
So he and I decided to do an experiment together.
And first we did a little pilot thing, and we found wildly different results in my experiments compared to his.
Then we did a formal experiment.
We set it up in his laboratory under his protocol with his subject population.
Everything was identical, the same randomization.
Everything was identical except for I worked with half the people and he worked with half the people.
And in the experiment, what we both ended up finding is that we had replicated our original results.
So if there was some systematic error...
In other words, I got a significant effect and he didn't.
But my guess is that it's not just about me, or else, you know, a lot of the other people you've been talking to over the years wouldn't also have the same story to tell, you know what I mean?
But let me just finish my story, which is to say that we then took that same experiment, and we thought, well, this is fairly provocative because it says something about objectivity.
You know, you assume an experimenter is somehow separate from their study.
But if the experimenter's intention shapes the result, then that is a fundamental assumption of science, you know, and of our whole way of viewing reality because we assume there is a world out there separate from ourselves.
So anyway, it's a pretty important observation, and so we thought we better try to replicate this.
So this time he came to my lab at the Institute of Nuetic Sciences, and we did the same experiment.
Everything was identical again.
And once again, we both replicated our original finding, which is now then four experiments I've done, all of which found significant differences in the two conditions, showing an increase in autonomic nervous system activity when a person is being stared at by a close-up television as compared to control conditions, and him not getting any results.
Actually, if you summarize all the data, his data are starting to look significant.
My favorite hypothesis has to do with sociability.
It has to do with the fact that in my experiments, I was able to communicate to the subjects that it would be okay to be open enough to have this kind of thing happen.
Whereas in his case, because his belief system doesn't allow him the intention, he therefore can't communicate to people that this would be an okay thing to have happen.
So I think that an experiment to do next would really be to look at whether it is him or me, or is it the kind of orientation we give to our subjects?
Yes, I know, but in the way you instruct your subjects versus the way he does, could have something to do with the subconscious suggestion, couldn't it?
I wonder if, of course there could be no studies, but if people who are under surveillance, for example, and have hidden microphones or cameras around them are almost in a constant state of heightened concern, sweating a lot, feelings of paranoia, of, you know, someone's watching.
Elmar Gruber, an Austrian parapsychologist, did this fun experiment where he actually videotaped people on a street corner and found that there was more activity when they were being stared at as compared to when they weren't.
Well, you know, these experiments have come so far, with some of them being so conclusive, That I sort of wonder why CBS News, NBC News, you know, the big major news outlets haven't come in because it would be such a good story to begin to tell the world that there's more to our mind than meets the eye.
But if I think about what the implications of it are, this issue of objectivity, I think, is central.
We assume separation.
We assume that we are somehow not part of.
But if our consciousness is really part of the physical world, then this suggests that we aren't isolated beings, but that we're all part of a big web of life.
And to participate in that more consciously seems to me to be a way in which to get around a lot of the environmental problems.
And I would say every social problem that we have is due to the fact that we are disconnected.
Well, I think that there are some really interesting studies that have been done.
Again, you know, I'll speak as a scientist and not as a person.
I also have my own belief system that guides me.
But I would say just looking at the data and people's attempts to look at that question, cross-culturally, every culture believes in some vision of the afterlife.
Every culture has it.
And if you look at studies like those of Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia doing work on reincarnation, he is documenting things like biological markers of reincarnation, the notion that if a person was killed in a life through some kind of physical trauma,
like they had a gunshot, that if you then look at the child, you find cases where the memory and the personality associated with the previous life are also correlated with a birthmark on the child in the same location as the trauma.
Yes, but if you begin to discover evidence that would appear to be contrary to whatever your belief system is, I'm intentionally not asking about that right now.
Could you objectively assimilate and correlate that information and deal with it objectively?
I mean, one tries always to be it is not my experience, however, in terms of my scientific career that these things, my experience is that these things are real, that there's something going on.
Not everything is real, and not always is it real when people report these experiences.
But I think there are very compelling bodies of data in the parapsychology literature to say that we have capacities that don't fit within the dominant view of what's possible.
