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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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	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.
	Aaron is today's webcam shot.
	Many, many, many people asking me to put up a shot of Aaron.
	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.
	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 turn 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 are 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, but not enough to fold the array up into a box properly.
	The array was more than half retracted when astronauts Robert Curbeam 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.
	The 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.
	Utilities 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 carmakers said Saturday that 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 lines, 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, 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 Uh, code.
	Morse code.
	Uh, that was done, uh, oh, 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, um, the code bands, to be honest with you, are largely empty.
	Particularly on 75 meters.
	Now, I guess I'm just talking to hams.
	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, you know, 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.
	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 requirements some time ago.
	And again, some of the old traditionalists at the AOL, 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 Weinman, 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 felt 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 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 Estits, 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, quoted, 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... 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.
	Oh my God!
	So if, 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 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?
	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 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 caused 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 a Dames.
	I'll be right back.
	Alright, between now and the top of the hour, it's going to be open lines all the way.
	Dr. Bernard Heisch is going to be my guest.
	Dr. Bernard Heisch 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.
	Hi, I just wanted to talk about you, uh, talking about your ham radio and shortwave and everything.
	My grandfather back in 1960s, late 60s, early 70s, got me into listening to ham radio.
	And then I bought one of those multi-band 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, KHVH from Honolulu, KONG from Kauai here, and another station, I can't think of the name, from up in Seattle.
	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 shortwave, apparently, so you might look for us on the shortwave bands as well.
	Well, somewhere, I should have kept the exact frequency, but I just learned it was true, and I think that's really cool.
	I was wondering why I kept getting all these emails from Iraq.
	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.
	I'll tell you a 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.
	Right?
	Here in the Philippines, we have one AM station on, get this, 666.
	Oh God!
	Yeah, now in a Catholic country, would you think there would be a radio station on 666?
	No, but there is.
	Oh man, you think that one monster came out that you talked about?
	I can't remember the name of the monster.
	It's the Oswong, sir.
	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 Not 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.
	Yes, you can.
	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 in Illinois.
	Hi, John.
	Hi, Art Bell.
	It's a great honor to talk to you.
	I've wanted to talk to you.
	I've listened to you for ten years.
	I've got a hundred questions, but I'll narrow it down.
	First, have you heard of the Out There TV people?
	They're from Pahrump, Nevada.
	Oh, yes, I have.
	Oh, yes, of course.
	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 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.
	Hello, Art.
	Well, in response to the previous caller, 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?
	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?
	Ah, but it's awesome.
	That's awesome.
	That's what it's all about, man.
	So anyhow, a few years ago, post 9-11, I'm a semi-depressed human being just because of the events of the world.
	Your show provided me an outlet because you had a little 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, 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.
	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.
	Hello, John.
	Hello, Mark.
	John is going once.
	Oh, can you hear me now?
	I hear you now, John.
	Okay, I don't know what happened next.
	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 of vitamin C, say Estosine, that absorbic acid, has a calming effect.
	Right.
	I'm taking that.
	I'm taking vitamin E. I'm taking large quantities of C. Yeah, I'm doing all that.
	But the best thing to take overall is calcium and magnesium.
	Okay, I'll try the advice.
	I appreciate the advice and I'll plow onward.
	But mostly it's the gum chewing.
	It really relaxes the body unbelievably.
	So that would be the priority there.
	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, there's a giant psychological aspect to this, and that's doing something with your mouth.
	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.
	Thank you Art.
	Everybody's talking about you quitting smoking.
	Okay, I mean that's not why I called.
	Do you like spinach?
	I can tolerate spinach.
	The only vegetable, I truly hate the vegetable from hell, lima beans.
	Otherwise I'm okay.
	Okay well, Spinach can help you curb the appetite.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it does help.
	I don't like spinach that much.
	It's not like I could, you know, every time I want a cigarette, go grab some spinach.
	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 You know, 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, you know, they're not ravens, they're not eagles, they're too big.
	And, you know, and she says, you know, she poo-pooed, you know, so we, you know, we went to the cabin we were going to, and then we came back and 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 distance 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 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.
	Oh my God.
	Those really are gigantic birds now.
	In the desert, in the Nevada desert, we have some absolutely monstrous birds.
