Summary
Dean Radin discusses the evidence for psychic phenomena and what they may reveal about consciousness. He explores whether consciousness is more fundamental than matter and why academic science resists ideas that challenge materialism.
Questions This Interview Explores
- How can psychic experiences be distinguished from coincidence or faulty memory?
- What evidence suggests that psychic phenomena are real?
- What do psychic phenomena imply about the nature of consciousness?
- Why do scientists resist research that challenges materialism?
- How might idealism or panpsychism explain experiences that transcend space and time?
Key takeaways
- A small but significant portion of reported psychic experiences may reflect genuine psi phenomena.
- Psychic phenomena blur the boundary between subjective experience and objective events.
- Consciousness may be more fundamental than the physical world.
- Idealism offers a broader framework for understanding psi than strict materialism.
- Scientific anomalies can reveal hidden limits in accepted theories.
- Academic taboos often restrict public discussion more than private interest in psi.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done, I think, 417 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways.
This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there is a donate button on every page of the site. That’s pretty much our sole means of support.
My guest today is Dean Radin, PhD. Dean is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS. Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, he held appointments at AT&T, Bell Labs, Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, and SRI International. He’s the author or co-author of over 250 technical and popular articles, three dozen book chapters, and three books, including the award-winning The Conscious Universe, Entangled Minds, and Supernormal.
While at Bell Labs, for fun, Dean wrote a series of humorous articles for the science spoof magazine Journal of Irreproducible Results. One of those articles later almost accidentally started World War III in a way that would have appealed to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. So, Dean, I thought that might be a good place to start.
🎵 A spoof science article nearly causes an international incident
Dean: Well, that journal is intentionally a spoof science journal, mostly written by scientists and engineers. At the time, in the news was a student from MIT who, just as a joke, decided to go to the library and figure out how to make a thermonuclear weapon.
Rick: Oh, I remember that.
Dean: Yeah, it was in the news and it caught some attention. People were surprised that it would be relatively easy, at least conceptually, to make a bomb like that.
Rick: And he was dancing in some kind of play at Princeton on stage, dressed up as a woman or something, and was getting ideas while he was doing this skit. Was that the story?
Dean: No, I don’t remember that part of it. It’s just the part about how the concept of making a nuclear or thermonuclear weapon was not really that difficult.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: And, more importantly, that it was in the public domain. So, at the time, I was writing a couple of articles that I called “Weekend Scientist” in this science spoof magazine, where you could do all kinds of things, like make a thermonuclear weapon in your kitchen in your spare time.
So I wrote that, and there were a couple of pages, and clearly it was a satire or spoof. So, 9/11 happens. About a month after 9/11, all the news media were going to one of the first places in Afghanistan where we had invaded at that point, and everyone was shocked, including Rumsfeld and everyone else talking on the media, about finding materials within the Taliban headquarters in one of the caves that were talking about nuclear weapons.
Of course, everybody was freaking out that the Taliban were going to have nukes. Eventually, some of the pages that were found were shown. I immediately recognized that this was what I had written. This was a spoof. This had nothing to do with actual material on how to make a nuclear weapon.
Fortunately, my name did not appear on those papers. Somebody had put the article up on the web, and clearly the Taliban or somebody had taken it off the web. In retrospect, if my name had been on those papers, I could have been in serious trouble, because I would have expected the men in black to show up at my house before I had any idea why they were showing up.
If they had said, “Well, you know, we found papers that you’re talking about how to make a thermonuclear weapon,” then I would not have had any idea what they were talking about.
Rick: That’s very funny. Yeah, you would have had a Paul Manafort situation. They would have shown up in your bedroom.
Dean: Yeah. So this is what happens. This was before I wrote this, before the internet was a thing. Over the years, it had taken on a life of its own and appeared on the internet.
Rick: Yeah, it’s funny. So that’s another wrinkle in that: this kid who did this thing at Princeton. He was performing in some kind of burlesque thing as part of his student play or something. He was doing these can-can dances and whatnot on stage, but having these flashes of insight while he was doing it, and it enabled him to come up with this concept.
Well, it’s funny you should mention Donald Rumsfeld, because I came across a quote while I was preparing for your interview. Maybe it was something you had quoted, or maybe I’ve heard it somewhere else. But Rumsfeld, interestingly, said—he referred to what we know, what we know we don’t know, and what we don’t know we don’t know. I thought that was apropos of Dean Radin’s world.
Dean: Yeah, it’s true. I deal mostly with what we think we don’t know. And, of course, if you don’t know what you don’t know, then you can’t do anything with that.
🛤️ How Dean Radin became a psi researcher
Rick: Yeah. We haven’t really told people yet what you’re about, but your primary focus has been on psi phenomena, or psychic phenomena. You’ve been studying this for years and getting results, actually.
I read in The Conscious Universe that you said psi phenomena fall into two general categories. The first is perception of objects or events beyond the range of ordinary senses. The second is mentally causing action at a distance.
Maybe it was premature for me to read that little bit, because I’d like to ask you first how you got interested in this in the first place. You were on track to become a concert violinist, and then you got into bluegrass, which I happen to love. Then, I don’t know, one thing led to the next, and here you are studying psi phenomena with an impressive academic and technical background behind you.
Dean: You’re asking how did that happen?
Rick: Yeah, I’m just curious about the chronology, or how one thing led to the next like that.
Dean: Well, I’m asked a similar question many times by audiences, popular and technical. Oftentimes, the audience is standing room only. So I turn the question back onto the audience and say, “Well, why is everybody here today? Why is this such a popular topic?”
In all kinds of contexts, popular contexts you can kind of expect, but I’ve given this in technical environments, governments, and the military, and it’s always standing room only.
The way I respond then is to say that your interest and my interest are the same. Everyone has always been attracted to the notion that there are special powers or abilities that people have. They saturate our history, and they saturate the entertainment world.
Everybody, in every domain—regardless of whether they’re scientists, laypeople, or whatever—is interested because these experiences happen to the majority of the population.
What Psi Phenomena Reveal About Consciousness
The question then becomes, “Well, what do you do with it?” Is this simply coincidence, as some scientists would say, or is it a clue that tells us something about what consciousness is and what our capacities actually are?
The only difference between what I do and what other people do is that I decided this was much more interesting as a scientific problem than anything else that I’d ever done. So I decided that if it was possible to make a living doing this as a scientist, then that’s what I wanted to do. By hook and by crook, with some skill and a lot of work at it, I managed to do that.
Everybody has always been attracted to the notion that there are special powers or abilities that people have.
Rick: That’s great. When you say this happens—people, the majority of the population, have these sorts of experiences—about a week ago I was meditating in the morning, and for some reason I was thinking about this guy that I spent about a month with in 1973, I believe it was. I’d heard he had died, and I was thinking about him and wondering how he died. “Nice guy,” “too bad,” and so on.
Then, later that afternoon, he contacted me on Facebook. I hadn’t been in touch with him since 1973. I guess that’s the kind of thing you’re referring to when you say most of the population has had this kind of thing.
Dean: Right. What you’re describing is maybe a telepathic experience, or maybe precognitive. Roughly half of the population talks about precognitive dreams. Crisis telepathy is very common, usually among family members. Psychokinetic effects occur, but they’re much rarer. They don’t happen very often.
If you start looking at the experiences that people regard as being psychic or synchronistic, roughly half of them probably are coincidence, because there are billions of people and trillions of events, and weird things happen occasionally.
Maybe another 25% of the experiences are mistaken. They’re not coincidences, but they’re forgotten or they’re twisted memories. We tend to conflate things in our minds; there’s confabulation, and so on.
That leaves roughly 25% of events where it’s not entirely clear what’s going on, but they don’t look like coincidence, and they’re not confabulation. From the laboratory studies, I would estimate that roughly 5%—a pretty small percentage of these kinds of episodes—really do reflect a form of psychic experience.
For the remaining 20% that’s left over, we just don’t know. It falls into that category of Rumsfeld’s, where we don’t know what we don’t know. But the 5%, I’m pretty confident, based on what we know from the laboratory, really does reflect real connections between people’s minds at a distance, and between people and objects, people and events, and so on.
For the remaining 20% that’s left over, we just don’t know. It falls into that category of Rumsfeld’s, where we don’t know what we don’t know. But the 5%, I’m pretty confident, based on what we know from the laboratory, really does reflect real connections between people’s minds at a distance, and between people and objects, people and events, and so on.
✨ Consciousness, materialism, and the limits of science
Rick: I think the way this topic might be best understood as relevant to my show—which is about people who have had experiences of spiritual awakening—is that there’s a fundamental disagreement about whether consciousness is a fundamental reality or whether it’s just an epiphenomenon of brain functioning.
The vast majority, I guess, of the scientific world believes the second thing. The notion that consciousness is fundamental is extremely relevant to the idea of enlightenment or spiritual awakening. It’s central to it.
I think your work—although maybe you do study a lot of meditators and people like that—I don’t know if you’ve attempted to study specifically people who say that they’ve had some kind of awakening in an abiding sense, but your work does chip away at that paradigm that it’s a material world and a meaningless universe.
We’re just biological robots, to echo Alex Tsakiris’s phrase, and consciousness is just a biochemical phenomenon of some type.
