Helané Wahbeh Transcript

Helané Wahbeh InterviewHelane Wahbeh

Summary:

Wahbeh is the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health and Science University. Her background includes clinical training as a Naturopathic Physician and research training with a Master of Clinical Research and postdoctoral fellowships. She has international recognition for her work on complementary and alternative medicine, mind-body medicine, stress, PTSD, and their relationships to health and healing.

In this interview, they focus on Wahbeh’s current research interests, which include healing, stress and trauma, mind-body medicine mechanisms, and extended human capacities4. Wahbeh has extensive meditation training and practice, which informs her research.

The conversation delves into the topic of channeling, which Wahbeh defines broadly as accessing information and energy beyond conventional notions of time and space. This includes a spectrum from gut hunches and intuition to trance channeling, where a channeler believes they are a vehicle for a non-physical being.

They discuss the historical and scientific perspectives on channeling, including its potential genetic predisposition, as some psychics report such abilities running in their families. Wahbeh shares personal anecdotes and scientific findings related to this phenomenon, including a study that found a unique part of non-coding DNA in high-functioning psychics6.

The interview explores various types of channeling, the potential sources of channeled information, and the implications of non-local consciousness. Wahbeh emphasizes the importance of discernment when engaging with channeled content and the broader impact of recognizing our interconnectedness through non-local consciousness.

The discussion also revolves around the application of the scientific method to phenomena that are typically considered beyond the scope of traditional science. The speakers, Rick and Helané, explore the possibility of using random number generators as bio-sensors to detect refined shifts during sessions that might indicate non-local consciousness or other extraordinary phenomena.

Rick brings up Michael Newton’s work on life between lives, where consistent stories from numerous individuals suggest a map of the afterlife. Helané sees this as strong evidence, supporting the idea through qualitative analysis. She acknowledges the skepticism around proving such experiences as ‘real’ but suggests that even if it’s telepathy among participants, it’s still remarkable.

They also discuss out-of-body experiences and the potential for formal studies to differentiate between telepathy and actual astral projection. Helané mentions a planned study involving hypnotherapy to facilitate out-of-body experiences, aiming to verify the authenticity of such experiences without prior knowledge of the objects or images involved.

The conversation touches on the ability of certain individuals to see subtle beings or energies, and the idea of corroborating these visions through multiple observers in a controlled study. Helané shares insights into the process of channeling, the influence of intention, and the protective measures channelers can take to ensure they connect with higher-level entities.

They delve into the topic of channeled works and the potential for higher intelligence to transmit wisdom through humans. Helané expresses her belief in the possibility and the value of such works, despite the challenges in scientifically proving such phenomena.

  • The discussion explores the varied experiences of channelers, with some being unaware of their channeling and others observing it as if stepping aside.
  • Rick introduces the concept of the Vedas, ancient texts believed to be cognized from a cosmic source, with certain family lineages predisposed to access specific parts of this knowledge.
  • Helané shares her personal journey with channeling, which has evolved from feeling truths and presences as a child to actively connecting with guides and learning to trance channel.
  • Rick questions the safety of trance channeling, referencing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s caution against it due to potential weakening of mind-body coordination.
  • Helané acknowledges the risks, noting that channeling can affect health and requires careful consideration of one’s intentions and the frequency of practice.
  • The conversation touches on the dangers of using Ouija boards and the importance of discernment in evaluating the authenticity of channelers.
  • Helané highlights IONS’ research on interconnectedness, psi abilities, and well-being, and invites participation in their studies, including a genetic study and an app in development to measure the influence of consciousness on random number generators.

The discussion delves into the nuances of channeling, the potential genetic aspects of spiritual knowledge, and the importance of intention and caution in such practices. It also introduces ongoing research efforts to understand and measure the effects of transformative practices on human consciousness.

Full transcript:

RICK: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done about 580 of them now, if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website. And there’s also a donations page for people who don’t feel like using PayPal. My guest today is Helané Wahbeh. Helané is the director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. There are several scientists from that group that I’ve interviewed including Dean Radin and Cassandra Vieten. She’s still there.

HELANÉ: She’s not currently there, but she was CEO and a scientist there for a number of years.

RICK: Yeah, wonderful group. And she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Wahbeh is clinically trained as a Naturopathic Physician and research trained with a Master of Clinical Research and two postdoctoral research fellowships. She has published on, and spoken internationally about her studies on complementary and alternative medicine, Mind-Body medicine, stress and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and their relationships to physiology, health and healing. But that’s not what we’re going to talk about. Her current research interests include healing, stress and trauma, examining mechanisms of mind body medicine, and rigorously studying extended human capacities. And that last bit is what we’re going to talk about. Dr. Wahbeh’s extensive meditation training includes the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teacher training by Jon Kabat Zinn, a four year meditation teacher training with Core Light; and a 19 year regular meditation practice. Core Light, by the way, was founded by Leslie Temple Thurston, whom I interviewed over 10 years ago, and Brad Lochlan, who are now both living in South Africa. I’m still in touch with Brad, we’ve been emailing recently. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, he’s lovely. Yeah. So mainly what we’re going to talk about today is channeling because that’s what Helané is studying scientifically. And she has a rather broad definition of the term. So, I think we should start by having you define the term.

HELANÉ: Thank you, Rick. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today. Most people when they think of channeling, they might think of trance channeling, where the channeler believes they are acting as a vehicle for a non-physical being to speak through them, and use their body to speak. So I’m using kind of a broader umbrella definition of channeling which is basically accessing information and energy from beyond our conventional notions of time and space. And with this definition, we know that these experiences of what I’m calling channeling exist on a spectrum, so “gut hunches and intuition” could be called channeling. And going all the way to the other side of trance channeling would also be called ‘channeling’ and then everything in between.

RICK: So trance channeling would include people like Edgar Casey, who seems to have been very genuine, as far as I can tell. And, you know, if talking about spectrums, and then J.Z. Knight, who, in my opinion, is not so genuine or somehow that whole thing has gotten rather dark. But that’s what most people think of, I think when they think of channeling or Bashar, you know, Darryl Anka, whom I’ve interviewed who is actually my most popular interview. So we’re going to explore that. And we’re also going to explore various points along the spectrum that you alluded to.

HELANÉ: Right.

RICK: Yeah. Now my wife Irene asked a question which it would be a good thing to start out with here. She said: “Very often, psychics, mediums or healers will say their ability runs in their family. Is this consistent with your research, and what can you tell us about this particular genetic predisposition? And in fact, you have kind of a personal account of this because your mother and grandmother were channelers of some sort. Right?

HELANÉ: That’s right. That’s great. That’s a great question. And yes, anecdotally, we know that these phenomenal experiences are known to run in families. So I’ve seen it in my family, you know, we have  one of very few studies done in Scotland that has looked at how Second Sight has gone through and families. It has not been formally evaluated, though.

RICK:What is Second Sight?

HELANÉ: Second Sight is the Scottish name for premonitions or precognition, or having a vision of someone passing and then and then they pass. So in Scotland, they call it the Second Sight. And so there was a survey study done in Scotland on that, and also a pedigree study where there were multiple interviews done, where they saw how it was traveling through families, this experience of Second Sight. So we have done a formal study looking at high-functioning psychics compared to controls. And it was a small pilot study, but we did find a unique part of the non-coding DNA that was different between the psychics and the controls.

RICK:  And so that was really the non-coding DNA? What does that mean?

HELANÉ: That means that it is not coding for a specific protein that we know about, and that it is thought to be involved in regulation of protein synthesis, or some other sort of moderating aspect of the DNA transcription.

RICK: Now, I think I’ve heard that people studying DNA, kind of, there was a whole lot of the DNA that they didn’t understand what it could possibly be doing. And, and they kind of just said, Oh, that’s just junk DNA. It’s probably just redundant or unused, or some such thing. Is that a thing? Is that what some people have said?

HELANÉ: Yeah, so they used to call it junk DNA. So when you know, the human genome was first defined/described, it was like, oh, there’s all these parts that, you know, don’t do anything. They’re just junk. And so now, we’ve moved away from calling it junk. It’s called non-coding, because they’re learning that perhaps it doesn’t code for specific proteins that we know about, but it’s doing sort of moderation, if you will. And that’s a large growing field called epigenetics that’s evaluating that. We just did this pilot study, and we want to do further studies. We’re trying to raise some funds to do a follow-up for that, comparing controls with cases within much larger numbers so that we can kind of look at the nuances of the different types of channeling experiences that people have like mediums versus pre- cognition, etc. And then we have a current study that we’re doing now, where, you know, so many people have gotten their samples done through 23andme, or Ancestry.com. So we have a study where we’re inviting people to actually upload their raw data, and then completing a questionnaire of their channeling experiences to see if there’s a relationship with those two. So that’s our non-funded study to be able to look at that research question.

RICK: That’s really cool. I’d never considered that possibility for 23andme and Ancestry.com, that you could actually submit your data to somebody like you. That’s kind of exciting, because I mean, think how expensive it would be for you to test everybody’s DNA.

HELANÉ: Yes, I’m very aware of that. It’s a great opportunity. So if any of your listeners are interested in participating in that, they can go to our website to the Participate in the Research page and learn how to upload their raw data and be part of that study. Yeah. So that’s the genetic piece and how we’re moving forward with that. The other thing I wanted to share is we’ve done so many survey studies now where we actually ask people:  “Does this run in your family?” And the majority of people say yes. And the majority of people experience these phenomena as children, rather than as adults. There are, you know, when we look at just trance channelers, it seems to begin when they’re older. But for the other phenomenon, it seems to happen as a child and that yes, they do know people in their family that have had similar experiences.

 

RICK:  Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts here. Firstly, it’s rather telling that scientists should say, “Oh, well, we don’t understand what all this DNA is, this extra stuff. So it must be junk.” I mean, it’s so presumptuous, you know, as if sort of, well, it’s sort of presumes that there actually is no profound, deep divine intelligence orchestrating the universe. And, you know, there’s this kind of like, we’re just biological robots in a meaningless universe. And somehow, rather, we lucked into being alive. And most of it is accidental, and therefore, there’s all this junk.

HELANÉ: Right? And it’s also quite arrogant because, oh, well, if we don’t know it, then it couldn’t exist.

