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Aug. 24, 2015 - Art Bell
02:15:03
Art Bell MITD - Dean Radin Global Consciousness
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From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning,
good afternoon, wherever you may be across the world's many time zones, every single
one of them covered by this program, Midnight in the Desert.
I'm Art Bell.
Welcome.
I have two rules for the show.
As you know, no bad language and only one call per show.
And by the way, I would like to thank all the listeners last week who said, hey Art, did you know there's no audio on hold?
No, it didn't.
I do now and it's fixed.
Now, actually, we've got two things set up now that are pretty cool.
And that is, When you call to be on the air with a guest or by yourself, whatever the case may be, the phone will answer itself.
The age of robotics, huh?
The phone will actually answer itself and you will hear the show.
Now, the fact that it answers itself is cool, I guess.
And then you will hear the show and you will then know I should turn down my device because I'm going to be on the air very soon.
So don't worry about it.
Turn down your device because you'll be able to hear everything going on on the phone.
So a major advance thanks to the input of many of you callers last week.
You'd like to know we got that done over the weekend.
Now, a brief announcement.
This has to do kind of with the soul of this program, Midnight in the Desert.
It is the soul of the program.
We're in a fight, and here's how I'll put it.
It's already settled, so don't worry about the fight.
I have settled it.
It wasn't easy, but I've done it.
Because of the fact that the word of this show is getting around like, I don't know, the flu virus or something.
It's not a very good analogy, is it?
The word that we're doing it again is certainly out in the world.
And as a result of that, recently, a lot of, several, big, big radio stations have approached me about carrying the show.
However, it comes with a price, like everything.
You know, like selling your soul.
A little like that we did a show on that last Friday, selling your soul.
The price is that they are commercial broadcast stations, and I understand they have the need to run commercials.
I came to a point where I had to make a choice.
I had several large stations ready to jump in if I would only increase the number of commercials.
And so I searched my soul and the soul of the show.
You know, I did this once.
Obviously we could right now build another giant commercial network.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it, folks.
So I told them I cringed really hard.
Some of these are pretty big cities.
But I told them no.
I'm not going to increase the number of commercials per hour.
We only have six and that's where it's going to stay.
So I stopped it.
And I think it really does go right to the soul of the show.
You'll notice our five minute newscast doesn't have to do with the world news very much.
Has to do with the paranormal.
It has to do with science.
It has to do with a lot of the things that we talk about here.
That was part of my vision.
My other vision was not to commercialize the hell out of it to the point where, well, it's just not what I envisioned.
This is what I envisioned.
And so this is what we're going to stay with, even if the price is to tell these guys sorry, which I did.
Hard.
Hard, hard, hard.
For an old commercial radio guy like me, really hard.
But that's what we're going to do now.
There are visionaries out there, like KXL in Portland, that carries this.
And they will reap one large, giant benefit from it.
And that will be ratings that will be through the roof.
Because we don't clutter up the show with weird commercials, various services that I won't go into.
And so forth.
So, the soul of the show is going to remain what it is.
Anyway, I thought you'd want to know.
I made that decision and turned down quite a number.
In the old days, I never would have done this, but there you go, folks.
All right, world news.
What's going on?
Well, it's good and bad.
The good is that the two Koreas got together and decided not to go to war.
Actually, I think the North blinked.
That little idiot up there gave us a deadline.
And they began moving forces around.
And so we began moving forces around, as did the South Koreans.
And the South Koreans have had it.
They're not going to put up with any more CRAP from the North.
And they're going to fight back hard.
And now the North knows it.
So there were two days of, you know, long talks and the bottom line was North Korea apologized for the landmines they put in.
South Korea took down the blaring speakers and now there won't be a war.
The big news, bad news, is the stock market.
Holy moly!
We'll talk more about this tomorrow night.
I'm going to have a one-hour guest tomorrow night.
But U.S.
stocks slid again on Monday.
That's putting it mildly down 1,000 points at the beginning.
I think they ended up about 588 points down.
I am watching China right now in real time.
Let me see what China's doing.
Not good.
Shanghai is down 4.33% right now.
Thank you, iPhone.
4.33% right now.
That's another serious fall.
It will go round the world.
By the time I'm off the air, Europe will begin their fall, and then probably Wall Street will follow.
We shall see.
Coming up in a moment, Dr. Dean Radin, who is the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
His latest book, Supernormal, cool name, published by Random House in July 2013, discusses ancient legends from a scientific perspective about supernormal powers developed through the practice of yoga.
To do this, Dr. Radin discusses what yoga is really about.
It's not what we see today in most health clubs around the world.
He also describes what the traditional superpowers are.
Do you want superpowers?
And considers if they are merely superstitions or something more.
He focuses on scientific experiments when investigating these abilities.
And this is going to be fascinating stuff.
The whole thing has immense implications for our understanding of human potential for science and society.
The foreword, by the way, of Supernormal is written by Deepak Chopra.
So this is a very, very, very interesting guy we've got coming on.
As you may recall, he was very involved with Princeton and still is.
And the consciousness experiment that I so dearly love.
So coming up in a moment, Dr. Dean Radin and we will talk of many things.
It is a good night.
Stay right where you are because this is going to be a good midnight in the desert.
I'm Art Bell.
So into you Not yet.
12 and midnight in the desert is counting packets your way on the dark
matter digital network to call the show please direct your finger digits to the
one nine five two two two five fifty two seventy eight that's one nine five two
call art okay don't call art yet not yet I'll let you know when it is time so now
comes Dean Raiting And Dean, welcome to the program.
It has been years since we spoke.
Thanks, Art.
It's a pleasure to be on your show.
Good to have you.
Reading just real quickly from Something up on the Consciousness Project site.
It says, our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.
We predict structure in what should be random data associated with major global events.
When millions of us share intentions and emotions, the GCP or egg network Data show meaningful departures from expectation.
The experimental bottom line has a billion to one odds against chance.
That is a powerful finding based in solid science.
And that paragraph seems to me itself very, very powerful.
Do you still agree with that notion?
Sure.
The difference now is that the overall effect is actually about three trillion to one.
Oh my God.
Really?
And it keeps getting a stronger effect the longer the experiment goes.
Alright, well a lot of people don't know what it is.
It is an experiment at Princeton which is trying to figure out if consciousness, human consciousness, has an effect or even predicts something that will happen to human beings globally or in a very wide area.
Is that describing it fairly?
Yeah, pretty much.
You mentioned the term egg, and I should mention here that the idea of this was to imagine that we could put an equivalent of an EEG, an electroencephalogram, which has lots of little electrodes that you stick on your head, but instead we'd use the head of Gaia, the head of the globe.
Right.
And so I came up with this term electro-Gaia-gram, or EGG, and that's why it's called egg.
And these eggs are, I believe, in the form of computers scattered around the world, all reporting back to Mama at Princeton.
And basically, these computers, if I remember correctly, are outputting random numbers.
There's a random number generator.
And what Mama is looking for is when all of or a lot of these eggs suddenly agree and become not random, Anymore but take on some coherence that has meaning it means something's about to happen Something is happening or something like that, right?
Right.
So the metaphor here is a tsunami detector To detect if there's a giant unexpected wave that spans the whole ocean what you do is you you put buoys and you scatter them maybe thousands of buoys all around the ocean and if you imagine that each buoy has a The equivalent of a little bell on it.
Right.
And so all of these bells are tinkling randomly most of the time because they're only affected by local forces, the movement of the waves.
But every so often, all of the bells start tinkling at the same time in the same way.
So rather than getting this background tinkling, you get the equivalent of a rising chord, say.
There's a change that you can hear.
So, rather than using buoys in an ocean of water, we're using similar devices that are designed to produce basically random tinkling sounds, although it's an electronic circuit, in an ocean of consciousness.
Sorry, here's a metaphor.
Here's a scientific question for you.
What leads you to believe that what you're actually measuring And I know you've had some astounding measurements, the one before 9-11 was gigantic, and we'll talk about the before part, but how do you know you're actually measuring consciousness?
Well, we don't know how to measure consciousness directly, so all we can do is infer that there are moments in human history where Millions, perhaps billions of people are all paying attention to the same thing at the same time.
Right.
And so this is unusual.
This is actually unprecedented in history where we have the technology now where everyone's holding a smartphone and can participate pretty much in real time to large-scale events as they unfold.
So if we have these moments of very high mental coherence in the sense that all of the attentions are pointing in the same direction, If mind and matter are actually related to each other, which is the underlying hypothesis here, then when the minds become very coherent, something has to happen to matter because of our hypothesized relationship.
Namely, if mind and matter are more or less two sides of the same coin, then if one side of that coin becomes very coherent, then the other side has to correspond.
So we use random number generators because it's very easy to detect moments of order spontaneously arising, not just in one or two random generators, but all of them around the world.
So that's what we look for.
So, again, you can't know for sure that it's actually consciousness that you're measuring, but it does seem likely to me.
I'll say that.
In other words, scientifically there's no way to To actually say this is a lot of conscious minds thinking or reacting to something around the world at about the same time.
Right.
But this, the idea of indirect measurement is very common in science.
In fact, almost every measurement we make is indirect.
We make a measurement and then infer A property based on that measurement, but it's not the thing itself.
Okay.
So this is actually not different than making a measurement of almost anything.
Well, you mentioned that the numbers have changed, and it's no longer a billion to one, it's way higher.
Right.
That begins to make... I still don't know if it says it's consciousness, but it sure does say, here's some solid science.
Somebody better take a darn hard look at this.
So sometimes what people say is, okay, well, we'll buy the idea that there are these correlations, correlations between large movements and mind, and there's something happening in these random circuits.
So maybe what's happening is that when everybody turns on the TV and is watching something, that there's a change in the power grid, or there's a magnetic change, or there's some kind of physical change, and that's what we're seeing.
And our answer to that is that the random number generators are designed from the get-go to exclude all of the known mundane influences.
So, these are metal boxes that are grounded, so it's not electromagnetic effects.
It's impervious to radiation, it's impervious to changes in temperature, impervious to all known physical effects up to the point where the device begins to melt.
So, provided that most of these are in offices around the world or in people's homes, If the computer's running okay, and computers put out regulated voltages, these random generators are operating in a proper fashion, and we have a huge amount of data from periods where there aren't large-scale moments of attention.
So, actually, about 98% of the data is not periods of high interest in the world.
Right.
Dr. Ritten, a question for you, and this is just a reach.
But, you know, I love radio, every aspect of radio.