The Limits of Reductive Materialism
Dean: It’s true. I think as a trained scientist, you come to assume that reductive materialism is the only way of understanding reality and that everything must be physical—material and physical. That’s undeniable as a method of studying the nature of the physical world. It allows us to do all kinds of interesting things.
Especially if you’re into engineering or physics, after a while you really do get the sense that you’re this close to understanding everything, because you can write equations on the blackboard that will tell you exactly how to get from here to the moon or from here to Mars. And it works.
So you get this inflated sense of being on the edge of understanding everything.
Dean: But after studying psychic phenomena for many years now and planning to see certain kinds of events in the laboratory and, in fact, ending up seeing them under controlled conditions, I think that in probably the first 20 years or so, I was mainly interested in simply checking whether we could believe that the phenomena were real.
But in the last five years, perhaps, I’ve become more interested in trying to figure out, “What does that mean from an ontological perspective?” And it didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that if you try to create an ontology that is purely materialistic and describe these kinds of phenomena—I have colleagues who are attempting to do that—I don’t think it works at all.
It becomes very, very difficult to figure out how these kinds of phenomena—all of which, by the way, are talking about a blurring between subjective and objective—actually work. That’s essentially what these phenomena are, with one additional piece: You blur objective and subjective, and it transcends space-time.
In fact, the one single thing that makes any kind of psychic phenomena weird is because it’s not locked into space-time. All of them. That’s the characteristic. So how do we account for that?
The closest thing that we have to it from a physical perspective is quantum mechanics. The strange thing about quantum mechanics is that it’s not in space-time in the usual way of thinking about the physical world. But quantum mechanics is completely mechanistic. I mean, it suggests that some of our assumptions about the physical world aren’t correct, or at least are special cases.
Classical physics is a special case of quantum mechanics. But quantum mechanics is not the end of our understanding of physics either. It’s probably stage two out of who knows how many other stages. So it doesn’t address subjectivity at all, basically. And the only thing that we actually know about anything is our own subjective experience.
Idealism and Panpsychism as Explanations for Psi
So I started reading a lot more about idealism and panpsychism and all of that line of thought and decided that it is a much simpler way of accounting not only for everything we know from the physical side of reality, but also for these kinds of phenomena. They suddenly are no longer anomalous. They’re phenomena that have to occur.
Rick: I’ve heard talks you gave in which you talked about the kind of resistance and pushback against thinking the way you think by people who are entrenched in a more materialistic perspective. And I know this is a common pattern throughout the history of scientific development. Thomas Kuhn writes about it in terms of paradigm shifts and all. Do you feel that—if scientists are this close, if they feel they’re this close to having it all figured out—this resistance is perhaps a symptom of the fact that they don’t want to admit that they might be really far from having it all figured out? It opens up a whole can of worms they’d rather not deal with.
Dean: Sure. If you spend your career and gain a certain degree of awards based on your ideas, you don’t want somebody coming along and shaking the status quo. We—whether we think about it or not—most of us identify with our ideas. So if you attack somebody’s ideas, it’s as though you’re being physically attacked. It’s not surprising that it produces a lot of emotion.
Rick: But you’re not really attacking any ideas. You’re not saying, “Your ability to get us to the moon is wrong.” You’re just saying there’s more. There’s another dimension that hasn’t been considered here, and it’s important, and we ought to think about it. It doesn’t refute anything that science has figured out, just as quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories didn’t refute anything Newton came up with.
Dean: Right. But remember that historically both of those theories were rejected violently by physicists of the day because people identified with their understanding, and somebody came along and said, “Well, no, your understanding is correct, but it’s a special case. You weren’t quite as smart as you thought you were.”
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: And that is what’s happening here as well. One of the complaints I hear from my more conservative colleagues is, “The phenomena you’re talking about cannot be true. It must be impossible, because otherwise you’d have to throw away all of the textbooks and start over again.”
So that’s a fear response. I try to remind them that, first of all, we change the textbooks every 20 years anyway. And second, what I’m talking about doesn’t require throwing away anything. All of the disciplines remain exactly the way that they were before because they’re very successful.
All that we’re doing is changing a couple of fundamental assumptions. The moment you do that, you see that the whole structure of the way that the academic system works—the way that we’ve carved up reality into different disciplines—those are special cases. They’re valid within the little slice that they’re studying, but it’s in a much larger context.
In the larger context, ultimately, you end up with consciousness as being fundamental in some way. And not only that, it’s more fundamental than the physical world.
In the larger context, ultimately, you end up with consciousness as being fundamental in some way. And not only that, it’s more fundamental than the physical world.
In the larger context, ultimately, you end up with consciousness as being fundamental in some way.
Rick: More fundamental than the physical world, you just said.
Dean: More fundamental than the physical world.
Rick: Yeah, right. I’ve heard it said that science progresses by a series of funerals. I don’t remember who said that, but I’m sure you’ve heard it.
Dean: Max Planck.
Rick: Max Planck, was it? Yeah, because people are so stuck in their ways, and you kind of need a new generation to think differently. So this idea that consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world—I mean, wouldn’t the most cutting-edge scientists look at the physical world and think, “Well, what is this? Let’s look deeper”? And the deeper you go, the less physical it becomes, to the point where it begins to resemble something very akin to consciousness.
Dean: Well, maybe not consciousness, but concepts like information, symbolism, and mathematics. So it becomes certainly more abstract, and the abstraction is pointing in the direction of information.
What do we know that is involved in information processing? Well, from a mechanical side, it’s the brain—or actually, the nervous system—and from the other side, it’s more like consciousness itself. Subjectivity is an information process in some way.
So you can come at this both from a mainstream perspective, from something like a neuroscience perspective, but I don’t think that ultimately works, because part of the curiosity here is: How is it that a three-pound lump of tissue in your head has figured out, to extremely refined levels, a description of the entire universe? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
It also points out repeatedly that science tends to be full of hubris, essentially. The little brains inside our little pea heads have figured out everything about the universe? I don’t think so.
But we are clever. I think we’re a reflection of the universe itself, each of us in some way. And so we’re able to access elements of reality that are not immediately accessible to our ordinary senses.
Rick: Yeah. Over the course of your career, have you seen this resistance to taking this kind of stuff seriously erode quite a bit?
The Public and Private Status of ESP
Dean: Well, the real issue is about a public versus private split. From a public perspective, we go through cycles. In the 1930s and 1940s, most academics accepted the reality of ESP based on J. B. Rhine’s work. Then behaviorism became popular in psychology, and that pushed it aside.
Then it came back in the 1960s and ’70s, along with the psychedelic revolution, and people were again saying, “Well, obviously this stuff is real.” Then there was a retraction in the ’80s and ’90s. We’re now in a cycle that’s going back up again.
So that’s from a public perspective—the public academic perspective, which is reflected in the way that the popular press covers these things.
From a private perspective, it has always been the majority of the population, including the majority of academics, who accept the phenomena. Because the phenomena are there, right? It’s what you can talk about in public that is quite different.
Some of my work involves business and government, usually military and intelligence worlds. They’ve always been interested in these domains. That interest has never gone away. The only thing that changes is what amounts to a kind of surface way that it is talked about.
Rick: And I’ve heard you say that many people who are interested in it won’t talk about it because then they won’t get their PhD thesis approved, or they won’t get some faculty position, or they won’t get tenure, or whatever, because they’re just treading on forbidden ground.
Dean: It is a taboo. The definition of a taboo is that there are certain things you don’t talk about. And there are taboos—not just around this topic, but many taboos, especially in the academic world.
Rick: It’s interesting. The fact that you said that the majority of the public believes in this stuff—I have a feeling that we have kind of innate, intuitive desires and longings and feelings about the full potential of life: our own full potential and human potential in general. And those can’t be repressed.
It’s like a beach ball you try to push under the water; it’s just going to keep trying to pop up. And sooner or later, we’re just going to have to face it and deal with it and come to fully understand it and incorporate it into the accepted body of knowledge.
Dean: All you need to do is look at what’s happening on television and in movies now to see how it’s popping up there. Some very large percentage—I don’t know what percentage, a third perhaps, or 25 percent—of television shows now have themes having to do with psychic phenomena.
Of course, like any form of entertainment, it’s always an embellishment, and it looks magical and so on. But the basic ideas are there, and the entertainment world reflects what our interests are.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: So, nothing new there.
Rick: So, as a scientist, do you pretty much restrain yourself to just studying the phenomenon without trying to come up with a theoretical understanding of how it works? Is consciousness a field, and how do we actually communicate between here and South Africa without any apparatus, and so on? Or do you get into that as well as actually measuring things that are measurable?
Dean: Up until the last 10 years or so, I was mainly interested in more focused phenomena and testing—empirically looking at the phenomena and trying to convince myself and others that we’re dealing with the real thing.
But in the last 10 years or so, I’ve become more interested in trying to look at questions about how we understand this in the larger context of understanding anything.
Rick: What have you concluded? Or maybe not concluded, but how has that developed so far?
Dean: Well, as I said, I think that I’ve come to an understanding that this makes more sense thinking of it in idealistic terms rather than materialistic terms. Unfortunately, science doesn’t have an epistemology of idealism. So we’re a little bit stuck in that it’s very difficult at this point to develop a theory on how things work mechanistically if you’re dealing with something like consciousness.
