Julia: He said, “Look, Julia, I had this dream, like a little dream at night, that we were all sitting in a room, like a conference room, and there was, outside the windows, you could see just devastation. And someone said, “If only we taught the machines how to love.” And he’s like, “I wanna make that not happen. Do you think we can teach AI to love?” (upbeat music)
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 and about spiritual topics. We’ve done over 750 of them now and if you would like to check out previous ones you can certainly do so on YouTube, but if you go to batgap.com you’ll see them organized in various ways that would be hard to organize on YouTube. This also exists as an audio podcast if you like to subscribe to those. The whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. We don’t run ads. If you appreciate it and would like to help support it, please go to batgap.com and you’ll see PayPal buttons and a page explaining alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Julia Mossbridge. I’ve kind of known Julia for quite a few years because she spoke at the Science and Non-Duality Conference a number of times and I always saw those presentations and found her very interesting. So it’s really great to be able to have an extended conversation with her now. So welcome, Julia.
Julia: Hey, thank you. It’s wonderful to be here. I’ve been wanting to be on the show for a while and apparently I forgot that I was invited previously.
Rick: Yeah, you were in the middle of getting ready for a TV show that you were gonna do or something or other and you said, “I’m too busy.” But anyway, here we are at the perfect time, right?
Julia: Yeah.
Rick: So reading a bit from Julia’s bio, she focuses ruthlessly, mercilessly on developing a deep understanding of love, time, technology, and how these human experiences relate to corresponding physical forces. By reading this, I’m giving you a hint of what we’re going to talk about today. Her most recent relevant projects include creating a Socratic GPT, in other words, an AI chatbot to guide intelligence analysts through the critical thinking process, leading a diverse team of technologists and designers to create a scalable, self-guided digital tool that increases overall well-being and is now being developed further within Native American communities, and leading an international group of AI developers and roboticists toward creating an unconditionally loving robot that reduces anger and cognitive load in humans. Some of her current affiliations include being Co-founder and Board Chair of the 501(c)(3) non-profit Applied Love Labs, Senior Distinguished Fellow in Human Potential at the Center for Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, Senior Data + Intuition Consultant at Tangible IQ and Founder of the Mossbridge Institute. Julia’s postdoctoral work in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition program at Northwestern University led to her interest in pursuing the mechanisms of precognition, (we’re going to talk about that today,) the ability to perceive seemingly non-predictable events. She holds a PhD in Psychoacoustics in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at Northwestern University, an MA in Neuroscience from UC San Francisco, and was awarded a BA with a minor in Computer Science and Highest Honors in Neuroscience at Oberlin College. So here are some of the things we’re going to talk about today. I gave you a hint of some, but we’re going to talk about the scientific study of unconditional love, universal love, and the difference between them. The importance of unconditional love for uniting our polarized culture, including time machine technology that can do that. Her work with non-speaking autistic people, covered in The Telepathy Tapes and the upcoming Telepathy Tapes documentary (and I’ve interviewed Diane Hennacy Powell about that, also), an upcoming women’s conference in AI, consciousness, cognitive science, robotics, and a book that she wrote that I read in the past week or so called “Have a Nice Disclosure!” and truth and reconciliation in the process of healing from government programs that may still be ongoing. There’s something called SOAR GATE that we’ll talk about. Also, National Service Programs to Support Self-Transcendence. So it’s going to be a lively couple of hours, and please send in questions if you’re in the live audience and would like to ask something that I’m not thinking to ask or Julia isn’t thinking to say. So here we go. Welcome again, Julia.
Julia: Thank you, thank you. I just have one correction for the intro, which is unusual to only have one. I’m no longer the Board Chair of Applied Love Labs. I’m the Chief Science Officer. The Board Chair, Catherine Geanuracos, is an interim Board Chair, and we’re looking for another Board Chair and some more board members there. So, just so you know.
Rick: All righty. You gotta update your bio that you send people, because that’s what it said in the thing that I got.
Julia: I know, I know. It’s not your fault. This happened a minute ago. Yeah, but I say it also to remind me. Take a look at our new website at applied.love. This is a long time coming, and that organization, which used to be called TILT, The Institute for Love and Time, is evolving into this amazingly broad and beautiful organization that really represents unconditional love well in the world. So I just want to say that right up front so I don’t forget. So I’m just encouraging people to go look.
Rick: So we’re going to start by talking about unconditional and universal love, but maybe we should take a step back and talk about what love is. I mean, you know, it’s the topic of pretty much all pop songs, and love makes the world go round when it’s not money making the world go round. And you know, people are obsessed with it, and most of those pop songs maybe don’t have anything to do with love in any refined sense. It’s more about lust or attachment or whatever. And you know, people talk about making love, but is that really love? So what do you, how do you define love to start with?