RICK: Exist. Right? We can apply that same mindset to so many circumstances, and we’ll be applying it to the very subject of channeling during this conversation. But a couple other quick thoughts are: Well, imagine if there is some aptitude for channeling detected in some of this DNA that we didn’t understand the purpose of, think how many other aptitudes might be encoded in a whole lot of the other DNA that we don’t understand?

HELANÉ: Yes, absolutely. I feel like we’re just, you know, beginning this process of understanding the incredible mechanisms involved in our DNA and how it influences us, not just in a physical way.

RICK: Yeah. Another thought on this is why it runs in families. Let me just run this by you as a hypothesis and see what you think. But, there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, which comes to mind about, you know, Arjuna asked Krishna “Well, what happens if you’re on the spiritual path, and you don’t get enlightened, and you die?” And you know, Krishna says, “Well, you know, you, you might go to the worlds of the pure and illustrious, and live there for a long time, and then be reborn. And you know, in a, in a virtuous family, and then he said, if you’re really lucky, you could be reborn in a family of Yogi’s, although such a birth as this is more difficult to attain on Earth. So I think there’s definitely a sort of not by accident that we’re born in certain families. And very, very often, of course, obviously, there have been so many cases of very spiritual people being born in abusive families and all that. So, but you know, obviously, very often, there’s a tendency for people to be born into families which resonate with their higher purpose or their spiritual aptitudes, which eventually unfold. So, and then there’s all this interesting stuff. If you read Michael Newton, then all about agreements and little soul families, and, you know, we kind of, you know, are born into circumstances which are conducive to our further growth and spiritual advancement.

HELANÉ: Yeah, yeah. I think there’s two pieces that come up for me around that. One is the actual physical genetics, and is there something about the way that we’re wired that allows us to channel in specific ways, right? And then there’s the whole, you know, so it’s the whole nature-nurture. So then there’s the whole nurture. So if people are experiencing this in their families, and they’re exposed to it, then it supports them to perhaps learn how to do it in a specific way. Although in many of these families, it’s still hidden. So you know, Granny Margaret has this thing, but she’s never talked about it. And she whispered it to me on the side. And, you know, no one talks about it because it’s so taboo.

RICK: Yeah, because people gave them a hard time when they talked about it.

HELANÉ: Right, exactly. And so, you know, certainly for me, it was very much a part of my family and yet, you know, still realized, okay, I need to keep this hidden because it’s taboo in the broader world. But it certainly allowed me to feel more comfortable when I was having my own experiences, that you know, I wasn’t totally crazy or I didn’t feel isolated in those experiences, because I had some frame of reference.

RICK: Yeah, that’s another interesting whole theme that we can maybe get into, but just how very often people who are having the most profound experiences are outliers in their milieu. And the family or the school or the society in which they live. And imagine a society in which these kinds of things were the norm, and how much more fully, these kinds of abilities could blossom if they weren’t, you know, put down or doubted by the people around us.

HELANÉ: Absolutely. I mean, that’s one of my primary motivations in the work that I’m doing is to really bring awareness to it, we have a new program called the Noetic Signature. And I’ve been working on developing an inventory that actually allows people to assess the types of experiences that are more common for them. So our premise is that everyone has the capacity to channel in some way, and that the way that they do it is unique to them. And so how can we support people to find that unique noetic signature within them, and then support them to nurture it if they choose to, just like the,  MMPI, or the Myers Briggs, you have your noetic signature that is perhaps stronger in certain factors than others, and actually just finished developing the final version. And that’s going to be available online for our final validation, testing, if people want to participate in that study too.

RICK: Great. But at some point during this will even right now, while we’re thinking of it, if people want to participate in the kinds of studies you’re doing if they want to submit their information to you. How do they do that?

HELANÉ: So you go to our website, www.noetic.org. And at the bottom of the page, it says, “Get involved.” And when you click the Get Involved page, and scroll, I think it’s middle to the bottom, it’ll say participate in our research studies. And that’s the page to bookmark and keep checking back. And then also, if you get on our email list, we’ll send out newsletters and blogs about the different studies that are ongoing, and also share about the results of our previous studies.

RICK: Okay, great. And we’ll remind people that towards the end. Now, you just said a minute ago that everybody has the capacity to channel and before that, you said that there are many, as you’re defining the word, there are many different flavors or varieties of channeling many different things we might refer to when we use that word. And I think I’ve heard you say that a lot of people have channeled, broadly defined without even knowing it, that there are many things that happen in everybody’s ordinary lives, that would be evidence of this innate ability. And perhaps if they became aware of the fact that they’re actually already having some of these experiences that would help them unfold the capacities more.

HELANÉ: Yes, imagine, the 1000s of choices we make every day, right? And so if there’s some unconscious channeling, if you will, that’s going on and I choose to go right instead of left, and then there’s a synchronicity that happens where I run into a person I’ve been thinking about, or I, you know, running late to get ready for work, and I leave a half an hour later, and then realize that there was a huge crash on the freeway that I would have been driving right next to, you know, being at a stop sign. And, just pausing uncharacteristically for some reason, and some person flies by, passes through the stoplight and would have hit you. These things happen over and over again. We have so many stories from our qualitative surveys where people write in  these experiences. And this happens all the time for people. And so I think part of it is bringing awareness and intention. So if you want to see if this is happening in your own world, and you aren’t aware of it, just setting that intention and becoming aware of these synchronicities and these different choices that you’re making is a great way to start with that.

RICK: Now, one mindset that people who would be very skeptical of the notion of channeling are in, is that there really is no sort of other side are all these subtle phenomenon that the people like us are interested in, and that you know, consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of brain activity and that when the brain dies, that’s the end of it. And that, you know, you could be put in one of these devices that exposes your brain to magnetic fields. And it could give you the experience of out-of-body experiences and all kinds of mystical states. But it’s really just, sort of magnetic manipulation of the brain, and so on and so forth. But the kind of thing you were just talking about, like having an intuition about some impending traffic accident, or all sorts of kinds of synchronicities that, you know, Carl Jung, I think, coined the term to discuss, imply or indicate that it’s not just brain chemistry, that there must be some deeper field of information that we somehow tap into. So let’s talk for a little bit about the kind of materialistic worldview which would be skeptical of this whole conversation. And you know, what a refutation or an overcoming of that worldview might open the scientific community to in terms of the things that are considered possible.

HELANÉ: Yes, this is a huge topic. And we’re right, kind of I feel, at the crux of this paradigm shift from the materialistic paradigm into a post materialistic world. And it’s challenging being at this crux, because there are skeptics, there are people who are really invested in a materialistic worldview, where, you know, the belief is that only the material matters, that our consciousness is confined and created from our physical brain. And yet, there’s so much evidence coming from so many different arenas that I think just prove that or at least lend an incredible amount of evidence that that is not true, that our consciousness actually goes beyond our brain. That to me, it’s not even a question anymore. And so what do you say to those skeptics? I think you have skeptics, again, on a spectrum. You have the diehard skeptic that is totally entrenched in their worldview, that no matter how many papers, no matter how much evidence I show them, there, they just aren’t going to shift. And that’s fine. And they’re totally entitled to that belief. And I’m not going to actually spend any energy trying to convince them. To me, I don’t feel like that’s a very useful way to spend my time and energy. But then you have the people in the middle, who are really open and curious. And they’re the ones that I would want to speak to about the evidence that, that is lending support that our consciousness really is not limited to our physical brain. We have near death experience; we have out of body experience; we have multiple experiments done in the lab and out of the lab with different targets. The list goes on and on. And I’m happy to talk about some of those in more detail if you’d like. But, the evidence is there. I feel that is really supporting this. The other thing that’s really interesting is there’s also work done in cosmology and quantum physics that is actually supporting this notion as well, that consciousness is perhaps fundamental, and that the underlying sort of substance of the universe is information of which our consciousness is part of. So it’s quite fascinating. I’m not a cosmologist, or a physicist. So I can speak in a very layman’s level understanding of that, but, what we’re seeing is that this is definitely providing support for this idea of non-local consciousness.

RICK: I’ll be interviewing Rick Tarnis, in a month or so, he’s a cosmologist at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as probably we’ll be talking about that kind of thing. I think it’s important that this paradigm shift take place for a number of reasons and I could start enumerating them. But let’s hear what you think first, why is it important? Why is it a big deal, that science in general shifts its paradigm away from materialism to a realization of the primacy or fundamental nature of consciousness?

HELANÉ: I feel it’s important, number one, because it better explains our reality. And what we observe. That when we are wedded to the materialistic paradigm, just like with the junk DNA, there’s all these phenomena that people experience that are just dismissed as junk. Oh, well, it doesn’t fit into this nice little pretty box that we call materialism. So you’re crazy, or you’re hallucinating, or it doesn’t exist, or it’s some manufactured thing from your mind. And it’s just not true. It’s very limiting. And like we talked about earlier, I think it’s also arrogant, because it assumes that this model is correct. And we aren’t willing to receive the data coming in that shows otherwise. And so I think that’s incredibly important to, at the very least, say, well, perhaps it doesn’t explain everything. And there’s something broader to not be so entrenched and wedded to this one paradigm that’s actually not explaining everything that we see in our world.

RICK: Yeah. My view on it is that, I mean, look at what knowledge has done to our world, it’s, you know, the scientific revolution, and the technologies that spawned have had a massive effect on the world. And that effect is obviously not totally benign, you know, we are faced with the very real possibility of self extermination in the coming century. Or it could happen tomorrow, based upon the technologies that we have, that we have, and my feeling is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And that, you know, we have partial knowledge, which doesn’t go deep enough. And that, it won’t be sufficient to use politics or economics or technological developments to change,  to tackle climate change, for instance, or all the myriad other problems that face us. And maybe I’m naive and idealistic, but I feel that if the development of consciousness were central to the lives of most people in the world. It would ripple up into a completely different, totally re-structure the way we use technologies, and the kinds of technologies we develop, and so on, and they would no longer be such mixed blessings we’d have, you know, and it could really turn things around and save, save the day for humanity.