So we don’t know what the mechanism of consciousness is. In fact, there may not be one. It may be that we’re in a holistic environment that’s fully interconnected. It’s before space-time. You can’t pull it apart by definition, in which case all of our methods in science fail.
So I don’t have high confidence that I’m going to figure this out, or that anybody else in the short term is going to figure out how any of it works. But as more of an umbrella understanding of the phenomenon, I think it makes more sense to think of consciousness as fundamental because, among other things, it reduces the anomalous nature of it.
Science really does not like anomalies. Even though science advances by understanding anomalies because they show where holes are in our assumptions, it rejects anomalies like crazy. It doesn’t like them. And yet that is ironically the very thing that causes science to advance.
So one of the other reasons why, early on, I was interested in these phenomena is because they do indicate that we’ve overlooked something very important. By studying these effects and convincing ourselves that they’re real, it would give us a clue about how to make the next big advancement.
Rick: Yeah. And when you say “very important,” usually people might think, “Okay, well, maybe we’re going to get some new technology out of it, like we did when we went to the moon and figured out so many things. It gave us sorts of breakthroughs that we wouldn’t otherwise have had if we hadn’t made that effort.” What sort of impacts do you think that really understanding this, as a scientific culture and as a popular culture—really figuring it out the way we figured out so many other things—would have on our day-to-day life and on some of the problems that confront us?
Precognition and Better Decision-Making
Dean: Well, at a very pragmatic level, we have always been faced as a species with the problem of making decisions without enough information. So how do we improve our ability to do that? Well, we need other ways of gaining information about not only present events but future events, to be wise about what the next step should be.
So these phenomena suggest that we have that capacity. We can call it intuition. We can call it whatever we like, but we have the capacity to, in effect, sample future possibilities and decide which one of those we want to go to.
So one would think that there are some people who are much better at this than others. We would think that, as a resource, as a society, we would want to cultivate that. We’d want to find those people and allow them to cultivate those abilities.
In the old days, we would have called them shamans. Well, those people are still around. They just may not even know that they’re shamans. They just know that they’re lucky or something. We should be wiser about how we use those kinds of resources.
So that’s true in every domain you can think of, from personal life to business and government. They should all have their resident shaman helping to decide what’s the next best thing to do.
From a more sociological perspective, you can make a case that many of the problems in the world are a result of what we think about ourselves and, in particular, what we think consciousness is.
So if we live within a worldview that says that we’re meat machines—we’re machines made of meat—and there’s no purpose or meaning to anything, well, then we will treat each other in that way, and that gives rise to, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Well, that is the way that we see the world. It’s like running by a kind of insane capitalism that is destroying everything.
What if our model of us being purely meat machines is not correct? Maybe there is some kind of inherent purpose or meaning to reality, and maybe it’s related in some way to consciousness.
So this has nothing to do with religious ideas. It has to do with our best understanding that we can get about the nature of what it means to be a sentient creature. Well, you would think that that, too, would be an important thing to figure out.
Should we end up basically going extinct because we don’t understand ourselves very well, or can we take this next step and try to figure out what’s going on by taking the best of our ancient wisdom—which much of has been cast into religious terms—and extracting the power struggle that is involved in a lot of religion, taking the essence of it, which mostly is the mystical traditions, and finding out what of that we can believe is true and what is not so true?
So both from an everyday pragmatic perspective to a societal and even a species-survival issue, there are many, many aspects here that are important to look at.
Testing intuition in the laboratory
Rick: Yeah. A study came out this week from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in which they suggested—we have perhaps a one-in-twenty chance of exterminating human life over the course of this century as a result of climate change. And to me—you say “entangled minds”—some even propose that the entire universe is a single and self-entangled object. And if that’s true, then what we do to the atmosphere and to the rainforests and to the oceans and so on, we’re doing to ourselves.
Dean: Sure.
Yeah. It’s not like, as you say, if we’re meat machines and that’s just dumb and sentient stuff, then maybe it doesn’t matter. But if it’s actually one self-entangled object, this universe, then the rainforests are as much a part of us as our arm is.
Rick: Yeah. It’s not like, as you say, if we’re meat machines and that’s just dumb and sentient stuff, then maybe it doesn’t matter. But if it’s actually one self-entangled object, this universe, then the rainforests are as much a part of us as our arm is.
Dean: Well, that’s from an ecological perspective. There’s no doubt that everything is interdependent in an ecological sense on Earth. Banking is completely interdependent as well.
The question here is much deeper than that, though, because now it is basically saying that your personal, private, subjective self is also dependent on everyone else’s personal, but not-so-personal, subjective self. And, by the way, not just on Earth but everywhere.
So this automatically says that if we as creatures have a sense of purpose and meaning, maybe that’s a reflection of something much larger than ourselves.
On the other hand, there could be an asteroid heading toward us right now that will destroy the Earth. Today, people are predicting an apocalypse today. Well, that’s not likely to happen, but it could happen.
Rick: Sure.
Dean: It could be a large, dark asteroid somewhere that will eventually hit the Earth, in which case it would be very easy for somebody who sees that asteroid about to hit the Earth to say, “Well, there couldn’t possibly be any meaning in that.” So we need to leave room for accidents in the universe.
But I’m also reasonably sure that we’re not the only forms of sentient, intelligent creatures in the universe.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, estimates these days are that there are more Earth-like planets in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. And probably asteroids hit inhabited planets just about every day somewhere.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. So we should have a sense of purpose and meaning, and a certain degree of being proud of ourselves, but not too much.
Rick: Yeah. So let’s get into some of the stuff that you have actually done by way of research, and that has not necessarily won you a million dollars from James Randi, but has actually been published and has substantiated the notion that we do possess these latent abilities.
Dean: Okay. Anything in particular?
Rick: Well, where would you like to start? I mean, what are you most proud of or inspired by, or what do you think people would find most interesting among the fruits of your research?
Dean: A lot of the work that I do starts from common experiences. So one kind of experience—and this happened to me six months ago or so—I was driving out of a strip mall and approaching the main street out of the strip mall.
To my right, I couldn’t see anything on the main drag because there was a bank in the way, and it kind of blocked what I could see. On the left, you could see a little bit farther down the street. I was approaching the light that would allow me to get onto the main drag, and as I approached it, it turned green.
Normally, I would accelerate, saying, “Okay, I have a clear shot.” I didn’t see anybody on either side, but for some reason I just felt, “No.” I felt this was not right somehow. So I slowed down.
The person behind me did not like that very much because we had a green light, but I slowed down, and I kept going slower and slower and slower with a green light and nobody visible.
As I approached the light, somebody blasted through it from the main drag at 50 miles an hour, not stopping at all for the red light. I realized that if I had continued on in the normal way, I would have been hit broadside, or it would have been a serious accident.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: So that is not that uncommon for people who pay attention to get an internal sense that something is not right about this.
Rick: There’s a verse from the Yoga Sutras, which goes, “Heyam dukkham anagatam,” and it means, “Avert the danger that has not yet come.”
Dean: Yeah. You be aware of it, basically. So I call that presentiment. It is a feeling about a future event, not a cognition. It’s not precognition but presentiment.
So the question is, how do you take an experience like that and see whether it’s coincidence or a real thing? I developed a paradigm, or protocol, in the laboratory where you put people in simulated danger, or you put them in a simulated emotional context, to see if their bodies unconsciously would respond physiologically differently to an upcoming event that was emotional in some way, as compared to one that was calm.
The way we did that is you set up a pool of pictures that are either very emotionally positive or negative. Positive emotion would be something like an erotic picture, and negative emotion would be a picture of an accident or surgery or something like that. Then you have a whole bunch of calm pictures: a picture of a tree, a picture of an ashtray, things like that.
Actually, an ashtray may not be so neutral anymore, but maybe a trash bucket or something like that—something that doesn’t have much emotional content to it.
Rick: Right.
Dean: And then you sit somebody down in front of the computer screen, you wire them up to look at some aspect of their physiology. We’ve looked at skin conductance, pupil dilation, EEG, heart rate, blood pressure—all kinds of things. In one form of the experiment, you’d have them press a button. Five seconds later, one of the pictures would be randomly selected and shown for three seconds, and then the picture would go away. They would relax for the next 30 or 40 seconds, and then they would repeat this.
The important element in the experiment is that nobody knows in advance what the picture is going to be, because it’s randomly selected after that first five-second period when you’re waiting. The screen is blank at that point, and so even the computer doesn’t know what it’s about to select, because it does the selection instantly before the image appears. So there’s no clue anywhere about what’s going to happen.
The prediction would be that if we are sensitive—if our perception extends through time a little bit and we’re sensitive to what’s about to unfold—will your body begin to gear up to become aroused before an emotional picture and remain calm before the calm picture? So it’s a differential measurement.
To make a long story short, after 15 years of experiments that I’ve done, along with colleagues around the world, the meta-analysis shows very clearly that this is a real effect: physiology does respond to what’s about to unfold. The timing, because of the way the experiment is done, is somewhere between around a second before the event and approximately 10 seconds. The difference depends on what factor of physiology you’re talking about. The brain tends to respond very quickly; heart rate tends to respond a lot more slowly. But if you look at it on the right time scale, you can see that the body responds differently to your future.