	I've 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.
	Hello Art.
	Hi.
	I'm delighted to speak with you again.
	I have an idea for how we can get to peace on this planet.
	Hmm.
	And it takes a little truth and openness, but it's a very doable thing.
	I'm listening.
	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...
	Hemp.
	What?
	Yes.
	Hemp.
	Cannabis.
	I just got a little shot out there.
	That's sure.
	But I mean, it does so very much, and it is also a teacher of peace.
	Food, fuel, fiber, medicine, and...
	I know.
	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 a half trillion dollars.
	A half trillion dollars!
	That's five hundred billion dollars in revenue.
	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.
	So, not all of us, but for some extent.
	So, I think it's time that we talk about it.
	I know, I know, I know.
	But remember, there's a war on drugs.
	It was such a shame that marijuana got included in the war on drugs.
	What a mistake.
	And of course, once a government makes a mistake, it doesn't very easily turn it around.
	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 and Astrophysics Laboratory and Deputy Director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Good Heavens, of course, in Berkeley.
	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.
	Dr. Bernard Heisch, welcome to the program.
	Well, it's my pleasure to be here tonight.
	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 physicist 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.
	You're absolutely right.
	I know.
	Why?
	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.
	Why?
	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 the persecution beginning with Galileo, Bruno was burned at the stake, the relationship between the Church and the 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.
	I guess that's what I'm here to talk about tonight.
	Good.
	I absolutely agree with you.
	I think they are compatible, and that's why the big why, why, why.
	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 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.
	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, and 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.
	So, the God Theory is that, explain it again to me, the God Theory is?
	It's 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.
	Peculiar properties of carbon and so on.
	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?
	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.
	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.
	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 the 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 it, evidence yet.
	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 know, 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.
	I mean, 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?
	Certainly, you're correct.
	Can you imagine what other form of communication might evolve past radio and television and the, you know, electromagnetic medium?
	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.
	Well, they are, but there is some work going on.
	I guess you, if you believe that, then you've been following the work at Princeton and elsewhere on consciousness?
	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.
	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.
	I don't know which ones you're referring to.
	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.
	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, we 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 this is a lot for you to swallow right now, but I can assure you, I'm doing this 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 5, when it was only a 1 or 2 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.
	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.
	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.
	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 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.
	And the people at Princeton were very careful about analyzing their data.
	Well, I guess it all walks with the quantum world, right?
	results, they did find results that could be backed up statistically. So I think
	their work is pretty impressive. Well I guess it all walks with the quantum
	world, right? I guess so. 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?
	Well, organized religion is a problem.
	Recently I had the chance to read Sam Harris' 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, you know, 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 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, it's 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.
	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.
	If suddenly all those restrictions and barriers were removed, what do you think would be the social result?
	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, so I should 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 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.
	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 worshipping something.
	Do you think there is a part of our brain that demands this?
	Well I personally don't.
	I think that it has to do with our consciousness rather than our brain.
	I tend to separate the two because it seems to me that That the brain is not necessarily the source of our consciousness.
	Rather, it may be the vehicle by which our consciousness interacts with our mortal 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 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.
	So, you don't feel that you can define consciousness?
	Or do you?
	Well, I think consciousness is something that we have inherited from and share with the intelligence that stands behind the universe.
	In other words, God?
	I would say God, yes.
	The intelligence, the supreme intelligence, transcendent intelligence, call it God.
	We're talking about the same thing.
	All right, all right.
	Doctor, hold it right there.
	We're at a break point.
	We'll be right back.
	I'm Art 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 Heisch 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, 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
	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.
	A.I.
	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.
	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 that there's even some evidence that we're 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 a different reality for several hours.
	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.
	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.
	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 You know, 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.
	Yes.
	I'll give you some examples.
	Leslie Lemke was an autistic savant who played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.
	1 after a single listen without having had a piano lesson.
	Daniel Tammet 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 Peek, who was the model for Justin Hoffman's Rain Man.
	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, or 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 artistics of art, 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.
	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?
	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, 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.
	Wow!
	Alright, 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?
	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 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.
	And then of course there is 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 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?
	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, 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, let new lifeforms come into being.
	And 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 lifeforms arise, and then let intelligence, let consciousness enter into those lifeforms 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 lifeforms eventually leading to us on this planet.