And in radio, if you have a better receiver that gets a better signal-to-noise ratio than the last receiver you had, and or if you have a better antenna for that receiver, either way you're going to get better data, better Decryption of whatever it is you're trying to listen to.
And I'm wondering if there has been any consideration given to some sort of way that one might amplify what is otherwise rather weak.
And by that I mean, of course, if it is our consciousness, that.
If there's some way to amplify it to the generators.
Well, we don't know yet how to amplify the consciousness side, assuming that's what it is.
Yes.
But we are actually doing an experiment now where we're changing the nature of the random number generator, hopefully to give us a better idea about what's going on on the matter side.
Really, really, really?
How so?
So, this is about five years ago.
We were thinking of, at that time, the odds against chance for the Global Consciousness Project was around a billion to one.
And so we simply said, OK, let's just assume this is a real effect.
Sure.
Well, what's happening to the random number generators that cause them to behave non-randomly?
And so what you need to do then is, again, on an engineering metaphor, you want to reverse engineer the random generator and kind of look down into the depths to find, well, why did these bits go this way versus that way?
Right.
So what we came up with is, first of all, you cannot go into a commercial random number generator and figure out what's going on, because the device doesn't have a tap at the actual source of the randomness.
Right.
So we created new random number generators.
We call them, for want of a better term, a quantum noise generator, because the source of randomness is actually quantum effects.
It's electron tunneling.
But we have a tap Right at the diode that's producing the noise.
Right.
And we're recording the noise itself.
Wow!
Of course, we couldn't do this when we started this project back in 1998 because it produces a huge amount of data.
We're recording at 44 kilohertz the actual raw noise.
Wow!
And we'd also decided that it would be nice to put these devices all around the world, but we're pumping out so much data that it would be difficult to actually support it by the internet.
So, we said we need to go to an event where there's tens of thousands of people, pretty isolated from the rest of the world, where there's at least one moment of 20 or 30 minutes where everybody is all engaged in the same thing.
And it became obvious to us what that was going to be.
It was the Burning Man Festival.
The Burning Man!
Right here in Nevada, yes.
In the middle of the desert.
Very isolated from the rest of the world, but between 60 and 70 thousand people, who during two events in particular, the burning of the man and the burning of the temple, you have huge amount of attention being paid on those two events, and each one lasts about a half an hour.
Can I ask a quick question, stupid question?
Is the amount of intention or consciousness affected by the quantity of drugs consumed?
Well, it's a very good question.
And one that can be answered at Burning Man!
Yes, although we don't have a good control.
I understand.
What we do know, though, is that I have friends who have gone to Burning Man many times, and they say that during the burning of the man, typically, and sometimes the temple as well, people in the audience do get a kind of palpable, sensed of effect, the feeling effect. I understand. Which is being
in the zone, like they all feel holy smoke, we're together in this and they feel it. Yes sir. So
whether it's the drugs or whether it's just the party atmosphere or something, it more or less reliably
produces the effect that we're hoping to get in the first place. Let me fairly say that I
think that that effect that people feel would be felt without the drugs. I was just sort of
trying to inject a little humor and wondered if the drugs might enhance or detract from it. Yeah.
possible answers.
I think it probably enhances.
Well, there you have it.
Dean Radin says, the use of some drugs enhances feeling.
Why do people... Yeah, walk you right out on a plank and push you over.
We're always drugging ourselves with legal and non-legal substances all the time.
That's right.
I actually have had a number of people on the show talking about drugs like DMT and some of those, and that might be a whole discussion we could have sometime.
I don't know if you have ventured down that highway, and I don't mean personally, but from an investigative point of view.
Yeah, we can talk about that.
I don't have much to say on it, because I'm the chair of our Institutional Review Board, which is the ethics review on experiments, and even though there are some drugs now that you can get permission to use, I've talked with people who do these experiments and asked whether they thought that somebody, for example, under the influence of psilocybin, could actually participate in an experiment.
And the answer is, for someone who's extremely experienced with the drug, they might be able to.
But in most cases, once the person is, shall we say, intoxicated, participating in an experiment is the last thing in the world that they're interested in.
I'm not sure if intoxicated is the proper word.
Are you?
Some word like that.
Toxic is probably not correct.
No.
Let's say put into an altered state of consciousness.
Much better.
Yeah.
Much better.
An altered state.
Yeah.
Okay, well then we do have some avenues we can go down that I didn't expect.
I really like, when you say a quantum noise generator, what's quantum about it?
Well, the source of the noise are electrons that are tunneling through a forbidden zone.
So, as a ham radio guy, you know that what a diode is doing is blocking electrons from getting across a barrier, but sometimes they get across anyway, and that's a quantum effect.
It's the wave-like nature of electrons that allow them to tunnel through a forbidden zone.
When that tunneling takes place is considered to be fundamentally random.
So, at a micro-scale, if you were actually to pay attention to what's happening at a diode, especially a Zener-type diode, you have these little pops that are happening.
Absolutely.
These little pops are timed randomly.
So, when we're recording noise from the diodes, we're recording these little random pops, and they're happening so quickly that you can't see them very well at 44 kHz, which is our recording rate, but what you do see is a very random-looking trace.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
Diodes, folks, it's a little device that allows electrons to flow in one direction, not the other.
Normally.
Right.
But Dr. Radin is saying some do flow in the, well, in the forbidden direction, I guess would be the way to put it.
All right, Dr. Radin, hold on.
This is going to be very, very interesting stuff.
Stay right where you are.
From the high desert, this is Midnight in the Desert with Dean Radin and I'm Art Bell.
Doing alright.
So listen to this.
While midnight sweeps across America, you've found an oasis for the mind.
To call Midnight in the Desert, please dial 1-952-CALL-ART.
That's 1-952-225-5278.
Dr. Dean Radin is the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
He's got a brand new book called Supernormal, and we're about to get there.
We're going to talk about being supernormal in a few moments.
Every time somebody on this show mentions the word quantum, I always want to give them the opportunity to explain to me and everybody else what they think they might know about quantum entanglement, if anything.
Doctor?
Well, it's always good to start with very simple questions, like what is the nature of consciousness and what is quantum entanglement?
Yes, especially late at night.
I know, but that's the time to think about this kind of stuff.
I mean, it may even be related to the rest of what we're talking about in some way, who knows?
But quantum entanglement is fascinating in almost every way a person can talk about it and imagine, but I know you can't explain it.
Nobody can.
Yeah.
Right.
And I am guilty of using the word quantum and describing the way that our new random number generators work.
The reason why quantum is interesting in this case is the major difference between classical and quantum mechanics is In classical mechanics, or classical physics, it is assumed that objects are separate, and more importantly, that observation does not affect the thing being observed.
In quantum mechanics, that's no longer true.
You observe a quanta, an individual quantum particle, say, its behavior changes.
And so that's interesting because it opens the possibility that there's a physical mechanism underlying the idea of measurement or observation, and that opens the door just a crack for consciousness to come into play.
Yes, yes, yes.
As I mentioned, there could well be a connection and you just made it.
Right.
Possibly.
You're absolutely right.
The mere power, the effect of observation is astounding.
And that could be wrapped right into consciousness and the whole thing that you've been investigating.
So I personally think, Dr. Radin, that the work you're doing and looking into all of this is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of, you know, I don't want to, it's unfair to use the word paranormal Connected to this, because it's not really paranormal, it's just an investigation into what is, and science will eventually make it para-fact.
Yeah, paranormal is just a placeholder word, meaning we don't understand yet what we're looking at.
Hear, hear.
So it's true that most of the work that I'm doing now would probably fall into the category of physics.
We're interested in looking at the That this major outstanding problem in physics, called the quantum measurement problem, which is all about why does the quantum world, why does this tiny microscopic world that we're floating upon, essentially, why does it respond to observation?
And I should add here that the founders of quantum mechanics, almost all of them, including all the way up until the 1950s, with people like John Voigt-Neumann, Who literally wrote the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
They all seriously discussed and took seriously the notion that there's something peculiar about consciousness that seemed to play a role in the physical world.
Now, today this is considered a minority opinion.
Many physicists today wouldn't imagine that consciousness had anything to do with quantum mechanics.
But on the other hand, not that many physicists today are paying attention to the philosophical underpinnings of quantum mechanics or the foundations of quantum mechanics.
That's right.
And when you look at the various interpretations of quantum theory today, there's roughly a dozen or even more different interpretations.
One of them is certainly that consciousness plays an important role, and there is no majority opinion in terms of what specialists and the foundations of quantum mechanics What they think is actually trying to tell us about the nature of the physical world.
So that's why one of the reasons why I'm doing physics-oriented studies is because one of the ways that you advance in physical theory is by doing experiments.
I mean, that's the only way we know how to advance.
I'm with you there.
Let me take you back now to, I think, one night when we attempted to, on that other show, get a lot of people concentrating and move the Richter scale a little bit.
And then I did a number of experiments, I'm sure you recall, trying to bring rain to areas successfully, I might add, and trying to have effects on people's health successfully, I might add.
And I got to the point where after about, I forget how many, five, seven experiments, something like that, I had you on the air.
And I remember that night asking you, I'd given it a lot of thought, and I thought, you know, I'm beginning to dabble here where perhaps I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
And even though it seems like we're doing a good thing, I recall a wish for rain in Texas where there was no forecast of rain and then one, it really came after our experiment and it flooded.
So, that set me thinking and people started, of course, emailing me saying, come on Art, move a hurricane, move a typhoon.
And that set me thinking, I have no idea what I'm doing.
And while experiments are fun, Um, well, I go back to when they pushed the button on the atomic bomb.
About half the scientists thought it would set the atmosphere on fire in a chain reaction.
Kill us all.
So, you never know what an experiment is going to do.
I really enjoy experiments, and I may even try another one of these, but they're a little freaky and scary, frankly.
There are unintended consequences.
There you have it.
Whenever you're dealing with the edge of the known, you have to pay attention to the unintended consequences.
And of course, it's almost by definition impossible.
So you just have to be very careful.
So one of the reasons why we're doing experiments of the type that we do, which might seem a little artificial, like the one of Burning Man, is because it's pretty benign.
You know, we're not asking people to mentally try to change anything.
We're just looking in the background.
To see whether this large-scale attention is pushing the physical world around in a measurable way.
And to make a long story short, we are seeing that and we're slowly beginning to get a sense of what is actually happening and why we get the effects in this Global Consciousness Project.
Okay.
What do you think you know?
In other words, You say you're beginning to get a grasp of how you change something material with focused intent.
Not intention.
It's attention.