The body responds differently to your future.
Rick: And you’re studying average Joes. You’re not getting psychic people into the lab; you’re taking graduate students who have a little spare time, want to earn a few bucks or something, and getting them in there, right?
Dean: Right.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: We generally do not work with people who make special claims. That is not always the case. Sometimes we do look for people with special ability. But in general, I’m interested in what is true in the population as opposed to what is true for somebody who has special skill.
And so what we’re able to show then is that we’re more or less—not completely—unselected, because people don’t do the experiment unless they’re at least interested.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: So it’s that level of selection.
Rick: Unless you pay them something or whatever.
Dean: But even then, if they don’t want to do it—they would—I mean, pay them a lot, but we never have a lot to pay.
Rick: Right.
Dean: So people in general have this ability. And the nice thing about this kind of experiment is that it doesn’t ask somebody to do a miracle in the laboratory. It’s a completely unconscious effect.
It is also true that among the most successful experiments in this field in recent years, it is very clearly established now that experiments that do not require a conscious response—in other words, that are implicit or unconscious—show much stronger and more robust effects. So this is one of the reasons why I think that meditators become much more sensitive to these kinds of phenomena. Simply because one of the main things that happens with meditation after a while is that you become more and more sensitive to things that would previously have been considered to be unconscious.
Rick: Yeah. One of the explanations of what meditation does is that it sort of expands the conscious capacity of the mind. Sometimes the analogy of an ocean is used, where the ordinary mind is just on the level of the waves, but through meditation the full range of the ocean—or more and more of it—gets to be conscious.
Dean: Right. So we did a survey among a thousand meditators having different levels of experience, from just starting to advanced, and asked them about a variety of different kinds of experiences that they may have had, from synchronicity to psychic to mystical and so on.
Basically, 75 percent of the people responding said that, as a result of their practice, their experiences that would be considered psychic or mystical increased noticeably. So it kind of fits this notion of what meditation does: it gets you more into contact with a portion of reality which is, for want of a better term, deeper.
Rick: Yeah. And in my own experience, and that of many people I know, there’s something that’s really precious which you wouldn’t necessarily call psychic or mystical or anything. It’s just like what you experienced with that car accident you might have had if you’d accelerated through that intersection.
There’s just a feeling like, “I think I should go this way,” or “I think I maybe shouldn’t do that.” It’s almost unconscious, it’s so subtle, but you’re just guided to just—
And I know people who say that they don’t really even think in the normal sense. They don’t form sentences in their head. They just have these subtle impulses, and they follow the impulses, and it ends up being far more fruitful, far more auspicious, far more desirable an outcome than if they had tried to rationally calculate what the best thing to do would be.
Dean: Right, right. So imagine that, on an individual basis, we can think of it as an enhancement of intuition, perhaps. What if the majority of the population in the world behaved that way?
Rick: Yeah. What a different world it would be.
Dean: It would be very different, right? One of the ways of judging whether it’s in a good direction or not is whether it becomes life-affirming. Is it wellness-oriented or is it profit-oriented—that distinction? One wonders. I would imagine that the more sensitive you become to others—to yourself and others—the more wellness-oriented it would be, because you recognize that you and the other person are not really that different after all.
Rick: Yeah, it’s like it makes the Golden Rule more automatic. If I were to do this, who’s it going to hurt and how is it going to hurt them, rather than just blindly doing the thing and hurting the person.
Dean: That’s because there are no other people.
Rick: Yeah, exactly.
Psychic abilities, ethics, and the use of power
And there’s an interesting thing I could throw in here—whoa, somebody just sent a fairly long question. Let me just see. I’ll get into this in a minute. I was just going to say, there’s an explanation I’ve heard which I find kind of satisfying: not only is consciousness fundamental but, like you said before, maybe some people are more comfortable calling it information. I would say calling it intelligence—and maybe all those things are qualities of it.
But there seems to be an intelligence which governs nature. And if we’re isolated and estranged from that intelligence, just in our own little individual bubble, then we don’t have the resources of nature’s intelligence at our disposal. But many people talk about living the Tao or being in tune with that universal intelligence, and then that becomes the guiding impulse of their life.
There’s a phrase called, “Brahman is the charioteer guiding life,” rather than just the individual limited intelligence. And so we couldn’t possibly calculate all the implications and ramifications of every little action with our individual intellect. But if we could get in tune with that deeper intelligence that does the calculation for us, all we have to do is kind of follow the impulses.
Dean: Yeah, well said. If Atman equals Brahman, then why not behave from the Brahman side rather than the Atman side?
Rick: Yeah. So just because this fellow just sent in a question, I think I’ll bring this in now, and we’ll get back into the rest of this. We were talking before about shamans, and a fellow named Serge from Luxembourg asked:
I have an African background, and having seen what happened in my country, and what is still happening there, and in other African countries, I’m not sure the government should have access to a resident shaman. In Africa, they use them and are still using them for selfish reasons, and I’m sure that in the European or Western countries they would use them for military purposes, as was done in ancient Greece. As you were saying, the Russians and the Americans have tried to use psi for spying on each other and have been interested in its military applications. So can you comment on that? Thank you.
The Ethics of Shamanic and Magical Powers
Dean: Well, it’s a good question, and I think one of the implications there is that if we remain embedded within a context where people are at each other’s throats, then they will use the power of the shaman and the power of the magician in that context.
So if we’re in a different context where we recognize that consciousness is more important than we thought before, and we switch from a capitalistic, crazy, aggressive society into one that sees the world as a single whole, where we probably should take care of each other and the planet, then the shaman could be used for other purposes.
So we know that there are just as many Darth Vaders out there as there are Jedi Knights. The power is neutral, in a sense. The abilities are neutral. They can be used for what might be thought of as good or bad, but it’s the context that determines how they are used.
So I don’t think that, in the current context, we can automatically assume that a shaman who had actual ability—as opposed to sham facilities—but someone who’s actually had ability, would automatically use it for good purposes. So that is a good question.
Rick: Yeah, it is. Last year, at the SAND Conference—Science and Non-Duality Conference—I remember you gave your talk on magic, and I think you touched upon the notion of black magic or dark magicians and so on.
Obviously, we’ve talked about movies, and you just referenced Star Wars, so it’s an interesting question. There are so many forces of nature that can either be harmful or beneficial, and this could be one more.
Is there any sort of safeguard or developmental procedure that we can conceive of that would tend to favor a more benign, altruistic development and application of these latent abilities? I don’t know. Do you have any answer to that?
Dean: Well, look at why, within the classical yoga tradition, a large portion of the Eightfold Path is teaching students about morals and ethics.
Rick: Good point.
Dean: Because people who are in an advanced state recognize that if your ego gets in the way, you do become a Darth Vader, because power is seductive at every level. So you could be seduced to the dark side fairly easily.
Rick: Yeah, interesting point. I was just corresponding with someone this morning—in fact, his email just came in as we were talking—about a particular guru whom I won’t mention. Many people can think of many examples. He became very—although people were very attracted to him, and he had great charisma and power and wisdom and wrote some brilliant books, he did some really creepy stuff and ruined a lot of people’s lives, marriages, finances, and all kinds of things.
So it’s an interest for me, and it’s something I’m actually going to talk about at the SAND Conference myself this year: the ethics of enlightenment. For the context of this interview, we could refer to it as the ethics of developing psychic abilities and latent capabilities. I think it’s really important because there have been so many horror stories.
Dean: Yeah, it’s probably the common theme about gurus in general: They have some kind of ability, and they learn very quickly that people gravitate to that. To resist the seduction of the power? Very, very difficult.
Rick: Yeah, which some people say in the Zen tradition: If you have awakened, wait 10 years before you start teaching.
Dean: Exactly. Yep. And the same would be true for—or at least a case can be made that if something were discovered about psychic phenomena that made it very robust—a method where you take a pharmaceutical, do some kind of practice, do anything, and become really, really good at it—would it be appropriate to release that knowledge? A case could be made that it would not be. As a species, we are not sufficiently mature to be able to withstand that power.
Entanglement and a connected universe
Rick: Yeah, that brings up an interesting point. A lot of people—I mean, I’ve often thought that certain knowledge and abilities will only come when we are mature enough to handle them. I don’t know if there’s much evidence for that, considering what we’ve been doing to the world.
And there are certain concepts that become part of the popular culture when they’re ready to. Someone like Steven Spielberg will come out with some great movie and it’ll just really blow people’s minds and popularize a certain notion, like extraterrestrials or psychic ability or whatever. It might even be that people like Spielberg and George Lucas and so on aren’t even conscious of the extent to which they are serving as tools of something bigger that’s guiding the culture along.
Dean: Yeah. Especially creative artists are embedded in that field, for want of a better term, a little more than others. They’re sensitive to what the population wants to see, and so they reflect it.
Rick: Yeah. Speaking of things that probably aren’t going to happen until we’re ready for them, at one point, in some talk, you talked about possibly using psychic ability to connect with extraterrestrials rather than through radio waves. Radio waves being a rather primitive form of communication that is actually already going out of vogue, even on this planet. Any comments on that? I thought that was interesting.