Julia: Yeah, so I tend to define love as a generic, so forget whether it’s romantic love or unconditional love or agape, kind of divine love. In a generic sense, I define love as that which connects. So it’s really fascinating to me that in English we have all these names for things that connect. Handshake, bridge, hug, glue, you know, these things that connect.
Rick: Gravity.
Julia: Gravity, magnetism.
Rick: Yeah.
Julia: And there’s many more, but we don’t have like one noun for that which connects. And so, that’s what I’m going to call love. And that connection does not have to be positive or negative. Like for instance, with magnetism is a good example because if you take magnets where their poles are the same pole is facing each other, they will repel. If you flip it around, they will attract. There’s actually no difference in terms of love with that. There’s a connection. And the connection may be a repulsive connection, and some of us have these with our people we’ve dated and we’re like, “That’s a repulsive connection,” but it’s still a connection, right? And we have an attractive connection. The point is that just the connection itself is what I want to call love, just the most generic foundational basic thing. And Rick, you’re about to say something.
Rick: Well, just the thought that God is love is a very popular phrase. And when I think that, I think, okay, well, God — and we could get into defining God — but is a very fundamental level of reality, certainly. And so perhaps that phrase implies that love is a fundamental quality or property of the universe itself and perhaps manifests in a variety of ways. In one way through humans, in another way through various laws of nature such as magnetism or the strong and weak nuclear forces or whatever. Maybe all forms of attraction are a manifestation or symptom of a very fundamental reality of the universe.
Julia: Right. Exactly. And that’s why I think there should be a physics of love. I treat love as a physical force that we don’t understand very well. It’s kind of like the physical force from which it all started, like the God force. I see those as equivalent, universal love and God. And there’s actually a physicist that I know who derived quantum mechanics from just the idea of connection, relationship. So that was kind of amazing. But I think it’s important to sort of distinguish, at some point in the love conversation, and maybe right now, sort of the foundational force of the universe, universal love that we’re calling it, which is that which connects. This is before space and time. It’s weird to say before because that sounds like it isn’t space and time, but this is underlying, I guess you could imagine it, space and time and matter and energy.
Rick: Prior to the manifestation as opposed to before in a linear time sense.
Julia: Well, yeah, but even when you say prior to, I mean, basically time…
Rick: More fundamental than.
Julia: More fundamental than, yeah, that’s better. And then still, like all of our pictures are either of space or time, before or under. And so it’s really interesting how our language helps us stay in this box. So there’s universal love, and then there’s, in my view, the experience of accessing, or the experience of recognizing, universal love. It’s everywhere. It’s part of all of us. It’s what creates everything. That’s the model that we’re talking about. But there’s an experience of recognizing that. There’s an experience of becoming aware of that, and it’s not necessarily permanent. It could be in some moments you’re aware of it, in some moments you’re not. And that experience is what I call “unconditional love.” So, unconditional love is a human motivational state or a human emotion that happens–it’s both of those things–that happens when you access or connect with–you’re aware of your connection with universal love. It’s an emotion that happens with awareness of what’s already true. And then there’s conditional love, which includes romantic love or love of a friend, where it doesn’t mean you can’t have unconditional love for a partner or a friend. What I mean is there are certain kinds of more mundane love that we have and we don’t always experience that as mundane. Like when you fall in love with someone, it’s still usually conditional love. It doesn’t feel mundane. But it has this piece where it’s so about the relationship with the other that it’s exclusive to everything else. And if the other messes up enough, you’re going to withdraw that love. Because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. And that’s sort of the model that we think about when we think about love and all the pop songs, except for maybe “All You Need Is Love,” which there are several pop songs that touch on to this experience of unconditional love, but most of them are about, “I loved you, but then you did this, and now I’m pissed, and I don’t love you anymore.” That’s the conditional love.
Rick: Yeah. So, two thoughts here. One is, I think you said something about love is everywhere, it’s in all things and so on and so forth. But there are so many situations in the world in which it’s really hard to see how that might be the case, you know, because there’s such horrific circumstances that people are in. Gaza, Somalia, places like that.
Julia: Everywhere.
Rick: Yeah. And that kind of shakes people’s belief in there being any sort of God worth existing, know, if he does exist, he must be some kind of sadist, I’ve heard people say, because there just doesn’t seem to be any love or quality or anything for…
Julia: Or she’s pissed off.