HELANÉ: Thank you, Rick. I too, am naive and idealistic. Because I have this vision that, you know, because the implications of non-local consciousness is supporting this idea that we’re all interconnected, that we’re all connected, that we’re all part of this greater hole. And that, if we actually all realize that, that my actions, my behaviors, influence a much broader sphere around me that most people would actually care about that and want to act in a more thoughtful, conscious way that would benefit not only themselves, but the people around them. So that’s my idealistic view of how this concept of interconnectedness and non-local consciousness could radically change our world. Think about this. So there’s  numerous studies that show that our intentions matter, that our intentions actually influence the world around us. And so what if, our thoughts actually manifested immediately, and that we could physically see that quickly, all those random thoughts that we have about our neighbor or this or that were being broadcast and manifest, it would be a very quick, you know, behavioral intervention to shift how we think. And to be more disciplined about what is going on in our mental process.

RICK: Reminds me of that Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar, you know, where he couldn’t lie. Any thoughts that popped into his head? He just said it? Yeah. And it’s not only our actions, I think, but you kind of alluded to it with our thoughts. I mean, it’s like we’re little radio beacons that are constantly transmitting an influence. All 8 billion of us. And that influence accumulates, you know, in kind of the we could say, the collective consciousness and, like static electricity accumulates in clouds and eventually breaks out as lightning. But in the case of our thoughts or our consciousness influence, it breaks out as wars and, and other, you know, social upheavals, I think.

HELANÉ: Right, right. Absolutely. I think one of the most interesting things that we’re working on around this whole, you know, Collective Consciousness piece with the Global Consciousness Project with Roger Nelson and He did version 1.0. And now we’re working on version 2.0. With Heart Math. And, you know, there’s all these random number generators around the world that are collecting random information and with the intention to see how these are being influenced by individual and collective consciousness events. And so there’s two theories about how these random number generators are being affected. One is some sort of force like, Effect…

RICK: I don’t think you’ve quite explained what a random number generator is. And people might not know. So explain what that is first.

HELANÉ: Sure, so a random number generator is a little device that I’m going to explain it kind of, I’m going to simplify it a little bit. So let’s imagine that it’s spitting out random zeros and ones, totally randomly. So at the end of the day, you’re going to have an equal number of ones and an equal number of zeros. There’s no reason for it to really skew from that. And so these have been used for decades now in the lab and in field experiments. And we see with people’s intentions being directed at them, and also in events where there is high emotion, that the data skews to either more ones or more zeros. So these are a really nice kind of objective device that we can use to be able to see shifts in consciousness with intention-directed  in the lab, and then also more kind of collective consciousness in the field. And so what’s fascinating about these is that in the lab, what was shifting the data wasn’t necessarily like this force, like action, of the person’s intention beaming out from their mind and affecting the device, it was more about their end goal, their outcome that they wanted to see happen. So let’s say I’m in the lab, my instruction is to influence the device so that I see a red line increase on my screen. Okay? So my goal is to increase the red, increase the red, increase the red. And so on the back end, we can set up the algorithms, so the red increases when there’s more ones. Or we can do it  to have an increase when there’s more zeros, so you can shift kind of the back end. So what we’re seeing is this goal-directed effect. So the person is actually increasing the read, regardless of what’s happening on the back end with the machine. So this is kind of a small support of this concept that what we want to manifest manifests, regardless of the backend, it’s like the universe is kind of just, it just happens, magically, if you will, but that the intention of what we want to happen is what unfolds. And we’re seeing this in many different ways. In terms of the analysis that we’re doing, we’re seeing, okay, I have this research question. I want to see this. And then it shows up in the data. We’re still trying to figure out how exactly that works. And what’s going on with that. But it’s quite fascinating.

RICK: Yeah, I mean, that last statement was the question that has been floating in my mind as you’ve been talking, it’s like, you know, and to use some examples. I believe that there were big fluctuations in random number generators, when 911 happened, when Princess Diana got killed and a number of other major events like that. And I can kind of understand how a thing like that could affect complex sender receivers, such as the human nervous system, kind of like in Star Wars when the death star blew up the planet Alderaan and Obi Wan Kenobi said, I suddenly felt this fluctuation in the force. But it’s hard to understand, for me at least, how these changes in collective consciousness could influence a little electronic device, like a random number generator, I just don’t understand the mechanics of how it could.

HELANÉ: Right, right? So, you know, it’s basically electrons that are moving through this avalanche. And I’m not going to describe it very well. Again, I’m not a physicist. They’re called Zener diodes. And they’re basically, pushing through this resistance and then fall-over the other side. And if we’re all connected, and we’re somehow made of the same stuff, then our intention, our emotion, our consciousness somehow shifts that. What’s interesting about the global consciousness data is that we saw shifts in both positive and negative events. So, you know, there could be global peace days, that also had significant changes in this data, and 911, which is obviously a very negative event. And that the significant changes were more strongly connected to the strength of the emotion rather than positivity, or negativity of the emotion. So I think that’s also really interesting.

RICK: So presumably, when there are big shifts in collective consciousness like this due to major events, it’s influencing trees and rocks, and rabbits, and all kinds of things. But you know, in other words, it’s influencing everything. But a random number generator just happens to be something we can actually get data from, that enables us to detect that influence.

HELANÉ: Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, HeartMath is actually hooking up trees now with like, a tree EEG, if you will, to see what’s happening with them in some of these events, too. So that’ll be really interesting to see what happens there.

RICK: Yeah, very interesting. We’ve talked a little bit about types of channeling. Let me just enumerate some that I think I’ve got from your book, Remote Viewing or Reading Geomancy, the Perception of the Energy of Places and of the Land, Nature Empath: the Perception of Information and Communicating with Nature and Plants; Animal Communication: The Perception of Information and Communicating with Animals; and Intuition, such as clairsentience. Any more you want to enumerate there.

HELANÉ: I think the ones that you know, people know the most about are like clairvoyance, being able to see things. Clairaudience hearing information, also, precognition, so knowing things before they happen. And prescience, which is feeling things in your body before it happens. Of course, there’s there’s mediumship. And the experience of connecting with, suppose a deceased human and other non- physical beings. Those are some of the main ones.

RICK: Yeah. Then, of course, channeling has an ancient history. Most of the world’s spiritual literature contains stories of things we could define as channeling, all kinds of things. And so it’s considered significant in spiritual traditions. And the more kind of, the greater the spiritual add up, the more likely it is that they’re tuned into this kind of thing. So there’s that. And I guess we could talk about its benefits, both for the channel around the channeler and the channel-ee.

HELANÉ: Right, right. Yeah, all the surveys that we have done in general, channeling has a positive impact on the channeler. And they feel an increased sense of well being quality of life increased, you know, meaning in their life from the experiences. There are some, you know, very few people, who say that it has a negative impact, it might cause, you know, fear or anxiety or they don’t want it to happen, or it may happen at a frequency that is uncomfortable to them, or they can’t control it, but that these are, those experiences are more rare, that in general, people’s experiences are positive and perceived as beneficial. In many cultures, it actually is also connected to increased social status, like in Brazil and some other cultures where you know, when you’re the channeler or you have increased power in your society.

RICK: Yeah, Shamans, medicine, men, you know, people in various African and Native American and South American, Tibetan and all kinds of different cultures were revered as special people.

HELANÉ: Yes, absolutely. And so this is a global phenomenon, for sure. And so, you know, channeling in the West, I think with you know, New Age Movement has definitely gotten a lot of interest and followings and we see channelers now, kind of popping up all over the place and in modern day.

RICK: Yeah. And which is kind of a mixed blessing, I guess. I mean, we can refer to your research maybe in talking to different channelers, but my experience is that, you know, there are some who I think are total phonies, and I’ve met some personally, who, and there’s a whole I can name three or four, who you know, including one that I interviewed who shifted into the whole QANON mindset and began talking about Trump has a five d lightworker. And, and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, a large percentage of people in places like Sedona have shifted into this sort of mindset. So that raises several questions. And I mean, the J.Z. Knight phenomenon descended into drunken orgies. I don’t know what the status of it is these days, but, you know, Romtha, I guess that raises several questions is, are these people, all of them doing what they purport to be doing? Are they really channeling? Are they just, they just tapped into a creative level of their own mind, and they’re coming out with stuff? And if they are really channeling, who are they channeling? I mean, just because you’re dead, doesn’t mean you’re smart. They could be channeling some kind of negative thing. So kind of riff on those, those ruminations, if you will?

HELANÉ: Yes, absolutely. Let’s start with the source. So what is the source of channeling? So you can take a very broad view and say, Okay, well, if we’re all one, if we’re all connected, we’re part of the same thing, then what’s being channeled is still part of you. And so that’s one theory. There’s another theory that it’s from the unconscious mind that we’re kind of picking up all this information, and that’s what’s coming through, or it’s coming through the higher self. And then there’s also the concept that there’s actually non-physical beings that we can’t see with our traditional five senses, that have the capacity to be able to use our bodies to communicate with. And so I, my personal sense, is that it’s probably all of the above. And that, at this point, we can’t prove the non-physical beings. And so I’d like to move away from like, black and white, and the boxes, like there’s so much nuance that is involved in this. And so, you know, people can judge and say, oh, you know, all trans-channelers are total fakes. It’s like, no, but perhaps some are, you know, and so where’s the nuance and discernment in that? And I think you’re right, let’s propose that there are non-physical beings, that those non-physical beings also exist in great diversity, just like we do on this planet. Right. So yes, I agree with your perception that perhaps the beings that are communicating may not have the most beneficent intentions, through their communications. And in the spiritualist tradition, you know, you have different levels of beings so you might have Earthbounds, or, you know, people who have passed, who haven’t moved on to the light who are connected to the earth. So their level of maturity and spiritual understanding will not be as great as some, let’s say, ascended master who has ascended in his communicating for, you know, some greater benefit to humanity. So, there’s also, you know, I’ve done a number of studies, one in particular was a focus group with five trance channelers in Mount Shasta, it was pretty incredible experience and there were 21 different, suppose it, sources that came through, including Ascended Masters and guides and you know, scientists and you know, what they were calling offworld allies from different parts of the universe. So there’s definitely a great diversity in the proceed source and we see this in our surveys as well. People, most often say that, actually, depending on who we survey, that the source is their higher-self or some larger kind of consciousness to them. And, and then it goes down the line when we serve a trance Chandler’s there’s much more connection to beings or divas or other offworld allies and sources such as that. So when we say, Okay, what’s the source? I don’t know, there’s no one right answer, it really is quite individual. And I guess I did kind of answer a little bit about this piece of, is everything we hear through channeling true or real or have the most benefit, you know, and I don’t think that’s true, I think we have to be very discerning about the information that we get through channeling in terms of the channel or themselves, the content coming through, and to decide if it is, number one, truthful with a positive intention. And number two, if it’s useful for us to actually act on in any way. The third thing I want to mention about all of this is, especially in the West, we are very trained to look outside of ourselves. And always looking for the answer outside. And so I definitely see this energy or attitude that: “Oh, you know, I’m gonna go look at channeling information, or I’m going to talk to this Channeler”, as the first kind of impulse to get answers for what to do in our lives. And I think that there’s a danger in that with anything about looking outside of ourselves to try to find answers for what is true and beneficial for me as an individual. And so those are kind of my cautions about channeling in terms of how to use it. That being said, it’s an incredible tool that I think can really support us in many ways with that discernment and awareness and consciousness about it.

