Art Bell

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Dec. 16, 2006 - Art Bell

02:40:05

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Bernard Haisch - The God Theory

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01:09:53

bernard haisch

01:03:53

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, 7,107 islands, Manila, I bid you all a wonderful weekend.
		It's absolutely spectacular here.
		The sun is out.
		We're in a slightly cooler time of the year.
		Here in the Philippines, we have basically two seasons.
		One is summer and one is the rainy season, which is still really summer.
		We're that close to the equator.
		So that's what you get.
		Two seasons, summer and the rainy season.
		What you have in the rainy season basically is you still have hot weather, but you have rain.
		If you can digest that.
		It's still hot and humid, but you have rain.
		So for that, we dub it a season.
		It's great to be with you all.
		It's my honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend.
		This is the largest, most popular program of its kind in the entire world called Coast to Coast AM.
		Great to be here.
		Erin is today's webcam shot.
		Many, many, many people asking me to put up a shot of Erin.
		So there she is adjacent to the Christmas tree.
		And you can just about see her beginning to look like she's going to be a mom.
		Not quite.
		It's just beginning.
		So there you have that.
		To get to my webcam, just go to coasttocoastam.com.
		Upper left-hand corner, it'll say arts webcam.
		Click on that.
		And that's a picture of Erin.
		Now, in my life otherwise, all is well.
		I continue to struggle with this quitting of smoking thing.
		The people who have said that nicotine is more addictive.
		I watched a movie the other day with Aaron called The Insider.
		The Insider was all about the tobacco companies.
		God, what a good movie that was.
		What an incredibly good movie that was.
		Anyway, I'm sure many of you have seen it.
		And all I can say is, wow.
		To see those CEOs stand, actually sit, I guess, one at a time, and claim that nicotine and cigarettes are not addictive.
		What is it they say two or three times more addictive than heroin?
		No joke.
		So now I'm simply substituting the addiction of nicotine gum for cigarettes.
		And as I think I mentioned last week, now you will find little deposits of nicotine gum that I felt I had not squeezed every last bit of nicotine out of.
		And I put them down here and there.
		And so I guess it's not nearly as messy a habit as smoking, but you will find these little hunks of gum around the house.
		And then occasionally I'll pick them up and drag what little is left.
		So I'm substituting one for another, but I guess it's much healthier.
		Working on it, working on it, working on it.
		It's going quite well.
		It's just that, God, you get sick of chewing gum.
		You really, really get sick of chewing gum.
		After a while, it's kind of like, oh, no, not another one.
		I was never a dedicated gum chewer anyway, so now it's constant chewing.
		Let us look briefly at the world, and then we'll look at some more interesting news.
		The West Bank, of course, Palestinian President Mohammed Abbas called Saturday for elections to end his violent standoff with Hamas.
		This is going to be a gamble that Palestinians will back him as he seeks to weaken the Islamic militants, avoid civil war, and keep momentum for peace overtures with Israel.
		Hamas accused Abbas of trying to topple its government, promised to block the elections, urged supporters to take to the streets.
		This is a real coup, said Foreign Minister Zahar, a Hamas hardliner.
		He's calling it a coup.
		Teams of hand-picked expert mountaineers tried Saturday to take advantage of easing weather conditions atop Mount Hood in the search for three missing climbers, but the fickle, still treacherous conditions turned them back.
		It's been a week now, 50-mile-an-hour winds, helicopters circling the mountain.
		Nothing yet.
		It's a long time.
		Iraq's prime minister reached out to Sunni Arabs at a national reconciliation conference on Saturday, urging Saddam Hussein-era officers to join the new army, and a review of the ban against members of the former dictator's ruling party.
		But key players on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide skipped the meeting, raising serious doubts that the conference will succeed in healing the country's wounds.
	Federal agents continue to eavesdrop on Americans' electronic communications without warrants a year after the president confirmed the practice.
	Experts say a new Congress's efforts to limit the program could trigger a constitutional showdown.
	Maybe there ought to be one over this.
	High-ranking Democrats set to take control of both chambers or mulling ways to curb the program that Bush secretly authorized a month after September 11 after the attacks.
	The White House argues the Constitution gives the president wartime powers to eavesdrop that he would not have during times of peace.
	A pair of spacewalkers, manually shaking a stubborn solar array, did manage to free some stuck grommet Saturday butt.
	Not enough to fold the array up into a box properly.
	The array was more than half retracted when astronauts Robert Kirbeem and Sunita Williams approached it after completing their main spacewalk tasks, after scores of shakes, and then inside remote control commands to please retract.
	The array folded another several degrees, eventually retracting 65%, but that's where it is now.
	Well, you know about the storm.
	Residents of the Pacific Northwest struggled to stay warm Saturday after the worst windstorm in more than a decade knocked out power to more than 1.5 million homes and businesses, killed at least six people.
	More than 600,000 customers in Washington and Oregon still had no power Saturday.
	Utility said some may have to wait until next week for their lights to go back on.
	The six largest automakers asked a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit by California that accuses them of harming human health and the environment by producing vehicles that contribute to global warming.
	The American and Japanese auto companies filed a motion Friday in U.S. District Court in Oakland to dismiss the state suit.
	And an attorney for the car makers said Saturday, the state officials who want to reduce auto emissions.
	Well, I won't continue from there.
	In a moment, I've got some news about amateur radio ham radio.
	It's a big one.
	Stay right where you are.
	By the way, we're going to be going to open line.
	So those of you that know the portal numbers and have something you would like to get on the air before we get to our guest, Dr. Bernard Heish, I believe it is.
	And boy, this is going to be an interesting interview.
	He really is a significant scientist.
	And he has views on, oh, I don't know, the Big Bang, on God, and so forth that should be very, very, very interesting from a scientist.
	It's the end of an era.
	It really is the end of an era.
	I would like to commend the Federal Communications Commission on what they have done.
	In recent days, the Federal Communications Commission has expanded the frequencies, the amount of allotment or space, if you will, that is allowed for voice communication versus code, Morse code.
	That was done some time ago and is about to go into effect, or just has gone into effect.
	Now, that was a wise decision that I've been urging for a very long time because the code bands, to be honest with you, are largely empty, particularly on 75 meters.
	Now, I guess I'm just talking to hands.
	I mean, you could listen to the bottom of 75 any given night and hear almost nothing.
	It was a terrible waste of spectrum.
	So they did a very wise thing.
	I know the ARRL is not, that's our organization that represents amateurs to the FCC and does a lot more and is a very good organization.
	But they've got a lot of old-time hams who are pretty much tied up into the concept of Morse code, dash, dot, dash, dot, that kind of thing.
	And so they weren't so happy about it, about that move.
	And now they have followed it up virtually, I think yesterday.
	A truly historic move.
	The Federal Communications Commission has acted to drop entirely the Morse code requirement for all amateur radio class licenses.
	Now, there are going to be a lot of people very happy about this.
	I have mixed emotions about it.
	I would say mixed emotions.
	I think it is indeed time, and I applaud the Federal Communications Commission for doing it.
	The rest of the world began dropping the requirement some time ago.
	And again, some of the old traditionalists at the ARL, that organization that represents us, have lobbied very hard to keep it.
	But I think it is time finally to do away with the requirement.
	It stops a lot of people.
	There are people who are dyslexic who just simply cannot learn the code.
	To me, it was easy.
	I did it at 13 years of age, and boy, it just came to me like that, and I spent a year on the air, and my speed went right up through the roof.
	I can still do about 20 words a minute.
	And it was like music to me.
	But I understand there are some dyslexic people who just simply can't do it.
	Well, guess what, folks?
	As of about now, no more code.
	So I greet this with mixed emotions, definitely.
	There's some part of me that's a little sad, but honestly, when you think real hard about it, it's time.
	So those of you who have not been able to get an amateur radio license because you could not pass even five words per minute, now that will not stop you.
	You have only a technical test to take for whatever class of license you would like.
	And on balance, yes, I'm sad, but I think it was a wise decision.
	Now, the worrying shrinkage of Arctic sea ice, they're now saying, could accelerate dramatically in coming decades, leaving our planet's most northerly ocean virtually devoid of ice, devoid of ice in summer.
	Now they're saying by the year 2040, according to a new study, the paper which appeared in the U.S. Journal of Geophysical Research Letters on Tuesday mainly points the finger at greenhouse gas emissions.
	It warns that if carbon pollution continues to increase at present rates, the Arctic's normal cycle of freezing and thawing faces, their words, catastrophic disruption.
	A simulation run by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Canada's McGill University predicted the area covered by ice in September, before new ice begins to form each year could shrink from about 5.9 million square miles to 1.9 million square miles within a decade.
	My God.
	By 2040, only small amounts of perennial sea ice would remain along the north coasts of Greenland and Canada in the summer.
	In winter, ice thickness would, get this, be reduced from about 3.5 meters or about 12 feet to less than a meter, 3 feet.
	We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research is suggesting the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that's happened so far.
	Greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat, we all know, gradually forcing the Earth's temperature up.
	But several peripheral factors could also account for such a rapid meltdown.
	Here we go.
	Listen carefully.
	Open water absorbs more sunlight than ice, accelerating the rate of warming, leading to more ice loss.
	In other words, more melting, more water, more absorption, more melting.
	They're really getting alarmed.
	It's called a positive feedback loop, and it's underway now.
	The shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap is viewed by alarm, viewed with alarm by scientists, as it appears to perturb important ocean currents elsewhere, noticeably the Gulf Stream, you know, that thing that gives westerly Europe its balmy climate.
	It also threatens animals like polar bears and seals that depend on the ice, and the Inuits and other native people who hunt these animals and have to travel on thinner ice in the quest.
	Now, that said, you may not hear a lot more about it.
	The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey who study everything from caribou mating to global warming, subjecting them to controls on research that might go against official policy.
	New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists.
	The rules apply to all scientific papers, to all other public documents, even minor reports on prepared talks according to documents obtained by the Associated Press top officials at the Interior Department Scientific Arm say.
	The rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads up to the agency's public relations staff.
	Barbara Wayneman, the agency's director of communications, said Wednesday, this is not about stifling or suppressing our science or politicizing our science in any way.
	I don't have any approval authority.
	What was designed to do is improve our product flow.
	Some agency scientists, who, until now at least, have held free from any political interference, worry that the objectivity of their work now could be compromised.
	Jim Estes, an internationally recognized marine biologist who works for the geological unit, said, quote, I feel as though we've got something, somebody looking over our shoulder every damn thing we do.
	And to me, that's Very scary.
	It borders on censorship.
	The explanation was that this was intended to ensure the highest possible quality research, said Estets.
	A researcher there at the agency for 30 years, but to me it feels more like they're doing this to keep us under their thumbs.
	It seems as though they're afraid of science.
	Our findings could be embarrassing to the administration.
	The new requirements state the USGS's communication office must, quote, be alerted about information products containing high visibility topics or topics of a policy-sensitive nature.
	Good God.
	We're talking about scientists here.
	We're not talking about people writing editorials that the administration might not like.
	Let me read that again.
	The new requirements state that the USGS's communications office must be, quote, alerted about information products containing high visibility topics or topics of a policy sensitive nature, end quote.
	Oh my God.
	The agency's director, Mark Myers, and its communications office also must be told prior to any submission for publication of findings or data that may be especially newsworthy,
	have an impact on government policy, or contradict previous public understanding, oh my God, to ensure that proper officials are notified and that communication strategies are developed.
	In other words, if I'm reading this correctly, and I know I am, so that we can figure out how to spin it before we release it.
	Whatever happened to the no spin zone.
	Let me read that paragraph again.
	That just scares the hell out of me.
	The agency's director, Mark Myers, and its communications office must also be told prior to any submission for publication of findings or data that may be especially newsworthy.
	Or I'll try and do this straight, or have an impact on government policy or contradict previous public understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that communication strategies are developed.
unidentified		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, I mean, just a straight read of that paragraph says, look, if something is really important, if you scientists find something really newsworthy, like the South Pole has begun to melt,
		we want to know about it first so that we can either change it, draw a big black line through it, or figure out how to release it with our spin so it doesn't sound so scary.
		Or maybe that all the fish in the ocean are going to be gone in 50 years.
		Now I wonder, if you give that story to a government official, you know, and basically the basis of the story is all the fish in the ocean are going to be dead in 50 years.
		His job is to sit down and spin this story so that the public won't get alarmed or that it won't hurt the administration's image.
		Now, if you had that job and that was your story, how would you spin that?
		Maybe like a caller we had last week who said, well, Art, the ocean levels are rising, right?
		So maybe if all the fish die, the ocean levels from the melting at the North and South Pole won't inundate our coastal city so much because all the fish will be dead and they'll displace, well, they won't displace more water, and so the ocean levels won't rise as high.
		Is that how you'd spin that story?
		Oh my God.
		What a world we live in, huh?
		And I'm on the other side of it at the moment.
		From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
		Indeed, here I am keeping an eye on the sun, of course.
		As you know, the sun is coming up with some giant, dangerous sunspots that cause the astronauts to have to sort of hide out a little bit while some of the radiation passed.
		I got a number of emails from people in the northern part of the U.S. who were seeing auroras, so the sun really was pounding upon the Earth.
		And why it's doing it at this part of the sun cycle, nobody knows.
		Well, not true.
		There is Ed Dames.
		I'll be right back.
		All right, between now and the top of the hour, it's going to be open lines all the way.
		Dr. Bernard Husch is going to be my guest.
		Dr. Bernard Husch is an astrophysicist.
		Now, listen carefully.
		He's author of over 130 scientific publications.
		He actually served as scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for 10 years, was principal investigator on several NASA research projects.
		Well, you get the idea, right?
		You know what he's going to be talking about?