Dean: Well, it’s true. We seem willing to spend 10 to 20 million dollars a year to look for radio or television broadcasts from other star systems because that’s basically looking under the streetlight, because that’s where we know how to look.
But realistically, if there were intelligent creatures out there who are way more advanced than we are—and we can already, I think, glimpse that our consciousness is capable of things that are way more interesting than electromagnetics—then what we should be using is not giant telescopes but people who have special skills and are sensitive to receiving information from elsewhere.
So there are people who claim that they’re in contact with creatures from other planets, and of course they’re dismissed as being kooky. It’s very difficult at this point to be able to vet whether they are correct or not, right? Because we don’t have independent methods.
But in principle, it would be possible to confirm or deny what’s going on. For example, if somebody claims that they’re in contact with people from the Pleiades, which is commonplace for some reason—people talk about it. I think it’s because the word Pleiades is pleasing to say. Well, then get five people who are claiming to talk to the same folks in the Pleiades, ask one certain questions, and then ask the other similar questions, and start to compare notes, basically, to see if in fact they’re communicating with the same people and getting the same kind of ideas.
This is, in principle, similar to what you would do if you were doing a radio communication. You use multiple ways of testing whether the information is correct and consistent. So why are we not doing that? Well, there are people doing it, but they are not being funded 10 million dollars a year to do it because it’s not considered within the way that we do things at present, at least not in a scientific fashion. But it could be.
Rick: Does the SETI program get 10 million dollars a year?
Dean: Well, I’m thinking of Paul Allen, who is funding the Allen Array, and so they’ve gotten tens of millions of dollars to do that. And the SETI program, which is no longer part of NASA but is an independent entity—yeah, they get support. A lot of support. Way more support than the kind of research that we do.
Rick: Yeah, and it’s funny because radio waves are really slow, even though they’re at the speed of light, in terms of the size of our universe, whereas the kind of thing you’re talking about is not constrained at all by time or distance.
Dean: As far as we can tell, the phenomena we’re talking about are not in space-time, so they don’t have those constraints. We won’t actually know if that’s true until we at least have a colony on Mars and we can do experiments from here to there, because you can’t get far enough away on Earth to check whether the speed of connection is actually light speed or beyond.
The reason why I think it is still beyond light speed is because of precognition. When you can get a signal from what we consider to be the future, we’re clearly not dealing with ordinary space-time.
Rick: Yeah. Here’s an interesting little segment from Entangled Minds that I took note of because I wanted to discuss it with you. You said:
Some scientists suggest that the remarkable degree of coherence displayed in living systems might depend in some fundamental way on quantum effects like entanglement. Others suggest that conscious awareness is caused or related in some important way to entangled particles in the brain.
And then that other thing that I read earlier—some even propose that the entire universe is a single self-entangled object. So would you explain a little bit what is meant by entanglement and why coherence displayed in living systems might depend upon it?
Dean: Entanglement is a translation of a German term that Schrödinger came up with in trying to describe one of the implications of the mathematics of quantum theory.
From a quantum perspective—at least the way that Schrödinger’s wave equation was devised—if you have two objects that interact—actually, if you have just one object, it’s described by its wave function. That’s the way that the mathematics works. If you have two objects that interact, they’re described by a more comprehensive wave function. Part of the wave function then has mathematical components that are the combination of both objects.
So the implication was that when two things interact, they get into a mixed state: They no longer have independent properties. Their properties are shared. So that’s what was meant by entanglement. Their properties are shared.
So the implication was that when two things interact, they get into a mixed state: They no longer have independent properties. Their properties are shared. So that’s what was meant by entanglement. Their properties are shared.
Einstein didn’t like this idea, which is why he came up with the notion of “spooky action at a distance,” because the implication would be that you have two objects that interact at some point, and then they go on their separate ways, and yet they’re not independent. They both contain part of each other, not in the form of a classical correlation—like two things that are spinning in the same direction—but part of their properties are literally mixed together in a way where it doesn’t matter where they are; they will still be connected.
Rick: Yeah, they can be on opposite sides of the galaxy, and if one changes in one way, the other changes instantly the other way, or so they say.
Dean: Well, in a more subtle sense, but yes. They’re no longer separate in the usual way of thinking of separateness.
So it took 30 years before John Bell figured out how to experimentally test that this is true. Now the experiments have been done many times, and they show that it is in fact the case that there is a kind of sharing of properties, and objects are not separate anymore.
And the separateness is curious because the connection is not in space or time. It transcends space, and it transcends time. That is why you can come to the conclusion that, at some point, a lot of things have interacted with each other.
In fact, on Earth, virtually everything has interacted with everything else over millions of years, in which case, at some deep level of physical reality, the Earth is one holistic chunk of stuff. Maybe the whole universe, then, is one chunk of stuff.
This is now purely at a physical level—it has nothing to do with the possible subjective side to it—but even at a physical level, we’re living in a massive bowl of Jell-O, so it’s all one thing somehow.
So now you add in subjectivity. This is like looking at the thing from the outside, like looking at the brain from the outside and knowing nothing about what’s going on on the inside. Well, the inside is the subjective awareness of the object.
You can have something like a brain, portions of which are down at the level of atomic particles, things like ions transporting between synapses. Well, those are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics. That means that there’s entanglement happening in the brain, happening everywhere, but in the brain as well, which means it’s a holistic object, some elements of which are not in space or time, but there’s also subjectivity to it.
Even from a classical neuroscience perspective, we know that there are correlations between the activity of the brain and subjective awareness. So that means that there are some elements of subjective awareness that are not in space or time.
I mean, this is a classical regression of what we know from physics today. If elements of subjectivity are not in time, that is exactly what we know as mystical and psychic experience.
Rick: Yeah. When I hear an explanation like that, I just think of an ocean analogy. You say there are some elements that are not in space and time—the deeper you go, the more universal it becomes. And so you get away from the specificity of the wave to the universality of the depth of the ocean, and fundamentally everything is infinitely correlated, everything in the universe intimately connected with everything else, and every—well, what was it you said? A single self-entangled object.
Dean: Right.
Rick: There’s nothing that is isolated from anything else.
Dean: Right. And so there are people whose personality is such that their sense of reality is driven very strongly by the ordinary senses. For those people, this kind of talk is crazy talk—
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: —because their experience does not include the possibility, or the experience, that what we’re talking about could possibly be real. For them, everything is common-sense classical objects, which look separate, and people are separate; everything is separate.
So that is a pretty large chunk of the population. Maybe the majority. I’m not quite sure.
Rick: I think it is.
Dean: Yeah. So for them, and those who become scientists who have that personality type, no wonder they resist this like crazy.
Well, I have found that in general, the people who are attracted to things like meditation—it’s changing now because meditation is prescribed as an anti-stress approach—but in the old days, people who would be attracted to something like meditation were not those kinds of people at all.
They were people who had an internal sense of connectivity, even though they may not have expressed it in those terms. But they would feel it somehow. So for them, what we’re talking about is straightforward; it kind of fits.
Rick: Yeah, and even a lot of people who take up meditation for stress and all—after a while, many of them begin to realize there’s something more.
Maybe the stress is taken care of, and then they start opening up to deeper realities and so on.
Dean: Right.
Very similar to somebody who may come from a perspective of common sense equals reality. Like naive reality: “It’s common sense.” Well, you take a psychedelic and suddenly that’s no longer true.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: So it oftentimes takes a very strong personal experience to question your prior beliefs. Otherwise, there’s no reason to change.
Rick: Yeah. You said in one of your articles, “I enjoy the challenge of exploring the frontiers of science, and I am comfortable tolerating the ambiguity of not knowing the right answer, which is a constant companion at the frontier.” I like that way of thinking, and what we’re talking about here is people who are convinced that they have the right answer, that things are the way they perceive them to be, and so on. But I think it’s much more interesting to live with a sense of wonder and mystery and not pitch your tent on some limited ground.
Dean: Right. But I remember when I was in training in an engineering school that you do get a sense, after a while, of a feeling of control and power over your understanding of the way things work. I was in a class, for example, where we were designing rocket engines, and you learn that the mathematics can describe how you need to move a rocket engine so that you can basically push a pencil up into orbit.
Rick: Yeah. Well, you see that you could do it with partial differential equations, and then you build it and it works. So you understand something. It doesn’t take long before that sense of understanding inflates quickly, and you get a sense that even though you may not understand everything from every other discipline, you’re on the right track and you’ve got it.
Well, I did get it. I mean, I remember what that felt like, and so I have great sympathy for scientists and engineers who do get this kind of inflated sense that we’re so close to understanding everything. Maybe it’s because I also came from an artistic background or something, where I realized that that sense was an illusion.
Rick: Yeah. People were saying that back in the 1800s. They said, “We pretty much got it all figured out, and there won’t be any major discoveries after this.”
Dean: Right. No reason for anybody to go into physics because it’s all already known.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s just a perennial limitation in people’s vision. I’m sure—I always think in terms of spirituality that everybody’s a beginner relative to what is possible, and I think that’s probably true of science as well. There could be civilizations that are millions of years more advanced than ours that would make us look like Stone Age characters.