And that these capacities reveal something really interesting, not only about ourselves, but our relationship to each other and to the environment.
And then that sense of transcendent that you alluded to before.
I mean, it is about that oneness, that web of life, that spiritual core, maybe.
Have you encountered ever in all your experimentation, remote viewing and otherwise, have you ever encountered what you consider to be a non-human entity?
She heads the Institute of Noetic Sciences, talking about things that you probably didn't know could be done, but are being done now every day.
And it sounds like pretty soon the rest of America is going to find out all about it.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
By the way, speaking of graveyards, Monday, Brendan Cook and Company are going to be here, and they take tape recorders into graveyards, tape recorders with brand new tapes that have never been recorded on before.
And most times, they come out with something on the tape, something on the blank tape.
A voice not theirs.
And perhaps, well.
Back to Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, and that'll be Monday, Doctor.
They do amazing, amazing work.
You were once walking through a graveyard yourself, you said.
Then if we assume for a second, for the sake of the conversation, that might be true, then why would that not necessarily be part of this non-local consciousness pool?
And it's all part of the notion that perhaps consciousness is not just in the brain, but is something that has transcendent qualities, transpersonal qualities.
It suggests all of those things.
If you can use your mind to somehow go to a geographical location 1,000 miles away and accurately describe its characteristics, that's pretty interesting.
And I actually love the concept of consciousness as nature, consciousness as the whole.
It's that great organizing intelligence that we're all part of.
And so when we are able to do these kinds of things like remote viewing, somehow we're able to tap into an interconnectedness that we don't see ordinarily.
You know, I'm kind of afraid to proceed until I know what I'm doing.
But I saw it work, Marilyn.
I saw it work to the point that it really began to send chills down my spine.
Would it be your view also that many minds concentrating on one thing, we talked about healing earlier, but affecting the weather or anything else of that sort, would be a more powerful force than one mind trying the same thing?
Well, my guess is there's a lot of them out there if they just were interested and were willing to take on the role of a conduit for resources.
I mean, money is this flowing currency, and I think that it's something that a lot of people now are recognizing that philanthropy is an important way of giving back to the community.
I think that that's all part of it.
Again, it's the connectedness piece and seeing ourselves as part of and money as part of.
All these things are important.
We're right now hoping to get A grant through the National Institutes of Health.
We have been completely reliant on philanthropic support and some foundation money, but right now we're trying to crack into the National Institutes of Health to see if we can't get one of their frontier medicine awards.
And we're very close, so keep your fingers crossed.
And if all of those millions of people out there would hold a positive intention and write to their senators if we don't get it.
If, Doctor, if millions of people were to begin concentrating on closing the ozone hole, on doing something positive for the environment, that's just one thing I happen to think of right now.
Would you think there would be a possibility they could actually have success?
I would think there's a possibility, and I think that if we can begin to think collectively about creative, positive solutions to some of our problems, that can't hurt.
You have to really visualize for the best outcome, I think is really a big part of it.
But I wanted to tell you, we were talking about who are people that are most responsive to these kind of effects and so on.
And I did a project at the Juilliard School in New York with the students there.
And they are people who are trained in music, dance, and drama.
And we did a Gonzfeld study where we were looking at whether people could go into an altered state.
It was a sensory deprivation procedure.
And basically it's like a dream state induction procedure.
So in other words, you put somebody in a room and you put these kind of halved ping-pong balls over their eyes and you shine red light over them and you play white noise in their ears.
And what you've done is you've reduced their normal sensory input so that they're still awake and their mind says they should be seeing things, but they're not.
So they begin to get imagery.
So it's an imagery induction and sensory deprivation procedure.
And it seems to be very conducive to having ESP type experiences because it allows people to look internal in an internal way.
And if they stay open and there's just a gentle wish rather than a forced intention that what's happening in these experiments, in the Juliet study, for example, we had a person in another room who was watching a video clip.
And so, for example, one day I was the sender, and I was watching a video clip from the movie Altered States.