		A book he's written called The God Theory, Universes, Zero Point Fields, and What's Behind It All, coming from a man like that.
		This should be a particularly intriguing interview, I would think.
		All right, let us begin, As promised, west of the Rockies.
		Ken in Hawaii, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, all right.
		I just wanted to talk about you, talking about your ham radio and shortwave and everything.
		My grandfather, back in the 1960s, late 60s, early 70s, got me into listening to ham radio.
		And then I bought one of those multiband radios, moved up to police scanners and all that.
		And now I live in Kauai, Hawaii, on the very, very North Point.
		And I tune in on AM radios, and I can go literally click by click and pick up a station from everywhere.
		I can pick you up on KFI from Los Angeles, KOGO from San Diego.
		No kidding.
		KHVH from Honolulu, KONG from Kauai here, and another station, I can't think of the name, from up in Seattle.
		I can pick up the story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, I'll tell you something you might look for.
		Last week, I just heard, and it's amazing to me because I've always wanted it to be so, but we're carried by the Armed Forces Network.
		Now, that means that we're on the air in Iraq, Afghanistan, virtually around the world, and on 5.7 something or another megahertz.
		We're also on short wave, apparently.
		So you might look for us on the short wave bands as well.
unidentified		5.7.
unidentified		Wait, wait, I've got 7.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, somewhere I should have kept the exact frequency, but I just learned it was true, and I think that's really cool.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was wondering why I kept getting all these emails from Iraq.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
		Yeah, I can even pick up stations from the Philippines, because, like, you know, over here in Kauai, there's a lot of Filipinos, so I understand.
		I don't understand it, but I recognize the language.
		I can pick up stations from the Philippines, Japan, Mexico.
		It's incredible because, you know, we have such a flat ocean coming out here, and it just bounces out here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you kind of a cute little thing.
		I'm sure you can.
		You might look for one.
		They're on different frequencies here.
		As you know, in the U.S., our AM stations are separated by 10 kilohertz.
		Oh, right?
		Here in the Philippines, we have one AM station on Get This 666.
unidentified		Oh, God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, now in a Catholic country, would you think there would be a radio station on 666?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, but there is.
unidentified		Oh, man.
		You think that one monster came out that you talked about?
		Oh, I can't remember the name of the monster.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's the Oswong, sir.
unidentified		That's it.
		That's it.
		But yeah, I've been, you know, I called during the earthquake we had here, and I wanted to talk to you about the radio waves then, too, but it was a little too much going on then.
		But yeah, I just think it's real neat that I can pick you up from all over the place.
		It's amazing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you can.
		You can just, you can get us from virtually anywhere.
		If you search hard enough, it's absolutely amazing what you can do.
		Just amazing.
		All right, my friend.
		Thank you very much for the call.
		And take care.
		We're going to go east of the Rockies to, no, yes, east of the Rockies to John and Illinois.
		Hi, John.
unidentified		Hi, Art Bill.
		It's a great honor to talk to you.
		I wanted to talk to you.
		I've listened to you for 10 years.
		Got 100 questions, but I'll narrow it down.
		First, have you heard of the Out There TV people?
		They're from Perump, Nevada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, I have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, of course.
unidentified		Oh, they're great.
		Kate and Richard Mucci.
		Everyone should listen to their program.
		Okay, how about everybody, let's get together for an international moon base, okay?
		I've been reading science fiction since childhood, and gee whiz, why don't we have a moon base?
		Why don't we have a complete, you know, space exploration, much more than the military budget.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The only answer I'm giving to that, my friend, is because it is expensive.
		That's right.
		The only thing keeping us from a base on the moon and then, of course, an eventual transit from there to Mars and onward is money.
		Money, money, money.
		Money makes the world go round and apparently prevents us from getting off this world.
		But if you listen to many knowledgeable scientists, we better figure out a way.
		If we want the human race to continue after we have finally managed to, in one way or another, obliterate ourselves, then we had better figure out how to travel.
		Over to the wildcard line, Tony in Denton, Texas.
		Hey.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		Well, in response to the previous colour, I think we should try to establish a base on the ocean floor as a first step.
		But that's just a thought.
		I mean, my second thought is, how's your new cat doing, the adopted cat?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dolly.
		Dolly is every day we have a battle.
		Every night, Dolly goes out to the Christmas tree, which, by the way, you can see in the picture of Aaron on the website tonight, and we have all these wonderful Christmas balls.
		There is no way, no way that a five-month-old cat will not take every Christmas ball she can get her little paws on and hide them, bat them around the house until she's hidden them under every available object.
		So every day we wake up and it's a search for where did the Christmas balls go.
unidentified		Ah, but it's awesome.
		That's awesome.
		That's what it's all about, Nancy.
		So anyhow, a few years ago, post-9-11, I'm a severely, or a semi-depressed human being just because of the events of the world.
		Your show provided me an outlet because you had a little anti-like a pro- and anti-war debate show.
		I've never called a talk show.
		I got through to you that night, and I was an anti-war debater who was very, very concerned about the World War potential, questioned the motives of the war and whatnot.
		However, I was rather dismissed as kind of a naive, a younger, naive kind of person.
		And my true question to you is if you can honestly look at your opinion, you know, and see how it's morphed over the past couple years and just, you know.
		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'd be glad to give you the evolution of my opinion.
		My opinion originally was that we should not go into Iraq.
		Very strongly.
		When it was being debated, when we were working our way up toward the second invasion of Iraq, I was very, very strongly against it.
		Now, once it happened, once our soldiers were in Iraq, and that includes now, I'm afraid my opinion did morph.
		I'm not happy we went in.
		Still not happy we went in, but we're there.
		Our soldiers, our citizens, our fellow citizens are there.
		They're fighting for their lives, for our lives, for our freedom.
		And so my opinion is we need to figure out a way to win this damn war and get our butts out of there.
		That's my opinion.
		We're there.
		Let's get the job done.
		Whatever it takes to get it done, to stabilize that government in some way, yes, we'll end up with bases in Iraq.
		It's a strategic situation.
		We all know there are reasons we went over there that were above and beyond weapons of possible mass destruction.
		Hell, we went there for the oil.
		Let's admit it.
		We went there for strategic reasons.
		We need a base in the Middle East.
		We need a place to station our troops and our supplies and our planes and so forth and so on.
		So we'll end up with permanent bases there for as long as there's a strategic reason to be there.
		And we've got to figure out a way to win.
		It's not simple.
		And I won't suggest it's simple.
		And I won't even suggest that I have that plan to win because I don't.
		I don't know how we're going to do it.
		But I know we can't stand another loss like Vietnam.
		John in New York on the wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Hello, John.
		John is going once.
unidentified		Oh, can you hear me now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hear you now, John.
unidentified		Okay, I don't know what happened there.
		I'd like to talk to you quickly about quitting smoking besides that Nicorette gum.
		Did you ever try vitamin therapy now?
		Because like large quantities, not even ERS, but large quantities of vitamin C, say estesine, that absorbic acid, has a calming effect.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I'm taking that.
		I'm taking vitamin E. I'm taking large quantities of C. Yeah, I'm doing all that.
unidentified		But the best thing to take overall is calcium and magnesium.
		1,200 milligrams of calcium a day with 800 milligrams of magnesium has a, unbelievably, it really relaxes the body unbelievably.
		So that would be the priority there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'll try the advice.
		I appreciate the advice, and I'll plow onward.
		But mostly it's the gum chewing.
		The gum chewing is good, you know, rather than the patch.
		The patch is okay, but it doesn't take care of...
		So as tired as I am of chewing gum, it helps from that point of view.
		And of course, it gives you your shot of nicotine.
		What I'm concerned about is that when I'm done with this, I'm going to be hooked on chewing the gum.
		Then what?
		I guess I chew gum for the rest of my life.
		Is that it?
		I guess.
		Let's go, oh, I don't know.
		Let's go here and say, Mike in Idaho, you're on the air.
unidentified		Thank you, Art.
		Everybody's talking about you quitting smoking.
		Okay, I mean, that's not why I called.
		Do you like spinach?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can tolerate spinach.
		The only vegetable I truly hate, the vegetable from hell, lima beans.
		Otherwise, I'm okay.
unidentified		Okay, well, spinach can help you curb the appetite.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah, it does help.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't like spinach that much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not like I could, you know, every time I want a cigarette, go grab some spinach that beans.
unidentified		Anyway, that's not why I called.
		I grew up in north-central Idaho, and, you know, there's a lot of wilderness.
		And my family has seen Bigfoot and lots of lights in the sky and so on and so forth.
		But the reason I called was either you or George did a show on Thunderbirds, the large birds that can't be explained.
		It might have been George.
		Anyway, about three years ago, my wife and I were in a part of central Idaho where there's a lot of meadows and medium-altitude lakes.
		And I looked out, she was driving, I looked out the side of the vehicle, and I saw these two big birds go over, huge wingspans.
		And I remarked to her, I mean, they're not ravens, they're not eagles, they're too big.
		And she says, she poo-pooed.
		So we went to the cabin we were going to, and then we came back, we were driving around, and there was this marsh meadow with about three-foot-tall dry grass.
		It was in the fall, and we were on a dirt road, and I judged distance by football fields.
		You know, I played football in high school, so I have a tendency to judge distances by the length of football fields.
		Okay.
		And about a little over a football field away, across this dry meadow, were these two birds standing, and the grass was just at their breasts, their bellies.
		They looked like cranes, you know, or herons.
		They were a medium brown, long beaks, and they were like eating, you know, insects or frogs or something in the marsh.
		And they had to have stood at the shoulders at the back, at least six foot tall.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
unidentified		I mean, they were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Those really are gigantic birds.
		Now, in the desert, in the Nevada desert, we have some absolutely monstrous birds.
		I have seen a few unaccountably large birds here, but I can't say that I've seen anything that would achieve six feet in height.
		I can't imagine what that would be.
		I did post a picture that I thought was absolutely authentic of an Aswang, which is a terrible creature here.
		Absolutely a terrible mythological creature, many Americans would say.
		I don't think you'd hear any Filipino say that.
		It's said to be half human, half creature, bird-like creature.
		Are there things still in our world that we don't know about?
		Probably there are.
		Are there creatures that may not be fully physically here and may be part of the metaphysical world because they seem to come and go as Bigfoot does, almost disappearing?
		You know, the tracks go along for a while and then gone.
		That's also a possibility.
		Could it be an alternate, some sort of alternate reality or alternate universe that they sort of blink in and out of?
		Sure, it could be.
		There are things here that are simply inexplicable.
		Going west of the Rockies to joy in Arizona.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		I'm delighted to speak with you again.
		I have an idea for how we can get to peace on this planet.
		Yeah.
		And it takes a little truth and openness, but it's a very doable thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm listening.
unidentified		Okay.
		There are energies on this planet that are given to us from the planet itself, living, breathing plants.
		And they are teachers of peace.
		And there is one in particular.
		It is one of the greatest foods on the planet.
		It is one of the greatest fuels on the planet.
		Biomass absorbs carbons before it ever emits any.
		It is one of the greatest cannabis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just a little shot out there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes.
unidentified		But I mean, it does so very much, and it is also a teacher of peace.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Food, fuel, fiber, medicine, and it was the Wall Street Journal that ran an article and said that if the United States allowed the sale of hemp in its various forms, including industrial and clothing and all the rest of it, it would generate immediately $1 half trillion dollars.
		A half trillion dollars.
		That's $500 billion in revenue.
unidentified		It would do so very much that is positive.
		It would create so much more the border issues.
		A lot of that would be negated because people could be growing things down in Mexico.
		They would have income down there.
		Also, honorable income.
		It is one of the most honorable and magnificent plants for 10,000 years.
		It has been utilized, and here it has been maybe 70 years or so that it's been lied about and deceived all of us.
		Or not all of us, but for some extent.
		So I think it's time that we talk about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know, I know, I know.
unidentified		We talk about it.
unidentified		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What a mistake.
		And of course, once a government makes a mistake, it doesn't very easily turn it around.
		Now, I would make the case that marijuana, as smoked, is far, far less dangerous than alcohol, far less costly to the economy than alcohol.
		The reason I think that it was banned, well, because it slows people down.
		Some might say it makes them lazy.
		And America, oh, America likes its people active.
		Workaholics, it wants workaholics.
		And if you're going to just sit down and sort of enjoy the world and look at the flowers and think everything is wonderful and beautiful, you're not working.
		And that costs the economy money.
		And that, my friend, is why I think it is not legal.
		From the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
		Morning, everybody.
		Afternoon, evening, whatever it is, wherever you are, worldwide.
		This indeed is coast to coast AM.
		Dr. Bernard Heisch is an astrophysicist.
		He's an author of over 130 scientific publications, so he has not perished.
		He serves as a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal.
		He did that for 10 years, was principal investigator on several NASA research projects.
		His professional positions include staff scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar, an astrophysics laboratory, and deputy director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California.
		Good heavens.
		Of course, in Berkeley.
		And in addition, he was also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
		Now, those are heavy, heavy-duty credentials.
		And what is he here to talk about?
		Well, we're about to find out his book, The God Theory, Universes, Zero Point Fields, and What's Behind It All.
		That's quite a claim of territory to be covering in an interview like this with a resume like that.
		In a moment, Dr. Heisch.
unidentified		Dr. Heisch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Bernard Heisch, welcome to the program.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's my pleasure to be here tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing to have you here tonight.
		Now, I've interviewed, oh my gosh, every manner of doctor and scientist and theoretical physicist and physicists, and you name it, I've interviewed them over the years.
		I generally, somewhere in the interview, doctor, I get to the point where I ask them if they believe in a creator.
		It's a difficult question for them.
		They don't like it, and they usually politely either sidestep it or give me a no, just a flat no, depending on their degree of honesty.
		Frankly, most scientists, most doctors do not believe in God.