So what we're seeing here is actually probably more described as a metaphor than a theory at this point.
The metaphor of a tsunami detector actually is kind of driving the way that we're doing the analysis.
Because as I mentioned, we're recording pure noise.
Right.
And if you do a Fourier transform on pure noise, you're able to see the underlying frequencies in the noise and you're able to see the phase of the noise.
Right.
So, we're thinking there's probably not too much going to go on in terms of the amplitude of the frequencies, but there might be in the phase, because after all, when you get a lot of phases that are normally random, and they suddenly start coming together, that's the difference between a light bulb and a laser.
Very interesting, yes.
It's the same amount of energy in both cases, but one is extremely coherent, and it produces like almost an entirely new kind of light.
So, we're looking at phase differences.
And the noise.
Wow.
These moments of attention.
And that's where we're beginning to see some interesting things.
Sorry for all the wows, but I mean they're justified.
This is new areas of your research that I'm just now hearing about and that's how I react as well.
That's really interesting.
So phase changes.
Right.
And how do you quantify it?
How do you For example, just describe what will be done at Burning Man.
Well, what we're doing is, last year we had 10 of these new type of random number generators on the playa, and the prediction was that we would see phase coherence between the generators.
So we're looking at actually at cross correlations among all of the generators.
Right.
So this year we're taking between 30 and 50 generators and scattering them all around
the playa, the desert, and again we're going to look at phase changes among all of the
generators at the same time during periods like the burning of the man or the burning
of the temple as compared to other times when people's attention is scattered all over the
place.
So what we would predict then is that when all this attention, this mental attention
becomes coherent, it's as though the minds go into phase coherence.
Well we're going to look at that and see if the same thing happens in the matter.
In this case, the matter is the random noise.
Doctor, is there any difference geographically?
In other words, Burning Man is a relatively tiny event from a geographic point of view.
And you're going to have these generators close, very close in.
How am I going to phrase this?
Would it matter if these detectors were in Moscow?
Could they still measure burning man the same way?
Or should I conclude that there is a geographic nearness effect?
That's a very interesting question.
It doesn't have a good answer yet at this point.
However, my guess is that proximity matters mostly in a psychological sense and not in a physical sense.
Because, see, this is not just a physics experiment and it's not just a psychology experiment.
It's right smack in between.
So, we can't ignore that there's going to be a psychological component to it.
And in this case, it's the psychology of us as the investigators, right?
We're involved in it.
Of course.
We're entangled with our experiment.
We're putting it out on the playa.
We have a certain expectation.
So, that psychological aspect is wrapped into the study itself.
However... You are the observers.
Well, we and everybody on the playa are doing something.
That's the inference.
Yes.
But however, in order to test the notion that you need locality, some of the generators are actually going to be in our lab in California.
Oh, no kidding.
A few hundred miles away from the desert.
Right.
But we will, by definition, simply tell the generators, your sister generators are out in the desert.
And I want you to behave the same way.
And this will help us see whether or not it's us, as the experimenters, that are somehow linking the meaning of the generator to the place.
Or maybe if the generators in the lab don't show any effect, but the ones in the playa do, then we'll say, okay, well maybe there is something like a physical distance that makes a difference here.
I've got an idea for you.
Okay.
Why not, just for fun, ...associate two of those monitors, those computers, with each other, just for fun, before they experiment.
I mean, what if the sensors themselves can be entangled, kind of like quantum entanglement, and that would then cause them to show similar results at a spooky distance?
Yeah, that's actually how we're doing the association.
Oh, really?
The boards that these generators are made on are little printed circuit boards and made in pairs.
You're so far ahead of me, Doctor.
You're making me feel inferior.
No, no, no.
You're asking exactly the right questions.
So these are, of course, things that we're thinking of in the process of doing the experiment.
We make the pairs of generators.
They're, by definition, linked.
They're entangled from the get-go, and then they're separated, and some go here and some go there.
I see.
So we're going to look at that issue as well.
Okay.
None of this is what you actually came on the program to talk about.
I just couldn't help myself.
It's okay.
It's fascinating.
And of course, your book is called Supernormal.
And of all people, Deepak Chopra wrote the foreword.
This is extremely interesting and let me just jump way ahead and then we'll fill in.
Is it possible that human beings can acquire super normal powers?
Well, yes, I think it is.
However, a very, very important component of all this is natural talent.
If you train to be a high jumper, But you don't have any talent in being a high jumper?
You're never going to get beyond three or four feet, no matter what you do.
Let us define what we mean by supernormal powers.
Can you give me a good example of what would be a supernormal power by definition?
Okay, so first I need to make a distinction between supernatural and supernormal.
Oh, sure.
Supernatural has a connotation of the divine.
This is a gift from God.
It's something that is beyond human.
In the yoga tradition, supernormal is the term that I selected.
It's because it is assumed that these abilities are an inherent capacity of human beings, and actually not just humans, but any sentience has this natural capacity to do certain things.
So, the certain things that are listed in classical yoga are mostly clairvoyance, various forms of clairvoyance from the macroscopic to microscopic, and some forms of psychokinetic influence, and then a whole bunch of things having to do with your own body.
So, those are the supernormal capacities.
We're talking about levitation becoming very light, and gravitation, which is the opposite, becoming very heavy, about inedia, Meaning you don't have to eat or drink anything.
We're talking about invisibility.
Things that you'd expect to see in comic books.
So those are described.
They're considered to be rare, even among the adepts.
Extremely rare to find anybody in today's world who can do these things, or at least is willing to show it.
And by far, what's much more common are what we consider plain vanilla psychic experiences.
Clairvoyance, precognition, that sort of thing.
Right.
Okay.
Boy, that's a long list.
I don't even know where to pick up.
With this list that you just gave me, have you Scientifically concluded that there really are people that can do this, these various things.
I mean, levitation, I'm very interested in psychokinetic ability.
Have you actually seen it demonstrated?
At the macro scale, no.
So we're talking about actual hovering of people, as in yogic flying?
No.
Even the best yogic flyers in the world can't hover.
They hop, but they can't hover.
And nobody can fly, as far as I can tell.
In terms of macroscopic, psychokinetic effects?
Yes.
No.
I've seen things like spoons being bent in very bizarre ways that don't seem to be normal, including things like the bowl of a soup spoon bent in half.
That would be very difficult to do if it wasn't a trick.
And there are, of course, plenty of ways of tricking it.
Well, that is my question.
Has it always turned out to be a trick, or do you think there really are people that can actually do that?
Well, I would say that the vast majority of things you see on YouTube are tricks.
People who claim to be able to do any of these things.
So those are almost certainly tricks.
And in cases where people are sincere, like disciples of gurus who claim that they've seen certain things, I've seen some of the videos that they've shot of what's supposedly telepathy, or not telepathy, but levitation.
Right.
And it's not.
It's hopping.
For movement of objects through psychokinetic means, we're talking about static objects, not something even like a little pinwheel, but just put a pen on a desk and move it mentally.
I've never seen that happen.
Oh, I have tried so hard.
But in terms of pinwheels, extremely sensitive systems, yes, I've seen things that I think are real.
Most of the evidence for mind-matter interaction are random systems or what we've been doing recently involving optical systems with interferometers and things of that sort.
Right.
I know the Russians did a lot of experiments in this area.
Do you think When we get back, we're in a break.
Do you think any of that is real?
And so we'll pick up on that when we get back.
But boy, the Russians really did some impressive stuff.
Could have been tricks.
Who knows?
I'm Art Bell.
I'm Art Bell.
in the darkness this is midnight in the desert with Art Bell
Now, here's Art.
Dr. Radin is my guest, Dr. Dean Radin, who is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
His latest book is Supernormal, and we're beginning to talk about supernormal things here.
And indeed they are, and I did mention at the break the Russians.
Boy, they did some seemingly really incredible experiments that were captured on video some time ago, and I'm sure that in your quest you've looked at those, and I wonder what you concluded.
Yes, I've looked at those, and the key word you mentioned is seeming.
I would say that it's very, very difficult to know based on the videos.
Even videos that haven't been made public as to whether or not what we're seeing is real or perhaps disinformation.
Are you privy to videos that are not public?
Some, yes.
And also from China.
Really?
So, it's not that different than what you can see on YouTube.
The only difference, perhaps, is the source.
It is known whereas sometimes on YouTube you never know who's who's posting what?
So they're both in Russia and China there are supposedly some highly talented individuals who are able to do
Things that we we generally don't see in the West Doctor are they are they ahead of us?
in this field Are the Russians and the Chinese ahead of us?
I don't think so.
No.
Good, that's nice to hear.
Yeah, we're dealing with phenomena that have been around since the beginning of humanity.
I'm reasonably sure that all major governments are tracking research in this area, because the moment somebody gets a breakthrough, that's a major threat.
But I don't think that there's very much Secret government research going on at the moment.
Actually, if a human, this is pure speculation, but I think it's good speculation, if I developed a superpower and I could influence others or influence things, if I could set this pencil on end and knock it over with my mind, I'll tell you, Doctor, I don't think I'd tell a soul.
I wouldn't tell anybody because, number one, people like yourself, well, no, you're a good guy, other people like yourself would get me and dissect me quickly, and or, other human beings, once they found out I really could do what I claimed I could do, would hate my guts.
And I might seem like a novelty at first, but if I could do things that other people couldn't do, they would hate me.
Eventually.
You are correct.
It's a major threat.
In many ways, it's a major threat.
Even if it had nothing to do with psychokinetic effects, just somebody being an extremely good telepath, for example.
Right.
Huge threat.
So, this actually brings us back to yoga.
It does.
One of the things that I wrote about in my book, Supernormal, is, well, why are these things talked about, these comic book style superpowers, Mentioned in yoga as kind of matter-of-fact do these practices and you'll develop these effects But it all comes with a proviso and a prohibition There's actually says in some of the sutras in the yoga sutras, which is like the the classical book of yoga That if you develop these abilities, you shall not demonstrate them to anyone including honored teachers for the very reason that you're saying it's actually two reasons one is that
That people are frightened.
Even people who know about these things can be frightened if they have very strong abilities.
The second is that the moment you demonstrate it to somebody else, your ego will be inflated because you have a power and people will respond to it as a power.
This is what gives rise to gurus who go a little bit nutty.
It gives rise to Darth Vader.
falling to the dark side. It's extremely difficult to withstand the way that other people would respond to you if
you actually demonstrated this. So
that's why these big powers are...
the student is told that you will encounter some of these but do not
demonstrate them.