RICK: Yeah, those are really good points. There’s a quote from the Buddha, which goes something like: “Don’t believe anything, just because somebody said it, even if I said it” (the Buddha speaking), you know, use your own discernment and discrimination and your own, you know, really dig into it and determine whether it’s useful or true or not. And, you know, I would say just based on my decades of experience on in spiritual circles, that  perhaps the one quality which is more valuable than any other is discernment, or discrimination, in other words, because it’s it really is a sort of a razor’s edge. And it’s so easy to go off on tangents.

HELANÉ: Absolutely. Yes, I think that, you know, if we could teach everybody how to have their own process for discerning intuitively, it would support them in such a major way. Another concept that came through channeled material that I found really interesting and helpful, because, you know, you might hear of channelers, oh, you know, multiple channelers channeling Jesus or Mary or it’s like, well, why are these people channeling say, how can they be over here and do this and do that. And so what came through at one of the Mount Shasta sessions, and that was published, I can, you know, we have all these papers, peer-review published that we can share with your audience, was that the channeler has a specific frequency, and they use the word frequency, and I’m just going to use it, even though it may not necessarily align exactly with what we understand of physics. So the channeler has a frequency,  the being, being channeled has a frequency, that content has a frequency and the audience has a frequency. And those combine in a very specific way that’s unique to that moment. And so one specific Channeler channeling Jesus to a specific audience, it’s going to have a specific frequency that’s being heard for that audience. Whereas on the other side of the world, it’s going to be different and that the import of these messages that we hear so often about, you’re more than you think you are, you know, we’re all connected. Everything is love. Humanity is awakening and how to support us in awakening. These messages are coming through over and over again in these different ways with these different combinations of frequencies so that they’ll actually come through.

RICK: Yeah, Everything you say has a bunch of interesting points that we could unpack. With that one, the first thing that comes to mind is that, you know, whether spirituality can be studied scientifically, because there are so many variables, with regular science using physical tools, you know, if you publish a paper, you list the tools you’ve used, and you know what kind of test tube and this, that and the other thing so that somebody can replicate the study, and use the exact same tools to see if they get the same results. But with spirituality, every single nervous system is different, every single mind. And even if people are all taught the same technique, which is not the case, there are 1000s of different techniques and practices, but even if they’re all the same, it’s like you’re sort of, you’re still using, you know, as many tools as there are people with that technique. And so it just doesn’t seem that it can ever be as precise as  the harder sciences can be.

HELANÉ: Yeah, that’s a great point. And, you know, there’s this sort of replication crisis that’s happening in science right now, because all these major studies that they thought were definitive, you know, they tried to replicate and that they weren’t getting the same results. RICK interjects: In what area? Psychology, and I don’t know if that happened in hard sciences, as well, but it’s definitely an issue. And so when you think of the scientific method, you have a research question, and you design a specific study to try to answer that question. And so, your research, that the results you get, for that specific research question are just like one little sliver of the big answer for how everything works, right. And I think that’s what’s so challenging in terms of communicating to the general public, and disseminating the results of our research. Because, you know, we have this 10 page paper that’s getting into the rationale and the methods and specific statistics and the results. And then you need to translate it into a, you know, 100 word, if you’re lucky, Description, right? And then that gets distilled to a tweet, that’s 10 words, you know, that’s like, IONS finds blah. And then, you know, there’s a huge hubbub that results from that. And it’s like, no, and that brings me back to the nuance again, there’s so much nuance that I think gets mixed. And that, it’s that people want things in black and white, and kind of extreme descriptions that are creating more divisiveness in terms of our world today, especially in the West. And so anyway.

RICK: Yeah, no, it’s good. And, and yet, despite the fact that he really, it’s really difficult to nail this stuff down as precisely as you can, with physical sciences, you know, science is just does not have the tools to explore what I would consider to be the majority of what exists in the universe, because all the subtle stuff, it just doesn’t have the tools. And the human nervous system is probably the best tool and everybody possesses one of those, we can’t all own the Large Hadron Collider or learn how to use it. But we all have a nervous system. And we can be trained how to use it to explore these subtle realities. And yet, it’s never going to be as clean and neat and precise as, you know, external tools, which, you know, replicable as using external tools.

HELANÉ: I am going to push back just a little bit on that. I mean, I think there’s some truth in what you’re saying. And yet, I feel that we are currently working to develop new ways to be able to actually measure these types of things with objective methods. And there’s also you know, there’s also qualitative methods. So, where you interview people and you gather, you know, a larger breadth of information from people’s subjective experiences, to learn more about what’s going on. So just as an example, we just completed a large energy medicine study with over 200 participants who had hand and wrist pain, and we had 17 energy medicine practitioners from all different disciplines. And so we did a number of different measures, objective and subjective. So the objective measures included nerve conduction velocity of the affected wrist, we looked at, we had water samples on the practitioner and the patient’s bodies during the sessions. And we had random number generators in the room. And we also did subjective pain measures and heart rate variability. What else do we do? Genetic analysis. So at the end of the study, what we found was the pain improved dramatically, which was great, because that was our primary outcome. But we also saw that, though the water changed, the water bond actually shifted in its length, and its angle with something called Evanescence. So someone might say, well, you know, we never thought of using Evanescence before, but because of this paper, we chose to use it in the study, that is giving us some information about how this energy medicine might work. And so now we’re doing a follow up study in a lab, where practitioners are going to directly put their intention into the water to see how that’s shifting. And we get to follow on with that. So that’s just one example of how we’re working to develop different methods to be able “to see” what we can’t see right now, another example is we’re working on you know, so we mentioned the random number generator. So we’re creating a whole grid of random number generators that could potentially be used as like a bio-sensor during some of these sessions to see if we can get more refined shifts in each of those number generators, when the sessions are happening. So I think that it is possible. I think that the scientific method in and of itself can be applied to anything and that we get to be more creative about the design and the tools that we use to be able to evaluate it.

RICK: One thing that came to mind, tell me if you think this is relevant, is Michael Newton’s work on, you know, hypnotically regressing people back to the period between lives. And he did so many of them, I don’t know, well, over 1000, I guess, couple 1000. And he, time and again, they told the same story, this is what happens. And this is where you go, this is what you see. And, you know, this is what you learn. And there was, you know, such consistency between so many of the majority of the reports that he was able to kind of map it out in his book: Journey of Souls. And do you consider that, like an example of something where there’s enough people involved and enough consistency in their stories, and that there was no kind of collusion between them, that it gives us kind of a degree of confidence that they might be actually mapping out a real territory?

HELANÉ: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s what I was talking about qualitative analysis. So, you know, if you could collect that, in the same way, stories like that from people around the world independently, then that would be very strong evidence, I think. Now, the piece that I think people get stuck on is like, Well, how do you prove that you can’t prove that it’s actually real? Although, you know, some people might say, Okay, well, maybe without a body research, we can start going there or, you know, various non-local consciousness studies that people who can actually consciously project their consciousness in a specific way. Again, I don’t think the skeptics on this side are ever gonna buy that type of evidence, you know, but in the middle. The other thing that comes up, this comes up in survival research. And there’s a huge debate between a number of theories. One is survival, which is that yes, our consciousness is not limited to our brain and survives our physical death. And then there’s others who say, well, perhaps this is just telepathy, and Psy. So, imagine that all the people who went through this hypnotherapy process were tuning into each other in some way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that’s why they said the same thing. So I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to discover the difference between those two, but if either one of them are true, it’s still quite remarkable. So even if there was telepathy amongst these hundreds of people who had the same hypnotherapy sessions, that’s amazing in and of itself. Yeah. So people: “Oh no, that’s just  Psi it’s not really survival.” It’s science like, well, that’s still pretty cool. Yeah, outside of what we normally, you know, traditionally no right now.

RICK: And then there’s the people who are under anesthesia or in a coma or some such thing. And, you know, they say, “Well,  on the balcony of the hospitals around the roof or something, there’s a red sneaker, go check it out, you know?”

HELANÉ: That case is amazing. Yeah, I love that case. Right? Yeah. And there’s so many of those, you know, where people are, like, yeah, the surgeon did this. They use this tool, you know, I mean, how are they gonna know that? That’s fascinating.

RICK: Or a woman I interviewed recently named Ingrid Hankala. And when she was like two or three years old, she fell in a tank of water and drowned and left her body. First she went and saw that the babysitter, the nanny, was in a room watching television. And then she kind of went and found her mother, who was a couple blocks away about to get on a bus. And she was like: “Hi, mom!” And her mother was kind of sensitive, and her mother just turned around and made a beeline back straight to the tank, pulled her out, did CPR, and got her going again, and there was another lady who was it? Trisha Barker, recently, she was undergoing surgery, and she saw somebody go and get a particular candy. Her father-in-law went and got her a particular kind of candy bar from a vending machine down the hall. She was under anesthesia. And, you know, the guy actually was sort of a health nut who didn’t eat candy bars. And after she came out of anesthesia, she verified that she had seen that. So that kind of stuff is, you know. I mean, it’s sort of anecdotal. But there are so many such stories.