Dean: Sure. I’m convinced that’s true. One of the ways I judge—without being too judgmental about it—one of the ways I assess where somebody is on this spectrum is by saying, imagine that there’s a fraction, and the bottom part of the fraction is everything that can be known, and the top part of the fraction is what we actually know now. Is that fraction closer to one or closer to zero?
Somebody who has an inflated sense—from my perspective, an inflated sense—of what we think we know is going to say we’re a lot closer to one; we’re pretty close. I think we’re so close to zero that it is effectively zero.
I think we’re so close to zero that it is effectively zero.
✨ Group attention and the Global Consciousness Project
Rick: Yeah, I would tend to agree. It’s interesting, your example of rocketry and getting something into orbit and how it gives you, how it imbues you with a sense of power when it actually works. You’re able to do that.
For some reason, it reminded me of supernormal abilities—which I’ve also heard you talk about—such as the things outlined in the Yoga Sutras, the various siddhis. If those things are real—people being able to levitate or become invisible or that kind of stuff—it would imply that they have some kind of mastery over natural laws which we don’t really understand. But they’ve somehow—it implies all kinds of things. It implies a deep connection between consciousness and the laws of nature that is not commonly understood.
It would be really cool if something like that were performed, because rather than the really tiny, subtle things that you find when studying large numbers of people, if individuals could perform that and it were proven that they weren’t just magicians, then it would sort of be an in-your-face forcing of a reassessment of our understanding of life and consciousness and matter and everything else.
Dean: Well, I think historically that has happened. There have been people who are quite good at some of the siddhis. I think it’s happening a lot for gurus who become popular. They may not have the advanced siddhis, but they have elementary ones.
Rick: Right.
Dean: A lot of people have elementary ones. Even among the advanced yogis, they all recognize that it’s extremely rare for somebody to have the advanced siddhis, because it’s not only that you have 30 years of meditation experience, but you also have talent in that particular domain.
It’s also important that within the Yoga Sutras there are prohibitions about demonstrating it. You don’t demonstrate it. It’s like Fight Club: You don’t talk about it. And for good reason. You can imagine, in today’s world, somebody who had these abilities and was demonstrating them—no one would believe it.
Rick: Everyone would need to see it personally.
Dean: Even if they saw it personally, most people would not believe it because we’re used to seeing these things as tricks, even in person. For those who do end up believing it, they will immediately become completely devoted to that person. That person then is going to be seduced by the power of doing it, which is why the prohibition is there in the Yoga Sutras. You just don’t do this.
We’re not ready for it yet as a species. So elementary siddhis are okay. We study these in the laboratory. We know that they’re real. The major siddhis may need to wait until we’re Homo superior, or at least something beyond Homo sapiens.
Rick: Yeah, they may need to. I was part of the TM movement for many years, and we all learned siddhi practices in the TM movement. To my knowledge, no one has convincingly demonstrated them at this point. And even some of the subjective ones, I don’t think there’s been any proof. Very often, the alibi used is, “Well, collective consciousness isn’t ready for it.”
Dean: Right. So I asked John Hagelin, who’s now in charge of the TM movement—
Rick: Yeah, who was a student of mine back in the day. I taught him to meditate back in the day.
Dean: Wow! So I asked him, “Well, what is the status of yogic flying? Has anyone been able to do it?” And the answer is no. There’s hopping, but there’s no flying.
Rick: The hopping—
Dean: There’s not even any hovering.
Rick: I’ve done the hopping, and it’s muscular. I don’t know. There may be sort of an energetic impulse that caused it to happen, but I don’t think any Newtonian laws are being violated.
Dean: Right. So I said, “Well, levitation is probably one of the most advanced siddhis. So why did the Maharishi start with the most advanced siddhi as a way of demonstrating that the siddhis exist?” And there’s no good answer to that. The Maharishi had his own ideas in mind, I guess. But why not start with an elementary siddhi?
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: Like teach people remote viewing or clairvoyance, or something that most people have to begin with that would be easy to demonstrate. It would also be easy to demonstrate not only that the phenomena exist, but that the practice of Siddhi Yoga would make it better. To my knowledge, no one has ever tried that.
Rick: What did Hagelin say when you asked him that?
Dean: I didn’t ask him that specifically.
Rick: Okay. Yeah.
Dean: But I guess now the teaching of Siddhi Yoga—or the Siddhi meditation method—is still going on.
Rick: Oh, yeah. The TM City program, they call it.
Dean: Yes, and people will claim—I’ve talked to people who claim that they privately experience some of the more advanced siddhis, but they don’t demonstrate them.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: So there’s no way to know.
Rick: Well, believe me, I did that whole thing for 25 years out of a sense of obedience and dedication, and I never saw any evidence. I don’t believe—I believe it’s possible. I believe people have levitated throughout history. It just hasn’t happened in contemporary experience.
Dean: At least not in a way that can be objectively—
Rick: Measured or—
Dean: —verified.
Rick: Right. But one thing I did experience—I’ve heard you allude to this in some of your talks—is meditating in large groups. One time I was in a group of 8,000 people all meditating together for a week or two, and boy, it was palpable. The atmosphere was so thick with this sort of bliss and coherence and energy and so on.
Of course, the reason the TM movement did this was to demonstrate that group coherence could have an influence on world events. So there were all these studies on crime rates and economic indicators and all kinds of things, in an attempt to correlate the assemblage of such groups with changes in society. According to the scientists, many of whom got those studies published—people like David M. Johnson—there was definitely a correlation.
Dean: Yeah. So we’ve done similar studies using different methods and gotten evidence suggesting that not necessarily meditation, but simply large-scale focused attention changes aspects of reality—physical reality. So it’s consistent with the so-called Maharishi effect, but looked at from a very different kind of perspective.
Rick: Yeah. Talk about that a bit. I heard you talk about how, on 9/11 and with the death of Princess Diana and some of these things which really drew world attention, there was a change that you could actually measure.
Dean: Right. So starting in the mid-1990s, my colleague at Princeton, Roger Nelson, got this idea that we know from laboratory studies that if you take a true random-number generator—where the randomness is based on a quantum event—it just produces streams of zeros and ones. You can assess them very easily using simple statistics, whether the output of the generator is random as expected or more orderly.
So this is an easy way of detecting unexpected moments of coherence that are arising in a physical object. In the laboratory, you use that as a way of testing whether somebody’s focused intention on the device—or the feedback from the device—makes a difference. The answer is, “Yeah, it makes a difference.” You can inject order into a random system.
So Roger got the idea of, well, maybe it’s not simply intention; maybe it’s just attention directed at the device. So he took random-number generators to lots of different contexts where you can predict that there would be large amounts of attention, like movies and plays and meditation circles and that sort of thing. And he was reporting that during the group activity, you would see order appearing where it shouldn’t appear in these physical devices.
Then starting in ’97 or ’98, Roger and I and a few others were talking about how nice it would be to have a system that was running all the time, so we could take advantage of unexpected events that we knew would draw the world’s attention. So it was launched in ’98, I think, and has run continuously since then. At times, we had up to 65 to 70 random-number generators running in major cities around the world and continually sending data up to a server at Princeton.
One of the events that we looked at was 9/11, along with many other events—500 or so since we started—that attracted a large proportion of the world’s attention for some time. And the question is, since we have a continuous database—now over 18 or 19 years of random data from all over the world—what happens to that random data during times when a predictable proportion of the world is paying attention?
The answer is that it doesn’t look random anymore. It’s no longer random. It’s becoming orderly in some way. So there are two ways of interpreting the results of this experiment. It is, by the way, a seven-sigma result.
Rick: What does that mean?
Dean: A seven-sigma result means, if you think in terms of the way the normal curve looks, that generally something is considered to be statistically significant if the mean—the center point of that normal curve—is chance. Then, plus or minus about two standard errors—standard error and sigma are the same thing—is where most things happen. If you go out to three standard errors on either side, it becomes rarer. But seven standard errors means that the odds against chance are beyond a trillion to one. At that stage, you’re way, way out, far away from chance.
So that’s where we are after 500 events in what we call the Global Consciousness Project, which is really Roger’s baby, but we have a bunch of people involved in this thing. There are two ways of interpreting what’s going on.
One is that when we selected an event to look at, that was important—that we were somehow selecting events that were going to give a good result. And this does not mean that we look at the data and then decide to use it. We define the event first—we formally define the event—and then we go look at the data.
So by doing the formal selection of events, those 500 events cumulate to seven sigma. We know that it’s a real effect. We still don’t know exactly how to interpret the meaning of those events, but that is nevertheless what we get.
For the last couple of years, we’ve been doing experiments like this using new kinds of random-number generators that we brought to Burning Man. Burning Man, as an event, is nice because it’s isolated from the rest of the world. It involves two major events that have 60,000 or 70,000 people all focused on that same event. One is the burning of the Man, and the other is the burning of the Temple.
So we’ve used commercial random-number generators and generators of our own design that we brought to Burning Man to see whether, in that context, we could get any evidence that there’s unexpected order appearing in the randomness. And the answer is yes. We see indications like we’ve seen on the global scale at these more local events.