And it was just a clip, it was the descent scene into hell.
We had another one in that experiment where the film clip was from The Wiz.
You know, the parody of The Wizard of Oz has Diana Ross as Dorothy.
And they're coming across the bridge, and the whole scene, again, is tinted yellow this time.
And there's a hot air balloon panning across, and you see the wizard, well, you've got the wizard in the background, because that's Oz.
And you've got the lion, the scarecrow, the tin man, and the dog with Dorothy.
And this girl, she was also a drama student.
She said she saw a hot air balloon right at the time when the hot air balloon was being watched from the other room.
And she saw a black female nightclub performer, a dog, a lion, a wizard, and yellow.
And then she saw, it looked like a cityscape of New York.
It was just phenomenal.
And so when you're able to get that kind of, what I enjoy really is trying to capture these things in a laboratory setting where we can really say with certainty that we had some genuine anomaly happen.
And then what are the conditions that can facilitate these kinds of abilities for happening?
So is there something about the creative mind or the dramatic mind?
If you can do that with a single individual, in essence, transmit to them an image, then what about the concept of introducing an idea or a concept into the collective consciousness?
In other words, actually sort of putting it into the great collection of ideas that will occur not to just one person, but to many or millions of people.
I think that I do some research down in the Amazon with a group of the Ochua Indians, and they believe that people dream for the collective.
They don't dream for the individual.
And that it is through the sharing of the dreams every morning that different elements are brought together in order to create a whole vision of what's possible.
And I think if we as a culture could begin to dream collectively and to really begin to create thought forms, I mean, I don't mean to sound new agey because I am not a new agey person.
I do believe, however, that there is something, even just at the cultural, sociological level of memes or ideas that are powerful in society, if we could begin to create more positive means, I think that could really help to shift worldview.
And then if you add on to that the possibility that a collective consciousness may actually be causal in ways that you mentioned about the weather or about the ozone layer or anything else, I don't know the answer whether we can actually do those big macro-level things, but I am absolutely sure that we can do more by taking that kind of position of positive imaging for the future than we can if we don't.
We need more people like you doing experiments at the micro level before we begin enlisting millions of people to try and do something that we don't know much about.
I think it's still at the stage of really trying to understand what's happening.
And also maybe now to begin to translate some of this into some training kind of ideas that, again, can be tested empirically so that we're not just going off on assumptions, but we're really trying to ground what we're doing in a way that allows us to proceed with caution but openness.
Doctor, alien abductions, it might not seem as though it's your field, but on the other hand, if a lot of this is occurring within the mind of the abductee, I suppose it might get close to your field in a way.
I think that it's true that there are some amazing things that happen in consciousness.
And one area that the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been interested in is in the health this is an indirect answer to that question.
And that is that there is this healing response that the body is capable of.
And in order to prove that, they looked at different indicators.
So you can take something like multiple personality, for example, and you can see that people in different personality states can actually have different physical symptoms, like an allergic reaction in one personality, but not in the other personality, even when it's the same body.
Yes, I think that there are examples in terms of things like stigmata.
There's a lot of indication that stigmata is a real phenomenon, and that would indicate, again, this way in which the mind-body-emotion matrix is very powerful.
So that if the mind, whether or not it really physically occurred, thought it had been abducted and there had been a bruise on the leg or something, it's entirely possible the person could wake up with a bruise on their leg.
I see things, for example, if you look at the hypnosis literature, it is really remarkable what the mind is capable of, the levels to which it can compartmentalize, in which there is this plasticity, you know, the ability to use emotion or image in a way that can really begin to shape-shift the body.
You know, there are no data yet to answer your question.
Rats.
Yeah, well, rats.
That would be the place to start, probably, is looking at rats.
But I think that, you know, when you mention animals, I think about Rupert Sheldrake's work looking at whether pets can detect when their parents are coming or their owners are coming home.
Rupert has this fascinating new project that, again, it's pretty anecdotal at this stage, but of a psychic parrot.