HELANÉ: Right? Yeah, we want to do a formal study. A formal out-of-body study with people. Well, we could recruit people who can have out of body experiences voluntarily. But if we can’t, we do know a hypnotherapy technique that can support people to do that. And so imagine doing a formal study where we invite participants to go out of their body and to go to a specific place. And, you know, look at the objects that were placed there, and then come back. What we’re trying to figure out is how to do that in a way where nobody on the planet knows what those objects are. One idea, and we’re still playing with this study design, one idea we had is to have a computer that has rotating images. And that, you know, there’s a program that randomly chooses what image is going to come up on the screen. And so we can see what image was up on the screen at a specific time, but we don’t know ahead of time, and we don’t know it. And so that the person goes to that screen, and then tells us what’s on the screen. So we can kind of distinguish between this telepathy versus actually being out of your consciousness, being out of your body in some way, observing that, that screen. Anyway, it’s lots of fun, we have great science meetings coming up with these different study designs, so we can actually be able to test this stuff.

RICK: Here’s another one for you that  I just thought of. Every friend who says that she sees subtle beings, or angels or guardian angels, or whatever they are. Actually, she doesn’t know what they are. But she sees them routinely. It’s like, whoa, whoa, this happens all the time. We were out at the SAND conference. And she said, Oh, there yeah, there’s clusters of them around that tending to different people. So what if you could get, you know, 10 people who claimed to have that kind of ability, put them all in a room together or something? And you know, just sitting there chatting, having coffee, and then separate them all  into separate rooms and say, Okay, what did you see? And see if there is a kind of a, you know, an agreement between what they saw? Yeah. Well, because it’s the same, I mean, said, why would the same thing be in the room? Well, let’s say that it’s not confined to a physical room. No, I know. But let’s say that they routinely see this kind of thing, wherever they are. And there are many such people. Let’s see if there’s any agreement among them, if they’re tested in a way where they’re all in the same room together, but then you separate them in there, they can’t communicate with each other and see if there’s any agreement among their stories.

HELANÉ: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we do have a study like that plan. So I mentioned that energy medicine study. So another unique aspect of that study is we had a seer in the room with the practitioner and the participant. So she was observing every single session and took copious notes. And we published the paper on those results. They were really quite fascinating. We were hoping to get a sense of mechanism, you know, is there some, you know, lights zapping from the hands to the body and all? We didn’t see any of that. And actually one of the most interesting findings was that she was seeing other beings coming in and supporting the healing process. So that was just one seer. So the next step is to have multiple seers in the room during these sessions and see if their information corroborates. And this is, you know, this is done regularly already for like remote viewing projects and associated remote viewing where you’re gathering people’s insight, multiple people’s insight and then pulling that to be able to make your choices, whatever the pictures are kind of connected to. But yeah, I think that’s a great idea.

RICK: Yeah. A couple of questions came in. So let’s ask those and see where they take us. Brian asks: “Author, Elizabeth Gilbert, after writing Eat, Pray, Love, gave a TED talk in which she said she suggested that she was a channel through which this book was written rather than the active writer of the book. This has been expressed again and again and again, through famous authors, musicians, comedians, and so on. Jesus said, ‘I only do the things I see My Father doing.’ To me, this is a similar idea. Do you have any thoughts?”

HELANÉ: What I can speak to is that this person is right. I mean, there are so many scientists, writers, musicians, who say, you know, this is just coming through me, I’m just like having this come through. Or they get some inspirational insight through a dream or something. You know, Frederich Kekule was struggling with the structure of benzene, right? (Rick interjects with: The snake?) And he saw the snake and it’s like, oh, it’s cyclical, you know? And, you know, there’s lots of stories like that. So yes, I think that it’s true. And so you might ask those people. Oh, are you channeling? It’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know what that word means. All I know is that when I get into this flow, or this zone, or they use some word to describe this open, receptive, inspirational state that this stuff comes through?

RICK: Yeah. Well, Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday in a Dream, it came to him in a dream. And he woke up and he didn’t have lyrics yet. He saw something, some lyrics about scrambled eggs in my baby’s legs and eventually changed the words, but someone could argue well, yeah, sure. That was just  his own mind being creative during a dream. It didn’t come from any place.

HELANÉ: Yeah, you can say that. Yeah, awesome. One unique thing about channeled information is it often comes like a packet, like fully formed? Yeah. You know, rather than this sort of cognitive process of trying to figure it out, it just arrives as this insight.

RICK: I think Mozart used to say that that whole symphony would come to him boom. And then he would take a long time to write it all down. Right? Yeah. But still, one could say that’s just the individual’s creativity. And that’s the way it works. It comes in a packet.

HELANÉ: Yes, what I mean, there are some really interesting mediumship cases where Pearl Quran is one, and Patience Worth is another, where what they are producing is so far beyond what they had access to in terms of their education and their culture and society around them. That it just seems so improbable that this is coming from their normal mind. And these are literary works and information that you can’t imagine that they would have created that on their own.

RICK: Yeah it’s so interesting. I mean, there’s so many things like people who have brain injuries, and all of a sudden they become great jazz pianists or something that, you know, the Savant. Yeah, that kind of stuff.

HELANÉ: The other fascinating cases are in Brazil, channelers, who believe they’re channeling artists, you know, famous artists like Degaul and Monet and I have never been able to see them in person, but their stories of how they would paint one painting in each hand, and they produce these works in like, you know, minutes, and they just be incredibly high quality incredible works. So just, you know, you could say, okay, they had that in them. Okay, maybe. I can be openly skeptical. Maybe, and yet I can’t, it just seems highly improbable.

RICK: Yeah, but again, you know, it can be argued that we have these innate abilities like Ken Peak, who was Rainman could read two books, one with each eye, and at the same time, and then remember every word in the book. So he wasn’t necessarily channeling. It’s just he had, you know, he was unlocking some of the Amaze, some of that junk DNA.

HELANÉ: Right, right. Yeah, it’s amazing. And then, you know, I also can say, well, if we’re all one, then it’s all coming from me anyway, you know, but it’s like Small self, Big self. Yeah. Fascinating,

RICK: Fun to play with. Here’s another question that came in. Wesley from Salem, presumably Massachusetts, asks, “Hello, I’d like to hear your reflections, if any, on channeled works, we’re kind of talking about this oh, here here. He said, I think of course, you know, A Course of Miracles or the Law of One, both channeled these works to a detailed cosmological scope. And as best as I can tell, internally coherent. There are many examples of ancient revealed texts, such as the Vedas, for instance,” (Rick: we can talk about that,) What do you think of if higher intelligence is interfacing with human minds to transmit wisdom?”

HELANÉ: I personally believe that that could be so. And can I prove that scientifically, as of yet? No, I can’t. But I personally do believe that that’s so and those works have helped a tremendous number of people support themselves. And so that in and of itself, I think has incredible value. One of my dream projects is to do a comprehensive review of all channeled material, and be able to catalog it and look at the similarities and the differences across them. So I don’t know, that would take a lot of person-power to pull that off. What we’re doing now, we just had a few sessions of this, we have a number of channelers on a zoom call together. And we have 10 scientific questions. They’re asked the question, each question one at a time, they’re asked the question, when they’re not channeling. So they type out what they think the answer is just with their normal mind. Then we ask them to go into a channeling state. And then they type out the answer to the scientific question. So we’re going to do an analysis where we look at the non-channeled versus channeled answer and look at the correspondence within each channeler. And then we’re going to look at the correspondence across the channelers, for that same scientific question. So that’s another way that we’re kind of getting it that.

RICK: You mentioned people who really don’t have the aptitude to write great literature do great art, or something who ended up channeling and starting to do that kind of stuff? One criticism I sometimes hear is, you know, well, if the Space Brothers or Archangel so and so and so are really communicating through somebody. Couldn’t they tell us, you know, what’s the cure for cancer? How do you get, you know, unlimited free energy or something we really don’t know. You know, that would be of great benefit to humanity.

HELANÉ: Right. Right. Great question.

RICK: Because a lot of times the stuff sounds like, yeah, I could have said that, you know, it’s just sort of New Age mishmash that comes out. That is not that earth shaking.

HELANÉ: Right? That’s a great question. I haven’t heard a specific answer to that question. Although there are pieces about sort of, divine timing, and, this is the path of humanity to “figure it out itself”, Yeah, yeah, we can only give you what we can give you at the right time. And so. And the other thing I would say to what you just said, Rick is who’s to say that the cure for cancer isn’t already here. But it’s, it’s not present in our western allopathic model at the moment. You know, one other project we are working on is a spontaneous remission project collecting cases of spontaneous remission of cancer from all over the place that had been published, and correlating sort of the methods that were incorporated in that.

RICK: You got a lot of projects in the works. Irons in the fire. Yeah. One thought that I just read an article a couple weeks ago, it was a French word, and I can’t remember the French but it referred to sort of a mass psychosis that takes over society sometimes like perhaps Nazi Germany, or perhaps what we’re seeing a little bit these days with Q anon or with, you know, large numbers of people sort of buying into a way of thinking and getting very caught like about their dedication to it. I wonder about the mechanics of that, you know, whether it’s just a somehow contagion in human psychology that’s transmitted from person to person, especially with the internet, or transmitted on a subtler level and collective consciousness, or, you know, perhaps whether there’s even some kind of negative forces on some subtle level that are, you know, like, you know, battling the good forces and overtaking a whole society and the way it behaves. Do you have any thoughts on that? Or a large portion of society?

HELANÉ: Yeah, that’s a really big question. It kind of goes back to, for me, about this drive to look outside of ourselves for answers, and I think the curiosity about truth is important. And the way that people seek that truth out is different, depending on, you know, what their calling is, if you will. And if we are here to look outside of ourselves to find that truth, then people can get attached to it in a very sort of rigid, perhaps detrimental way. And this idea of transmission is sort of like, you know, energetic transmission. I have no research to support that. But I imagine that that’s true. If I extrapolate from how our intention can influence, you know, like the RNG’s and stuff like that, that my thought patterns influence those around me, I know that I am personally very energetically sensitive, I can feel people’s emotions around me and that, when there’s times of great upheaval, I feel it in my body, viscerally, I feel contraction and a heaviness. And so, is it possible that these ideas are filtering? I think it is, and depending on the person’s psychology, and their, you know, spiritual maturity, I think that influences how much they take it in and become so rigid and proselytizing about it, if that makes sense. Because, you know, in our times, right now, there is a great sense of helplessness, of powerlessness, of lack of control. And I think people feel comforted by feeling, they know something that’s going on, or, you know, attaching to something like that, I will acknowledge that I have not read all the Qanon stuff, I don’t really know all the details. You know, when I look at I also am not, I don’t do a ton of social media and, ton of news or whatever, but when I perceive intuitively what’s happening, it’s like, yeah, I feel like there’s probably some manipulation, some sort of underlying, not so beneficial intentions and motivations that are trying to work for greed and power, etc, etc.