		Well, you're right.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		You're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God.
		But still, to their credit, the Academy did issue a statement saying that whether or not there's a purpose in the universe or a purpose for human existence or whether or not God exists, those are questions that science can't answer.
		Science must remain neutral about those.
		So that's the official position.
		But you're right that most scientists just don't want to have anything to do with the idea of a God that might lie behind the universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a good question.
		I think some of it has to do with the antipathy between science and religion going back decades.
		I mean, after all, there was a persecution beginning with Galileo.
		Bruno was burned at the stake.
		The relationship between the church and scientists of the 17th century and so on was not very good.
		So I think that that has a lot to do with it.
		There's a lot of, I think that science is still reacting to outmoded ideas of God.
		I think it's possible to conceptualize a God that is compatible with science.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good.
		I absolutely agree with you.
		I think they are compatible, and that's why the big why, why, why.
		I just, there are many things in this world we still do not understand and we cannot explain.
		And they seem as magic to us, some of them, including a lot of operations of the human brain, although I guess we're closing in on some of it.
		But as the metaphysical and science sort of move along their separate tracks, I've been noticing in recent years that they've actually, even though they don't want to, they seem to be getting closer together on some subjects.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think there's a good reason for that.
		There have been some remarkable discoveries in astrophysics over the last 20 years or so, say.
		We've discovered that there are a lot of laws of the universe that seem to be amazingly just right for life to evolve.
		That is, there are certain properties of the universe that, for all we know, could have been slightly different or even radically different, but if they were, we wouldn't be here.
		So that poses a problem.
		Now, it is possible to explain that away, and that's what most scientists prefer to do, to say, well, if that's the case, and we know it's the case now that the universe has some amazingly just right properties, if that's the case, that implies there must be trillions and trillions of different universes that we can never detect just so that ours isn't really special, just so that ours is part of a statistical ensemble.
		It's not really special.
		So you have to create a lot of hypothetical universes, perhaps even an infinite number, to explain it away.
		And I'm simply proposing in my book, The God Theory, that it's equally logical, equally rational to assume that maybe there is an intelligence behind the universe.
		And that's the reason that we have the special properties that let life evolve and that let new life forms develop according to the laws of evolution and so on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the God theory is that explain it again to me.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		The God theory is that there is an intelligence behind the universe.
		And then I go on to discuss what the reasons for that might be.
		And those go back to the discoveries that the universe seems to have some just right properties.
		For example, there are at least half a dozen I could name having to do with the strength of the nuclear force, the strength of the gravitational force, the amount of dark energy and dark matter, and peculiar properties of carbon and so on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does your theory, Doctor, allow for the possibility that there is other intelligent life on a par with us, or perhaps even greatly more evolved than we are somewhere out there?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Oh, almost certainly.
		I mean, that's something I think that most astronomers would grant that probably there are other civilizations in the universe.
		After all, there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy, at least 100 billion galaxies in our universe, and so we're discovering planets around other stars, several per month.
		I think pretty much the consensus in astronomy is that there must be lots of civilizations out there in the universe.
		The issue, of course, is whether we'll ever be able to communicate with them or be in touch with them or ever be able to travel to other star systems.
		That's the question.
		But that there are other civilizations out there, I think that's pretty much taken for granted.
		Although, of course, we have no direct evidence of that yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is your feeling?
		Indeed, as you point out, there are so many stars, so many planets.
		We now discover them, as you point out, daily or weekly, the bigger ones, and that implies there's also smaller ones.
		And so at the right distance from a sun.
		It's almost inevitable, it seems, unless life is utterly rare to the point that it's only here, that it has evolved in many places.
		And yet, SETI has found nothing.
		We've had no signals.
		Of course, we have lots of, well, sort of evidence with all these UFO sightings and the abduction stories.
		I just had a really good one last week.
		And we have that, but it's not hard put your finger on evidence yet.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And that's the problem.
		For scientists, you need the hard put your finger on evidence, the forensic evidence.
		And unfortunately, We just don't have that today.
		But to your question about detection of other civilizations with SETI, you're making quite an assumption in SETI that radio communications, which have served us well for only about a century or so, that that kind of technology would persist and become a dominant mechanism of communication.
		And that may simply not be correct.
		We could have a universe, even a galaxy, even a local neighborhood of stars full of life, and maybe discover someday that they've moved well beyond radio communications eons ago.
		So we may just be asking the wrong questions when we do radio searches.
		But then again, who knows?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Certainly, you're correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you imagine what other form of communication might evolve past radio and television and the electromagnetic medium?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is jumping in kind of far into the book, but it's my suspicion that ultimately we'll discover that probably it's consciousness that lies behind the universe.
		The consciousness of an infinite intelligence.
		And I think ultimately we'll find that we ourselves are manifestations of that consciousness.
		And so it may be that in the future what we use to communicate will have nothing to do with electromagnetism or some of the laws of physics that we know now, but may have to do with other laws that deal with the nature of our own consciousness.
		But that's taking us pretty deeply into areas that are, at this point, at this stage in our knowledge, very speculative.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they are.
		But there is some work going on.
		I guess if you believe that, then you have been following the work at Princeton and elsewhere on consciousness.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Yes, indeed.
		I know those people pretty well, Bob John, Brenda Dunn, Roger Nelson.
		I've worked with those people.
		I even accepted and published their papers in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Doctor, I think that is extremely exciting.
		I made a statement on the air a number of years ago after I did a series of experiments.
		Have you heard of those?
		Probably you haven't.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I don't know which ones you're referring to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I did a series of experiments with Mr. Nelson and Dr. Nelson and others.
		And in those experiments, I, for example, took areas of the country.
		You know, I have access here to millions of people.
		And it was reckless, I now feel.
		But at the time, I looked for areas that had drought, hadn't had rain in months and months and months.
		I really did this, Doctor.
		And I just took time out and asked my listeners, millions of them, to concentrate on forming clouds, on forming moisture, in fact, on causing rain.
		I did a total of 11 experiments, doctor, and in each case, we caused within an hour, within an hour, doctor, we caused rain in areas that had not seen it in months every single time.
		We also worked on some health issues for people.
		I mean, we just did some amazing things.
		They were so amazing, doctor, that they scared the hell out of me.
		People began emailing me and saying things like, okay, let's take a hurricane that's headed toward the coast and divert it.
		And I know there's a lot for you to swallow right now, but I can assure you, I'm doing so on the air.
		We really did this.
		And that's when I stopped.
		I said, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
		This is obviously a power.
		What we have done has worked.
		We caused rain in Texas, in fact, floods.
		We caused rain in the Northwest that had been bereft of rain for months and many other areas.
		And it worked, and it scared me, Doctor.
		It actually scared me.
		I would tell people, close your eyes during this next break.
		We'll all give it a try, millions of us at once.
		The people cooperated.
		It really happened.
		And then I realized I had no idea.
		It was a real power, obviously, because it was working.
		Or it was a series of coincidences that, I don't know, the numbers for it would be off the chart.
		So it worked.
		And it scared me.
		And I said, I'm going to stop because what if, since I don't know what I'm doing, we, for example, divert a hurricane away from the coast, giving it more time over the water, and then the damn thing circles back, now being a category five when it was only a one or two before.
		So, you know, the old toying with mother nature thing.
		I really did those experiments, doctor.
		They really worked.
		And at the end of it all, I said, I'm stopping.
		I'm not going to do it anymore until I understand it, which I may not ever in my lifetime.
		And in fact, we even did one with the cooperation of the folks at Princeton, and we caused their little eggs to go berserk just as an experiment, and it worked.
		And if you look, Doctor, over the record of what they've done at Princeton with 9-11 and all the rest of it, and all this occurring before the actual incident, you've got to believe that what you're on to when you mention consciousness, this is something real.
		And I said, you know, someday we may find that consciousness, in its own way, has more power than the atomic bomb, atomic energy.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, that could be ultimately.
		It is a dangerous thing because if we do have such powers, I mean, think of how they could be misused.
		I think that the fact that our consciousness operates in a very limited kind of way in terms of the things you're talking about is probably essential for a human civilization to exist because of the, well, you know, the old maxim, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
		Now, the importance of the Princeton work is that the effects that they found were extremely tiny, but they were tiny and yet backed up by statistics.
		I mean, the people at Princeton were very careful about analyzing their data, and while they found very minute results, they did find results that could be backed up statistically.
		So I think their work is pretty impressive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess it all walks with the quantum world, right?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I guess so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I completely agree with you.
		I'm not sure how all of this fits in with spirituality, with religion.
		How do you feel, for example, About organized religion.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, organized religion is a problem.
		Recently, I had the chance to read Sam Harris's book, The Letter to a Christian Nation.
		And I thought, well, I'll read this.
		It'll probably annoy me, but I'll read it.
		I should read it after all.
		It's presenting a very different view than my book, so I better find out what he talks about.
		And I found myself agreeing with about 90% of it, because what he's doing is pointing out some of the absurdities and, in fact, some of the dangers of organized religions.
		There are things that you find in the Bible that I certainly would not want to attribute to any kind of benevolent God.
		And so I find that religions are something that perhaps I'm hopeful that mankind will ultimately grow out of.
		But not because there isn't a God or because we're not spiritual beings, but rather because religion has the capability to be misused by human beings, misused to generate hatred, intolerance, religious wars, persecutions.
		It simply has a lot of potential for mischief.
		And if you look in the Mideast, you know, you'll find yourself facing a situation in which people are slaughtering each other simply because of differences within the same religion.
		And so the absurdity to which religion can be carried by human beings is quite amazing.
		On the other hand, religion and spirituality are not necessarily bound together.
		My suspicion is that we're all spiritual beings, but that our spiritual nature is something that will be subject to scientific study eventually.
		I hope spirituality becomes part of the branches of knowledge alongside of astronomy and biology and physics someday.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If all organized religion suddenly ceased to be, I've always thought that organized religion had a purpose, and that purpose was to keep control of people.
		In other words, a lot of people, it seems, refrain from doing something that would be considered evil or bad because their organized religion tells them that.
		Now, if suddenly all those restrictions and barriers were removed, what do you think would be the social results?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, if removed too quickly, probably you would have negative consequences.
		But my belief is that, I shouldn't say belief, actually, I'm a scientist after all, and so I can say my suspicion is that we are really spiritual beings living in physical bodies.
		And our spiritual nature is one that we share with whatever intelligence made our universe.
		And as spiritual beings, I think that there are certain laws that go along with that, one of them being the concept of karma.
		I think that the things that we do as spiritual beings are things that will have consequences for us, and you can't dodge the bullet of responsibility for things that you do.
		So if we actually believed that the actions of our lives and the effects on other people were things that we would have to eventually either be rewarded for or we would have to account for in some way, that would change the world.
		It really would change the world if we believed wholeheartedly that we can't just with impunity commit crimes, murder, damage to other people.
		That would change the world if we truly believed there was a law of karma that would make things eventually balance out and come back upon us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There was a man who wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain, Doctor.
		And his theory was that there is a part of our brain that virtually demands that we worship something.
		And if you go to, for example, I mean here in the Philippines, there are some areas that man almost hasn't been to here in the Philippines, some islands where you go and inevitably they worship something, the sun or something.
		So you can go to parts of the world, perhaps in Brazil, perhaps in other remote areas of the world.
		Inevitably, you find these natives worshiping something.
		Do you think there is a part of our brain that demands this?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I personally don't.
		I think that it has to do with our consciousness rather than our brain.
		And I tend to separate the two because it seems to me that the brain is not necessarily the source of our consciousness.
		Rather, it may be the vehicle by which our consciousness interacts with our immortal bodies.
		But I don't take the brain and the biochemistry of the brain to be the explanation of who we are as human beings, of what our consciousness is all about.
		I think there are deeper explanations that we could find by delving into the reports of the mystics and the esoteric traditions within the various religions.
		I think that there is much more to us as human beings than simply as chemical machines that are driven by neurophysiology and processes in the brain.
		I think we have to look much deeper than that.
		And that's not a view that's very popular in science at the moment, but I think eventually as we begin to explore consciousness more and more in this century, we'll come to find that it's a necessity that we look elsewhere for what causes our own consciousness rather than simply looking to the chemistry of our brain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you don't feel that you can define consciousness, or do you?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think consciousness is something that we have inherited from and share with the intelligence that stands behind the universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, God.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I would say God, yes.
		The intelligence, the supreme intelligence, transcendent intelligence.
		Call it God.
		We're talking about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, all right.
		Doctor, hold it right there.
		We're at a breakpoint.
		We'll be right back on Mart Bell.
		So consciousness, in a sense, equals God.
		I could probably get kind of next to that theory.
		We're going to talk about this fascinating stuff.
		Dr. Bernard Heitch is my guest.
		Now, I want you to remember we're talking to a man who, a scientist, you just don't hear this kind of thing from scientists.
		An astrophysicist, a man who's worked with, headed NASA projects, a man who you just would not expect to hear this sort of thing from.
		So we're going to explore this in detail.
		Stay right where you are.
		Just very quickly, because I think it's going to fit into what we're talking about here in a moment.
		I rarely recommend movies or books unless they're just over the top.
		But I must tell you, the other day I went out and rented a DVD that I had not previously seen called AI, Artificial Intelligence.
		AI is the name of the movie.
		If you have not yet seen that, oh my God, go out and rent it or buy it or whatever and look at it.
		It just knocked me right off the couch.
		AI.
		Doctor, welcome back.
		So it's an oversimplification, but in a sense, then, our consciousness equals the God within us or the God, the God.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I think that's right.
		I think basically our consciousness is the same as that of God, except, of course, it's been attenuated by the fact that it has to deal with and reside in mortal bodies.
		So it's just a tiny, tiny fraction of that infinite consciousness.