No, I think it would also give rise to strapping me to a wood post and putting lots of flammable stuff below me and
burning me eventually. I mean, maybe not in the modern world, but
you know, I'd be filled with lead.
One way or the other, I would not be tolerated.
Even in the modern world?
That's right.
Maybe not in the United States, we hope, but in other countries where there's still pretty high superstition, there is fear of witches and people are killed.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, look, even in the United States, we think we're so advanced, in some ways we are, But our human emotions are pretty much as they always were.
I grant you we're tolerating more, but somebody with that kind of power, for example, the ability to read one's mind, no way.
That would simply not be tolerated.
So you have to imagine, if there are people capable of this, they're keeping it to themselves.
Fair?
Yes.
However, the reason why we study, the reason we do experiments of the type that we study is to see whether, in principle, something like telepathy is real.
And in principle, is psychokinetic effects real?
And we don't generally go looking for people who claim that they have these abilities, because sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.
So instead, we work with the prototypical college sophomore.
In other words, people who think that they might or might not have the ability, they
don't really know, but they're willing to try and experiment. That's how the vast majority
of Psy research is done, with just ordinary people to see if the yogis were correct
in saying that this is a natural inherent ability and most people quite weak, but
nevertheless there.
And so we know from those experiments that average people, selected pretty much at random, can demonstrate telepathy, to a very weak degree, but for a real effect in the laboratory.
And the same with precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis.
That's how we know these effects are real, but at the extreme levels, the Olympic levels, those people are very difficult to find.
Okay, well here's an off-the-wall question for you.
It is thought, generally, That teenage girls in their formative years, you know, 13, 14 years old with the hormones just raging away, have powers that are abnormally higher than others.
Is that just like something that belongs in myth busters or is there possibly something to it?
You're talking about psychic powers or psychic abilities?
Yes.
I would say probably not.
No.
Okay.
Mythbusters.
Yeah.
The few studies looking at developmental stages in psychic ability, the peak usually is at four years old.
Really?
Yeah.
It's young children who don't know yet that they're not supposed to do these kinds of things.
Yes.
Well, that I get.
Very interesting.
Four years old.
And they learn that they are not supposed to be able to do that by the time they're seven or eight?
Well, when they start to become socialized, and they realize that if you start revealing secrets of your friends, you're going to get shunned real quick.
Uh-huh.
So they don't do that.
But at four, they don't know what they can't do, so they do it.
Right.
And if they're younger than that, then their language skills and their interaction skills are not quite developed enough.
Somewhere around four years old.
And by the way, around four years old is where you get most of the evidence for reincarnation.
You're absolutely right.
What an interesting point you've made.
Wow.
Most of the evidence for reincarnation.
God knows I've heard so many, as you point out, about four-year-olds who will say things like, oh, you know, I did that.
I was there a long time ago.
Or they suddenly recall something just out of the blue that cannot be.
There's a great deal of evidence for that, and you're right.
Just about that age, before they know they can't do it, and after they've got enough language skills to prove they can.
Right.
Wow.
Fortunately, the abilities are not suppressed completely, and that's why we're able to take college sophomores and see effects.
Now, if you start selecting people based on reports that they had, some people become adults and they never lose these abilities, even quite strong as adults.
If you select those people out and you do the experiments with them, you get much stronger effects in these studies.
So, we're able to do a variety of partitioning the data according to personality and experience and so on, and you get pretty much what you would expect.
The talent makes a difference.
Indeed.
All right, let's talk for a moment about yoga.
What we know of as yoga in the West, and I'm no expert, so you may need to define yoga for me, just period, the common Western definition.
And then what you're talking about, the yoga you're talking about, is a different animal, right?
Well, it's the original animal.
So, yoga in the West is kind of a quasi-spiritual aerobics.
It's stretching with special pants.
Let's put it that way.
And it's perfectly fine, but it's only one tiny little component of the original classical yoga.
What we do today is mostly poses and stretching and some strength building and that's all mainly about what in a classical sense we'd call the asanas, the poses.
The purpose of the poses and the strength building was for one thing only in the original yoga.
It was to make your body strong enough so you're able to sit down for very, very long periods of time.
That's why.
And so why do people need to sit for very long periods of time?
It's because the real goal in yoga was meditation and all of the training physically and mentally and breathing and all the rest of it was to allow your body to be comfortable enough so that you could meditate for many, many hours every day.
That's where That's generally what we're not doing in the West, although I think more and more yoga studios are introducing some degree of meditation into the practice.
If somebody is able to meditate many hours a day, it is toward what end?
It is towards the end of reaching a state of meditation called Samadhi, which is a form of absorption or union with the universe.
We might think of it as a classical mystical state where you see no distinction between you and me and there and then and now and here and so on.
All of those ordinary distinctions dissolve.
This is, by the way, what the founder of our Institute had.
Edgar Mitchell was in the spacecraft and had Samadhi with the universe.
A very classic mystical experience.
Many people report this.
Sometimes it's spontaneous.
Sometimes it's in meditation.
We did a survey of 2000 beginning meditators to simply ask, from the beginning of your meditation practice to now, which might be a matter of months or years, have you noticed any spontaneous arising of things like synchronicities and maybe telepathic impressions and so on?
Have you simply noticed this happening?
And something like 75% of them say yes.
So, we have some anecdotal evidence, reporting evidence, that what the classical yoga is talking about is that we're pretty sure that psychic abilities are arising from a very deep part of ourselves.
And if you think of this as a mind-matter interaction, very deep in the physical world and very deep in the mental world are more or less the same.
That's the assumption here.
So, if you train your mind to dive very deeply into your mental space, you're actually also diving into physical space.
And so one of the reasons why you're able to start having amazing synchronicities and some psychic abilities is because, as we know, deep down in the physical world, the quantum world, it's non-local.
We're no longer dealing with things that are in space or time.
It's somehow beyond space-time.
Well, every psychic ability, every mystical experience, the one thing that makes it strange is that it is beyond space-time.
Right?
Yes.
You have connections with people at a distance, either in space or in time.
We give it different names like telepathy and clairvoyance, but all of them are considered weird because they don't seem to fit in ordinary space-time.
Is it possible to begin this practice of yoga as you're defining it?
Um, with the goal being to attain one of these superpowers, or is that cheapening it to the point where it doesn't work?
In other words, you've got to get to this union with everything before you can even begin to think about it.
Well, some people certainly will take up yoga with the idea that they're going to develop special abilities.
Yes.
And some of them probably will.
So nothing wrong with that attitude about it as you enter into it?
Well, from a classical yoga perspective, you're told to not put a lot of attention on the cities because you'll be seduced by the power.
And by the way, you actually don't need to read Samadhi in order to have these abilities.
Some of them are going to spontaneously arise pretty quickly.
But if you get just overjoyed with having occasional telepathy, you might stop doing your practice.
And that's the warning in classical yoga.
That's not the goal.
The goal is to go way beyond that.
Right, right.
Hold tight.
Oh, we're going to break here.
Want to take a ride?
From the high deserts and the great American southwest.
This is Midnight in the Desert, exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
To call the show, dial 1-952-CALL-ART.
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Dr. Dean Radin is the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
He is my guest tonight.
Boy, we are in the deep stuff here.
No question about that.
Fascinating stuff, actually.
Alright, Doctor, this one will probably hit you pretty hard.
Or maybe not.
But it's from JDD, whoever that is.
I get these computer messages.
Please ask the good Doctor on what basis and what authorities he concludes that the purpose of Samadhi is union with the universe, in quotes, rather than with the supreme creator of the universe.
Thanks.
Great show.
Tricky question.
Doctor?
Yeah, it's a good question.
Not really.
It's a bad question.
It's a tricky question.
Well, I don't know.
It's a matter of interpretation.
So, and one of the things, in fact, the reason why I studied yoga rather than, for example, I could have looked at the charisms of Catholicism.
I think that the actual phenomena themselves, the charisms and the cities are basically exactly the same thing.
I mean, they're even described in similar ways.
Levitation shows up in Catholicism, shows up in Shamanism, shows up in Yoga, shows up everywhere.
Yoga, I decided to take that route because it assumes that these are human abilities.
These are not divine gifts.
Ah, there you went.
Yeah.
So, Samadhi then becomes something about you and the universe.
And in that case, you don't need to assume that there's a divine.
Well, that's what they wanted you to, wanted to try to force you to answer.
Well, I mean, personally, I'm not a very religious person, so I don't, I don't need the divine.
I don't need that hypothesis.
Maybe there is some kind of a universal intelligence of some type, but I might not speak about it.
I don't know.
Well, all right.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think that reincarnation is a significant possibility?
Well, I think it would be foolish to not pay attention to the case studies.
On the other hand, there are a number of ways of interpreting that information, which may or may not suggest that there's actual survival, or at least reincarnation-type survival.
Since we know that a lot of the data comes from roughly four years old, and we know that four years old are also about as psychic as they're going to get naturally, and we know that one of the forms of psychic ability is clairvoyance, then a child could use clairvoyance to get any information that they wanted to, in which case they could just as easily get information that they will get lots of positive feedback from their family and maybe researchers who come and study them.
So, we don't actually know where the information comes from.
Well, we do know that Buddhism certainly supports the concept of reincarnation.
Yes.
And I know that you're going to talk about the Dalai Lama in here, or an instance with the Dalai Lama at the very least, and it's all absolutely fascinating to me.
I have this funny feeling that there may be something to reincarnation, but you see, When you say there is, or that there very well may be, then you're getting close to what this person was asking about the Creator.
Well, but why?
Why would reincarnation necessarily mean that there must be a divine?
Well, true, I guess.
But it would seem to suggest that there is a power far greater than Ourselves, and you can call it divine as easily as not.
Right.
Is there a power greater than us?
Absolutely, that is the case.
And I'm thinking of this not so much in terms of traditional notions of God, but simply in how much do we actually know about who we are and our place in the universe?
Not a whole lot.
Yeah, as compared to what is left to learn, we know almost nothing.
So, is there a possibility of other life in the universe that knows much more, simply because they've been around for a few billion years more?
Almost certainly.
But those people, to use a word, because I don't know what else to call them, if they're... I mean, imagine what we know now through science, and just a thousand years from the future, today.
and where we were a thousand years ago, we're going to know much, much more about everything.
Sure.
If somebody from a thousand years in the future came back and gave us a lecture, we would understand almost nothing.
And somebody might then mistake them for being divine.
It irritates the hell out of me that I know I'm going to die and not be able to be around to know these things.
Well, that's why things like reincarnation are an interesting idea, because maybe a piece of you will be
around.