Rick: Yeah, that could be. But then people ask, “Well, why would she be pissed off at a newborn baby who’s born with cancer or blindness or something like that?”
Julia: Exactly.
Rick: Yeah. “Why would she be pissed off at six million Jews?”
Julia: Because we model God as a being in the material world with the same limitations as a being in the material world. So we fail to model God as God actually is, which is not a being in the material world, which is instead the love that’s foundational. And so, I mean it quite physically when I say that God is part of each of us or this universal love, which I see as equivalent to God, is part of each of us. I mean it literally, that’s what our atoms are made of. So if you have atoms in this model, you’re made of God. You’re made of this universal love. But there’s a big difference between that and being aware of it and experiencing the unconditional love that happens when you’re aware of it. And it can feel like it’s harder to experience that when your life is full of hardship, pain. But that’s, there’s actually, there’s psychologically, there’s not a one-to-one there. In fact, there might be a hint that, within states that are very difficult, I don’t mean like locations by states, I mean like times of life…
Rick: Circumstances.
Julia: …circumstances that are very difficult, it might actually, if you’re psychologically capable and you’re physically capable in that moment of being in a self-transcendent state, you’re much more likely to be able to access this experience of connecting with universal love because almost it pushes you towards self-transcendence. My husband had to go through a double lung transplant 13 years ago. He’s doing great. Thirteen and a half years ago, actually, almost 14 years ago this… No, 13 years ago this June. It was two years of being really, really, really, really sick. And then just being unconscious for a while, and we didn’t know if he’d live or die. And then getting lungs, and then two years of recovery. So it was a lot, and it was really hard. And I have permission to talk about his experience, which is great. He’s talked about it before, too, but his experience was, you know, he was unable to breathe in a normal way. So he was breathing about 60 times a minute, 24 hours a day for about six months. And in between breaths, so like this is very precious, his words are very precious, right? Because he has to breathe so fast. But in between breaths, he said, “I see.” He said, “I’m not the candle, I’m the flame.” And he was completely at peace. And his body is just like devastatingly thin, and he’s he’s in trouble physically. But he was able to see that. He was able to access that universal love and know that he’s the flame. And that, so I think there’s, when people say, “Well, sometimes it’s really hard,” I’m saying, “Yeah, it is really hard.” You could be in hard circumstances, and there are hard circumstances all over, and sometimes people who aren’t in hard circumstances feel guilty for accessing love and saying that we’re all made of love because it’s like, “Well, what about those people in Somalia?” But those people in Somalia are also working hard to try to access that, and sometimes they’re more capable of it. So it’s interesting.
Rick: Your husband’s comment reminds me of a line from a group that was a little bit before your time called the Incredible String Band, but the line was, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.”
Julia: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Rick: Yeah, and when we talk about God, my concept of God is that, you know, is that God is hiding in plain sight and is quite evident if you look at anything closely enough, like a single cell and the miracle of what that cell is doing. So God is an all-pervading reality. In fact, some would say from the perspective of maybe Advaita Vedanta that it’s the only reality and that there’s an evolutionary trajectory or agenda to the entire universe and to our lives as, you know, entities in this universe and so whatever we’re going through there’s some… if you could zoom out and see it from a God’s eye view there’s some evolutionary value or significance in whatever everybody is going through.
Julia: You could, and I always have two reactions to that. One reaction is like, “You could, that’s really beautiful.” And another reaction is like, “And we have to be so careful not to use that as a bludgeon.”
Rick: Yeah, or as a spiritual bypassing kind of thing.
Julia: Yeah, I’ve seen people, I mean, even to my husband when he was sick, like, “Oh, you must let go of your sadness.” And I’m like, “Well, my doctor says I need a lung transplant, and I think I’m going with that, but also, yes, I’ll let go of my sadness.” But the model of the New Age world can often be that you have to do things right in order to… there’s a list of things to do and you have to do the things on the list the right way in order to get the things you want. And that’s not great, it’s not helpful, and it’s not true.
Rick: It comes across as judgmental and I don’t mean it when I said that. It’s more like there’s a sense, for me at least, that it… and this could apply to myself, too… without it being kind of cruel or heartless, there’s an “all is well and wisely put” kind of feeling about everything, that nothing is arbitrary or accidental and all. There’s a kind of a divine wisdom orchestrating it all.
Julia: Right. And sometimes it’s really hard to be in touch with that, and that’s quite reasonable to not be in touch with that because you’re in touch with this other experience. And at the other hand, it might be a time when it’s perfect to be in touch with that.
Rick: Okay, so we’ve kind of defined love in a tangential way. Let’s get into your distinction between unconditional and universal love. I’m not quite sure myself about the precise definitions of those words.