		But I think it is the same stuff.
		And I think there's even some evidence that this is going along the right path by considering consciousness to be something like that, something we share with the intelligence behind the universe.
		Aldous Huxley wrote about his experience in the 1950s with the drug mescaline.
		He had one very intense experience in which this drug, which is the same one used by the Indians in their ceremonies, Native American ceremonies, he used the drug to put himself into an altered state, and then he tried to describe what that world was like, because he was in an indifferent reality for several hours.
		And he wasn't, of course, entirely successful because he had to use the words of one world to describe the feelings in another.
		His explanation was that he viewed the brain as a filter of consciousness rather than as a source of consciousness.
		And by that, I mean that he was assuming that perhaps his consciousness was tuned to that of a universal one, that of a creative intelligence behind the universe.
		And when he took the drug, it put a crack in his mental filter.
		And he was able to see things and experience things that he wouldn't ordinarily be able to because his brain was not filtering out that vast amount of consciousness that is the sea of all consciousness.
		And that was a very interesting idea that suggested to me that maybe there's evidence in the behavior of autistic savants.
		Autistic savants are people who sometimes can't do the most simple things like tie their shoes, and yet they can do the most amazing things that you wouldn't expect a human being to be able to do.
		I'll give you some examples.
		Leslie Lemke was an autistic savant who played Tchaikovsky's piano concerto number one after a single listen without having had a piano lesson.
		Daniel Tamet cannot tell left from right, but he can multiply two huge numbers in his head while talking to you.
		Moreover, he recited the value of pi, the value of pi, to 21,514 decimal places.
		Now, this is an amazing thing.
		I couldn't imagine memorizing the value of pi to those number of decimal places.
		And by the way, it goes on to infinity.
		Pi never stops.
		But 22,514 decimal places.
		And he did that not by some kind of mental calculation, as he reported, but by seeing forms in his head.
		He visualized shapes in his head, and they told him what the next value of pi was.
		And then lastly, Kim Peake, who was the model for Dustin Hoffman's Rainman.
		He can read two pages simultaneously, of course, one with each eye.
		He has perfect recall of 8,000 books, and for recreation, he memorizes telephone directories.
		Now, these are things that I don't think, I would say, a human being can't do except they've been done.
		And the common factor among these three people and all Autistic Savants is that they all suffer some form of brain damage.
		And so this very neatly dovetails with Aldous Huxley's idea of the brain as a filter rather than a source of consciousness.
		The Autistic Savants, in my view, may be showing evidence that they're tuning in to a universal knowledge that we all have access to, except we have to filter out most of it to exist in the everyday world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, is this something that you contend would be unique to human beings?
		Or if we eventually develop artificial intelligence, if we get enough memory, enough speed, processing speed, whatever it is that it takes, do you think we will ever actually develop an artificial intelligence that possesses consciousness?
		Or is that something that is in God's territory?
		And no matter the speed in the storage, it will never happen?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a tricky question because it seems to me there is the possibility that if you manufactured an artificial intelligence that was sophisticated enough, interesting enough, capable enough, that could serve as sort of an artificial life form,
		and the universal intelligence might decide that, indeed, that's an experience worth having, and therefore consciousness could enter into that artificial intelligence the same way that I think it does into human beings and animals and so on.
		So it may become the host of consciousness, but the question is, is the consciousness coming from within that machine emerging from it, or is the consciousness coming from the outside deciding, gee, this is a very interesting experience to have.
		Let me experience what it's like to be an artificial intelligence in this universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		All right.
		Now we're going to get into some difficult territory, and this is something I've thought a lot about.
		I've read the Bible, Doctor, and I would imagine you've probably at least read some of it, if not all of it.
		And there is so much recorded in there, Doctor.
		There is so much information in there.
		Was that all, I mean, the miracles, the Jesus who walked earth, all of that that forms the basis of our organized religion in the West, And then others like Jesus, who became the basis of other religions around the world.
		Is all of that cooked up by man?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, some of it does seem to be.
		I'm really bothered by some of the things that I do find in the Bible.
		Let me give you an example.
		This is out of Deuteronomy.
		There is the statement that if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father's doorstep.
		That's in Deuteronomy.
		Now, I don't believe God wrote that.
		Any God who would write that is not any kind of God that I could worship.
		And so I just don't believe that that's a God-given commandment.
		And yet, there it is in Deuteronomy.
		And unfortunately, the Bible is full of things like this, things that we would reject today as being immoral, as being in some cases utterly inhumane, and yet they're in the Bible.
		So you have to be very careful about how you attribute the authorship of the Bible and the purpose of the Bible.
		And that's where I find myself in agreement with some of the criticisms of people like Sam Harris, for example, who does give some very cogent examples of things that you find in the Bible that simply are not the kind of thing you would expect of any God that's worthy of belief.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then, of course, there's creation itself, Doctor.
		For example, I've interviewed many religious creationists, and from their point of view, we have been here no longer than 6,000 years.
		And, of course, we were placed here by God.
		Now, I think that science has done a job on that theory, a complete job.
		I mean, obviously, we have evolved.
		I don't think there's a whole lot of dissent from that.
		There is some, and the dissent that is there is very, very vocal.
		So perhaps you'd like to comment a bit on the whole concept of creation versus evolution.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I would, because the theory I'm proposing, first of all, has nothing to do with intelligent design.
		When I talk about a God behind the universe, I'm thinking of a God whose ideas perhaps became our laws of nature, whose ideas became our physical constants.
		And this is a notion that goes back to the early 1930s when Sir James Jeans, who was one of the great astrophysicists of that era, in fact, he even has a crater on the moon named after him, and he was knighted for his work.
		He wrote a book called The Mysterious Universe.
		And in it, he wrote that the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
		So to him, the universe seemed more like a thought.
		And this led me to think that perhaps these fundamental principles of the universe that are very conducive to life may well be the thoughts of a great intelligence.
		And that great intelligence would dream up a universe.
		Why?
		Probably because that intelligence would like to experience some of its potential.
		And that potential is best experienced by entering into the life forms that arise in our universe and perhaps others.
		And that's where evolution comes in, because I think evolution is a tremendously good way to let new things arise, to let new life forms come into being.
		And I think the purpose of the creator, I think the purpose of the creator is to experience novelty, not to manufacture a cookie-cutter universe, not to manufacture creatures designed by intelligent design, but rather to have a universe whose basic laws are set.
		Let a Big Bang become the origin of that universe.
		Let evolution take place over billions of years.
		Let life forms arise.
		And then let intelligence, let consciousness enter into those life forms and experience physical reality.
		That's what I suspect it's all about.
		And that's totally consistent with what we know about 13.7 billion-year-old Earth and evolution taking place and resulting in the life forms eventually leading to us on this planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have interviewed many theoretical physicists who believe that it's very likely that the reason we have not yet encountered other intelligent life, at least to a level of proof,
		a bar that they're willing to accept, is that when life emerges, it gets to the point roughly where we are now, where it has discovered and begun to apply the uses of element 92,
		where it begins to perhaps even approach the quantum era, and life inevitably cyclically destroys itself or is destroyed by some cosmic event like a big rock.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I certainly hope that's not true.
		In our case, it could certainly go either way given our past history and our current abilities and our current abilities of religions to foster hatred and intolerance among different groups.
		So our example is not that optimistic a one, although I myself suspect that we will get through this.
		But whether or not that applies to other civilizations, certainly you can't assume that's any kind of universal law.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why are you that optimistic?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, we've made it through some pretty bad times already.
		Religions have been the source of problems for a long time.
		People have been persecuted.
		Millions of people have been slaughtered in wars.
		And we're still here, and we have a world that is more advanced than ever before.
		And perhaps it's just that intrinsically there's a certain amount of optimism.
		I can't really prove it, can I?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, and I think that I'm a pessimist.
		I think the larger possibility is self-destruction.
		Now, we've not been in that time where we had the ability to destroy ourselves for very long in the larger scheme of things.
		That's all pretty new to us.
		But I worry that nuclear weapons, or perhaps even scarier, biological weapons and all the other things that we face these days that could literally mean the end of the world, or at least the end of man on world is a better Way to put it, can be set loose.
		And we certainly seem to have no shortage of people willing to strap whatever it is around their belly and take themselves and as many others out as they can.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And I think that's, in fact, well, to be frank, that's in fact the reason I wrote my book, because I think it's essential to have some kind of a concept of God that makes sense scientifically and that takes us away from the narrow views of God that cause the kind of rivalry and hatred that we're seeing in the world today.
		Visions of God that call for destruction and violence, visions of God that picture him as if he were some desert patriarch hungry for worship and eager for slaughter.
		That's the idea we have to put behind us because that is what could take the world to its ultimate destruction.
		I think that it's entirely possible, though, to conceive of a God that's not like that, that has a purpose in creating a universe, that has a purpose for our lives, and that is consistent with science.
		And so you have this middle ground I'm trying to appeal to.
		The people that don't want the fundamentalist notions of God that foster hatred, and yet they are perhaps too much under the sway of scientists who argue, well, we've proven there is no God, which of course is not the case.
		Science can't prove that one way or the other.
		And I'm proposing a middle ground, a middle ground that's based upon a concept of our own spiritual nature, but not one that's tied to any religion, because the religions, they can't be right because there are so many of them and they disagree.
		So are we to say that one is right and the rest are wrong?
		I don't find that possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, does your theory of a creative force, God, include the probability of an afterlife?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I think it's not just a probability.
		I think it's built into the theory because if we really are sparks of an infinite consciousness, then almost by definition, that consciousness can't die.
		And so if that's what we truly are, consciousness inhabiting physical bodies, then it becomes a moot point.
		We can't possibly die because how could that consciousness die if it's part of the infinite intelligence?
		I think that a statement by Pierre Thélar Deschardin, the Jesuit paleontologist, says it quite well.
		He wrote, surely we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.
		And if that's the case, then I think it becomes almost self-evident that indeed when we die, we transition into some other realm where consciousness resides, but that we probably come back again.
		And that's probably the purpose.
		It's probably the purpose of being in this universe to have experience and to give.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now that was going to be my next question.
		In what manner do you imagine consciousness to continue?
		And I guess your answer is reincarnation of some sort.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I guess I would say that, yes.
		I think that, I mean, what sense would it make for consciousness to come into this universe, inhabit a body, live 80 years of life, say in Bakersfield, and then be over and done with, because the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
		So it doesn't make a great deal of sense to me to assume you come into life once.
		You may be born into a life that is plagued with problems.
		You may be born into a life that gives you untold wealth.
		And all these injustices, these injustices, make it look as if the whole thing is simply a very unfair game.
		I think that if we look upon the possibility that there are multiple lives that we live, then the circumstances of an individual life take on a very different character.
		The injustice that seems to go along with human experience has a different perspective if you look upon the possibility that we come back more than once and that we live other lives.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's my understanding that reincarnation actually was part of the Bible at one time, and the Council of Nicaea removed it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Had you heard that?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I have heard that, but I've got to say I've not studied that, so I've heard it, but I can't swear by that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I also tend, as you do, to believe that reincarnation may be the way consciousness would propagate, but there is a problem with it, too, and that is what sense does consciousness reincarnated without any conscious memory make?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think the conscious memory, the lack of conscious memory, is sort of part of what you need to have a novel experience.
		Let's assume, for example, that you did have a number of lives behind you and you came into a new life fresh, and the idea was to experience this new life to its fullest.
		If you were burdened and saddled with that past knowledge, the decisions you make wouldn't necessarily be free and novel decisions.
		I think that we're given an opportunity in any given life to do things in an independent way, to be unburdened from our past.
		And I think that if we indeed are the supreme intelligence experiencing physical reality, it's essential to forget who we are, because if we remembered who we were, namely sparks of God, that would put a damper on the novelty of a given life.
		That would put a damper on the experience.
		It's sort of like playing a game, playing a game of, say, hiding the treasure.
		You bury a treasure someplace and then you find it.
		Well, if you buried it yourself and then you tried to find it, what fun is that?
		You know where it is.
		So you have to forget where you put the treasure if you're going to play that kind of game.
		And I think that's what God does when God experiences incarnation as a physical being.
		He forgets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So perhaps, well, along with everything else, the treasure he removes is wisdom, the one thing we gain with age.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Indeed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So we have to start the game all over again.
		But you're right.
		It's novel, and without that novelty, it just wouldn't be the same game, would it?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		No, not at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right.
		This is fascinating stuff.
		Dr. Bernard Heich is my guest.
		He's truly a hardcore scientist, but.
		Boy, he sure does have a different point of view.
		So leave your thinking caps on.
		This is going to be absolutely fascinating.
		From the Philippines, basically the other side of the world.
unidentified		I'm Mark Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen very carefully to what this man says.
		Dr. Bernard Heitsch is extremely credentialed.
		He's an astrophysicist.
		He's written over 130 scientific publications.
		Served as scientific editor of the astrophysical journey, a journal, journey, I guess it is a journey, for 10 years, was principal investigator on several NASA research projects.
		Professional positions included scientists at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab and deputy director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley.
		Now, from a person of this magnitude, would you expect to be hearing what you're hearing tonight?
		I think not.
unidentified		I think not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, you've obviously considered reincarnation.
		So would you imagine or guess, Doctor, that reincarnation is an endless process that, or at least as we humans, can consider endless?
		Or is there a sort of a gentle karmic learning process that results in something other than yet another and another and another birth?
		Is there a graduation?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think there is.
		I think the ancient view was that time was a cyclic thing, and therefore there was the belief that if you do come back again, you have to somehow live a life that will get you out of this, that will get you out of this treadmill of reincarnation.
		I think the view we have now, certainly one consistent with what modern science is telling us, is that things evolve.
		Physical life forms evolve.
		And so I think that just as physical life forms evolve, probably our spiritual nature evolves.