	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.
	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 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.
	Why are you that optimistic?
	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.
	Perhaps it's just that intrinsically there's a certain amount of optimism.
	I can't really prove it, can I?
	No, and I think that the... 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.
	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.
	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, 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.
	Doctor, does your theory of a creative force, God, include the probability of an afterlife?
	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 It becomes a moot point.
	We can't possibly die, because how could that consciousness die if it's part of the infant intelligence?
	I think that a statement by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 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.
	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'll probably come back again, and that's probably the purpose.
	It's probably the purpose of being in this universe, to have experience.
	And 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.
	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 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, In 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.
	It's my understanding that reincarnation actually was part of the Bible at one time and the Council of Nicaea removed it.
	Had you heard that?
	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.
	I also tend, as you do, to believe that reincarnation may be the way consciousness would propagate, but there's a problem with it too, and that is, what sense does consciousness reincarnated without any conscious memory make?
	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 treasure someplace and then you find it.
	Well, if you buried it yourself, and then you try 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.
	So perhaps, along with everything else, the treasure He removes is wisdom, the one thing we gain with age.
	Indeed.
	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?
	No, not at all.
	All right.
	All right, this is fascinating stuff.
	Dr. Bernard Heisch is my guest.
	He's truly a hardcore scientist, but boy, he sure does have a different point of view.
	Leave your thinking caps on.
	This is going to be absolutely fascinating.
	From the Philippines, basically the other side of the world, I'm Art Bell.
	Listen very carefully to what this man says.
	Dr. Bernard Heisch.
	He's extremely credentialed.
	He's an astrophysicist.
	He's written over 130 scientific publications, served as scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for 10 years, was principal investigator on several NASA research projects, professional positions included scientist Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab, and deputy director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley.
	From a person of this magnitude, would you expect to be hearing what you're hearing tonight?
	I think not.
	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?
	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 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 It 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.
	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?
	Radically increasing.
	Well, there's a fixed supply or not.
	I wouldn't know that.
	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.
	Okay.
	Alright, alright.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	What is the zero-point field in physics?
	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.
	Okay.
	It's the energy that remains when all other energies are removed from the 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, this 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, a basic law of quantum mechanics, that 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 Uh, 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, um, basically the stability of matter, the, the ability of it to resist the acceleration and thereby make possible a, you know, a stable, solid world for, for evolution to take place on.
	So it's, uh, I would say if you look up zero point energy or 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 zero-point energy as studied in physics.
	And there are those who point to the zero-point field and equate it with God, yes?
	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.
	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.
	You apparently feel that physics in the modern world is facing some kind of crisis today.
	Is that correct?
	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.
	There are 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.
	Oh, now wait a minute.
	There is what's going on at CERN, and they have hopes.
	They have hopes.
	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 could 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 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've 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.
	Is there, therefore, a problem with the multiverse theory?
	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 a universe that really seem to be just right for planets to arise around stars and have conditions that are conducive to life.
	In fact, we could talk about those at any length that you want.
	Um, 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.
	Gee, Doctor, you put yourself in a unique position.
	You're going to have everybody angry at you.
	Well, I hope I have people curious about what I say, because I would like to... 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.
	Well, that's quite possible, and I would suggest that both sides go to my website, the website, thegodtheory.com, and see some of my questions and answers.
	That's 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's 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.
	Yeah, I was going to say, not for one that wants to survive.
	Might I ask, Doctor, how you got from being in the hard sciences, which you're clearly very much in, to writing this book?
	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.
	I did very well there and graduated, and went on to the St.
	Minard Benedictine Archabian 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.
	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.
	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
	the world from you. I'm in the Philippines.
	The Philippine Islands are approximately 87% Catholic.
	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 law.
	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 lampposts 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.
	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' book on the 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 thing.
	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.
	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.
	I'm kind of torn on that point.
	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.
	How long has your book been out, Doctor?
	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 That I do think you can believe in, if you want to.
	You don't have to.
	How has your book been greeted by your colleagues?
	You know, I don't really hold a 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.
	But still, there must have been some feedback.
	Somebody must have sent you an email saying, hey, what happened to you?
	No, you know, I've got nothing negative.