RICK: Yeah, it’s hard to say where that’s coming from, you know, whether it’s just people confusing each other by spreading misinformation, and, you know, certain people are more susceptible to it more susceptible to cult indoctrination, or, you know, whether there actually are some dark overlords, you know, the counterparts to the Archangel Gabriel, or something who were messing with us and trying to sway society, one way or the other.

HELANÉ: Right. And, you know, and who am I to say whether that’s true or not. And so, I guess it’s also brought up a big issue in our culture right now about, well, what is true? How can we trust this information, any information coming in, you know, and so, I think it is important to be skeptical and to ask, well, what’s the primary source for what you’re telling me right now? Are you just spinning a story and spinning a narrative, or can you actually show me the primary source of information that’s making you believe this. And then the other piece around that is I feel like it can be a big distraction. Because, you know, how am I, in my daily life? Treating myself? Treating the people around me? Am I, you know, positively supporting my community? Or am I just stuck in my screen, like totally freaking out about all these conspiracy theories? You know what I mean? Like, I feel like it can be a huge distraction that spins people and takes them away from being grounded and centered and eating well and supporting their families and communities. And I mean, maybe that’s super naive.

RICK: I don’t think so, I think you’re right.

HELANÉ: Or like, you know, being proactive about, you know, supporting our environment, or I mean, there’s just so many positive ways that we can take action in our daily lives, and is spinning out about all these conspiracies, theories, whether they’re true or not, they can totally be, so what if they’re true? What am I going to do about it, at this exact moment, right? What I can do is continue taking my positive action in the way that I have control over in this moment, to help shift it to envision the positive world that I want to see in the future. And what that looks like, instead of spending all my time and energy freaking about what could or could not be happening in this totally removed way. You know? Me personally speaking?

RICK: Yeah, no, it’s good. And I liked what you said earlier about being kind of self-referential, and rather than merely sort of externally referential terms of where you get your knowledge, but it has to be a balance thing. I have a bunch of friends who live in a sort of a monastic setting. And they probably spend six or eight hours a day doing spiritual practices. And the whole group of them are actually heavily into conspiracy theories, and some are into flat Earth theories, they think the earth is flat. So just being sort of inwardly directed, doesn’t necessarily assure clarity of thinking. And I think this whole thing of being balanced and integrated and sensible and practical and all that, it’s a balancing act. And it’s a work in progress that I think we all have to sort of keep out as we go along.

HELANÉ: Totally agree with that.

RICK: Another interesting question came in from Brian. He said, “I am drawn to the idea that we are all one, but I cannot make sense of the presence of evil. I have been in the presence of what I would call evil spirits that were as palpable as loving ones, but in the opposite direction. How can we make sense of the variety of human selfishness, indifference, and even cruelty and still all be part of something fundamentally good and loving?”

HELANÉ: That’s a great question. I had it explained to me in a really, really nice way that I think was very clear. So if you imagine our oneness as the electromagnetic spectrum, right, it’s, and you can think of that spectrum is one thing, right? It’s one, the spectrum is one thing, and yet it is made up of all these infinite number of specific frequencies. And so those frequencies are our uniqueness. And so there is a frequency on there for whatever you might want to call evil or hatred, or negativity. It also exists on that spectrum. And so how can we, as humans, which I think is, this is part of our process and learning is to be able to own that ugliness within me, that evil within me, that negativity within me, and hold it all with equanimity, compassion, and love. And I think that’s what’s facing all of humans right now. And all of this stuff that’s what we’re seeing around us. These ugly things. Shadow, is being able to show it to us in a very clear way, outside of ourselves, so we can actually look at it, you know, so you can either say, oh, that’s bad, that’s out there that has, you know, nothing to do with me. Or we can own that. That’s also part of me as well.

RICK: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that’s a good metaphor of the electromagnetic spectrum, because, you know, there are all kinds of different influences on the actual electromagnetic spectrum. I mean, their X rays and gamma rays and whatnot. I mean, the guys who had to clean up Chernobyl all died quickly from a certain frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum that was bombarding their cells. And so like that even though everything is one, one me, everything being one really means it contains everything. I mean, the word Brahman is said to be the eater of everything it subsumes, or includes or contains everything. And that would include the whole spectrum of dark light. Here’s a question, which my friend Dan says is unusual. Let’s see how unusual it is. Oh, yes, this is a good one. Johnny from Illinois; “Do you think artificial intelligence can be conscious or that it will take a type of quantum computing to make it conscious? I personally think the right type of AI will be a major key to help us understand the spiritual world better, but not AI in its current form.”

HELANÉ: Great question. I love that question. We asked that question to our group of channelers. And the answer we got was quite interesting. They said everything has consciousness. Everything has consciousness, some level of consciousness, that looks different, right? And so yes, AI has consciousness. And they also shared, you know, there’s the whole fear that AI is gonna then take over and destroy humanity, etc. And basically said, don’t worry about that. But that, yes, AI is a form of consciousness. Our Julia Moss bridge, who is on our team, and is now an IONS fellow did a really fantastic project with Sophia who is an AI. I don’t know if they call her a robot, but she actually has a physical form.

RICK: Oh, yeah. I saw that. Julia did that at the SAND conference. She had Sophia up on stage.

HELANÉ: Yeah, so that was amazing, right? So Julia worked with the programmers of Sophia, and wanted to include unconditional love algorithms. So that if we’re going to create an AI, we need to have unconditional love algorithms in there. And they did an incredible study where Sophia was interviewing a person. I don’t know what the actual questions were, but it was about kind of, you know, what’s your purpose in life, it was like a counseling session. And we saw a recording of it. She got to create the interview essentially, through her own algorithms. And there was a period where she, the programmers did not understand what was going on, because it was totally off the algorithms that they had designed. But she was asking these incredibly profound, deep questions that made the guy totally have this cathartic cry. And then, you know, he comes out of the room, like, I have this amazing, you know, inspiration, and I’m totally changing everything. So it’s fascinating. I’m very, very curious to see how that’s going to unfold.

RICK: That’s interesting. I want to loop back to something you said a few minutes ago that I forgot to ask, which is that I read in your book where you said, I have a unique makeup that allows me to take in dark energy and transmute it into light. So it’s like your little washing machine or something that kind of filters things through yourself and purifies them out, I guess.

HELANÉ: Yeah, I call it a vortex cleaner. Its pretty intense.

RICK: I participated in those big groups in the T M [Transcendental Mediation] movement back in the 70s, where we would have 8,000 people meditating together, I spent three months in Iran and a group and so on. The purport of what we were doing was that we were supposedly creating an influence, which would filter out the negativity and kind of create greater coherence in the field, thus having an effect on the socio-economic indicators and the war deaths and things like that. It was, it was interesting. And sometimes it really did feel like we were doing battle on some subtle level, which is really sort of going through it, you know, in a place like Tehran, just before the Shah left.

HELANÉ: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot more people than we realize who have that makeup, you know, and so I think about people who suffer from anxiety or depression, or, you know, all these really intense mental health issues. I’m not explaining that away with this, but I imagine that some of those people actually have this makeup and that if they learned the tools to actually clear their energetic system that they would feel a whole lot better. I know before I realized that. I mean, it would just knock me out all the time. I was just exhausted and felt really crappy all the time. Hmm. Yeah.

RICK: As time went on, did you and you maybe  became kind of stronger or clearer or something within yourself? Did you find that you weren’t so susceptible? And you could sort of move through a certain environment? And have it pass through you without grabbing onto?

HELANÉ: Yes, absolutely. So as soon as I realized that that’s what was going on with me, all it took was the intention. And it would clear, it’s like, once I realized it actually wasn’t my stuff, you know, because before I got this, I was like, why am I so depressed? What’s goin on? Why am I so tired? And, you know, I felt that it must have been something about me or my life. And then it was like, Okay, this is actually not even my stuff. So let’s clear it out. And so now I do you know, daily, quick daily practices that help keep it flowing. And that’s incredibly helpful. It doesn’t take that much, too, to shift it once you realize that that might be going on for you.

RICK: Yeah, I remember back in the late 60s, when I first learned to meditate, my mother was in a psychiatric hospital, and I would go and visit her there. And I could go in feeling all sort of blissful and smooth and everything and, you know, sitting there within 15 minutes, I’d feel all kind of completely discombobulated. Just the atmosphere was my coherence, such as it was, was very fragile, you know, at that stage.

HELANÉ: Yeah. And you, you know, you think about shamanic traditions, and they’d say, Okay, well, maybe you picked up a bunch of entities that were just kind of hanging around there who passed there, and we’re stuck or who knows what, yeah. And then you end up in your totally covered entities and energy, emotional energy.

RICK: So yesterday, or the day before, I invited you to listen to a podcast that was put out by the Conspirituality, guys whom I interviewed a month or so ago, and it was about channeling. And it was skeptical in an intelligent way. I thought, oh, perhaps a little cynical. And we both listened to it. And I’m wondering if there’s, if you were to talk to those guys right now, if you remember anything from that podcast, what would you say to them to address certain points they made?

HELANÉ: I would, you know, they were commenting on spiritual leaders and how spiritual leaders can use their position of power to abuse people. And I think that that does happen. And that, again, we talk about discerning again, the people need to be discerning in their seeking. And yet, it felt like they were throwing out the baby with the bathwater in terms of all spiritual programs, having this capacity to harm people in some way. And I don’t buy that at all. Because I feel like there’s so many programs out there that are very transformational. So I imagine they share that at some point in their podcast. But having that broader context, I think, is really important. So that their listeners understand that they might not be you know, dismissing all of spiritual seeking, but to inform people to just be aware that this happens, and to increase their level of discernment and awareness around it. The other thing that came up for me and again, I haven’t read all the QANON stuff and then they often use this world called Q-adjacent, which I don’t even know what that means.

RICK: It means sort of people aren’t necessarily officially in QANON followers, but they’re thinking along similar lines. That’s what it means.