		And so the education, the experience, the good and the bad that we take with us from any given life hopefully takes us on an upward path so that somehow whatever that consciousness of ours is evolves in a way that's kind of parallel to the evolution of life in a physical form on planet Earth.
		So I do think that it's an upward journey.
		I think ultimately it probably does lead to reunification with the ultimate intelligence because I think that's what we are.
		It's sort of like a giant bonfire out there that is that intelligence behind the universe and we're little sparks, little flames of that bonfire.
		But ultimately we return to the ultimate bonfire that's there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		What about the old question of, well, if reincarnation is in fact the way it happens, how do you account for the increasing number of consciousnesses present on Earth?
		Well, radically increasing.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Whether there's a fixed supply or not, I wouldn't know that.
		So, you know, you can always have more consciousness arising if the intelligence behind the universe is an infinite consciousness, which I suspect it is.
		So I don't think there's any shortage, actually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		All right.
		Let's try this then.
		If reincarnation is sort of a progressive thing, then one would imagine that you'd be able to see the social evidence here on Earth of that progression.
		And maybe I'm just too much of a pessimist to be able to see it.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is kind of worrisome, isn't it, that we're still quarreling with each other after all these centuries.
		But I do think that some of the laws that we've adopted, for example, the emphasis these days on human rights, that was not part of human civilization anywhere on the planet in the past, in the not that distant past.
		The rights of women, the increasing equality of the sexes in the Western civilizations anyway, I think there is evidence that we are moving upward, but unfortunately it's a very zigzag kind of upward trajectory.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you think if you were to look at the totality of what we can actually document of human history, that you can show that progress sufficiently so you could say, well, yes.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess it kind of looks that way to me, but I guess I'm putting some slightly rose-colored glasses on because I prefer to think that that's the case and that we can evolve and we can become better human and spiritual beings as we learn from the experience of life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is the zero-point field in physics?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, now you've gotten into an area that could take a long time to discuss.
		I'll have to put on my best Carl Sagan here because now we're talking about hardcore science.
		It's the energy that remains when all other energies are removed from a system.
		It's a quantum law.
		For example, we know zero-point energy is a reality because liquid helium, when you try to freeze it, take it down to a temperature near absolute zero, just refuses stubbornly to freeze unless you put it under pressure because zero-point energy keeps the jiggling motions from being entirely stopped.
		So we know that we have to deal with the phenomenon of zero-point energy.
		And the question is, where does it come from?
		It comes from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, basic law of quantum mechanics.
		It says you can't ever take the last bit of energy away from anything.
		And so if we apply that law to light, a radiation field, we find that there is a certain amount of energy that you simply can't take away.
		And I call it sort of a quantum light, a virtual form of quantum light underlies the universe.
		And that's zero-point energy.
		And the question is, to what extent is that energy real or virtual?
		And that's still a very controversial topic because the work that I've done over the last decade or so, which was funded by Lockheed, Martin, and by NASA, suggests that there may be some fundamental physics that can be traced back to the zero-point field.
		It has to do with the nature of matter and mass.
		It has to do with basically the stability of matter, the ability of it to resist acceleration and thereby make possible a stable, solid world for evolution to take place on.
		So I would say if you look up zero-point energy or a zero-point field on the web, beware of what you find because most of what you find there will be kind of a catch-all form of nonsense that has very little to do with the reality of the zero-point field and the zero-point energy as studied in physics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And there are those who point to the zero-point field and equate it with God, yes?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		There are, and That's a very superficial comparison because the zero-point field is defined very precisely in physics.
		It has to do with quantum radiation.
		Very precise, very limited definition.
		Now, might there be something deeper to it than that?
		I admit I do speculate on a deeper connection in my book, especially the one having to do with the work that we did over the last 10 or 12 years, suggesting that maybe the inertia of matter could be traced back to the zero-point field.
		That sort of metaphorically implies, well, there's an underlying form of quantum light that makes the world solid and stable.
		Gee, that begins to sound kind of esoteric.
		That begins to sound like it may be a physics perspective on something that the religious traditions have alluded to.
		And it's that kind of connection that I speculate about in the book, but I wouldn't want to take it any deeper than that because it is purely speculation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You apparently feel that physics in the modern world is facing some kind of crisis today.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that correct?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is, in fact.
		Now, I'm looking at this from a slightly neighborly perspective, not a direct one, because I'm not a physicist.
		I'm an astrophysicist, an astronomer, either one.
		And they're very similar, but they're not the same.
		They're different communities, different journals, different meetings.
		But the problem with physics today is that so much of physics has gotten tied up with string theory.
		There are literally thousands of physicists working on string theory and publishing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of papers a year on string theory.
		The problem is that string theory has absolutely no experimental verification, not even any suggested test that could demonstrate whether it's right or wrong.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There is what's going on at CERN, and they have hopes.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Hopes.
		They have hopes of detecting.
		That's right.
		They have hopes of detecting, say, the Higgs boson.
		That's not string theory.
		The detection of strings is utterly beyond anything we can even imagine now because the size scales of strings are maybe 20 orders of magnitude.
		I'm using scientific terminology, I'm sorry, but many orders of magnitude smaller than anything we could possibly detect in any collider that could be built on the planet.
		There's beginning to be some dissension from string theory.
		There have been a couple of books that have come out in the last year.
		One by Peter White.
		He's a mathematician, I believe, at Columbia University.
		He wrote a book called Not Even Wrong about String Theory.
		And then the physicist Lee Smolin, a very respected theoretical physicist, has just written a book.
		And it's called The Trouble with Physics.
		He talks about the fact that string theory has this magic hold on the communal mentality of physics and that it's really achieved nothing provable in 20 years of research.
		So I think there is a problem with physics today, and I think there's a new impetus that is necessary.
		I'm not quite sure from which direction that will come.
		I kind of hope it might come from the direction of some of the relationships we think we found between the quantum vacuum and the mass.
		But there is kind of a bottleneck that's happened in physics over the last few years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there, therefore, a problem with the multiverse theory?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, the multiverse theory is, of course, the alternative theory to the one that I'm proposing that addresses why is our universe special?
		You know, I alluded to the fact that there are maybe half a dozen properties of our universe that really seem to be just right for planets to arise around stars and have conditions that are conducive to life.
		And in fact, we could talk about those at any length that you want.
		So those properties of the universe have to be explained somehow.
		You can't get away from them.
		They're pretty much accepted and undisputed that the universe is kind of uniquely tuned toward life.
		So to explain that away, which is what most scientists would prefer to do, implies that you have to have lots and lots of other universes that are different than ours, so that ours becomes not really special, just this is the one we're in, because we couldn't exist in any of the other hypothetical ones.
		And my suggestion is that, well, maybe it's not a bunch of other universes.
		Maybe it's that there is an intelligence behind this universe.
		So that's the situation on the multiverse.
		You need to have that if you want to have an explanation for our special universe without resorting to some kind of intelligence behind it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gee, Doctor, you put yourself in a unique position.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're going to have everybody angry at you.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I hope I have people curious about what I say because I would like the whole course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no.
		It's fascinating, and I'm with you.
		I'm just saying that the scientific community is probably going to be banging on your head, and the religious community is probably going to be trying to sock you in the stomach.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's quite possible.
		And I would suggest that both sides go to my website, the Calphysio, or the website, the Godtheory.com, and see some of my questions and answers and some of my perspective on why I've written this book.
		Because I wrote it because I think that ideas like this could put the planet on a better trajectory.
		If we could put behind us some of the outdated ideas of religion, some of the aspects of religion that are causing more problems than they're benefiting mankind, we would be in much better shape.
		And on the other hand, I don't think that a kind of materialistic philosophy that says, look, there is no purpose behind the universe.
		There's no purpose behind our lives.
		It's all just an accident.
		It's all just statistics.
		Move on and don't worry about there being any God or any purpose for your life.
		That's not a good philosophy for a civilization to have.
		In fact, I think that's ultimately a deadly philosophy for a civilization to have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I was going to say, not for one that wants to survive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Might I ask, Doctor, how you got from being in the hard sciences, which are clearly very much in, to writing this book?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it goes back to my childhood, actually.
		When I was about six years old, I knew pretty certainly that there were two things in life I wanted to do.
		One was to become an astronomer, and the other to become a Catholic priest.
		I had a very religious mother, and so I was fixated on becoming a Catholic priest, and I went to a high school in Indianapolis called the Latin School of Indianapolis, which was a preparatory school for the seminary.
		Did very well there and graduated and went on to the St. Minerid Benedictine Archabbey and Seminary in southern Indiana, which was the next step in the road to the priesthood.
		Now, I left that when I was finished with my freshman year because I began to have some differences with the Catholic Church about some fundamental issues like birth control and divorce and so on.
		And so I decided to leave that part of my life's aspirations behind and dedicate my full attention to becoming an astronomer, which I did.
		But I guess my openness to some of these ideas of spirituality and our human nature as being more than simply a collection of chemicals, that does go back to my upbringing and to the fact that I studied to be a Catholic priest.
		And so I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of spirituality, although I am uncomfortable with the ideas of some of the baser aspects of religion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's remarkable.
		Let me note, I mean, your background is remarkable.
		Let me note for you and for the audience, and I've said this previously, I, of course, am on the other side of the world from you.
		I'm in the Philippines.
		The Philippine Islands are approximately 87% Catholic.
		In the United States, we have separated religion and the state to a large degree, to the point where religious symbols and so forth are on a regular basis ejected from public property and so forth and so on.
		Here in the Philippines, religion is part of the state, is actually part of the state.
		In fact, drives the state.
		In fact, drives the laws.
		So here, of course, there is no abortion.
		Here, of course, there is no divorce.
		Here, of course, you see crosses and you see religious artifacts almost demanded to be on public property.
		They hang from lamp posts and public light posts and you name it, and you see it here.
		And in the Philippines, although there is abject poverty everywhere, there also remains an incredibly strong sense of family, doctor, that we haven't seen in the U.S. for decades.
		And so religion here does seem to have positive influences of some sorts.
		Now, it's not all roses, mind you, because there's no divorce.
		So a lot of people end up leaving their partner, and it's just the biggest mess you ever saw in your whole life.
		But family is paramount here.
		And if you look at the U.S., where we've tried to remove God from all public view, there have begun to be some problems as a result of it.
		Now, perhaps you have a comment on that.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do.
		I think that it's important to separate the misuse of religion by human beings and the existence of God.
		They're two totally different things.
		And that's why when I read Sam Harris's book on A Letter to a Christian Nation, I found myself in agreement with most everything he said, because religion has been misused by human beings to do the most awful things.
		Fine, I accept that.
		It's true.
		But does that mean there's no God?
		No, it has nothing to do with that.
		These are two totally orthogonal questions.
		And I think that the rejection of any kind of notion of God by a society and the removal of any kind of reference to the possibility of there being a God, I think that can have some negative social consequences.
		And so I can see that some of the positive aspects of a belief in something other than secular humanism could be a positive thing for society.
		But the problem is if you let religions go to their extremes, then you can create even worse problems.
		So I'm kind of torn on that point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As am I. It's just something that I noticed having moved to the other side of the world that I thought was very, very interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How long has your book been out, Doctor?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		It came out in May.
		It's been, well, you know, I've got to say I put 30 years worth of thought into this book.
		It's really kind of a distillation of my decades of being exposed to science, being part of the scientific community, writing research papers, and mulling over the same questions I've thought ever since I left the seminary.
		Is there a God?
		What is the purpose of my life?
		What's the purpose of the universe?
		And so I've really tried to distill the 30 years of seeing things from both sides of the fence into a book that proposes something that I do think you can believe in if you want to.
		You don't have to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How has your book been greeted by your colleagues?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		You know, I don't really hold the book up to my colleagues and say, here, look at this, because I realize that, as I said when we started the interview, 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God.
		So I assume probably 93% of my colleagues probably feel the same way.
		So I don't put my book up in their face and say, look what I wrote.
		I kind of have gotten myself into enough hot water, perhaps, by writing it in the first place.
		So I don't promote it among my professional colleagues.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But still, there must have been some feedback.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Somebody must have sent you an email saying, hey, what happened to you?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		No, you know, I've gotten nothing negative.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		If you look at Amazon.com, you'll find that the reviews I've gotten from people are quite positive.
		I've got essentially a five-star review from the average of the 23.
		But I've gotten nothing negative from any colleagues of mine, which may just mean that they're totally oblivious to the fact I've written this book, which will be fine with me for a while anyway.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fascinating.
		Well, I can imagine it got five stars.
		The whole concept deserves five stars easily.
		All right.
		Well, let's talk a bit about your twist on creation.
		Science and the best theoretical physicists, why?
		You talk to them, Doctor, and they tell you one of several things, but one thing they all seem to agree on is that prior to the Big Bang, they don't know a damn thing.
		Nothing.
		Zero, zip, nothing.
		But they will tell you that from something smaller perhaps than a quirk came all that is.
		They just don't know how that happened.
		And oh, that's music.
		That means we're at a breakpoint.
		So when we get back, perhaps we can talk about that instant that nobody seems to understand at all.
		Would that be all right?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		That would be just fine.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Let's dive in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good.
		All right, Dr. Bernard Heich is my guest.
		He has written a book that I think you want to go get your hands on right away.
		It's called The God Theory: Universes, Zero Point Fields, and What's Beyond It All.
		I hope you're not just joining us.
		That would be a real shame because you've missed a lot.
		Dr. Bernard Heisch is my guest, and boy, are we deep into it.
		What a wonderful interview.
		We'll get back to it in just a moment.
		Stay right there.
		All right, as I said prior to the break, Doctor, I've always had this, I don't know, I've interviewed so many scientists and they tell me, the theoretical guys, that everything we see, all the stars and all the planets and all this immense everything, came from something apparently smaller than a quark.