Julia: Right. So universal love I think of as a physical force, the description of which is “that which connects.” So if you imagine that there’s a physics of love, it would involve what does connecting do in terms of creating the universe and how it works? What does connection do? That’s what love does. So that’s universal love. It’s like a physical force. Unconditional love is a human experience. So it’s like saying photons are physical things. They’re particles/waves of light. But the human experience of walking out into the sun when a bunch of photons are hitting you, it’s a feeling of warmth. Sometimes people don’t like it, sometimes people do like it. It’s a human experience that’s different from the physical force but is correlated with the physical force. And so in this case, if universal love is that which connects as a physical force of connection, regardless of the sign of the connection, then unconditional love is the awareness that that is there, that universal love is there, right? By there, I mean here, like right here.
Rick: Okay, so that helps. Now, usually, when we hear unconditional love, it means that I love you no matter what, or Jesus loves everybody no matter what, or that kind of thing.
Julia: So what the experience is, what the human experience, so what I’m positing is that the human experience of being aware that universal love is right here has the quality of feeling loved and loving without anything needing to change. So the human experience of accessing this universal love, of being aware that that is here, is feeling loved and loving without anything needing to change.
Rick: Byron Katie-ish, if you know her teaching.
Julia: It’s just love.
Rick: Loving what is.
Julia: Yeah, right. Like Buddha. I mean, it’s one step beyond Buddha though, because it’s not not just accepting what is, it’s loving what is. So it takes a little bit more work, I would say.
Rick: Yeah. And I would add that, let’s say we mentioned Somalia, so let’s say you’re in Doctors Without Borders, and you love those people without anything needing to change, but you’re dedicating your life to changing things to make it better for them. So it doesn’t preclude trying to affect change.
Julia: No, what’s actually interesting is it’s paradoxical. So when you feel unconditional love, when you are in a situation where all of a sudden you’re feeling it, it’s incredibly motivational. It’s a motivational emotion. It makes you want to change things, which is funny because there’s no need to change. Here’s what I think is going on psychologically. You don’t have the desire to change something so that then there will be love. You acknowledge there is already love and that nothing needs to change and that somehow puts you into this mind of, “Oh, it’s easier to change things and I feel motivated to do it.” And I think it’s because we’re so used to being trained up with conditional love and we’re so used to that, “Well, if you just thought this way or if you just said that thing or if I just said this thing or if I just did that thing, then I would be worthy of your love or you would be worthy of my love,” yada, yada, yada. And then, “Oh, if you do that, I’m going to withdraw your love.” This is a way that we use to try to make ourselves feel safe in the world. Like, “Oh, good. I’ll love my neighbor, but not when my neighbor’s a motherfucker.” Sorry. And so it’s like it helps us feel safe, and I understand it. It totally makes sense. But when you have… All I’m just saying, I’m not saying this is a prescription, I’m just saying this is a description. When you have the experience of being aware that universal love is right here, and you have the experience of loving and feeling loved without anything needing to change, then what happens is you feel incredibly motivated and capable of going and making whatever change it is that occurs to you. And it’s funny, you’re more motivated than when you’re operating on conditional love.
Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of someone I interviewed a few months ago whose son had a terrible drug addiction problem and of course she loved him and was doing everything that she and her husband were doing everything they could to help him and spending a lot of money and this and that and she ended up going and taking ibogaine because she thought maybe he should take it but she thought, “Maybe I’ll take it first and see what it would do,” and it ended up really helping him. But well that’s just kind of a specific example, but a mother’s love is characteristic of what you just said.
Julia: Well, a good mother who’s not mentally ill, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, that kind. So what got you onto this whole love thing? What motivated you to focus so much attention on it?
Julia: I don’t ever know how to answer those questions of, “Why did you start doing this?” Because I really do think that, and this comes into the time thing, I really do think that many of our actions are both pushed from the past and pulled from the future. So I can’t tell a coherent story about why, but I can tell you what happened, which is that someone came up to me at Institute of Noetic Sciences when I was the Innovation Lab Director there, and his name was Jim Grote, a G-R-O-T-E, wonderful man. And he said, “Look, Julia, I had this dream, like a little dream at night, that we were all sitting in a room, like a conference room, and there was, outside the windows you could see just devastation. And someone said, “If only we taught the machines how to love.” And he’s like, “I want to make that not happen. Do you think we could teach AI to love?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I think we need to–I think humans have a hard time. I think everybody has a hard time with this particular thing, but let me see what I can do. And so we started this Loving AI project, which is trying to teach AI to love, but really as far as we got was trying to create AI embedded in a robot that could help people love. And I think that’s still a really valid goal. And I think that AI teaches, AI learns from however we are. And so, if we can teach humans to love better, it’s going to help AI love better or know how to love. So that’s what happened. Now, why did he talk to me about it? Why did I get interested in it? Why did I start thinking we need to have a scholarly definition of unconditional love? We need to be able to make a questionnaire that we can validate that’s related to unconditional love, that just was necessity to get the job done of working on the robot project. And so, once I felt called to do the robot project with the AI, then everything else just had to get done in order to make that work out. And that’s kind of how, I guess, everything goes for me. So, I could just tell you what happened. I can’t tell you why it happened. And I could tell you that then there’s a project and then you just have to do all the things that need to be done to make the project work out.