	Really?
	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 that I've written this book, which will be fine with me for a while anyway.
	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 quark, Came all that is.
	They just don't know how that happened.
	And, oh, that's music.
	That means we're at a break point.
	So when we get back, perhaps we can talk about that incident that nobody seems to understand at all.
	Would that be alright?
	That'd be just fine.
	I'd dive in.
	Good.
	All right, Dr. Bernard Heisch 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.
	Let's stay right there.
	Alright, as I said prior to the break, Doctor, I've always had this, I don't know, I've interviewed
	so many scientists that, 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.
	Thank you.
	It's just too much to contemplate.
	What's your take on it?
	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.
	In fact, there was 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 I'm not entirely alone among 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 looks 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.
	Okay, so it is your view then that it did occur that way, and that there was a creator that made that happen?
	Indeed.
	I think 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 pre-existing something to make something happen.
	You can only imagine a great emptiness.
	That's it.
	You can imagine a great emptiness prior to this.
	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 pre-existence of something in order to make anything happen.
	Well, if there was just great emptiness, Doctor, and you didn't even have two objects, I mean, in order to even have time, a measurable thing, you must have one object moving in relationship to another, yes?
	That's exactly correct, yes.
	Well, I guess we're both in an area that you can only speculate about.
	It really does inevitably lead to something so much greater than ourselves that it has to be a god.
	So why is it that scientists can't or won't make that little leap, or big leap?
	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.
	I think if we have a concept of God as an intelligence behind the universe, Not one that micro-engineers life-forms and creates the 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 hard-core 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 terra 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 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.
	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?
	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, But that will become part of the scientific mainstream.
	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.
	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?
	Well, I guess if it did, I suspect and I hope it would be a more peaceful world, because if we have that as a common belief, we can 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.
	So then, it would probably be your view that the path to God is an understanding and exploration of consciousness itself?
	I think so.
	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.
	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?
	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 is unsustainable for a civilization to be built upon.
	Are you beginning to achieve this with the book?
	Are you getting any feedback that indicates to you you're making some progress?
	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, working on a project called the Digital Universe that we haven't discussed yet, but maybe we can for a few minutes, which is a 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.
	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.
	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 It's consistent with everything we know in science.
	It's consistent with the Big Bang.
	It's 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, and you want to become a scientist.
	93% of the members of the Academy of Sciences reject God.
	I think that's pretty much the percentage you 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.
	I mean, that even includes the majority of the medical community, Doctor.
	I think the medical community is much more open to the 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.
	So I think the medical community is somewhat more open than is the world of physical science.
	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.
	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 would start a dialogue, a dialogue between scientists that have an open mind and 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.
	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?
	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 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.
	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's small, I agree, but it's beginning to move into areas that are fuzzy.
	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, you know, science could take off some of its own dogmatism and look at things like this, at results like this, experiments like the ones carried out in 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 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.
	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.
	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?
	How would you instruct them?
	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. 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.
	Dr. 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?
	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.
	Well, they did find him in a hole.
	Good point.
	Very good point.
	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 allowed to get anything.
	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?
	I think I can do that.
	All right.
	Dr. Bernard Heisch 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.
	I'm 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.
	Dr., 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.
	Well, I guess I want to talk for a couple 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.
	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 to the human body and trips to 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.
	It's a very ambitious program that ultimately I think will result in what Carl Sagan would have called Encyclopedia Galactica.
	That's what we hope to create over the next few years, the next few decades with the Digital Universe.
	That's digitaluniverse.net.net, that's correct.
	Okay, 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.
	Good evening Art and Dr. Heisch.
	Another top ten show guys.
	I can hear Terence McKenna's just beaming from the afterlife from hearing Dr. Heisch link God and novelty as scientifically as possible.
	I can only imagine the book you might write, Dr. Heisch, if you did DMT.
	I've heard of that.
	I'm not anxious to take it, but I've heard of that.
	We can focus our mind's consciousness on creating objects and experiments.
	With more minds here, Well, you ask a tough question.
	than ever before, and most minds are focused on their religious story.
	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 Terence called, the point at which
	all possible novelty will express itself?
	Well, 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 Mayan calendars and so on, but as a scientist I have to say, well, you know, 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.