		Something so small we can't even right now, I guess, do anything other than imagine it.
		It's just too much to contemplate.
		What's your take on it?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, the thing that you're alluding to is the Big Bang, because we know the universe began 13.7 billion years ago.
		The universe came out of something that was as incredibly tiny as you describe.
		And that's pretty well known.
		And in fact, there is the Nobel Prize that was awarded this year for measuring what the universe was like early in its life cycle.
		So yes, that's true.
		And the question is, what came prior to that?
		What was the cause of that?
		But before we get into that, I guess it's worth noting that there, I'm not entirely alone amongst scientists in thinking that there is a deeper explanation for the origin of the universe that involves an intelligence of some kind.
		For example, Sir Fred Hoyle, who was the British cosmologist who coined the term Big Bang, in a 1995 Scientific American article, he's reported as saying that the universe looked to him like an obvious fix and attributed that to an intelligence.
		Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, in his book, The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics, wrote that there are realities existing apart from our sense perceptions.
		And I've already mentioned Sir James Jeans and his ideas that the universe looked more like a great thought than a great machine.
		And then there's Sir Arthur Eddington.
		He's the scientist who made Einstein famous, because in 1919, he's the one that led the Eclipse expedition that measured the deflection of starlight that proved that general Relativity was correct.
		So, Eddington was a great promoter of Einstein.
		He wrote one of the first textbooks on general relativity.
		He was the one who discovered how stars shine.
		In other words, he was the first to propose that thermonuclear reactions drive stars and wrote a textbook on that.
		But he also wrote a book called Science in the Unseen World because he was a mystic.
		He thought that there were other realities beyond the physical.
		So I'm not entirely alone in my thinking.
		There are some very prominent and deep thinkers who've shared some of these ideas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so it is your view then that it did occur that way and that there was a creator that made that happen?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, I think that the Big Bang is a great way to start a universe.
		I mean, if I had to start a universe, I'd do it the same way, I guess.
		But the question is, what came before that?
		And it's even a question whether this is a legitimate question, because I think that space and time probably came into being along with the Big Bang itself.
		And so the question of what came before takes on kind of a deeper, fuzzier significance because we can't really extrapolate time to an even earlier event that preceded the universe because probably there was no time at all.
		But you do need some kind of preexisting something to make something happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can only imagine a great emptiness.
		That's it.
		You can imagine a great emptiness prior to this.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		You could, but if there weren't any quantum laws, then you couldn't even have a quantum fluctuation.
		If there weren't any inflation fields, you wouldn't have the inflation that's thought to drive the early universe.
		You need the preexistence of something in order to make anything happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if there was just great emptiness, Doctor, and there were no, you didn't even have two objects.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, in order to even have time, a measurable thing, you must have one object moving in relationship to another, yes?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly correct, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess we're both in an area that you can only speculate about, but it really does inevitably lead to something so much greater than ourselves that it has to be a God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So why is it that scientists can't or won't make that little leap or big leap?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that there is this, as I said before, this historic problem of the conflict between science and religion that goes back centuries, to Galileo and Bruno and so on.
		There's also the problem that I think we need a more modern, up-to-date concept of God.
		I think the concept of God that we have in many religions is very anthropomorphic, and as such, it's been the source of a lot of conflict.
		It's been the source of a lot of abuse and misuse of powers.
		And I think that science is reacting to notions of God that are too simple to be true.
		That I think if we have a concept of God as an intelligence behind the universe, not one that microengineers life forms and creates a universe that is a 6,000-year-old universe, that makes no sense at all.
		I think it's possible to come up with a concept of God that even a hardcore scientist would say, well, that's an acceptable idea.
		I may or may not believe that.
		In fact, I probably won't believe anything because as a scientist, I don't believe things.
		I insist on proof.
		But it's a possibility I will hold in mind, one that I think stands on equal logical ground with the idea that there is no God and that everything can be traced back to some kind of quantum fluctuation or inflation field.
		But where do those come from?
		So we're at Terry Incognita here, and it cannot be proven one way or the other.
		And I'm not claiming in my book that I've proven anything, only that there are two possibilities and that you can accept whichever one you want.
		But you know, I think there's actually a slight edge for the possibility that there is an intelligence.
		And that has to do with the reports throughout the ages of mystics and the prayerful and spontaneous exceptional human experiences people have had.
		People have communed with this intelligence throughout history, and that's part of our human knowledge.
		And I think to discard that and say, well, that's not scientific evidence, you can do that.
		But I think we'll discover in the century ahead that there is reality to those kinds of perceptions and that there's much to be learned from that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, as quickly, Doctor, as science is now moving, maybe toward the quantum world, do you think it's possible that science may one day run right into God?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Very good question.
		I guess what I'm hoping is that someday the knowledge of our spiritual nature, the understanding of our spiritual characteristics, of our spiritual abilities, of the nature of our consciousness, that that will become part of the scientific mainstream.
		And we'll begin to explore things that sometimes are pejoratively just thrown out as, quote, supernatural, as part of what a greater science has to encompass.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you suppose socially would occur if science did what it's so unlikely to do, and that is actually prove the existence of God?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess if it did, I suspect and I hope it would be a more peaceful world because if we had that as a common belief, we could begin to perhaps work together better, more peacefully, to try to understand what that means, to try to understand what the implication is for us as human beings for the purpose of our lives.
		So I think that would be a very good thing, a very hopeful thing.
		I don't see that as very likely, though, because I don't think that these things can be proven, at least not until perhaps our own consciousness comes to the state where we can directly experience this and know for a fact things that we just have direct experience of rather than the need for experimental proof.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then it would probably be your view that the path to God is an understanding and exploration of consciousness itself.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I think so.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I think consciousness is going to be the center stage in this century and that it'll probably be more important to understand that than to understand some of the problems that now are center stage in physics and astrophysics and biology.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you suppose that the difference between those life forms and civilizations that make it and those that don't might be those that discover this path versus those who don't, those who stay with the material, with the bombs and the biological terrors that we all know about?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that ultimately a kind of morality that a society needs can't really be grounded in something that denies our basic nature.
		And I think that our basic nature is that of consciousness.
		And I think we're getting into trouble if we look at ourselves strictly from a reductionist, materialist perspective.
		And I think that the philosophy underlying that is one that it's unsustainable for a civilization to be built upon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you beginning to achieve this with the book?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you getting any feedback that indicates to you you're making some progress?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a little hard to say.
		The book hasn't been out all that long, and it hasn't gotten a huge amount of promotion.
		So the book is there, but it's not one of the best sellers yet.
		I'm hoping it is because I wrote it Not because I want to make a ton of money on it, but because I think the ideas I'm presenting offer a new perspective for a world that's in deep, deep trouble.
		And it kind of goes hand in hand actually with what I'm doing professionally as a working on a project called the digital universe that we haven't discussed yet, but maybe we can for a few minutes with the science education project.
		And I think that the idea of presenting to the public information that's not driven purely by commercial purposes is something that will also be of use to the world.
		And that's what I'm spending all my time on professionally.
		And between that and writing the book, I hope I've made some contribution to providing a more positive trajectory for the world to discover.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am terribly concerned, Doctor, about the amount of scientific ignorance in this country right now.
		It will make you sad if you look.
		And for some reason, I guess we're still turning out young scientists, but it just doesn't seem like people are turning to science at the rate they once were.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that's correct.
		I think the U.S. is losing its edge, and I think some of that is due to unfortunately some of that is due to religious influences that seem to be opposed to science, that see science as the enemy.
		And unfortunately, some scientists see religion as the enemy.
		And so with that kind of tension between the two worlds, I think that a decline of interest in science is something you might expect.
		And again, that's why the kind of middle road perspective I'm presenting, which is to conceive of a God that's consistent with everything we know in science, consistent with the Big Bang, consistent with evolution, that offers us a view that I think can resolve this tension and make people interested in pursuing science, even if they want to discover God, even if they want to be very close to God personally, they don't have to reject that to pursue a career in science.
		The way it is now, you can feel very uncomfortable, I suppose, if you are a very religious person, a devout person, you want to become a scientist when 93% of the members of the Academy of Sciences reject God.
		And I think that's pretty much the percentage you'd find in the scientific community overall.
		So it's kind of a hostile environment toward the person that might be a very devout person that communes with God.
		And I think that that's part of the problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that even includes the majority of the medical community, doctor.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I think the medical community is much more open to the idea that there is an intelligence behind the universe because it's not so it is more tied to the human nature, to human reality, to human thought and experience, rather than to purely mathematical analysis.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		So I think the medical community is somewhat more open than is the world of physical science.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you would be, for example, if you wanted to introduce this as a course in a university, you'd be run out of town on a rail.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're right.
		These ideas are not ready for prime time in that sense.
		And I'm hoping that, I mean, perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I'm hoping that my book could start a dialogue, a dialogue between scientists that have an open mind and people that do believe in God, but that see some of the drawbacks and pitfalls of organized religions.
		And they're looking for a middle ground.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, in a way, though, isn't science likely to ultimately do itself in in the sense that as it even goes down the road that it has carved out for itself, it inevitably, when it goes far enough, is going to get to a juncture that meets up with spirituality?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it will, and I think science will rise to the occasion because scientists are smart people, and science has been very successful.
		And I see a future in which science will be carried on looking into realms that at this point are being excluded from science, but that will of necessity become part of it.
		And perhaps the world will be better off someday if we have science but not religion.
		I think that religion has become a very divisive thing, but to have a spirituality that finds a, or a study of spirituality that finds its place among the branches of knowledge of science, that would be a very good and a very desirable thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It'll probably be a pretty difficult moment for science, to be sure.
		But I have this feeling that we are sort of racing toward that.
		There are areas of science right now that are going to be, that are bumping into this.
		And again, I point to the work at Princeton.
		It is small.
		I agree.
		But it's beginning to move into areas that are fuzzy.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that's right.
		As I said, I know the work at Princeton.
		I deeply respect it.
		I published some of that in the journal that I edited.
		And I think that if science could take off some of its own dogmatism and look at things like this, at results like this, experiments like the ones carried on at Princeton openly and with an open mind, there's a lot to discover there.
		The problem is that there are many scientists who, I think, suffer from the religion of scientism.
		If you take the view that science has proven that there is no God and that there cannot be any spiritual realities, then you've also become a believer.
		If you've become a believer in something that you might as well call scientism, the belief of scientism, belief in scientism is effectively a religious dogma.
		And that's not a healthy thing.
		And the scientific method is one thing.
		The scientism that goes along with thinking that you've uncovered what is possible and what is not possible and that what is possible does not include any kind of spirituality or God, that's not the scientific method and that's not behaving the way a scientist should.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So from your perspective, Doctor, if you were to run into a depressed person who's asking the world and God and anybody else who will listen, what is the purpose of my life?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How would you instruct them?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I go directly to the heart of that in the book because what I'm proposing is that life is all about giving God his experience.
		I imagine God to be an intelligence of infinite potential, of infinite ability.
		But potential is a very sterile thing.
		It's one thing to have potential.
		It's another thing to have experience.
		And I think what God does, again, thinking along the lines of what Sir James Jeans wrote many years ago, I think what God does is to take some of his ideas and have those ideas become the laws of nature of a universe like ours.
		And then the universe takes off and does what it can do within those laws.
		Let's evolution take place.
		Let's life forms arise.
		And then you have the ability for that intelligent consciousness to enter those life forms and to take its potential and have experience instead.
		To live as a human being, to live as a frog, to live as a turtle, to live as an alien in some other civilization.
		I think that's what the purpose of the universe is, because that way the intelligence behind it gets to experience itself.
		In fact, that's what some of the esoteric aspects of some of our religions actually allude to.
		For example, in Kabbalah, that sort of thing is alluded to.
		And I suspect that's what the reason is behind the universe.
		And so if that's the case, then our purpose in life is to give God his experience.
		And in fact, we're giving God our own experience because we are, in that sense, God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, back to reincarnation for a moment, just based on what you said.
		Do you think that consciousness is a big crapshoot?
		That is to say, do you believe, for example, that in one life a human consciousness may be in the next a frog?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I don't think you go backwards.
		I think it's upwards.
		I think if you're a human being, you come back as a human being.
		Or perhaps you graduate to something better.
		I mean, I'm not excluding the possibility that you might wind up in some other civilization somewhere else in the universe.
		If you've lived a good life, preferably that's a better civilization.
		But I don't think that you go backwards.
		I don't think you can wind up as a cockroach or something like that.
		Perhaps if you've done very terrible things, perhaps if you're Saddam Hussein, you might come back as a cockroach.
		I don't know.
		But I generally don't think that's the case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they did find him in a hole.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Good point.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Very good point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, listen, I have pretty well dominated you selfishly here for a couple of hours, and it's been just absolutely incredible.
		What I want to do is allow the audience to have a crack at you.
		That's what we sort of traditionally do in the last hour.
		And it'll be interesting, I think, to see what I mean, you're liable to get anything.
		Remember that there's every person, every manner of person listening, many of them devout Catholics, for example, or what have you, every manner of person.
		So you're going to have to prepare yourself for nearly anything.
		Can you do that?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I think I can do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Dr. Bernard Heich is my guest.
		Ladies and gentlemen, go get his book, The God Theory.
		Universes, Zero Point Fields, and What's Behind It All.
		I don't see how you can resist.
		I'm sure you can go to Amazon, The God Theory, Universes, Zero Point Fields, and What's Beyond It All.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here I am.
		Dr. Bernard Heisch is my guest.
		And judging from the way everything lit up like a Christmas tree, as soon as I said we'd open the lines, I'm guessing all of you have a lot of questions.
		And I'm not surprised.
		What an interview, huh?