In the last two years, we brought our own devices to Burning Man, where we’re recording the noise itself—the electronic noise—rather than turning it into bits, because all the previous studies looked at random bits. Now, by taking the noise, we’re able to see whether the reason why we see effects in bits is because the noise changes. To make a long story short, yes, the noise changes too.
So the metaphor we used in our last study last year was, maybe what’s happening is a disturbance in the Force.
Rick: Good one!
Dean: It’s Obi-Wan’s metaphorical description of some kind of distortion in space-time as a result of a shift of attention. We analyzed that in the noise by looking at autocorrelations, which is the self-similarity of the noise over time. So it’s a temporal measure.
We also looked at something called mutual information, which is that we had 32 generators and were able to look at the outputs of all 32 in relationship to each other. So that’s looking at a spatial form of coherence among the generators. It should give separate results. But if they don’t, we would detect that right away.
So we had both a temporal and a spatial way of measuring what was happening in the generators before, during, and after the two major events. And we saw what amounted to distortions in space and time, consistent with the idea of a disturbance in the Force—a warping of space-time as a result of lots of people suddenly focusing at the same time.
Rick: Seems like you could do this at baseball games and things too. The World Series.
Dean: Well, there are colleagues who have done it. We have colleagues who have done it at places like when the Red Sox finally won the World Series after many years and things like that. So, yeah, it could be used in lots of contexts.
Rick: Yeah. What I don’t understand is how and why human attention on something totally unrelated to a little random-number-generator machine, such as a baseball game or Burning Man, should affect a random-number machine. I mean, what the actual mechanics of physics would be that would cause this machine to churn out numbers differently than when people’s attention was incoherent.
Dean: The reason you ask that question is because we are so embedded in reductive materialism that that’s the only way we can imagine that something could happen. So now, think—turn this on its head—and say that maybe we really just live in a universe that’s all consciousness. Right?
So the physicality is emerging—it’s emerging from it somehow. In which case, if you go to an unusual period where some localized domain of consciousness becomes highly coherent and focused, the physicality that arises from that is going to look a little bit different than it would if you had a gazillion different directions of attention all the time.
So one of the ways that you would detect this moment of highly ordered consciousness would be through a more ordered form of physicality. And so it’s not just the random-number generators that are changing. Everything changes.
Rick: Yeah, refrigerators and Volvos and everything else are being influenced, but just the random-number generators have the sensitivity to change in a way that we can measure.
Dean: Not only that, it’s the only thing that we’re measuring. So if we could detect a moment of coherence in a plant or a refrigerator or a battery, we would find that all of it changes if we were smart enough to figure out what to measure. That’s what the implication would be.
Rick: I get that. That’s a good explanation. It’s the first time I’ve ever understood that. A simple example might be if you can somehow make the ground in a forest be more fertile, then all the plants are going to be nourished simultaneously, just automatically.
So there’s sort of a—for lack of a better word, there’s the Force or a field of consciousness, and if that can somehow be enlivened, and if group events—things that focus large numbers of people’s attention—can enliven it, then since that field is common to everything—refrigerators and Volvos and all living beings and everything else—there’s going to be a sort of universal upwelling of influence, and certain things will be able to measure it.
Certain physical apparatus will, and human beings will too if they’re sensitive. I mean, these days, do you concur with that, my understanding of it?
Dean: Yeah. That’s right.
Rick: Sometimes I like to put things in my own words just to make sure I got it.
Dean: Sure. The other metaphor I use sometimes is a Möbius strip. A Möbius strip from a distance looks like a ribbon. A ribbon has two sides—like mind and matter being two sides of something different, not connected at all other than through this ribbon.
But if it’s a Möbius strip, then what looks like mind and matter are actually one and the same thing. So whether you see it as mind or whether you see it as matter depends on how closely you’re looking and how you’re looking and all the rest.
But because it’s on the same strip, when one part of it is doing something, the other part has to do something similar because it wasn’t separate. So that’s another metaphorical way of looking at the relationship between two things that appear to be separate but are actually not separate.
What looks like mind and matter are actually one and the same thing.
Rick: A woman named Prithvi from MIT sent in a question. Sloan.mit. Is there a school at MIT called Sloan? In a particular subsection.
Dean: Mm-hmm.
Rick: Okay, so her question is, “Can you share with us examples of interesting studies that have been conducted with folks with advanced cognition?”
Dean: Advanced cognition? I’m not—
Rick: I guess she means precognition, perhaps?
Dean: I don’t know. We did do a study with long-term nondual meditators. Maybe that’s in the right direction?
Rick: Maybe. We’ll take a crack at it. She can always send in a follow-up if she wants to.
Dean: So we recruited people who had a minimum of 20 years of active practice in non-dual meditation—things like Dzogchen. This was a presentiment experiment of an extremely simple type where they would go into their meditation, wear special glasses that had little lights that could flash in the glass, and wear earbuds that could make a tone.
We wanted to see what was happening in their brains with 32-channel EEG. Would their brains respond before a light flash or an audio tone? And would the response be different depending on what was happening? In other words, would the response reflect the fact that they were getting visual input or audio input? We wanted to see how the future event would affect it, and whether the effect would be measured differently depending on what was affecting it.
We had—I think we had eight non-dual meditators and eight matched controls for gender and age. The joke around where I live is that it was much more difficult to find controls than it was to find meditators.
Rick: Because it’s California, right?
Dean: Yeah. I mean, go on any side street and you’ll find an advanced meditator. But to find people who have never meditated is somewhat difficult. We managed to do it.
The bottom line was: What is happening in the brains with these extremely non-emotional stimuli—very simple stimuli that are just producing evoked responses in the brain in different locations?
The non-dual meditators showed a very clear brain difference depending on what the future event was. Sometimes they would get a light flash, an audio tone, both at the same time, or nothing. We did some differential measurements and looked at the same kind of measurements in the controls, and their brains showed no effect at all.
So what this says is that the people who had these 20 years of this meditative style—which was the reason why we chose them—most advanced meditators will eventually start reporting moments or feelings of spaciousness, meaning extended through space and extended through time. Timelessness.
We wanted to know whether there was an ontological reality to the sense of being extended through time. The presentiment experiment is exactly what does that. It extends awareness through time, and we detect that by what’s happening in the body. They did show that effect, whereas the controls did not.
Rick: Cool. So, Prithvi, if that answered your question, good. If it didn’t, send a follow-up question and Dean will answer it. But we’re probably going to wrap up pretty soon, so send it quickly.
From psychic phenomena to natural magic
Okay. So, Dean, thinking about what we’ve talked about for the last hour and a half or so, are there some things that are important to you that you would like to have the opportunity to say—things you’re working on, things you have worked on—that we haven’t even brought up?
Dean: Well, way back when I was at Princeton, I decided I wanted to write a trilogy having to do with psychic phenomena, because this is what I’d been studying for a while.
The first book was The Conscious Universe, where basically it was a presentation of how we know in science that anything is a real thing. So it has to do with replication and experiments and how you understand all that. That’s what that book is about.
The second book was addressing the question that came up a lot: “And how do you explain any of this stuff? It doesn’t seem like it fits in the laws of physics.” The second book, Entangled Minds, was largely about the physics of this.
The third book was a result of people asking me, “Well, if everybody has this, how do I get—how do I train to make it better? And is that a good thing?” So I chose classical yoga, the Yoga Sutras, as a way of demonstrating, first of all, that this has been around for a long time.
The Yoga Sutras are useful because the third book talks in detail about the various kinds of abilities that can be developed and even gives a recipe for it. It addresses the question, “Can we believe what Patanjali wrote about 2,000 years ago?” The answer is, “Yeah.” He wasn’t making up fairy tales—at least not for the elementary siddhis.
So the fourth book, which will come out in April 2018, is a book that I hadn’t originally planned because I thought those three books would be enough. So instead of a trilogy, it’s a quartet—or whatever the literary equivalent of four is. Is there one?
Rick: I don’t know.
Dean: What’s after a trilogy?
Rick: I don’t know.
Dean: A quartet? Something like that.
Rick: A qualogy.
Dean: Yeah. So I decided to expand beyond yoga to the esoteric traditions in general, to look at what those traditions say about these phenomena and whether they provide a clue about a way of understanding why these phenomena make sense.
Empirically, we have good evidence that they exist. It’s still very difficult to shoehorn the phenomena into our understanding of the physical world in the way that we learn in a secular society. From a religious perspective, people have faith that magic happens all the time, but I’m a scientist. In a secular society, we can’t rely on faith as an answer. It’s not an answer to anything. It’s faith.
So I went back to look at the whole of primarily Western, but also other, esoteric traditions, with the intention of synthesizing from all of that clues that would tell us why any of this makes sense—or whether it makes sense.
Of course, I very rapidly discovered that this has been done many times, and that most historians and philosophers who do the same thing end up with the same synthesis. Aldous Huxley’s perennial philosophy is just one example of many that come to the same conclusion, which is that if you take the experiences that have been codified into the esoteric literature and mystical experience, they say that consciousness is fundamental and the physical world emerges from it. Basically, it’s idealism.
The other thing that you see is that people throughout history have been interested in the question, “So what? What do you do with that knowledge?” The esoteric perspective—the “so what?”—has turned into ways of controlling our environment.