It's a pretty amazing thing.
But I understand what you're saying.
We're talking about the old part of the brain.
There are some experiments now underway in this area of consciousness studies and sort of the frontiers of consciousness that are looking at brain physiology and how it correlates with psi experiences.
Before, we were talking about the metaphor of the brain is kind of the radio and then this kind of information transfer happens like the radio waves.
If it's like that, it's probably not quite like that.
That metaphor is faulty.
But if it is like that, then we have the capacity to really do remarkable things.
unidentified
Okay, now the consideration.
Have you ever considered the fact that when people communicate and their minds are wandering off in other directions, communication is highly imperfect.
However, when they are thinking about what they are saying, communication becomes very clear.
You mean sometimes like when your wife is talking to you and you're reading something and you're sort of going, hmm, that's relatively close.
unidentified
Or you can intentionally do it by speaking to somebody and letting your mind drift off in another direction and proceeding to think about something totally different.
No, no, but are there not people who virtually choose to die?
They, in effect, give up or their mate has left them or left the world and they simply choose to follow and inevitably and statistically, provably, they do.
So getting geared up for the stuff that, you know, when you hear about these stories, again, this reveals the power of the mind, you know, that people who have a deadline to turn in a manuscript, they die the day they turn in the manuscript, you know, or the correlation of death and fulfillment of a birthday or holidays after those events.
So there's really some amazing ways in which we really can cultivate our intention and our tension.
And the second one, and then I'll get off the phone and let you all discuss amongst yourselves, is have you done any experiments with people who are paralyzed?
For like when you have somebody who's blind, their other senses like hearing and smell accelerate.
And if somebody who's paralyzed from the neck down, maybe you're a little bit more in tune to, I guess, the psi factor or however you want to call it.
What I would say about that is that remote viewing is a methodology.
You have a domain of experience, which we would call psi phenomena.
And psi phenomena include telepathy, which is mind-to-mind communication, clairvoyance, which is mind-to-object, like a geographical location, precognition, which is knowledge of the future.
Those three, telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, we call extrasensory perception.
Well, you know, in these experiments, we're seeing indirect indications of it, where it looks as though the intention of a healer can influence the health outcomes of a patient.
Oh, well, there was a wonderful book that was called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain that talked about a whole lot of the stuff that was going on there.
And no, there was definitely a lot of interesting work, and I think there still is some interesting work going on.
But the question was about psychic ability and remote viewing.
And what I would say is that when we want to study something like extrasensory perception, so telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition, we tend to use different methods to do it.
One method is remote viewing, where we use geographical locations.
Another method is Gonsfeld, where we put somebody in this sensory deprivation kind of procedure.
So those are two methodologies.
And those are methodologies to study psychic abilities.
Well, remote viewers would generally object here, and they would say, no, wait a minute.
Remote viewing may have a relationship to psyllability, but it's really a specific discipline that goes far beyond and eliminates the ego of the participant and so forth and so on.
It's an excellent question, and I don't think it's been answered.
I don't think it's been asked, really, in a formal experiment.
And I would suggest that the caller and anybody else out there who's interested do some research on these things.
We need people.
We need good, capable, smart people who can do good research in any population.
But I think that question in particular is a good one because it suggests that there would be because of the deficiency there could be a compensation using the psychic ability.
And I think that's a very good hypothesis and definitely worth testing.
If there was a person out there or if there are persons out there who are capable of real telekinesis, and I don't mean just remote influencing now of another individual, I'm talking about somebody who could take a lighter, put it on the table, concentrate on that lighter until it went right across the table because of the power of their mind.
Would that person be well advised to submit themselves to scientific testing?
Or do you think that a person like that going public would be subject to some pretty cruel treatment from their fellow human beings?
Now, as far as psi things, they must be very subtle.
As an example, if some moron were to take a chainsaw and cut down a tree, you could bring every holy man, every psychic, every medium in the world, and they could all sit around it and chant and pray and envision it in white light.
And whatever they did, that tree would not stand back up and come back to life.