		Dr. Bernard Heisch coming right back.
unidentified		Dr. Bernard Heisch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, just before we launch into phone calls, which we're about to do here, is there anything that we should have covered in this interview that I did not touch on or you didn't?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess I want to talk for a couple of minutes about what I'm doing currently, which is working on the digital universe, because I agree with you that science education in the U.S. is a problem.
		And one of the things is that the Internet has such potential to educate people and to inspire, especially young people, to begin to investigate the nature of the cosmos and to have careers in science.
		So with the digital universe, we founded a foundation of which I'm president called the Digital Universe Foundation.
		And our objective is to create, in effect, what would be kind of a PBS of the web.
		In the same way that the public television system is sort of separate from the commercial system and provides a high-quality level of both entertainment and education, we're trying to form a part of the web that will be a place where experts can identify worthwhile material,
		provide new content, provide interesting ways to present trips through the human body and trips through the universe and all sorts of valuable educational tools in an area of the web that is sort of segregated from the rest and we call the digital universe.
		And so I invite the listeners to go to digitaluniverse.net to see what I'm talking about.
		But it's a very ambitious program that ultimately, I think, will result in what Carl Sagan would have called the Encyclopedia Galactica.
		That's what we hope to create over the next few years or the next few decades with the digital universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's digitaluniverse.net.net.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we can certainly send you some visitors.
		No question about that.
		All right.
		Away we go.
		Let's see.
		Let's go to Mike in Ohio.
		You're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
unidentified		Good evening, Art and Dr. Heisch.
		Another top 10 show, guys.
		Art, I can hear Terrence McKennis just beaming from the afterlife from hearing Dr. Heich link God and novelty as scientifically as possible.
		I can only imagine the book you might write, Dr. Heich, if you did DMT.
		Dr. Heish.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I've heard of that.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I'm not anxious to take it, but I've heard of that.
unidentified		Since we can focus our mind's consciousness on creating objects and experiments with more minds here at the same time than ever before, and most minds are focused on their religious story.
unidentified		So, Doctor, do you think humanity could manifest a self-fulfilling prophecy such as the arrival of a supernatural deity as we approach 2012 and what Terrence called the point at which all possible novelty will express itself?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Ma, you ask a tough question.
		Wish I had a good answer.
		I think that ultimately we do create our own reality.
		In some way, collectively, the human race has created the world that we live in.
		I'm not saying the physical planet, but I mean I'm talking about the kind of reality, consensual reality that consists of the beliefs that we have, the laws we have, and so on.
		And I think that there is the likelihood of the human consciousness going to another level.
		I certainly hope that that's what happens in this century.
		I don't know whether anything profound is going to happen in 2012.
		You know, I see that date bandied about in terms of mind calendars and so on.
		But as a scientist, I have to say, well, I'm not going to put a whole lot of stock in that.
		But I do think that human consciousness is at a threshold, a place where we need to decide somehow or other together whether we're going to push it on upwards to a more enlightened state or whether we descend back into barbarism.
		So that's not a very satisfactory answer to a very profound question, but it's the best one I can offer at this hour.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, do you think it will be a slow evolutionary progress?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or do you think there will be a moment, an epiphany, just some magic moment of realization?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think things do seem to have a sense of speeding up.
		I'm not talking about time speeding up, of course.
		I mean, time's a steady thing in physics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A kind of a quickening, if you will?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A kind of a quickening, if you will?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		A kind of quickening.
		Again, I don't know exactly specifically how that is taking place in what way, but there's a sense that things are sort of building up ahead of steam and that something lies ahead, some decision point, something that the human race has to go through in order to break through to a better way of doing things because many of the ways we're doing things are just not working anymore.
		So I would say some kind of a quickening is on the horizon.
		When and how, I really wouldn't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Certainly, environmentally, we're in a very difficult place right now, Doctor.
		I mean, I'm seeing stories about the end of fish in the ocean in 50 years.
		I'm seeing stories about all of the ice at the North Pole being gone in a relatively short time, and the destabilization at the South Pole of the ice sheets that are very worrisome because they're above land, and ocean currents changing, and it seems as though a lot of things are converging right now environmentally that are extremely worrisome.
		And to add, and then just to add one more thing on top of that, I just finished reading a story indicating that the administration has put in place a kind of a filtering network for any sort of scientific reports that might displease current policy.
		Any comments on all of that?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, certainly the environmental issues are becoming very profound.
		One of the scientists that I'm working with at the Digital Universe is Dr. Robert Corell, who's a meteorologist who's been involved in the Arctic studies for many years.
		In fact, he spends probably half his time up in the Arctic, and some of the stories he's told me about the change in climate there are really astonishing.
		For example, the average winter temperatures, average winter low temperatures in some areas of the Arctic have changed by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
		It's absolutely a staggering figure.
		And he, too, has reported to me his observations of the ice in the Arctic regions and the projections that in less than 30 years or 30 or 40 years, the ice will be gone.
		You might say, well, the ice is gone.
		Isn't that good?
		You can now travel more easily from one part of the world to another.
		No, it causes a very serious problem because it could possibly disrupt the Gulf Stream, for example.
		So there are all sorts of consequences that would ensue from that, plus the fact that the melting of the ice would mean there's more absorption of energy, more absorption of sunlight by the darker waters, which would then become reinforcing to the melting, cause even more melting.
		So there's a feedback loop that's going in the wrong direction as far as we're concerned.
		So it is all very worrisome, and I think it's part of the challenge that faces the human race, not only our own consciousness, but our own environment are basically coming to a point where a change is necessary if we're going to make it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm now seeing stories that don't put forth conjecture anymore about the feedback loop, but insist now, or they're beginning to insist, that it actually has already begun in the Arctic, as an example.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		It's possible that it has.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		It really is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, let's see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In Clinton, Massachusetts, Michael, you're on the air with Dr. Heich.
unidentified		Pearl.
		I would like to talk about how you were saying God is the overall consciousness.
		And how you said before you had, you took, you took 11 experiments of making rain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was me, yes.
unidentified		Yep.
unidentified		I'm nervous because I'm on the air, but.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just relax, Michael.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know you know what you wanted to say, so just take a deep breath and think about it and say it.
unidentified		Instead of God being the intelligence of our consciousness, I'm thinking of it more being the combination of all consciousness on all levels.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think that is probably pretty close to what the doctor was saying, Doctor.
unidentified		It is indeed.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I'm talking about an intelligent consciousness that transcends space and time and that, in my view, probably was the origin, the causation of the universe.
		But that consciousness then enters into life forms in this universe, the life forms on this planet and probably elsewhere.
		And so collectively, we are that consciousness embodied in the physical forms that exist in this universe.
		And so I think I'm agreeing with what you're saying.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you are.
		International line all the way to Manitoba, Canada.
		Brent, you're on with Dr. Heisch.
unidentified		Well, hello, Dr. Heich.
		Hello, Art Bell.
		I'm very pleased to be on.
		I'd like to take this moment to say hello to Larry at Staples here in Winnipeg.
		He saved my cap, so I just got a little close to home anyway.
		I have the whole question that Dr. Heich and yourself were alluding to as to whether religion and science would clash or would ever meet in the middle somewhere.
		It seems to me that they are one in the same.
		We have within all of us a life force, if you want to call it spirit, if you want to call it energy that doesn't dissipate, it's a life force that's in all things.
		It's in humans, cats, dogs, grass, trees.
		It's in the motion of atoms around electrons, in solid objects such as rocks.
		It's in continual motion, and it's universal.
		It's galactic, it's cosmopolitan in the cosmos.
		It's running the whole thing.
		If you take that energy, that life force, and I believe Dr. Hirsch referred to a fire and sparks.
		If you take the same analogy and call it an ocean and drops or what have you, if you take an eyedropper of that drop and you put one drop in your head and one in Dr. Hirsch's and one in mine and one in a tree and a dog and whatever, it's that life force that operates within the shell that it's given.
		Ours happens to have a brain and thumb and baby finger motion and the ability to take that life and learn from the experiences that are given to it.
		But overall, once that life force leaves our shell, this thing that we're carting it around in, and goes back to the ocean of life force to be redistributed either whether that's conscious or not.
		And my question in conscious would be, let's just take two glasses of that life force from the ocean and take an eyedropper and put a little red dye in it and drop it back in the glass and try to suck it back up.
		You're not going to get all of that same drop.
		You're going to get a mixture of the collective consciousness of us all.
		And if that, the scientific nature of that breaks down to, I read one book called The Consciousness of the Atom, and there have been myriad scientific explorations into our human capacity for self-healing, for directing the things within our molecular structure to heal itself or to grow or what have you.
		If there's a consciousness in an atom, then we ourselves would, to that atomic consciousness, be a God.
		It's like a family member worshiping family as such and not realizing at one point that they are themselves every bit as much a part of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Brian, I'm going to have to ask your life force to ask a question, if you have one.
unidentified		Certainly.
		As a Question, I'm not really sure where I would go with that.
		I'm more in agreement with Dr. Hirsch's theory that it's an expansion of the whole.
		We're all take a collective consciousness.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Brown, I'm going to have to hold you there, and I'm going to have to.
		I think there is agreement there.
		And he did have an interesting point, and that is that at the end of our existence, you would essentially take our consciousness and it would become sort of part of the larger consciousness, or would it remain individual and distinct in every sense, or would it just become a part of a mixture that perhaps is reincarnated?
		It's only some small part of what was a consciousness reincarnates, Doctor?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good question, an excellent question, in fact.
		I tend to think that there is some continuation of personality, some continuation of experience.
		It seems to me that the giving purpose to, or rather, being expressions of God's potential is better served by some kind of evolutionary process in which the life we live becomes part of the experience of a consciousness that goes on to live other lives and so on, and that the whole thing isn't simply sort of buffered back out and rebooted at the end of each life.
		But that's my own perspective on it.
		There's no way to prove this one way or the other, except perhaps if individuals happen to remember a previous life.
		Some people have claimed that with greater or lesser credibility.
		But it certainly is a good question and one for which we can only speculate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you looked into any of the apparent evidence of, for example, hypnotic regression that does move into another life with some amazing things sometimes, including other languages spoken, that sort of thing?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, indeed, I would point to the work of Professor Ian Stevenson, who's really done, I mean, his work stands head and shoulders above that of anybody else.
		Ian Stevenson is a professor at the University of Virginia, psychiatrist, and he began to investigate cases of reincarnation scientifically 60 years ago.
		What he did was to identify children that remember past lives because children seem to remember these things and then forget them as they grow older.
		And what he tried to find was a correlation between the child's story and actual families that could verify that, oh, indeed, this individual that the child remembers was indeed so-and-so.
		And he said He found thousands of cases.
		He spent years doing this, probably 40 years.
		There are a number of books that he's written and articles that he's published.
		Again, some of these appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration that I edited, so I got to know him quite well.
		And I would say, if you're at all interested in that question of reincarnation, go find Ian Stevenson's books and read them, because that's where the evidence is to be found.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very good.
		Welcome, Line, Aaron from Houston, Texas.
		You're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
unidentified		Hey, how you doing?
		Great to talk to you both.
		And my question is, we've been talking a lot about God tonight.
		I've really enjoyed it.
		And I was wondering what you would say about the negative energy on earth.
		I mean, there's so many examples with cases like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy.
		These things have been labeled evil.
		How about child predators and just child abuse?
		These horrible things which leave all of us spellbound.
		We can't comprehend doing this ourselves, but it's there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		How about this line?
		Free will is a bitch.
unidentified		Well, that's true.
unidentified		So some people are just innately cruel.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say that the question of evil is certainly one of the vexing questions throughout human history.
		I think there's a way to begin to look at this, not an ultimate answer, but a way to begin to look at it.
		In order to have any kind of experience, you need to have polarity.
		And by polarity, I mean the existence of opposites.
		You can't experience light without darkness.
		You can't experience heat without cold.
		You can't even experience winners without losers.
		Imagine all the football games that are played on Sunday afternoons.
		If they all came to a dead draw, that would be very boring.
		You need to have losers to have winners.
		And I'm afraid that you need to have a certain amount of not good in the universe in order to experience good.
		And the problem is that we have free will.
		We have free will, and we're very creative people.
		And unfortunately, that combination of free will and creativity and the ability to choose our own path takes some people from a certain amount of not good, which is necessary for existence and even tolerable, to not good that becomes pathological, that becomes evil.
		There's a certain amount of not good that's unavoidable.
		For example, if you take a shower in the morning, think of all the bacteria that are dying, or think of the cells in your body that die to keep you alive.
		You need to have a certain amount of the existence of an opposite to let experience happen.
		And that means a certain amount of not good is necessary.
		But the pathology is the problem.
unidentified		Okay.
		Thank you.
		I was just wondering, is there an inspiration behind the not-good?
		Is there something there saying, you know, this is tempting to some person when in another person it's disgusting?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, if you're alluding to the idea of whether or not there's a thing like Satan, I would say no, definitely not.
		I don't think there's any supernatural force behind evil.
		I think evil is strictly a product of the human free will together with the human intentionality and the human creativity that we have.
		And unfortunately, with some individuals, it can devolve from simply not good into something that's really, really awful and which we call evil and is very destructive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Heaven and hell?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't believe in heaven and hell because I think that if we're going to have this continuation of consciousness, then you wouldn't really need a heaven anyway because the idea is to be conscious or to live a life in a physical body and to transition back and forth, I suppose, between those two.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold one moment.
		If we do have reincarnation with some eventual result or graduation, if you want to use that term, then why not a heaven?
		Why not a final place for a soul or a consciousness, if you will, that has traveled the path intended and has landed?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say a reunion with the infinite consciousness, the seed of everything.
		That would be the definition of heaven.
		Because if you perceive heaven as a place, a garden of Eden, It becomes, I guess, at that point a matter of semantics.