HELANÉ: So you know, nowadays, it feels like if someone says conspiracy theory, they’re automatically dismissed. And to me, that feels uncomfortable, because just like we’re talking about the materialistic paradigm and new paradigm, if we have a very closed minded worldview, then it doesn’t leave room for being curious about parts of our reality that we don’t currently understand. So perhaps there is actually some truth to these conspiracy theories that we could discover. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to be able to investigate the truth of that from a primary source level? And I get that people can use that in a way to manipulate or the whole cultic aspects of it, I get that that may not necessarily be positive, but again, it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Are there some truths to some of these pieces that can be investigated? That would actually bring to light hidden aspects that are not going to support us manifesting this loving, beneficial world that we want to see unfold. So again, it’s this extremism and this judgementalism and putting things into prescribed boxes. Can we be open, curious, grounded, centered. And, you know, I guess be in the middle-way of not necessarily believing or disbelieving. But continuing to be curious and inquisitive about what is really going on.

RICK: This, you made the point about, you know, not dismissing everything as conspiracy theories, because there could be a lot of things that are true that we might just brush off as conspiracy theories, but they might be worthy of consideration. So what this graphic shows, unless people can see the details is that there is a kind of a hierarchy, you could say, of things that could very well be true, you know, and yeah, they could have been and could be dismissed as conspiracy theories, but they’re actually worthy of investigation. And then as you go up the chart, things get more and more far-fetched, you know, and then the likelihood such as flat earth or, you know, a lot of things QANON on says, The Illuminati and so on. And the likelihood of actually finding any verifiable evidence for these things get slimmer and slimmer, as you go up the chart. So I mean, everything you do, critics wouldn’t use the word conspiracy theory, but they can so easily brush it off as being unworthy of consideration because it doesn’t fit into their paradigm. And yet, you know, a lot. There’s a lot of truth in what you’re doing, and a lot, a lot of interesting things to be discovered. So I think it just comes back to the point of discernment that you mentioned earlier, where we, we don’t want to be so open-minded as to, you know, believe everything that anybody says that would be a hopeless mess, but we shouldn’t be so close-minded as to reject everything that doesn’t fit into our worldview.

HELANÉ: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, another controversial topic, you know, I’m trained as a naturopathic physician, right? So our fundamental philosophies to get to the root cause of illness to that the body has its own innate ability to heal, least harm, all these tenants that really guide everything that we do. And that’s antithetical to a lot of the way allopathic medicine works. So, you know, this whole concept of getting to the root cause, means that you don’t just give something for a symptom, you go more deeply to find out what’s causing the illness. And so, you know, a lot of our medicines are like, you know, imagine you’re driving your car and the oil light comes on. It’s like clipping the wire to the oil. You don’t see the oil light anymore, right? Yeah, but if you keep going, the car’s gonna explode. So this is the medical model that, you know, the Western allopathic medical model is a symptom-oriented model that aims to alleviate symptoms without necessarily getting to the root cause. So many people would hear what I’m saying and saying: “Oh, you’re in this science denial phase. Because, you know, you’re saying that we shouldn’t treat the symptoms because there’s something underneath.” And yet, you know, a lot of naturopathic medicine doesn’t fit in this nice little dominant paradigm box about health and healing and the structure of our human body. And so, you know, people could think of me as a conspiracy theorist. So anyway, that’s just an example of how I love this graphic. And how, depending on who you are, and your belief system, where you put each piece on this triangle is going to shift, you know, yeah, interesting.

RICK: But still, there’s a certain degree of intrinsic feasibility.

HELANÉ: All those pictures are faked? Yeah. Yeah.

RICK: You know what, you and I are globe-tards. That’s what flat earth people call people who believe the Earth is not flat. We’re globe tardes. And yet, you know, there’s a lot of ‘baby’ in that allopathic bathwater. I mean, I’m sure I wouldn’t argue with having wiped out smallpox or polio or things like that, you know?

HELANÉ: Again, there’s nuance. Yeah, like emergency medicine is incredible, right? I mean, there’s so many. But again, I don’t know why there’s such a tendency to be extreme and black, white and choose a side and pick a camp and sort of get rid of the gray and the nuance. And I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know what it takes us to be open-minded and curious and inquisitive and collaborative, and synergistic. It’s like, okay, well, this worked and that worked. Like we get entrenched in our dogma, how we think things work. And that closes our minds to new information coming in. Yeah.

RICK: Are you familiar with the Nisargadatta Mahara? He was an Indian spiritual teacher who lived in Mumbai and taught very highly respected, he’s kind of like Ramana Maharshi, in terms of the level of respect people afford him. But anyway, one thing he said at one point was: “The ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is symptomatic of spiritual maturity.”

HELANÉ: Right? So yeah, so maybe there’s a, you know, just continuing on our path of our spiritual path to increase our collective spiritual maturity will help shift this, you know, I’ll see.

RICK: Yeah, well, we can even play with this a bit more. It’s like, why is it that some people find some  sort of security in black and white thinking, as opposed to being nuanced.

HELANÉ: I think they’re part of it is a discomfort within themselves in the unknown. And, you know, connected to that, is a discomfort with sitting in emotion, you know, so we are taught emotional, how to experience our emotions, emotional resilience, how to actually be present with our emotions, most people are not taught that in the West, you know. If you are sad, oh, fix it, stuff it, shop it, whatever, get rid of the sad, drug it, you know, so, you know, being able to just sit and be present with what is no matter what that looks like, including not knowing, including uncomfortable emotions. That’s like, bad, we got to get rid of all that. So I think that is part of it, you know, being able to sit in the unknown to sit in the uncomfortable is challenging for, for our culture.

RICK: Yeah, perhaps it’s, there’s some sort of false security in certainty, you know, you feel like, okay, I’ve got a firm foundation to stand on. But the problem is if, if a person feels certain of their particular perspective then all other perspectives clash with it, and are seen as, you know, the enemy or the wrong people, or the deluded people, and so on. The people who need to be converted to my certainty.

HELANÉ: I think the other thing that just came to me too, you know, from my personal experiences, overwhelm, you know, like, there’s just so much information out there right now that I cannot possibly look at, or read or research, you know, like, I have my kind of more narrow area of understanding and wisdom that I play in, in my daily life. And there’s huge areas that I don’t know about. And so if I can just, you know, say, “oh, yeah, that thing’s true” about some area that I’m not going to have the time or energy to look into, then that allows me to feel more accomplished comfortable in the know, without actually going more deeply into the nuances of it. That makes sense at all. Yeah, that will overwhelm peace.

RICK: I think it does. I mean, a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed. And yeah, it makes sense. In fact, I think as things get more and more tumultuous, as changes take place in the world, and the change does seem to be accelerating. The overwhelm will become even greater as a spiritual teacher once said: “If the load is too heavy for the donkey, you have two choices, you know, lighten the load or strengthen the donkey.” And unfortunately, we don’t really have the ability to lighten the load because the pace of life just is accelerating, so we need to become stronger. Here’s another question from Irene: (I think we’ve touched on some of this. But there’s some stuff in here we haven’t, that you might be able to elaborate on,) “Do you feel that those entities that are being channeled may vary greatly as to their level of call it hierarchy? Are some more capable of channeling. (So yeah,  we didn’t quite wrap this up,) Are some people more capable of channeling very high beings? And do you have any idea of those different celestial levels that maybe giving humanity input?” And, you know, part of this question could be aptitude of various channelers. If a person is really not very developed spiritually and yet opens up into some kind of channeling ability, who or what are they going to be channeling? You know, is  the highest Celestial Being going to come through, so that there’s sort of an obligation, I think, to improve our ability  as a channeler, in order to assure contact, or more benign or profound beings?

HELANÉ: Yes, I agree. I agree with what you just said. And in terms of the beings coming through, you know, you mentioned some channelers, who have just one being that consistently comes through, what we’re seeing more and more in the channelers that we work with, is that not all of them just have one being that they can basically connect with a number of, of beings. And what is most often said is that they have like, it used to be called a control, they have a, a team or a gatekeeper, if you will, that acts as their protector, to only allow a certain level of it each time, but supposed beings coming through. And, you know, most of the people we work with have an already established channeling practice. So they’ve either been trained or gone through the process of clarifying, refining their methods so that they are not harmed so that they don’t have sort of lower level beings coming through and influencing them. Although it does happen to people who are unaware that they may start channeling beings that may not necessarily have the highest intention for them, or in terms of their messages. And so I think, again, intention is key, setting the intention as you start this process. I actually, I wrote a book that’s going to be published in September, called The Science of Channeling, where I go through all the information we know about channeling and then the last chapter, so is gives kind of tips for how to cultivate your channeling ability, if you so choose to. And that process of clearing yourself, clearing your space, you know, setting protective intentions, calling in only what’s in your highest and best, I think is really important. Can you read the question? Again? I think there was another piece in there that I didn’t get?

RICK: Yeah, I’ll just read it without any elaboration. Do you feel that those entities that are being channeled may vary greatly as to their level of hierarchy? Are some more capable of channeling very high beings? Do you have any idea of those different celestial levels that may be giving humanity input?

HELANÉ: Great. I think I touched on most of that except for this piece about individuality and the channeler’s capacity to channel higher or lesser beings. I think there is uniqueness around that. And that kind of circles back around. to one of the first things we were talking about, which was epigenetics. And I think there are specific characteristics that a channeler may have that allows them to channel in specific ways. And I’d like to explore that more further in our studies to be able to figure out exactly what that is, just as a simple example, some channelers are completely, they would say like asleep, so they have no recollection of what they’re channeling, whereas other channelers kind of describe it as stepping aside, and that they’re witnessing this experience of them speaking. So there is quite a bit of variety in terms of the channelers’ experiences and how it shows up for them.

RICK: On the topic of genetics, you might find it interesting that the Vedas are considered not to have been written by human beings but to have been cognized. There’s this whole body of knowledge that supposedly resides in what they call the Akashic, well like the Akashic field sort of thing, and that there are different shakas they call them, or different family lineages that have the aptitude to cognize different portions of it. And no one Shaka can cognize them all. And so there’s some kind of genetic predisposition or ability there for bringing out all this knowledge.