Well, you have to find yourself a good chiropractor.
Show him the MRI, show him the x-rays, and that's what you must do because if you don't do it, it's just like having a dislocated finger that you don't pop back into place.
He made a good point, I think, which is that the kind of phenomena, psi-phenomena, are subtle.
They are subtle.
And that I think what needs to be advocated is an integral model of consciousness, that consciousness is about these subtle realms.
It's also about the physical realms.
You know, it's about the whole.
And I think when we think about health and healing, I think the full perspective or spectrum from the physical to the psychological to the spiritual are all things that we need to take into consideration as we look to what kind of medicine we want to create for the future.
In most of the experiments, like if you're looking at mind-over-matter kind of experiments, if that's the right way to think about it, which it might not be, you know, but let's just think about it that way for a minute, then most of the experiments that we've done involve some systems that have randomness.
So we're really kind of looking for busy, noisy systems so that this kind of subtle influence can take place.
And human physiology is one of those places where it's a complex system and you can have multiple gateways in.
I think that I wouldn't rule out the possibility that people could sell a tree with their mind, but I have seen no data to support it.
And short of data, I would probably think that it's not the most parsimonious explanation.
So I would definitely agree with what he was saying, and I think it's just really important to hold the hole.
Even when, like for myself, I get enthusiastic about the furthest reaches of our potential.
And I think it's important also to just think about how important it is for us to think about the mind-body connection and the importance of relaxation and meditation.
And doctor, is there any work going on in this field without commenting on it specifically that you are aware of that the public has not been made aware of?
Oh, I didn't mean necessarily military, although that's a good separate conversation.
I meant in private labs around the country.
After all, if we did find that person who could knock the lighter across the room or lift something into the air, it's doubtful to me that it would be made public.
If we found a super psychic human being, first we would want to really make sure that that's true.
And we would probably take a good deal of critical attention to making sure that's true.
Particularly when you work with special subjects like people who are stars, you have to be really careful about protocol and methodology and things like that.
We tend to work more with a lot of people rather than with any one person.
That's why I say they're doubtful if they'd be on Montel Williams soon, you know, or that anybody would hear about anything that would be rather quiet for quite a long time.
And earlier, you guys were talking about the experiments you did with the AIDS patients and how you had all these different people from all these different religions.
And it was very beautiful to see the breakdown of all doctrines and just the positive energies being put forward and how that can really affect others.
But to say that really creates a fear in a lot of people's minds, which Art, you kind of brought Up later, couldn't someone just stop my heart?
When there's no morals, when there's no concept of good and evil, when there's no breakdown of right and wrong, and all there is is just this energy transfer.
There's a certain idea that it would create a licentiousness within society.
Do you feel that to know that energy is to truly know the depths of it and that there could be no possibility of harming another person?
Because you would know in this moment that their consciousness is eternal.
Why would anybody kill them or why would anybody hurt them if they really knew that energy to share it, there would be no possibility of any kind of harm being done?
And so how do we, you know, round it out with greater appreciation for the qualitative issues that your caller mentioned, the morals, the context for developing these kind of practices.
Well, is there any guarantee that somebody who would be deeply enough into this to be practicing remote influencing, for example, or remote healing or something of that magnitude that they were very, very adept at, is there any guarantee they would automatically be morally pure as a result of the process they've gone through?
Or is it entirely possible you could have, you know, a psych Hitler?
Well, what we talked about before, you know, I think that there is the light and the dark inherent in all things.
So we can ask the same question about the Human Genome Project, and we can say that as a culture, we have privileged that project and put a lot of our resources toward that.
A lot of our money, billions of dollars have gone into the genome project.
And so that is really a wonderful way in which we have galvanized our collective mind.
It just seems as though it's not a complete story.
I think blocking, I think thinking about blocking, I think thinking about ways in which you can shield and retard these kinds of abilities is really important for the field to move forward.
I mean, we could always use more people and, you know, more resources.
As I said, it's a small field.