The methods were astrology, which turned into astronomy; alchemy, which turned into chemistry; herbalism, which turned into pharmaceuticals; and one other class, which turned into magic.
We don’t consider magic today to be a real thing other than entertainment. It’s Harry Potter and Harry Houdini. So I got interested in looking more carefully at the esoteric ideas about magic. What is it? What do you synthesize out of that as to what it even means?
I discovered, to my shock, actually, that I’ve been studying magic for almost 40 years, because when you look at what magic actually is, it’s divided into three categories.
The first is divination, which is cast in terms of tarot cards and crystal ball reading and all of that stuff. But divination is about perception through space and time. That’s clairvoyance, remote viewing, and precognition. That’s what science has looked at and has confirmed to be a real thing.
In other words, that magical practice of divination is real. It’s not, of course, anything like what you see in Harry Potter or in entertainment, but that’s always the case. It’s always an embellishment, but the phenomenon is real.
The second category is force of will, which means an intentional manifesting of things in the world. That’s magic. We study that in the laboratory through psychokinetic experiments, and we know that that’s real, too.
The third category is less certain, but it’s theurgy, which is communicating or dealing with spirits or non-physical entities of some type. That’s primarily studied in the modern world through things like mediumship research.
All of these ancient techniques were heavily coded with all kinds of medieval stuff, which in today’s terms is theater. I would consider most of it to be theater and ritual. When you strip that away to get to the essence of what these methods are, we find evidence through scientific, experimental, repeated studies that these traditional ideas about magic are real.
So that became the fourth book on magic, which, as you said, is coming out in April 2018. It goes into enough detail, I think, to show why ancient ideas about magic will become the future of science, in exactly the same way that astrology became astronomy and alchemy became chemistry.
There’s an element—this is not supernatural magic. It’s natural magic. It is simply the way that the world works.
This is not supernatural magic. It’s natural magic. It is simply the way that the world works.
There are important clues, I think, from these ancient esoteric ideas—called esoteric only because they were suppressed. It’s not esoteric for any other reason. The same is true for “occult.” It just means hidden or suppressed.
So I spend a chapter and a half in the book talking about why I think this actually is the future of science and not a reversion to the past.
Rick: Interesting. I want to question you on that a little bit more.
To me, the whole Vedic understanding is that consciousness is fundamental and all—not only fundamental, but really is everything—and that it contains within it all the impulses of intelligence that govern the manifestation and maintenance of the manifest universe.
Consciousness contains all the intelligence, all the laws of nature that govern everything. That makes it so easy to understand how the phenomena you study could work, and how phenomena we have not yet seen, such as levitation, could work. Otherwise, it’s a complete bafflement, and you have to reject it as bogus if you’re operating from a materialistic viewpoint.
Dean: Right. No, it’s true. That’s why it is very, very difficult for someone who has been inculcated into materialism as the way—the only way, especially—to study how the physical world works. It’s very difficult, maybe not possible, to take these phenomena and figure them out.
As in the example before, you said, “How could focused attention change the world?” The immediate thing that we turn to is: What is the mechanism by which the physical is going to the other side? And if that is the case, it may be completely backwards. You start from the other direction, and suddenly it becomes very straightforward.
🕊️ Bringing science and spirituality together
Rick: Yeah. Something you said a minute ago fascinated me, which is that this is the future of science.
I sometimes think that a time will come—I don’t know when, 100 years, 300 years—when people will be bemused about the rift between spirituality and science. It will seem primitive, because these subjective and objective approaches to gaining knowledge will have merged into a common endeavor. Each of those branches will have contributed tools that the other didn’t have, and they will sort of augment and supplement one another.
In other words, subjective means of gaining knowledge—meditation, that kind of thing—if used in a systematic way, could enable us to explore all sorts of subtle realms that physical scientific apparatuses are too crude to measure, detect, or explore.
On the other hand, science, with its logical, methodical approach, can take a lot of the hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo and subjective confusion out of spirituality and make it a much more rigorous and systematic thing.
But the two coming together will provide us with a much more seamless understanding of nature. It won’t be fragmented anymore; it will give us the whole range. What do you think about that?
Dean: Well, I think it’s inevitable.
Rick: Yeah.
Dean: I’m more optimistic that it’s not going to take 300 years. It might take as little as 20 years if we simply decided that it was something we wanted to do—at least to make a step in that direction.
Rick: Well, it’s already happened for some people, such as you, but for it to happen for the culture in a predominant way might take a while. Hopefully not. I don’t know if we have 200 or 300 years to wait.
Dean: Well, that’s the thing. See? We may not have the time to wait. This is another reason why I think that trying to search for radio signals from aliens is not the way to do it. Because it’s easy, at least for me, to project that eventually—you’re right—that what we currently call spirituality is simply a more refined form of the physical world that we don’t have good words for yet, that involves subjectivity in some way. Aliens who have any kind of intelligence at all will have figured that out and be way ahead of us.
Even a thousand years—which is nothing in space terms—a thousand years from now, if we have any degree of cleverness at all, we’ll figure out a lot more about this. And at that stage, you would realize that, I guess, if you wanted to be on another planet, you just think in a certain way and you’re there. You don’t need ships, you don’t need any of the mechanisms that we normally think about as being required to travel from here to there.
Or maybe you don’t need to travel physically. There are other ways, other forms of physicality that we don’t have good names for yet. But the concepts are there; we just don’t know how to use them very well yet, other than in what amounts to theater. We have theatrical ways of using it.
Rick: Yeah. Some of the people you referred to earlier who claim to have communicated with extraterrestrials say that they have developed technologies which have mastered the interface between consciousness and physical machines, such that it’s sort of like these machines are controlled with the consciousness of the operators. If one wants to be on the other side of the galaxy mentally—which could be done very quickly—the machine is actually capable of following suit. Very Star Trek-y.
Dean: In a way, it’s way beyond Star Trek.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: I mean, it sounds like pure fantasy at this point, but I think it’s a natural consequence once we begin to understand better the relationship between mind and matter, which is why, for the last 10 years or so, that’s what I’ve primarily been concentrating on: the mind-matter interface as an area of study.
Rick: Well, it’s exciting. Here’s a quote from Deepak Chopra. I think it might have been from your book. He said there are two camps of visionaries, from the distant past and the fringes of the present, and they’re both advancing on us. I think what he means by that—well, you elaborate on that. I’m talking too much here.
Dean: I sometimes know what Deepak is talking about, and sometimes I don’t.
Rick: Well, I think what he means by that is that there are ancient and modern visionaries. The fringes of the present means people like you who are on the cutting edge and who are leading us into a future in which there’s a more enlightened view or understanding of the way things work. The ancient visionaries from the distant past are as relevant to what you’re doing as you are. I mean, a lot of people have already figured it out. We just need to interpret what they have said to understand their language, because they’re speaking in the concepts and language of an ancient culture. That all needs to be brought into a modern scientific understanding.
Dean: Right. So it becomes a language issue. I’m reasonably convinced that mystics throughout history have all been trying to say the same thing, but we are limited by our language.
The nice thing about science is that it has enabled us to go into more abstract places where language begins to fail. The whole history of science is to develop—usually mathematical methods, but language goes along with it—that address more and more abstract ways of thinking.
If you make a case that if you only had counting numbers—numbers starting with one—most of it would be classical forms of the universe. But without developing zero, you couldn’t get very far, and you could get much less far if you hadn’t developed fractions. If you haven’t developed transcendental numbers, or complex numbers, or set theory, and so on, at each stage, when you develop more and more complex ways of thinking about reality—purely from a symbolic level, because that’s what mathematics is—you can go deeper.
The deeper you go, the more abstract it looks when you’re sitting on the surface. And yet there are people who live in these very deep levels, either experientially or as mathematicians. I think this is one of the reasons why people who do this very abstract math—they’re not normal people, almost in the same way that somebody who’s a very advanced meditator is not a normal person anymore.
Normal meaning the average Joe Six-Pack on the street? You can’t be. You can’t be at that level of abstraction and be able to express it to other people. You may be able to demonstrate it through your beingness, but not talk about it very easily.
Rick: As the Beatles said, “The deeper you go, the higher you fly.”
Dean: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Well, very good. I really appreciate this discussion. I hope others have enjoyed it. Is there any kind of concluding remark that you would like to make?
Dean: No.
Rick: You’re good.
Dean: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, great. Well, we’ve covered a lot, and it’s a lot of food for thought. So let me just make a couple of concluding remarks.
As everyone knows by now, I’ve been talking with Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I’ll be linking to his website and IONS’s website and so on from Dean’s page on batgap.com. I also have links to his books that we’ve discussed during this interview, so you can check those out.
Also, while you’re there, check out all the other stuff that’s on the site: past interviews under that menu, the audio podcast if you want to sign up for it, email notifications of each new interview if you want to sign up for that, and the donate button. Actually, you can sign up for that. There’s a monthly one and there’s also a one-time one, and various other things.
There’s not too much. Just explore the menus and you’ll see what’s there. So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one. And thanks again, Dean. We were going to do this a couple of weeks ago, but Dean had a cold, which he’s now gotten over, so he was very flexible in rescheduling this. And I appreciate your time.
Dean: My pleasure.
Rick: Okay. Thank you.
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