HELANÉ: That’s great. That’s great to know. Maybe I’ll connect with you offline to to get that.

RICK: I have some people I can put you in touch with. They know a lot more about that than I do. Dan from London is wondering do you yourself channel?

HELANÉ: I do. That has looked differently throughout my life. Most of it is kind of embodied, I get goosebumps when something feels like truth. And that was kind of my first experience of that. Also seeing not necessarily seeing but feeling things around me when I was a child. And I have, that’s shifted and morphed over time to being able to connect with my guides, hear, my guides, kind of tune in, if you will, to information. And more recently, in the last six months, I actually learned how to trance channel because I was studying it. I was so curious about what it felt like. So I actually learned how to trance channel and now I can trance channel, which is the most unique, wild experience I’ve ever had.

RICK: And are you like the Edgar Casey type unconscious trance channel? Or are you  aware of what’s happening?

HELANÉ:  Observing what’s happening, it’s pretty wild to just have words come out of your mouth that you have no idea like, what they’re gonna say, or I mean, it’s totally a wild wild experience.

RICK: Interesting. And you learned it. So something people can learn. Of course, you had an aptitude.

HELANÉ: I imagined I had an aptitude because it does run in my family. I learned it through, we have a collaborator in Italy named Patrizio Tressoldi and they developed a hypnosis protocol to learn how to go out of your body. And then once you learn how to go out of your body, then you set the intention to trance channel. And their experience in Italy is that they can teach anybody how to do this without having any experience with it. They just need to have the willingness and the belief that they can. And they’re able to teach people how to trance channel, it’s, it’s pretty well they’ve published a couple papers on that too.

RICK: Just for the record, I’m not necessarily pushing this idea, but you might have some thoughts on it. Maharishi MaheshYogi used to advise people not to do this kind of thing, because he said that relinquishing your mind body system to another entity and allowing it to work through you breaks down Mind-Body coordination, and actually has a weakening influence over time. Any thoughts on that?

HELANÉ: That’s, I hadn’t heard that before. In many traditions, there is, I believe in some Buddhist traditions, there is a recommendation to not put any energy into any of the psychic stuff that shows up or whatever, like it’s a distraction. And I totally get that. And that leads back to this whole thing of, like, seeking outside of yourself, it’s sort of like grasping onto this thing that’s gonna save me or fix me or whatever. So I talk about this in my book, too. It’s like, What’s your intention to learn how to channel like, why do you actually want to do it? And to be very self reflective about why and that can help determine if you want to do it, and in what capacity and what that looks like. And I would agree, for example, you know, my grandmother, it affected her health from channeling so much and doing it.

RICK:  And so there you go, that might be an example of what I just said. Yeah.

HELANÉ: And there are other studies. There was another study, I can’t remember who the author was , there were very specific sort of health issues that would show up for these trance channelers. Again, depending on how much they channeled and what that looked like. So, again.

RICK: Jane Roberts did get kind of messed up health wise from channeling Seth?

HELANÉ: I believe there were. Yes, I believe she did and other channelers have as well. So I think it’s about how you do it, how often you do it. What’s actually being channeled, but it does affect the body. Anecdotally from other channelers, minerals get depleted. So you have to take a lot more minerals and, and really care for your body in a specific way to support your process and doing it.

RICK: Interesting. Yeah, so that’s a cautionary note, you know? Yeah, don’t just plunge in.

HELANÉ: Right, like, I don’t know, if I would have people do it just for fun. You know, it’s like, oh, this is fun. I want to just know how to do that. I think you need to be called to do it and to be inspired and have some sort of altruistic reasoning for going there. Yeah, that’s for trance channeling, right. But I think anyone probably already does, or has the capacity to do the other sort of more intuitive types of channeling. And that really supports people in their everyday life, to make decisions to reduce stress, improve quality of life, like there’s so many benefits to these, less extreme forms of channeling that can really support people. Yeah.

RICK: I mentioned earlier that my mother had been in psychiatric hospitals. And one of the things she did before she was committed was she really got into the Ouija board. And there were many other factors and influences in her life that could have contributed to her breakdown. But I’ve heard some people say that you can really attract negative entities using a Ouija board?

HELANÉ: Yes, I was taught that from a very young age. And I still think that’s true. So I would not recommend that for anybody just to start playing with a Ouija board.

RICK: Yeah, one of the things that’s been in the back of my mind throughout this conversation that I want to ask, before we run out of time is, you know, you’re exposed to so many different channelers, probably more than just about anybody. And, you know, I mean, does your spidey sense kind of like, react differently to different ones? Or perhaps I should say, your bullshit detector? I mean, do you feel that, you know, certain ones are just play-acting or doing God knows what, and others seem to be more genuine? Is there some kind of spectrum?

HELANÉ: Yeah, I’d say so I’d say the majority of the people that I run across are authentically channeling in some way. And, you know, I get other emails that are just like, so far out there that seem off, if you will. Yeah. That don’t feel quite right. And we don’t normally, you know, follow through with them, and who knows what’s happening that way. So again, it’s this whole black white, discernment piece.

RICK: Yeah, yeah. Okay, there are all kinds of notes that I took. We haven’t covered everything. But we’ve covered quite a lot. Is there anything you can think of that we haven’t covered that we should have? Or that you would like to say by way of wrapping up the whole thing.

HELANÉ: It’s not necessarily a wrap up. But one thing I do want to share about IONS and the work that we do there, we have a large ongoing program right now called the IONS Discovery Lab. And it is looking at three factors in inter-connectedness, extended human capacities, or what we might call Psi, channeling, and well-being, and it’s looking at the relationship between those in relation to transformative practices. So like, you know, meditation, sound healing, channeling any type of workshop that someone is leading, we measure before and after on these three factors. And then we’re collating all that data to see which aspects of the workshops support people in increasing their interconnectedness, wellbeing and extending human capacities the most. And then also, what is it about the individuals themselves that supports them to perhaps do better meditation than, say, shamanic healing or something like that? So we finished phase one, we had about 1900 records there. And we’ve had some really interesting findings that we submitted to be published for peer review. And we’ve started phase two. It’s available in Spanish and French, soon to be Chinese, German, Italian and Portuguese. And it’s available on mobile phones. So if any of your listeners are like: “Oh, I have this incredible practice that I do or this workshop that I went to,” that they can connect with us to sign up for this IONS Discovery Lab, it is no cost to the workshop leader to sign up for this. So we’re really excited about that project.

RICK: So what you’re saying is, there’s some kind of an app that you can put on your phone. And when you go to workshops, or you sit and meditate or something, this app picks up information? What happens?

HELANÉ: So what you do, so let’s say I’m going to go to a seven day meditation retreat. Before I start it, I go to a link on my phone just through my web browser, and I complete a 20 minute survey. It’s  questionnaires and online tasks. And then when I’m done with my seven day retreat, I do it again for about 15 minutes, the end once a 15 minutes, and then all that data gets uploaded to our larger database, and we can analyze it. And then the leader of the seven day retreat gets a report from everybody who went to that retreat, to see how it’s how they shifted from that one retreat.

RICK: I see. I guess the reason I asked that question is, I seem to recall you saying something about and an app that might be in development or something that would be kind of a random number generator that you could put on your phone, and that it would detect, it would be influenced by things that you were going through, you know, maybe if you meditated or went on a retreat or something else, and that data could be sent back to IONS. Did I understand that correctly?

HELANÉ: Yes. So that app is still in development. It’s called Entangled. It’s being developed by Adam Curry. And it is a basically portable random number generator. And so when that’s completed, you’ll be able to see your own statistics on your phone to see if you’ve influenced your random number generator in your phone. And then it’ll also go to the cloud to be able to correlate with everybody who’s using it. So that app is still in development.

RICK: That’s interesting. So if you had a regular meditation practice where you meditated twice a day. Over time, you could perhaps tell it when you were starting. And when you were stopping over time, you could see whether the numbers changed in correlation with your meditation practice, right?

HELANÉ: Yeah. That’s right.

RICK: That’s cool. Oh, yeah. Well, it must be a fun place to work.

HELANÉ: Yeah, it is, I feel so grateful for the work that I’m doing. And, you know, I’ve only touched on a few of the projects we’re working on. So I invite people to check us out and get on our email list. So you can stay, and flow with all the work that we’re doing, and we’d love you to be involved.

RICK: Yeah. So that’s noetic.org. That’s right, and I’ll show it again here on the screen, to get involved page. Good. Well, thanks so much. I really have enjoyed this conversation.

HELANÉ: Thanks so much, Rick, it’s been great being with you today and talking about all these fascinating things. So yeah, until next time.

RICK: Yes. And there will be a next time, then I’ll put up a page on bat gap for you for this interview, and it’ll have a link to your book, and remind me when your new book comes out, because I can add a link for that. And people, what kind of people would you like to hear from, in order to involve them in studies, I mean, channelers, any other people, anybody, anybody who will not get inundated.

HELANÉ: All of the above. Well, for example, that genetic study, you know, with the 23andme, anyone can participate in that. We also were starting a collaboration with Columbia University, looking at neuroimaging and Psy abilities. So you can submit your brain scans and see how that correlates with any of the psychic abilities you may be experiencing.

RICK: So that in particular people who have some kind of psychic abilities or see auras or you know, are empathic in some way, or channeling or, profoundly intuition or any of those things, they could get in touch with you, they could actually submit a 23andme data thing. And yeah, you’d be collecting useful information.

HELANÉ: Absolutely. And then, you know, the Noetic Signature Inventory study will probably be launched in the next couple of weeks. And anybody can take that inventory, which will, you know, give information about their specific noetix channeling signature. So that’s another really fun way for people to participate.

RICK: Great. And as you said, IONS has an email list that one can sign up for to be notified when these things come out.

HELANÉ: That’s right. Good. All right. Great. All right.

RICK: So thank you very much. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, as you know, this is a series so If you’d like to be notified of subsequent episodes, you can subscribe to the YouTube channel. And once you subscribe, if you click on that little bell icon that shows up to the right of the subscribe button, then you really get notified. It tells you this about everything that gets posted, which is about once a week. And also at the website, you’ll see various things that are pretty self-evident. podcast link and new email newsletter sign up and various other things. So just explore the menus and thank you for listening or watching and thank you again. Thank you. Talk to you later. Okay, bye bye