Maybe not.
I mean, this is part of the great mystery.
We don't know yet.
That's actually one of the reasons why I do this kind of research, because, like everyone else, I'm interested in knowing the answer, but I'm not willing to take it on faith.
Well, that's what science is, right?
That's what it is.
But, you know, I do know that eventually science is going to pin a bunch of this down, and I think that physicists and perhaps even some religious people are going to get closer and closer and closer eventually.
As more gets known, or maybe there'll be a giant war, who knows, as we discover more about ourselves.
There was a movie, probably little known, I wonder if you happen to ever catch it, it was called Eye Origins.
No, I don't know that.
Well then, to you and the audience, I recommend that you have that experience.
It's about reincarnation, and that's all I'll say.
It is incredibly well done, and it simply speculates that as we begin to identify people worldwide by their eyes, you know, the bio-identification that you can do with eyes, that they suddenly began Begin finding two people with exactly the same eye identification.
Well, turns out that one of the people was dead.
And somehow or another, well, I don't want to give away the whole movie, but I think you get the idea, right?
Yeah, my sense is that for many centuries there's been this big split between science and spirituality.
That split is slowly going to be closed.
And so, what we currently call science today and what we currently call spirituality are going to merge at some point.
And we'll have better terms for both sides of that, what is currently a gulf, but the gulf is going to disappear.
And it basically all comes down to what do we know?
Well, we know a little bit now, but there's a lot left to learn.
Why are scientists so predisposed to not just dismiss what they cannot prove, but ridicule it?
Well, if science... if you think about the way that science began four or five hundred years ago, it was very lucky, wealthy people who had the luxury of time to be able to look at the natural world.
Right.
Today, it's people's jobs.
So the moment that your job depends on how you talk about things, you have a very strong motivation to go with the flow and to not rock the boat, so to speak.
Sure.
You need to eat.
You need to eat.
Unless you have progressed so far into what you're going to talk about tonight that you don't need to eat.
Well, I made a decision a long time ago that I find these topics More interesting than anything else that I know.
So do I. I like to eat too, but occasionally I don't have to.
Oh, we will talk about that.
Stay right there.
Amazing stuff.
There are people who actually don't have to eat.
Hogwash you say?
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Alright, so here we go.
Once again, Dr. Radin, welcome back.
Thank you.
Let's cover a couple of things before we do pick up lines.
As an example, the Dalai Lama.
Every time the Dalai Lama is around, a lot of prominent scientists, who you would think wouldn't want anything to do with the Dalai Lama, line up to meet him.
How come?
Because they want to take a picture with him, or a selfie, so they can put it on Facebook.
Well, yes, but that must mean that they think very highly of the Dalai Lama and a prominent scientist probably ought not think that way.
Well, why not?
I mean, he has a certain gravitas and is a Nobel Prize winner and political leader.
On the other hand, he's also well trained in science.
Yes, indeed.
And he's been holding dialogues between Buddhist monks and scientists for many years now.
And it's one of the outcomes of it has been very valuable in terms of making meditation research safe for academics.
It's led to all of these wonderful books that are out there now about
Changing change your mind change your brain books like that.
It's all about brain stuff but the Dalai Lama is somewhat frustrated in all this
because he wants the scientists to start talking about the rest of
What his beliefs are of Tibetan Buddhism which involve all of the psychic and mystical experiences?
The scientists who are generally invited to those meetings don't know anything about this area
And so they usually just dismiss it or they say well. We don't know anything about it
Some scientists have even had super normal experiences.
There is your book title, Super Normal Experiences During Meetings, Meetings with the Dalai Lama.
And I think you know of something specific that happened to a psychologist.
Paul Ekman is it?
Yeah, Paul Ekman.
So Paul Ekman is a famous American psychologist who came up with the idea of analysis of micro-movements in the face.
You can tell a lot about somebody by these tiny little movements going on in their facial expressions.
So Paul describes a case where he was in the presence of the Dalai Lama And he said, unexpectedly, he had this very strong physical sensation, which he would feel in the presence of the Dalai Lama, which he called warmth.
But there wasn't any heat involved.
It's something that felt very good.
It was nothing like he had ever felt before or after.
And the way he then started to deconstruct what was happening is that he just felt good.
He felt goodness somehow.
And he had realized that for much of his life, he had always felt very angry about things, and the anger was simply missing when the Dalai Lama was around.
Well, it turns out that one of the special powers, the so-called siddhis that are described in yoga lore, one of them is called radiated nonviolence or radiated goodness.
And this is when you achieve a certain state of equanimity in yourself that you radiate it out.
Okay, that would be almost influencing.
In other words, remote influencing.
And maybe you're not going to be willing to call it that, but I don't see how you cannot.
Well, it's not influencing in the sense of intention.
It's simply presence.
Your presence alone will affect people around you.
There is also a city that is about Influencing people at a distance, and it's very, very similar to what we might call a Jedi mind trick.
Okay, this is S-I-D-D-H-I-S, right?
Right.
Siddhis.
So, it's a Sanskrit term and it means roughly perfection or attainment as a result of disciplined meditative practice.
Those are the powers.
So, one of the powers involves influencing others' behavior.
Very much like that famous scene in Star Wars where Obi-Wan tells the stormtroopers these are not the droids you're interested in.
Right.
So that's a matter of like wiping somebody's mind momentarily.
That has actually been tested in the laboratory.
Oh?
And it works.
Oh?
So the way you test it in the lab, of course all of the experiments have euphemisms.
It's called an experiment in Facilitated attention.
The idea is that you have put somebody into a room and you have them look at something like a candle flame and you give them instruction that every time that they notice that their mind has wandered from looking at the candle flame that they should press a button.
Meanwhile, outside the room, you have somebody who's given a task to every so often help
that person attend or distract their attention, purely mentally, from a distance.
So that's the Jedi Mind Trick.
And the way you measure the result in the experiment is how often the person reports
that they've mind wandered.
So when you're helping them pay attention.
The mind-wandering should go down.
When you're trying to distract them, mind-wandering should go up, and that works.
And what kind of differential have you found in experiments?
Well, what you end up with is a probability against chance.
Right.
For pressing the button, and it is a statistically significant effect.
It's not wildly strong, but again, the people who are doing the experiment are the equivalent of college sophomores.
So you're just average people who are willing to do the experiment can
show this effect that Suggests that if you find people who are exceptionally good
at this that they actually can do the equivalent of a Jedi mind trick
You have you actually?
Observed that this done Well, I know about the experiments that are done
But not I haven't seen people who are exceptionally good at it, or maybe I have but they wipe my memory
Yes, perhaps, but you do think it is it is within the world of possible
Yeah.
It's actually very similar to a much larger class of studies that are feeling of being stared at.
And Rupert Sheldrake has done a version of that.
We've done our own version of it.
And that works as well.
You isolate somebody.
You have a closed circuit TV that looks at them.
They don't know when somebody is looking at them or not.
And you measure physiological changes like that person's heartbeat or skin conductance.
And you can see that when somebody's on the other end of the video stream looking at them, their physiology is reacting differently than when there's nobody watching.
So that has been shown also to be a significant effect again in unselected volunteers.
You certainly have a fascinating area of research, Doctor.
I need to ask you this because you've got it down here and I'm not sure what it means.
What does your research contribute to the possibility that consciousness is not a product of the brain?
Well, ultimately, that's really what we're talking about here.
It's all about what is consciousness?
Is it something, as the neuroscientists currently say, that it is generated by the brain?
Thinking of the brain as something like a fancy computer with recursive circuits and information processing and so on, that somehow consciousness gives rise to that, or the brain gives rise to consciousness.
The kinds of phenomena that I study, though, strongly suggest that the brain is certainly involved in some aspects of cognition.
There's no doubt about that.
But whether it gives rise to all of what we know about the mind is strongly questioned by things like clairvoyance.
Or are higher levels of consciousness simply reached when you Put yourself in the proper state as you've been describing.
In other words, that consciousness is out there kind of like, I don't know, kind of like the ionosphere circles the world, and you can put yourself in a state to, in essence, meld with it.
Well, if that is the case, if I understand correctly what you're saying, you go into a state of consciousness that is generated by the brain, but now it's sort of hovering outside your head somewhere.
Yes, yes, exactly.
If that is the case and you take a quantum model, again to use that word, quantum because some aspects of quantum mechanics are not in space-time, which gives you the possibility of extending out through space and time, Well, maybe something like that could explain clairvoyance or precognition.
We actually don't know at this point.
In fact, if you look at surveys by neuroscientists, there's a very nice one looking at the unsolved problems of neuroscience.
Every discipline does this every so often.
They have a list of things that we don't know yet.
One of the unsolved problems in the neuroscience is what gives rise to consciousness, in this case meaning awareness, self-awareness.
We don't have any idea.
In fact, that's listed as one of the things that we may never know from a neuroscience perspective.
Well, wasn't consciousness classically oversimplified by people saying consciousness is self-awareness?
Well, the mysterious part of consciousness certainly is awareness and self-awareness, yes.
The more that we've learned about The unconscious aspects of the mind and the brain, you begin to see that a lot of what we talk about as unconscious is brain stuff.
It's pre-processing and other kinds of brain things going on.
The way that we know that is through correlations, right?
I mean, there's basically only correlations that we see, neural correlations of consciousness, both at the level of awareness and below awareness.
But correlations don't mean causation.
It's like one of the first things you learn in statistics.
The correlation looks like it's coming from the brain, but we don't actually know that.
That's true.
All right.
Would you be willing to take a few questions?
Sure.
All right.
Let's try it.
Seattle, Washington.
Hi.
Hi there.
I've been listening to the theory of consciousness, and I want to know if I have an idea.
Is it possible that the mind is actually just a conduit for consciousness?
In other words, consciousness being somewhere else, and that as we register brain waves,
we're just seeing that the mind is like a receiver for consciousness.
It's funny, I...
It's likely elsewhere.
That's almost what I just asked.
Doctor?
Yeah, that is certainly one of the possibilities.
Mind is a filter of consciousness out there, or a receiver of consciousness.
Actually, it's very similar to what I talk about in my book, Supernormal, that yoga philosophy, at least one form of yoga philosophy, is called Sankhya.
It actually postulates that the universe consists of actually three things.
One is pure consciousness.
It's just fundamentally out there.
It's just something that's there.
It's part of the fabric of reality.
The other thing is the physical world is there.
It's like a real thing.
It's what science studies.
You can't deny it.
But the mind is the thing that connects the two.