	Doctor, do you think it will be a slow evolutionary progress, or do you think there will be a moment, an epiphany, just some magic moment of realization?
	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.
	A kind of a quickening, if you will?
	Pardon me?
	A kind of a quickening, if you will?
	A kind of quickening.
	Again, I don't know exactly, specifically how that is taking place and 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.
	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 be, might displease current policy.
	Any comments on all of that?
	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 Carell.
	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, they're 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.
	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 a reinforcing to the to the melting, probably 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.
	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.
	It's possible that it has.
	It really is.
	East of the Rockies, let's see, in Clinton, Massachusetts.
	Michael, you're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
	I would like to talk about how you were saying God is the overall consciousness and how you said before you took 11 experiments of making rain.
	That was me, yes.
	I'm nervous because I'm on the air.
	Just relax, Michael.
	I know you know what you wanted to say, so just take a deep breath and think about it and say it.
	Instead of God being the intelligence of our consciousness, I think of it more being the combination of all consciousness on all levels.
	I think that is probably pretty close to what the doctor was saying.
	Doctor?
	It is indeed.
	I'm talking about 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, 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.
	International line all the way to Manitoba, Canada.
	Brent, you're on with Dr. Heisch.
	Well, hello Dr. Heisch and 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.
	The whole question that Dr. Heisch and yourself were alluding to as to whether religion and science Uh, would clash, or whatever, meet in the middle somewhere.
	Uh, it seems to me that they are one and the same.
	Uh, we have, within all of us, a life force, if you want to call it spirit.
	Uh, 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.
	Uh, 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 Cosmoth.
	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 And 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.
	Okay, Brennan, I'm going to have to ask your life force to ask a question if you have one.
	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.
	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?
	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, 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 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.
	Have you looked into any of the apparent evidence of, for example, hypnotic regression that does move into another life of some amazing things sometimes, including other languages spoken, that sort of thing?
	Well, indeed.
	I would point to the work of Professor Ian Stevenson, who has 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, a 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 correlation between a child's story and actual families That could verify that indeed this individual that the child remembers was indeed so-and-so.
	And he found it!
	He found thousands of cases.
	He spent years doing this, probably 40 years.
	There are a number of books he's written and articles 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.
	Very good.
	Well, Carline, Aaron from Houston, Texas.
	You're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
	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.
	Well, all right.
	How about this line?
	Free will is a bitch.
	Well, that's true.
	So some people are just innately cruel.
	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.
	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'd 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.
	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 another person, it's disgusting.
	Yes, 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, they can devolve from 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.
	Transition back and forth, I suppose, between those two.
	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 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 of heaven as a place, a garden of Eden... Well, then, nevertheless, a heaven of sorts... Becomes, I guess, at that point, a matter of semantics.
	If reunion with the ultimate intelligence is heaven, then I'm comfortable with that.
	All right, good enough.
	And I'm just plain comfortable.
	We'll be right back.
	Kuki, 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 artbell at aol.com.
	That's a-r-t-b-e-l-l at aol.com.
	Or artbell, better yet, at mindspring.com.
	M-i-n-d-s-p-r-i-n-g.
	Artbell, all lowercase.
	A-r-t-b-e-l-l at mindspring.com.
	More in a moment.
	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?
	Well, I think, in my view, 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.
	It is, yes.
	Yes, He was.
	But then again, we are all God.
	So, there's sort of a brotherhood we have with Jesus Christ who was here 2,000 years ago.
	Oh, you do think Jesus Christ walked the earth?
	Pardon me?
	You do think He walked the earth?
	Well, there certainly was a person, Jesus Christ, to walk the earth.
	The question was, was he God?
	And the answer is, well, yes, but we are all God.
	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.
	Then, you, in effect, do cherry pick a bit in the Bible.
	Yes, I guess I do.
	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.
	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.
	Okay.
	Wild Card Line, Ben in Chandler, Arizona.
	You're on with Dr. Heisch.
	Hello.
	Yes.
	Thank you very much.
	And Dr. Hirsch, 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... Wait a minute, I'm not even sure about the first one.
	Slow down.
	Does God have a gender?
	Yes, and if so, would it make a difference in our existence?
	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 just makes no sense to me.
	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?