		If reunion with the ultimate intelligence is heaven, then I'm comfortable with that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good enough.
		And I'm just plain comfortable.
		We'll be right back.
		Pookie, we're all on that ride together.
		My guest is Dr. Bernard Heisch.
		He has written a book that I heartily suggest you go get your hands on right now, The God Theory.
		Universes, Zero Point Fields, and What's Behind It All.
		I suspect if you go to Amazon, The God Theory will get you where you want to go.
		And of course, we've got a link on the coast2coastam.com website.
		And while we're on that note of communication, if you'd like to email me, you may do so.
		I am Art Bell at AOL.com.
		That's A-R-T-B-E-D-L at AOL.com.
		Or Art Bell, better yet, at mindspring.com.
		M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G.
		Art Bell, all lowercase, A-R-T-B-E-W-L at mindspring.com.
		More in a moment.
unidentified		More in a moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, Dr. Bernard Heisch.
		Doctor, I am peppered with questions as the program proceeds by computer as well as the phones.
		And Ed in Flint, Michigan asks an interesting question.
		Please ask the doctor if he thinks there'll be any reason that God might come to earth in the next hundred years or so.
		Now, I would add to that.
		Do you think God was here in, you know, 2,000 years plus ago?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think in my view, I mean, God is here.
		He's here now.
		He's here in all of us.
		And was God here in the form of Jesus Christ?
		I think that's what you're asking.
		And I would say yes, he was.
		But then again, we are all God.
		So there's a sort of a brotherhood we have with the Jesus Christ who was here 2,000 years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you do think Jesus Christ walked the earth.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do think he walked the earth.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, there certainly was a person Jesus Christ who walked the earth.
		The question was, was he God?
		And the answer is, well, yes, but we are all God.
		So, in fact, there's one quote of the Bible, and only one quote in the Bible that I have in my book, and it's from John 14, 12.
		And it says, In all truth I tell you, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, and will perform even greater works because I am going to the Father.
		And to me, that means that Jesus of the Bible was saying, you too can be as I was, you know, a Son of God, a flame of God, a spark of God.
		You too can do great things and do even greater things than I, which implies that we have that same ability and that we, in fact, are God incarnate here with these abilities that Jesus manifested as an example to us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then you, in effect, do cherry-pick a bit in the Bible.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I guess I do, because as we discussed when I think the interview first began, there are a lot of things in the Bible that I couldn't possibly attribute to any kind of benevolent God.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		And so I think you do have to be careful in what you take in the Bible as something to take seriously, because there are things in there that I think are not very good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Weill Carline Ben in Chandler, Arizona.
		You're on with Dr. Hush.
unidentified		Hello.
		Yes, Art.
		Thank you very much.
		And Dr. Hush, I have a question for you.
		Does God have a gender?
		And if so, would that make a difference in our existence?
		And the second question I'd like to ask you, keeping that up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not even sure about the first one.
		Slow down.
		Does God have a gender?
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		And if so, would it make a difference in our existence?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can't conceive of God having a gender because God is in all of us.
		And so I think that the Father, Mother, God, the God with the male attributes, the God with the female attributes, the God that has neither, and God is all of those things.
		I can't imagine God as being a male.
		It makes no sense to me.
unidentified		Very good.
		I feel like God is a super spiritual massive intelligence, or hell would not be necessary.
		Is that what you might feel, Doctor?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I perceive of God as being an intelligence with infinite potential that exists beyond space and time, that exists beyond humanity.
		In Kabbalah, it is said that God is simultaneously greater than infinity and less than zero, and that any attribute that you wish to assign to God, he does not have.
		And I'm saying he there just because of the English language, not because of any gender issues.
		Any attribute that you assign to him, he doesn't have.
		Any attribute that you deny him, he does have.
		So God is ultimately beyond our perception, beyond our understanding as human beings.
		That's what Kabbalah says, and I tend to agree with that.
		And so certainly there would be no gender issue because God is beyond all of that.
		But I think the gender arises because to have any kind of manifestation of existence, you need polarity.
		You need, as I said earlier, the light to experience, or darkness to experience light and cold to experience heat and so on.
		And the male-female polarity fits in very nicely into that schema.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've explained eloquently, I think, how you feel about organized religion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That said, is there any organized religion or text that supports it that more attracts you than Christianity?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I am still sort of a Christian.
		I'm a very independent-minded Christian.
		But if you ask me, I would say, yes, I'm an independent Christian, and I do go to a church now and then.
		I go to Unity Church, because unity seems to be one of the few religions that takes seriously the notion that all religions should be, if they aren't, they should be at least, a path up the mountain.
		And there may be different paths, but there's only one summit.
		And so I would consider myself to be an independent Christian who attends Unity Church and even has sung in a unity choir from time to time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of what you said sounds closer to Buddhism to me than Christianity.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		It probably does.
		It probably does.
		And I'm not all that surprised.
		And in fact, if the things I say correspond to the things said by religions like Buddhism or Hinduism, then that's not surprising.
		In fact, it's a good thing because of what I said contradicted those, then probably one of us would be wrong.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, Daniel in California, you're on the air with Dr. Heist.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		Well, Dr. Heist.
		I first have a suggestion for you, Art, and that is that I listened to the Mass Mind experiment back in the day when you did it, and I understand your fear of having the burden of directing so much intention based on something that you suggest.
		And I want to offer the suggestion that it is a powerful tool, and that perhaps by a democratic website that people can elect a thought or a prayer, and everyone of your audience votes on it, and then you announce it on your show, everyone can focus in on a democratically elected thought, and therefore you relieve you of the burden.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if I thought a great vote by the unwashed, that is to say, those who don't understand it any better than I did, would come up with a good idea, then maybe that would be all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I don't think anybody sufficiently understands all of this yet to begin using it.
unidentified		I agree, but I have to believe in the goodness of the human being in the faith that we'll come up with something good.
		Doctor, you've been mentioning a lot about Kabbalah, which explains the realm and interactions of the soul and the Creator and the relations of both of them with the physical world.
		And it's intrinsically related, inseparable from the Torah, the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, which you might call the Bible or the Old Testament.
		But this is not really what it is.
		It's a living document that defines and teaches About the very principles and spiritual realms that you're touching on tonight.
		And I just would make the suggestion that you not dismiss it, or anyone in your audience dismiss it simply based on a few passages that are either mistranslated or not fully understood.
		And because that's a bar and a gate to the knowledge that you'll never be able to ascertain with such a quick dismissal.
		And that it needs to, the Kabbalah needs to be understood with the written Torah and also the oral Torah, which was also given by God, Hashem, to all of the people standing under Mount Sinai, which was approximately 3 million people, not just Jews.
		And that knowledge is available and accessible and can be disseminated to anyone who wants.
		Just ask your local learned Jew and he will be happy to sit down and learn with you.
		It's a lifelong process, but it's well worth the effort and the questions that you are asking tonight, I think, will be addressed in quite extraordinary detail.
		Thank you for your work.
		And I just ask, have you studied the Hebrew Torah and expounded or investigated into the other works that help explain it?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		No, I've not.
		I don't have any particularly deep knowledge of Kabbalah.
		I did study with a rabbi for a few months, but certainly my knowledge is very superficial.
		I have great respect for it.
		With regard to the issues of the Torah, if you're referring to what I would call, from my Catholic Christian perspective, the Old Testament, you know, it's a very mixed thing.
		There certainly are things in there that are profound.
		There certainly are things in there that I think are just unworthy of God.
		So it's something that I think you have to be very careful about, about accepting lock, stock, and barrel.
		I don't think I would recommend that, but I certainly have tremendous respect for the esoteric aspect of the ancient wisdom.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line one, Joe in Los Angeles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Dr. Haish.
unidentified		Yes, Mr. Haish, I have a question concerning the uncorruptibles, the saints that don't decay, Father Pinto, stigmata, and hypnosis.
		And maybe what we're having is to awaken.
		In other words, what I mean by awakening, when you take the hypnosis, right, and you imagine a cat scratching you, your cat is scratching, when you take hypnosis and you put a person between two chairs and they're absolutely flat, and when you take a mother, when it sees a child underneath the car, the mother develops superhuman strength and actually picks up the car with one hand and grabs the child and pulls the child out from under the car.
		I think what we have is maybe an awakening of consciousness that maybe the only limitation is the fact that we put limitations on our limitations.
		If we could ever awaken to the fact that, like through hypnosis, that we have no limitations, you know, we have miracles.
		I mean, you got people that are basically the uncorruptibles in the Vatican that do not decay.
		You got Father Pinzo with a stigmata.
		You've got people that could heal people from wheelchairs just through the power of suggestion, but maybe even the power of God himself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Joel, hold on.
		We're way short on time.
		These kinds of things certainly have occurred, Doctor.
		You want to comment on them?
		I mean, they have occurred.
		Seeming miracles.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I suppose it's possible, in my view, it's all traceable back to consciousness.
		And I think consciousness has abilities to do things that they're not yet recognized by mainstream science.
		And perhaps sometimes those abilities can manifest in rather extraordinary ways.
		At least there's historical evidence that that has happened.
		When the Catholic Church decides to canonize a saint, it actually investigates in some detail the claims of miracles.
		And I wouldn't dismiss that all out of hand simply because it has a supernatural context to it.
		So I don't dismiss these things.
		But, of course, as a scientist, I always have to look at them very skeptically and say, well, all right, maybe, but where's the evidence?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can tell you this, Doctor, that probably will encourage you.
		As I mentioned to you a little while ago, I get these messages as we go along in the program, actually hundreds of them.
		And just an enormous number of people have just really resonated with what you've said and have said things like, finally, somebody articulating what I've thought all my life.
		A great number of messages like that.
		So that probably bodes well for your book.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's very good news.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is good news.
		West of the Rockies, Jack in Tacoma, Washington.
		You're on the air with Dr. Heich.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hi, Dr. Heich.
		I applaud the intellectual integrity that you show in allowing for the theoretical existence of God.
		I'd wonder, have you ever asked God to answer specific scientific questions?
		And if so, what would those questions be?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would have a ton of questions.
		But you see, my problem is that I'm not an experiential person.
		I'm a very intellectual person.
		I'm married to a very experiential person.
		I think she's had some influence over my beliefs.
		But I myself don't tend to experience God.
		I have a problem with that.
		And I wonder whether that's something that I can change.
		I'm not certain that I can.
		Perhaps my role in life has been to look at God from a very intellectual point of view so that I could propose a theory like the God theory and write a book to try to bring a little bit of light into a darkened world.
		But I just have not been able to commune directly with God, so everything I'm writing is from a very intellectual perspective.
		And I guess I could easily come up with a list of long questions that I would like to get answered by God if I could tune into him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, Larry in Missouri, you're on the air with Dr. Heich.
unidentified		Oh, hi, Artie.
		Hi, Bernie.
		Yeah, this is Larry.
		First of all, thanks a lot for reaffirming my belief that I'm God.
		If you have any questions for me, Bernard, and also what about hell?
		You mentioned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we actually already covered that.
		It is an interesting concept to squash.
		But if you've been listening carefully to Dr. Heich, there really cannot be a hell, but there can be, I suppose, another life that punishes one with karma.
		Is that pretty close, Doctor?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty much what I'm saying, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On the, well, let's see, let's go to Canada, I suppose, international law.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And Margaret, you're on the air with Dr. Heich.
unidentified		Oh, I'd like to ask the doctor if he's ever read Lopsing Rampus books.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I did about 10 years ago.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		There were a couple of them that I read.
unidentified		Well, I've read all 12.
		He passed away quite a few years ago.
		But he was a Tibetan priest.
		And he was dying.
		In his books, he was dying.
		There was a man in England that was going to commit suicide, and he took over his body.
		He ended up living in Calgary for a good number of years.
		But according to his books, we come back 12 times.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there anything in your thinking, Doctor, that sets a numerical number of times that one might incarnate?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		No, and I would think you wouldn't have that because I think it would be a function of the kind of life you've had, what your evolutionary path is, whether you want to keep coming back to a world to help other people, even though you might yourself have graduated to the next step.
		I think there are all sorts of factors.
		So I couldn't conceive of any one number being significant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nor could I. Dawn in Oklahoma City, you're on the air with Dr. Heich at not a lot of time.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hi, Dr. Heisch.
		How are you guys doing tonight?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		It's fine.
unidentified		Good.
		I wanted to ask you, I've read a book here recently that just kind of rang true with me.
		It talked about the beginnings of what we call God, saying that there was a void and the void created a vacuum and energy and the force.
		But anyway, he goes on, this author goes on to talk about God being an energy that is wanting, as much as you've talked about a little bit tonight, wanting to experience.
		And stated that when he lowered his vibrational level, or when God lowered his vibrational level and created the Big Bang to enter into this physical dimension, that the physical laws of this dimension apply.
		And one of those laws is for every force, there's an equal and opposite force.
		He believes the battle of good versus evil is when God entered this dimension through the Big Bang, that an equal and opposite force was created that is here to limit God's experience in this dimension.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry to cut you short.
		It's a wonderful question, but we'll have to leave it there.
		A quick comment?
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think there's some merit to that idea.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't know how to take it to any deeper level than that because it's very complicated at that point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		What a wonderful interview you've been, Dr. Heisch.
		It's been a pleasure having you here.
		It truly has.
		I've very much enjoyed it, and I hope you'll come back, and we will do it again.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Let's do it again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Heich, have a good night.
bernard haisch ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care, my friend.
		All right, Dr. Bernard Heich.
		You know, that was as good as it gets, folks.
		It really was.
		I hope you have a good day ahead, and I will indeed, if the creeks don't rise and the typhoons don't thunder in, be back again tomorrow to try this one more time.
		So for tonight, from Southeast Asia, the other side of the world, essentially, I'm Mark Bell.

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