Somebody, Jessica Utz, who's a statistician from the University of California at Davis, calculated that I think the amount of money that has been spent in the 130 years of parapsychology is equivalent to about, I think she said, a month of mainstream psychology.
So, I mean, we really haven't gotten the kind of critical mass of people with the kind of resources that are necessary in order to really answer so many of the questions that are being raised.
Hi, I was listening to you, and I was interested because in my background, my mother and I, my family, used to talk about ESP, and we didn't consider it anything that was terribly abnormal.
It was sort of just part of our life.
She'd talked about things that had happened in her family.
But anyway, as an experiment, my mom, even though they were poor, our family was poor, things would come to them if they needed it almost magically.
So I remember as a young girl, my mother would, she'd say, let's do an experiment.
And for instance, my little brother really wanted a rocking horse.
So my mother said, concentrate, let's concentrate everybody on a rocking horse.
And to make a long story short, we got a call from a distant aunt that said, you know, somebody was going to be throwing out a rocking horse, and did we have any use for it?
And that was sort of the thing that would happen when I was younger.
So I grew up with it.
And then I had my own children.
And I would, sometimes when they were younger, I would lie in bed with them and I would say, I'm thinking of something.
And I would ask them if they could see what I was thinking of.
And often they would get it right on target.
And with my son, we were listening to music.
And I said, you know, listen to the music.
And then I gave him a pencil.
And I said, draw what you're thinking.
Just draw out whatever you think of when you hear this music.
And by gum, he and I both drew, it was a staircase with a stick figure on it.
It was almost identical.
And I kept the paper.
And so things like that have just always happened to me.
And I've always felt, am I rambling too much?
These are great stories.
And I always felt that we use a part of the brain that I almost think it was sort of de-evolved from times when we needed, like, say, agoraphobia, when you were in a tribe, you basically needed to stay inside or you would be killed.
Or even the need to fit in.
Today we have such a desire to fit in with our peers.
Well, if you didn't fit in with the tribe, you would be an outcast and you would starve and die.
And we take so much of what happens with animals for granted, from the simple to the complex.
Like even I noticed when my cat gave birth to kittens, it knew how to take care of them and it ate the placenta.
And I started thinking, all these animals, and even some like bugs that can turn themselves into leaves, make them look just like it.
Well, it seems to me that maybe we've lost some ability of the brain to, you know, even maybe that's how we communicated telepathically because we didn't have the ability for speech.
And so it seems to me that a lot of these things are very ordinary and everybody has a capacity for unconscious foreknowledge and we're just being able to talk about it more without feeling silly or, you know, and so can I just add one more little story in?
Well, you know, the whole point of that call, I think, it was a pretty good one, really, because there is a lot of natural, innocent psychic or mental ability that goes on between mates and family members, and it just does seem natural, doesn't it, after a while?
Is for a while I've had this, I don't know why, I had this ability of like knowing the end of a song without even hearing it for the first time I've ever heard it in my life before.
Sometimes for some reason I feel like I can read people's minds once in a while when I'm talking to somebody and so I know what they're going to say.
And do you mind if I give one real brief real quick story there, Art, real fast?
Real fast.
When I was in high school, I used to have this guy that used to pick on me all the time in high school.
And one time we went on a real quick field trip and we were up in these mountain areas and I really didn't like this guy too much.
And for some reason I was concentrating.
I was thinking to myself, like, I wish something would happen to this guy that would wake him up that he wouldn't pick on me anymore.
Exactly at that same time on that field trip, a rock landed on his head.
Certainly, it reveals the complexities of all the stuff we're talking about, and that anything that can be used for good can potentially be used for harm.
It's an irony for me that to wake up, he had to go to sleep, which was, you know, probably he lost consciousness and then he regained consciousness in a new way.
One can't conclude that that was a causal connection.
There are many ways in which these kind of things work.
I mean, one possibility is that you picked up on the fact ahead of time that it was going to happen.
Not that you caused it, but that you perceived it.
Again, is this a remote viewing thing or is this a mind over matter thing?