So, interestingly, in yoga, the mind is considered to be partly pure consciousness, pure awareness, and also partly physical.
So, actually, it's interesting that these ideas are thousands of years old, and how they came up with it, who knows?
But it actually kind of fits what we're beginning to learn from a combination of neuroscience and the kinds of research that I do.
Suggested the mind is both physical.
It's partially brain, but it's not completely brain It's also something else which we can call consciousness Help you caller.
Okay.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Thank you Let's go to Somebody banging in I'm not sure where you are.
Hello Hello.
Yes.
Hello Hello, it's wonderful to talk to both of you.
I You are my current heroes, and I wanted to talk about a couple of things.
I specifically went to college to get my Master's in Clinical Psychology to study this stuff, and just like Dr. Radin, it's exhilarating.
It's fun.
It's what I would do.
I mean, I wouldn't jump in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of sharks.
That would terrify me.
This doesn't scare me, as it does a lot of people.
Also, I think the ego, you talk about the ego as blocking psychic experience.
I think that the ego does create an interference in psychic experiments.
When you get like let's say 10 psychics all in the same room and test them to see how good they do.
Their egos and the seriousness of it might cause a problem.
If you keep it, the experiments On a play basis, like for fun, let's see how far we can do this.
Even if you wanted to do it competitively, make it more of a game to keep that looseness and the game feeling about it where it's not too dark and too serious.
I'm thinking that might work really well.
Also, I've done some research into astrology, which is probably not your thing right now, but it turns out that I did some psychic experiments decades ago with a woman I met on the beach and we were using five different objects like a plant, a rock, a crystal, a bell, kind of similar to the five cards that are used in psychic experiments.
And we found that we did really, really, really good when the full moon was in Pisces.
And coincidentally, Pisces is the most psychic sign there can be.
Okay, well I don't know about that, but what she suggested earlier is interesting, Doctor,
that if it's not such a structured, serious experiment...
If it's done more casually, as almost in a game, you might get a better result.
Any experience with that?
Yeah, well, she is completely correct in terms of ego getting in the way.
That's definitely, we see that happen in the lab a lot.
It's one of the reasons, by the way, that we don't test people who come to us who claim to have special abilities, because the moment that they learn that maybe they have some kind of ability, their ego always becomes inflated, and we don't want to be responsible for that.
So, it is possible, Doctor.
Let me just get this out of the way, because it opens up an area of exploration for me.
It is possible that there are many people out in our world today that have superpowers of one sort or another who are totally keeping it to themselves and that even if they began to show other people they learned very quickly that that was a bad idea and they keep it totally to themselves and perhaps they use it for advantage in life, advantage in business, advantage period.
Right.
I am pretty sure that that is the case.
In fact, when I talk to business leaders and politicians and people in the military, initially some years ago when I started to talk to high-level people, I didn't know whether they're going to be highly skeptical or how they're going to respond to the kinds of things that I've been looking at.
Right.
But pretty uniformly, they agree that they would not be where they are unless their intuition was exceptionally good.
They may not talk about this in terms of psychic ability.
No, they wouldn't.
They would say intuition is a much easier word to digest without beginning to burn the witch.
Right.
And they will privately all admit that they're completely on board.
So these talks that I give are easy to give.
And very few very strong skeptics within those fields because as they tell me, They wouldn't be where they are unless they were repeatedly correct in making decisions where there was no other form of information.
All right, Doctor.
Hold tight.
We'll be right back.
This is just a two-minute break.
Fascinating stuff.
Absolutely fascinating.
Dr. Dean Radin is my guest.
And if you've been with us, you've got to have a question.
Remember, when calling Midnight in the Desert, let the phone ring until answered.
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Call 1-952-CALL-ART.
That's 1-952-225-5278.
That's actually interesting, because we've got a sort of an auto-answer now.
When you do call the line, what's going to happen is, you're going to suddenly, you're going to hear the audio of the show like that.
That means, You've made it.
So hold on.
It's auto hold.
And it's also auto audio.
In other words, you get the audio of the show.
Means you've made it.
Hang in there.
You'll be on the air.
And when you get on the air, you'll hear a little boing sound.
It's kind of cool, actually.
A little boing.
Let me demonstrate that to somebody right now.
Hello there, caller.
Did you just hear a little boing?
What was that?
A yes?
Hello, caller.
What a terrible demonstration.
I'm on the line.
I'm trying to get a... Caller, are you there?
Going once, going twice.
All right.
Yes, yes, I'm here.
Well, what in the world were you doing?
Trying to figure out how it works, but I got it now.
Thank you.
Good Lord.
So did you hear a boing or not?
Yeah, I just caught it.
I thought it was running into the room.
What a lousy demonstration!
All right, anyway, you're on the air with Dr. Dean Radin.
Hello.
Yes.
I wanted to ask, Howard, in regards to this subject, as he's taken into consideration near-death experiences as well as out-of-body experiences, and is that part of how he is You know, we're working out the theory there.
You know what?
Let's ask about these.
Doctor, these are very interesting things.
NDEs, fascinating.
OBEs, fascinating.
And I don't know if you've looked into them or you have an opinion about them, but these are things that I study and interview guests about and I'm fascinated by.
What do you think?
Well, of course, NDEs and OBEs are strong Challenges to the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain Yes, because if you don't have a brain and you still have experiences, well, where's it coming from good point?
So and so your answer is you obviously have to be looking into them because it meets up with what you're talking about Well, I look into them in the sense that I'm aware of the literature and I know people who are Know much more about this than I do But we tend to do experiments, and it is possible to do experiments with NDEs, as Sam Parnia is doing, but that's a full-time job, and we can only do so much.
So I let the experts in the NDE studies do what they do best, and I pay attention, but we're not actively pursuing that area.
You've got enough to work on.
All right, let me try this experiment again.
It's got to work.
I'm going to go to Hawaii.
I'm going to say, hi, Hawaii.
You're on the air.
Did you hear the Boeing?
Yes, I did.
Welcome to the program, and thank you.
You're more than welcome, and it's an extreme pleasure to talk to the both of you.
Thank you.
And rather than give you all my experiences with ESP and everything and UFOs and waste everyone's time, I'm just going to shoot right to the question.
OK.
I have noticed, because of my perception over the years and also Paul Smith has finally agreed to this on one of the other radio shows, that there is no such thing as the number two that is a convention.
In other words, if you have even a small particle, The very nature of its description is that it is located somewhere and therefore cannot literally be in two places at once, even to include the interference patterns that you get with the slit light experiment from Einstein.
And so if there is no such thing as a two, in other words, you can have a bottle of Coca-Cola And you can have another bottle of, well, let's say soft drink.
I don't want to say that brand name again.
I don't care.
Another Coke.
You can have two Cokes and you do not have a copy of the original.
I mean, that's all you do have is a copy of the original.
You can never have the original over again because it would occupy the same space.
I'm not sure I get it, Doctor.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
Well, let me try one more time here.
Any object, even molecules in the universe, and this is macro and micro, are self-evidently individual, but they also are just part of one big thing, the whole universe, the whole cosmos.
Oh, the great one?
Yeah, in other words, that's why remote viewing is possible is because we are there wherever it is that we target.
And the grid or the Akashic Records or whatever you want to call it, does automatic targeting and essentially locates part of where you are already at.
All right, now I sort of get it.
Doctor, have you looked into remote viewing?
It is indeed fascinating.
Yes.
Something to it, in your opinion, or what?
Yeah, well, not just remote viewing, but all psi experience suggests that the universe is aptly named.
Namely, it's one thing.
Quantum mechanics certainly tells us that the physical world is actually better thought of as relational and as holistic.
And from that perspective it actually makes a lot of sense that the reason that you're able to just as easily tell what's on the other side of a card as the other side of Pluto is because they're not really separate.
Separation is an illusion.
And by the way, that is one of the core principles in most Eastern philosophies as well.
Right.
I understand what he said.
Just how he was trying to get us there was tough.
Yeah.
Because he said there's no number two.
Right.
And I actually use number two a lot in my work.
So.
Right.
Gotcha.
Skype.
Tom, you're on the air.
Hello, Tom.
Going once.
Tom has waited so long.
Are you sure you're not there, Tom?
I guess you're not there.
Too bad.
Let's go to Amy on Skype.
You are there, I hope?
Yes.
Okay, turn your radio off, please, or device, whatever it is you've got on.
Okay.
Hi, Dean.
Hi.
Dean, you had mentioned that neuroscience doesn't know what consciousness is.
I was wondering Do you feel that your line of thought alludes more to pseudoscientific magical thinking, rather than the fact that we have not yet neuronally mapped what one would define as consciousness?
I'm simply reflecting what leading neuroscientists say when they're reviewing the evidence that we currently know about what gives rise to consciousness.
But it's not only that.
If what we see in the laboratory for phenomena like telepathy and so on are real, which I think the evidence is pointing in that direction, then a brain-centric understanding of consciousness does not seem to be sufficient.
Now the only proviso to that is if the brain is also operating on quantum principles, which of course is at least as controversial as the existence of a psychic phenomena, Then the possibility arises that the brain could give rise to consciousness, and Art mentioned this earlier, and consciousness then, or awareness, is actually not just in your head as a classical physical object, but is also spread out in space-time as a quantum object.
And in that sense, you can create a completely physical explanation for why the psychic phenomena are real and why the brain would generate consciousness.
Yeah, but I feel that we're dealing with areas with a lot of mystery, and there's a lot of subjective thought around it.
And personally, I don't feel like there's any compelling evidence for what you're positing.
However, I do find it interesting, and thanks for having me on the show.
You're very welcome, but actually there is compelling evidence.
I mean, statistically, it's very compelling, Doctor.
I agree.
I mean, that's what we see in the laboratory.
That's what people have been looking at for over 100 years.
The notion of not seeing the evidence or not feeling compelled by the evidence is an interesting one, because we know that a priori decisions or a priori beliefs about data strongly determines what you can see.
And it's in both directions.
It's a sword that cuts both ways.
If you start out thinking this stuff probably isn't real, then you just you can't see it very well.
You can't evaluate it very well.
The other side, of course, is if you completely believe everything, then even the evidence, which isn't very good, you'll see it in a very positive light.
So this is not just true in this field, but every area of science is always dealing with the notion of how do we get beyond Our a priori biases, and ultimately we do the best that we can to provide the best evidence that we can, and the future will let us know who's right.
Alright, let's see, this is Karen on My Wormhole, which sends me messages during the show, and she says that Twitter is asking Dr. Radin To please review the time frame of the 9-11 random generator results, and that is worth talking about for just a moment.