	I perceive of God as being an intelligence with infinite potential that exists beyond space and time, that exists beyond... In fact, here's an interesting perspective from Kabbalah.
	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 either 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, 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.
	You've explained eloquently, I think, how you feel about organized religion.
	That said, is there any organized religion or text that supports it, that more attracts you than Christianity?
	Well, I am still sort of a Christian.
	I'm a very independent-minded Christian, but if you asked 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.
	There may be different paths, but there's only one summit.
	So I would consider myself to be an independent Christian, Who attends the Unity Church and even has sung in a Unity Choir from time to time.
	A lot of what you said sounds closer to Buddhism to me than Christianity.
	Oh, it probably does.
	It probably does, and I'm not all that surprised.
	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 if what I said contradicted those, then probably one of us would be wrong.
	Wild Card Line, Daniel in California, you're on the air with Dr. Heist.
	Hello Art, hello 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 relieve you of the burden.
	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 alright.
	But I don't think anybody sufficiently understands all of this yet to begin using it.
	I agree, but I have to believe in the goodness of the human being in the faith that will 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 and separable from the Torah, the Hebrew Bible.
	In Hebrew, which you might call the Bible or the Old Testament, 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, 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 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'll 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?
	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 That'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.
	Alright.
	Wild Card Line 1, Joe in Los Angeles.
	You're on with Dr. Hayes.
	Yes, Mr. Hayes, 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, you take hypnosis and you put a person between two chairs and they're absolutely flat and when you take a mother, when you see the 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 off 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've got people that are basically incorruptible in the Vatican that do not decay.
	You've got Father Pinto 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.
	Okay, Joe, hold it there.
	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.
	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?
	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.
	Well, that's very good news.
	It is good news.
	West of the Rockies, Jack in Tacoma, Washington.
	You're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, Dr. Heisch.
	I applaud the intellectual integrity that you show in allowing for the theoretical existence of God.
	I wonder, have you ever asked God to answer specific scientific questions?
	And if so, what would those questions be?
	Ah, well, I would have a ton of questions.
	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, and 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.
	Wouldn't we all.
	East of the Rockies, Larry in Missouri.
	You're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
	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?
	Okay, we actually already covered that.
	It is an interesting concept to squash, but if you've been listening carefully to Dr. Haish, there really cannot be a hell, but there can be, I suppose, another life that punishes one with karma.
	Is that pretty close, Doctor?
	That's pretty much what I'm saying, yes.
	On the, well, let's see, let's go to Canada, I suppose, the International Law.
	And Margaret, you're on the air with Dr. Heisch.
	Oh, I'd like to ask the doctor if he's ever read Loftsingh Rampa's books.
	Actually, I did about 10 years ago.
	There were a couple of them that I read.
	Well, I've read all 12.
	He passed away quite a few years ago.
	But he was...
	A Tibetan priest.
	Yes.
	And he was dying.
	In his books, he was dying.
	There was a man in England was gonna commit suicide.
	And he took over his body.
	He ended up living in Calgary.
	Oh, for a good number of years.
	But according to his books, we come back 12 times?
	Okay, that's interesting.
	Is there anything in your thinking, Doctor, that sets a numerical number of times that one might incarnate?
	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 When to keep coming back to the 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.
	Nor could I. Don, in Oklahoma City, you're on the air with Dr. Heisch, and not a lot of time.
	Hi Art, hi Dr. Heisch.
	How are you guys doing tonight?
	Fine.
	Good.
	I wanted to ask you, I've read a book here recently that just kind of rang true with me.
	The beginnings of what we call God, saying that there was a void and the void created a vacuum and energy and 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, when God lowered his vibrational level and created the Big Bang to enter into this physical dimension, I'm sorry to cut you short.
	It's a wonderful question, but we'll have to leave it there.
	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. I'm sorry to cut you short, it's a wonderful
	question, but we'll have to leave it there. A quick comment?
	Well, I think there's some merit to that idea, and I wouldn't know how to
	take it to any deeper level than that because it is very complicated at
	that point.
	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.
	Let's do it again.
	Dr. Heisch, have a good night.
	Thank you.
	Take care, my friend.
	All right, Dr. Bernard Heisch.
	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 Art Bell.

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