Indeed, 9-11 registered big time on the random number generators.
However, it, if I recall correctly, registered about 30 minutes, or began registering about 30 minutes prior to the event itself.
You've had a lot of time to think about that, Doctor.
Any thoughts?
Why?
Why before the event?
Well, this unfortunately is, there's no easy answer to this.
The standard analysis that we put, that we use for all of the events, for 9-11 it did show a significant effect, but not wildly significant.
It was only on exploratory analyses where we began to see much stranger things happening, like The event of 9-11 was preceded by about three hours of a trend, which turned into a highly significant trend.
But we didn't predict that in advance.
I mean, we didn't even know about the event in advance, obviously.
But the standard analysis is usually about an hour before something happens to several hours afterwards.
The exploratory research went back days before to days after.
And there you see the very long-term strange trends Where 9-11 is happening in the middle.
So maybe there was some kind of a mass-scale precognition that something was about to unfold.
Certainly after the event, it took the world several days before it calmed back down into randomness.
But again, I don't want to push it too much in terms of what we found, because those weren't analyses that were predicted in advance.
Still, if you can understand that feeling and you feel it, you might as well duck, right?
Well, we know from many other experiments that we call presentiment, that the body does respond several seconds before a randomly selected emotional versus calm image or stimulus.
So, we know that in principle that we do get information from the future.
So, if you amplify that into a couple billion people, then the likelihood is that a lot of people, sometime before this major event occurred, felt something.
I know from even from my own family that my mother said that she woke up that morning and immediately felt that her blood pressure was way up.
And so she took her blood pressure and it was so high that she got nervous and called the doctor.
And just around that time is when 9-11 happened.
Wow.
She was reacting to something unusual.
And once she learned what the event was, her blood pressure returned to normal.
So, again, multiply that out by lots and lots of people, and it does suggest that somehow people can feel when something is about to unfold.
Well, I had my own event.
One really cool, pre-cognitive, or not-so-cool-at-the-time-scared-me event.
All right, stay right where you are.
Dr. Dean Radin is my guest.
You get a shiver in the dark.
It's raining in the park.
Meantime, I think I want to have Bob Crane on live and have him do his buffering imitation.
Live.
Wouldn't that be cool?
Remember, when calling Midnight in the Desert, let the phone ring until... No, no, no, no, no.
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Let's try this one.
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That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
That's awesome.
Man, that's funny stuff.
5278-1952. Call Art.
Call Art.
All right, back to our guest, Dr. Dean Radin.
Hi, Doctor.
Really good stuff tonight and really some deep thinking that has to be done.
And you must do that every day.
I mean, what do you do on your day?
Does the weekend come and do you stop thinking about all of this and sort of lock it out and go to a different world?
Or is it with you full time?
I consider that I'm very fortunate to be able to do this kind of research, and so I work on it all the time.
I mean, it's not work for me, it's fun.
Well, I do get that.
You know, we live in a strange world where you have a majority of people, including scientists, who have these experiences, and yet, at least in the Western world, we're taught not to talk about them.
As an example, I'm a member of a group that has been meeting monthly for 20 years almost.
A very prominent group of scientists at a major university who have done their own experiments.
They get successful results.
They refuse to talk about them in public.
And so it is easier today to get a PhD at a university by writing a dissertation on Buffy the Vampire Slayer than it is to do something on telepathy.
I mean, it's kind of crazy.
It may be crazy, but I've had my own precognitive experience that was so strong That it was ridiculous.
I mean, I think years ago I explained it to you, and I hate being dragged into doing it again, so I'm not going to.
I'm going to resist.
But suffice to say, I had one that was so strong that even when I tried to ignore it, I couldn't.
And it turned out to be absolutely precognition.
You know, somebody hit my car, is the end of the story.
And it really happened, and I knew it was going to happen, and I have no idea how I knew.
But it wasn't Let's see, how can I put this?
It wasn't subtle.
It was like ocean waves crashing over me, to the point I couldn't ignore it.
That's how strong it was.
But I can't repeat it.
Right.
Yeah.
So, motivation, attention, maybe the moon has to be in the right position.
These are many, many unknowns that we don't get.
Yeah.
Again, that's why we create little artificial tasks in the laboratory to detect whether in principle what you experienced was a genuine precognition as compared to a coincidence.
That's why we know that these things are possible, and occasionally you get something which is so overwhelmingly strong for the individual that it could in fact be a genuine effect.
Oh, it was genuine.
Of course, that's easy for me to say.
On Skype, Blake, you're on the air.
I'm on the show, actually.
Yes, actually.
Oh, man, I've been a fan of you for so long.
It's amazing to finally be able to be on the air.
I wanted to ask Dr. Radin if he had read anything or noticed anything about Hermeticism or the Kabbalion.
because I've always found that has like a really cool correlation with science like the principle of vibration
and correspondence and Mentalism and I've always thought that like this Eastern
philosophy kind of like stemmed from the stuff that I read about in the Kibbalion
Just wanted to know if he had a Done your research into it. I'll take my answer off the air.
Okay. Yeah, I'm familiar with that that book and with a great deal of the esoteric literature or the occult
literature And I I think I agree that what we currently know as
science today came out of those traditions I mean, alchemy and chemistry are very closely related to each other in terms of their origins.
And we know now that Newton spent a huge amount of time on science, but actually more on alchemy.
So, science today owes a great debt to people who, today of course you would look at the occult lore and see it as lore, and yet I think some of those old wives tales, the old wives were probably smarter than we think.
Knoxville, Tennessee, hello.
Hello.
Hi.
I don't want to say who I am or anything.
That's fine.
I know that you guys are really, really smart and maybe you've read this book called The Strange World of Frank Edward.
And I read this book about 20 years ago and there was a fella in the book who was in bed for like his whole life and he was extremely spiritual.
and intelligence and he talked about the wisdom of the ages and everything well when this guy died they performed an autopsy on his brain because he was so intelligent but when they opened up his head there was no brain and the guy was like speaking from his spirit and his soul so I know that you mentioned about consciousness Some years ago, I had a UFO experience.
All right, well, we're going to hold on that one and we're going to stick with the no brain for a second.
He had no brain.
I had never heard this.
Doctor, how about you?
Yeah, I'm not familiar with that book.
There are cases, though, contemporary cases where people complain of a headache and then they have a MRI and it turns out that they it's not that they don't have any brain.
But that their brain has been squashed flat.
Yes.
Because there's a lot of liquid that they have cerebrospinal fluid that has pushed their brain.
So it's just a very, very thin piece of brain.
Right.
And yet they still have a normal IQ.
And other than a headache, they function so normal.
That's right.
Actually, people have had half their brains removed and continue to function.
Right.
So some of this we can understand just from neuroplasticity, that the brain can rewire itself pretty well.
But it does make you think that then you'll take all of the little bits of evidence, everything from this kind of phenomenon to near-death experience and beyond.
Is the brain the thing that gives rise to what we think of as ourselves?
As I said before, some of it certainly does.
You can't deny that the neurosciences are quite good at what they do, but only when you start ignoring all of the other little bits of evidence suggesting that maybe it hasn't completely wrapped up the whole story.
Fascinating stuff.
Ken, you're on the air.
Hey Art, great show, and I love the newscast on Dark Matter Network.
Great.
Thank you.
Dr. Wren, this question's for you, and I'm sure you'll appreciate this, Art.
You talked about the DNA being unique and possibly an antenna on a previous show, and I submit to you, along with this other lady's mentioning of the brain function, it's a function of the neurons, and many of our great avatars in history like Tesla and Ford, Their brains were examined and they had quite a few extra neurons.
I'm thinking that might be a function of intelligence or the reception of the consciousness.
I'm not sure that that's really a true statement.
Doctor, is that true?
Have they examined in autopsies and determined extra neurons?
Not necessarily extra neurons, but some areas of the brain are denser.
So, in some areas we'll have more neurons, yes.
So, maybe more neurons in use.
I think we only use some small portion of our brains, the average, right?
Well, neurons are dying all the time, but fortunately there are new ones that come along and are created.
So, we know, for example, if somebody spends a huge amount of time in intellectual work, that they're going to have more neurons in certain areas of the brain.
The second question, though, to point out, though, is this Potential antenna of the DNA and the helix being unique to every individual I post to you that the possibility that it was engineered that way and if indeed we were engineered as a slave race by the Anunnaki and the Sumerian cultures that it would be a great way to control and monitor if our brain is indeed a receiver a large population to do their bidding and if let's call that bidding being
Well, he's really going off the cliff a little bit there, but DNA is an interesting topic all by itself, Doctor.
Yeah, I don't have a comment about what other creatures may have done to engineer us or not, but what I can say about DNA is that oftentimes psychic phenomena has been known to run in families, suggesting that there is a genetic component.
So, we're actually doing an experiment now where We're identifying people and families who have psychic skills and matched other people that don't report any psychic ability at all in families.
And we're going to do a full genome analysis of each of these people.
And then using modern techniques, we look at not individual genes, but networks of genes to see if there's a discernible difference between the genetics of people who have the ability versus who don't.
If we do find a difference, it becomes quite interesting, because it suggests that there are already known pharmaceutical methods which can push certain gene networks, and you might be able to create a drug or therapy to either enhance or reduce psychic ability.
Wow.
There's a thought.
Right.
There's a thought.
Hold that.
We'll come back and discuss that.
To enhance your psychic ability.
What do you think?
From the kingdom of Nye, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art
Bell.
Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
That's 1952.
Call Art.
Definitely the wild side of midnight.
Dr. Dean Radin is the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and my guest tonight.
And we've been down all kinds of fascinating roads, and we're still on one.
Please feel free to join us.
Lots of time left, and I think we left it at drugs.
You mentioned there might be a drug eventually that would enhance psychic ability.
Really think so?
Yeah, it's possible.
I mean, if there is in fact a genetic component, then the possibility arises of being able to push or suppress that component.
Now, the suppression side is interesting because I suspect that at least in some cases, people who are diagnosed as schizophrenic are actually uncontrolled psychics.
They're driven crazy because they don't have control over these kinds of effects and they're quite strong for them.
Of course, that's not true in every case, but if there's true even in some cases, it means that it may be possible to develop a targeted kind of therapy To allow the person to be, quote, normal by simply turning off this ultra sensitivity that they happen to have.
And of course, on the flip side, you might find people who are mildly talented and you're able to vastly increase their ability, at least for a short period of time.
Or, I hate to get all Nazi-like on you, but I mean, if there really is a strong genetic component to PSI ability, Then I suppose you could begin breeding for it, right?
Right.
So one of the dangers in all of this is that you could both select people, because if you
get their DNA, you could find out if they have the ability.
Wow.
You could select them, you could target them, you could create a genetically modified race
of super psychics.
That's why all of the research that we do, at least, is in the public domain, to prevent
the possibility of some sort of a thought police from arising.
But the reason we're looking at it is because if we're not going to do it, we know somebody
else eventually will.
So we figure it's better to know than not to know.
So having said what you just said, isn't there somebody at some three letter agency somewhere who is probably jotting your name down right now and thinking, well, you know, he's right.
If we don't do it, somebody else will.
Or worse yet, we're already doing it.
I'm sure I have a dossier or multiple dossiers somewhere.
And again, we publish everything that we do, so it's in the public domain.
All right.
On we go to, I think, Allentown, Pennsylvania or something like that.
Hello.
It's Johnny from PA, and I did hear the boing.
Good.
Thank you.
And I want to bring up some evidence before I ask the question.
The evidence is your show, Art.
Back in the old show, you used to do experiments with positive intentions.
I know.
Or love.
I know.
And you had some pretty remarkable results, if I remember correctly.
I know.
Actually scary.
Okay, so here's my question for both of you, and it's an opinion question.
If we believe that and we don't think it's a coincidence, because I don't, and if you know you can do something and you can make a positive result as an individual, don't you have sort of an obligation to or responsibility to sort of go through life making those positive changes in your world.
I'll take the answer off the air.
All right, off the air it will be then.
Doctor?
Yeah, a responsibility of course.
We have a responsibility for our actions.
This pushes it into responsibility for our thoughts.
And I accept the evidence that we've seen in the lab and our colleagues see in the lab, suggesting that at least to a small extent, your intentions are not just inside your head.
They do push the world around.
So yeah, we do have that responsibility.
It's not always easy to carry it out, but yeah, it makes a difference.
All right, Billy on Skype.
Hi.
Hello, Art Bell.
Yes.
First, I'm Carther.
Thank you.
In the information age, we question everything, making the return of the legendary Arbel monumental to those of us who are asking.
Thank you.
First, yes, sir.
First, I'd like to introduce someone who is also involved in the same study.
He's Tom Campbell.
He's one of the original researchers for the Monroe Institute, and he has a book out called The Big Toe Theory of Everything, and he's Basically giving a scientific angle on everything that's being discussed tonight.
The point is holographic theory of consciousness.
It makes neural functioning secondary.
Consciousness is primary.
Material is secondary.
Science says that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neural physical physiology.
But the reverse is true.
Neural activity is an effect of the organized consciousness already projecting limitations that we call the material neural world.
So I would like to hear the feedback and I'll take that off the air.
Thank you very much, sir.
All right.
Here it comes.
Yeah, I know Tom.
We've actually, we did a chat one time that was made into a video.
It's on YouTube.
I have his books and basically he's talking about what might be called information physics, which is a branch of physics looking at the role of information, not force so much, but just pure information in shaping the world the way that we perceive it.
And maybe the way that it actually is.
So I think Tom's on to something.
I talked to Tom about some of the experiments that we've seen in the laboratory and tried to get a description from his perspective on why we get the results that we do.
And I think his ideas are in the right direction, but perhaps not quite specific enough for us to know what to do with them.
Back to the phones in the Boeing Twin Cities, I think.
Hi.
Yes, this is Marcus from St.
Paul.
Art, I've been listening to you since grade school, and I'm currently 27, and this is my first time calling in.
People just won't stop doing that.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
So, Dr. Radin, when you were talking about these supernormal powers and psychic powers Tending to be the strongest in young children, it sort of gave me chills because I have very strong memories from as a young child of repeatedly being able to levitate in my bedroom.
After all this time, I'd sort of forgotten about it for a while and I had just started thinking about it again.
Recently and convinced myself.
Well, these must have been recurring dreams or something my imagination being away with me that Convinced me that this was actually happening and in light of what you said, I'm starting to Reconsider and wonder if this actually happened and that is so interesting caller.
I've got some of the very same memories That is so weird, I I actually sort of kind of Remember being able to levitate.
Dr. Radin?
Yeah, so my first inclination in such a thing is to assume that the story is real.
How would we go about testing it?
Well, it's possible, of course.
I mean, we need to find cohorts of four-year-olds who Uh, who have the ability, or at least claim to have the ability, and just start by taking videos.
Uh, that's not so easy to do, however.
Doing studies with children, especially children who are sleeping, and claiming special abilities, uh, it is possible to do, but so far I don't know anyone who's actually done it.
It's up to the moms out there.
When you go in and little Johnny's four feet in the air, That's right.
Grab your iPhone.
And tell him, no, don't do that.
Tell him, okay, that's fine to do.
Just wait, and I'm going to take a video.
You know, what this caller says, though, is very interesting.
I kind of have those recollections myself, vague recollections of being able to fly a little and levitate, and isn't that weird?
Caller, thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, take care.
Fascinating.
Arlington, Texas, perhaps?
Hello.
Yes, good evening.
How are you guys doing?
Just fine.
Good.
Recently, I had what you'd kind of call a near-death experience, and since that experience, I have tapped into this cosmic stream of consciousness.
Okay, it kind of scared me for a while, but I have learned to live with it and control it, and you know, Dr. Dean, you were correct when I talked about it with my family.
They thought I was crazy, so I just kind of played it down and let it go.
So, now I'm using it in my own way, you know, with my friends and just projecting friendship and happiness.
And, you know, I know a lot of things that I shouldn't know.
One of the things that is very curious about Burning Man, I watched a tape session of that recently and I wasn't really aware of it before.
And it was so funny because it felt like I had been there and like I was there when I was watching it.
And I'm very interested in attending the next one where we're having all the sensors available.
Dr. Radin, when is it coming up?
When is Burning Man coming?
It's over Labor Day, so it's coming up in a week, and about this time next week.
Short notice for you, Koehler.
Yes, I'm supposed to be in Austin City Limits and then Tennessee for a little bit then, but I was real curious about something that I have kind of determined is that the universe is conscious, and each of our brains is a miniature copy of the universe.
And that's what connects us.
And I have developed a special formula that I take of two very simple elements and two more complex chemicals that is a way that's kept that with me and has enhanced it.
What do you take?
Well, very simply, magnesium and calcium.
And DMEA and MACA.
All right.
Have you ever heard of such a combination, Doctor?
Well, I know what all those things are.
I haven't heard of it being used for this purpose.
So I don't know what to make of that.
You know, it may well be that some people out there have come up with concoctions of things like that that do act in this way, I
guess it's worth looking at people's recipes.
Hello there, you're on the air. If you heard the boing, you're on. Art, I heard the boing. Good.
Art, this is my 20th year, just as a side note, listening to you.
And guys, it's so powerful.
It's probably one of my favorite shows of all time that you've done, Art, because so many people are hearing about all these different little practices and things they might do for meditation and so forth that are just going to be experiencing these very powerful things in their own life.
So all I can say to them is hold on tight and try to keep your wits about you, because I guess my Point of my call was that I had extremely powerful experiences starting in 1994 when it just sort of was unleashed as what I call the classic beginner's mind.
Right.
And, you know, it really almost overwhelmed me in very specific ways that were dangerous to me if I sort of didn't meander and sort of, as luck would have it, sort of get through it.
And later on, years later, ended up having You know, a true crisis, when I had two full months before 9-11, the beginning of those experiences, very visual, specific about it, leading up to the actual event, where my life almost mimicked it, as I flew cross-country that day in a wide-body jet at a Newark airport, having woken up that day right next to Building 7, where I worked.
I mean, it was a whole very powerful thing, but then not being able to stop it, that failure to, sort of, actionable intelligence, really crushed me, and I had really survivor's guilt on that entire experience.
God, it gives me chills right now, just that I was able to deal with it afterwards.
So just the downside, I was going to point out, of realizing you have certain abilities,
but then in some ways, the negative of your failure to stop truly horrific events
in certain cases can just be crushing.
So on that psychological side, I wouldn't not want to have had all,
the full range of psychic experiences I then went on to have, all from the healing of animals,
the seeing of the auras, the crazy synchronicities, all these powerful, wonderful things,
creative visualizations, but that downside, I shut down for several years after that.
I do understand.
I guess, Doctor, we don't have much time, so I'm just going to have to guess here, but if you have psychic abilities, And then something like that happens.
You could almost suffer a kind of survivor's guilt, couldn't you?
Because you felt it, you knew it, it happened, and you couldn't prevent it.
Absolutely.
In fact, one of the next books I'm writing is about developing your psychic abilities and why that may not be such a great idea for the very reason that the caller is saying.
All right.
I want to get this in because time is short.
Your book is, your current book, Supernormal?
And it's available everywhere that books and e-books are sold.
That's an easy way to get it.
Boy, we live in a great world now, don't we?
So your next book will deal with developing these talents and suggest that it may not be such a hot idea for what that caller just said.
Right.
So part of the notion of training or developing these abilities is to learn how to turn them off.
It's almost more important to learn how to turn it off than to turn it on.
Wow.
I guess you're right.
Let's see if we can take one more call.
Amazing stuff tonight, really is.
Atlanta, hello.
Meagher Roswells, Art.
Thank you.
This is Juan, so a shout-out to all the bell-gabbers out there.
Yes, sir.
I was going to ask you a question.
Have you ever heard of the research of a physicist at MIT named Max Tegway who has suggested that Consciousness can be considered as a form of, considered to be like a form of matter.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm familiar with that.
A form of matter.
Yeah.
It's related to the brain giving rise to consciousness, in which case consciousness is a form of matter.
Yeah.
I don't happen to agree with that, but that, you know, people are free to have their, their own opinions.
It's hard for me to imagine that too, but... Well, it would be a very peculiar kind of matter, but after all matter and energy are the same thing, so we can think of it more as a type of energy.
Alright.
That works for me too, so... Alright, I'm afraid that's about as much as you get thought or consciousness as matter.
It's hard, it's a hard concept to get your brain around, but a lot of this is I wish I had known earlier about your new book, because I would have made you talk more about it.
We're out of time, unfortunately.
Dr. Dean Radin, it has been my pleasure having you on.
Years have gone by, and you are still as riveting and fascinating as ever.
Thank you, my friend.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Dr. Dean Radin.
Brilliant guy.
Absolutely brilliant.
Doing things that are probably years and years ahead of the rest of the scientific community with regard to consciousness.
Really was something.
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