Rick: I use AI a lot and I also think about it a lot and I’ve been listening to various interviews and podcasts. There’s a great podcast called “The Last Invention,” which really covers it brilliantly, and Tristan Harris has been giving some good interviews lately. But one of the sentiments expressed in those podcasts and things was that, if we could somehow imbue AI with motherly love so that it has a nurturing attitude toward the human race, then perhaps the doomers will be proven wrong and it won’t kill us all. It has tremendous positive potential that will be realized.
Julia: Well, yeah, and also this idea of motherly love, we have to be very careful with that because most people both love and hate their mothers. I mean, it’s a really profound thing. Your mother has so much control over you for your whole life and even after she’s dead. Because she literally is why you exist. And your father conceptually is, yes, also why you exist. But we sort of get it that we were in our mom’s bellies for nine plus months, and that’s a really profound, very different kind of connection. So I think calling it motherly love, we have to think about the implications, because people can subconsciously turn against that, misogynistically turn against that. And that’s part of this conference that you mentioned. The folks who have been working on AI, robotics, cognitive science, and even a lot of the consciousness studies folks, when I say folks, I mean like scientists and philosophers and such, are largely male and have largely been male forever. And there can be an unconscious undercurrent, and sometimes conscious undercurrent, of hostility towards women/mothers because it’s like we want to do what we want. We don’t want our mom telling us what to do. And I get it. But part of why we wanted to do this conference, this group of women and a few male allies and other gender allies who are supporting the conference, is because there’s something to the power of the feminine around shaping minds. Who really shapes minds? This is the job of creating an AI. This is the job of creating our culture that’s going to include a lot of AI interactions with humans, is to understand the shaping of minds. That is still largely the job of the mother. And at the same time, we have to be careful about those misogynistic… I mean, part of the other reason the conference is being created is because of what Jeffrey Epstein did to the field by dismissing and deriding women academics in the field and setting the field back, I think, probably by decades as a result. So anyway, I guess I got onto that conference, but that’s part of what’s motivating it is really careful thinking around what voices are we not listening to and what voices do we really need to listen to as we create this technology. The conference, by the way, is called The Synapse, and if you want to contribute to the conference, we’re looking for donations. If you want to attend the conference, we’re looking for applications. You could go to thesynapse.co and check it out. I’ll add that to your BatGap page, also.
Julia: Cool.
Rick: So just in case it slips by, so what did Jeffrey… I mean, we know what Jeffrey Epstein did to a lot of women, some of them on the younger side, as his good friend, Donald, said.
Julia: But wait, stop, wait, wait, stop right there.
Rick: So yeah, so what are you getting at there?
Julia: Stop right there. We tend to giggle, like there’s giggling around that. But we got to be really careful with that because it’s the discomfort that’s making you giggle. But he raped and sexually assaulted young underage women.
Rick: I know. That’s not a laughing matter. I’m not saying it…
Julia: No, I know. I’m not saying it is, but I’m just saying I’m pointing out the discomfort. We almost don’t want to talk about it. It’s not cute, like, “Oh, he has a predilection for younger women.” We don’t want to talk about the discomfort that comes up with, “He’s a fucking sexual predator.” So anyway, I just wanted to point that out, that we should be able to talk about that openly and not feel weird about it. So that, yeah.
Rick: But you brought up his name as having somehow had an effect on this whole field.
Julia: And if you go into the Epstein files, so what happened was someone told me my name was in the Epstein files, and I looked it up and it was. And a lot of the times was Deepak Chopra forwarding stuff about the Science of Consciousness Conference to Jeffrey Epstein, and I was in there because I’d spoken there several times, and so that was just boring. One time was Deepak making fun of my presentation at Science of Consciousness to Jeffrey Epstein. Another was Joshua Bach making fun of me to Jeffrey Epstein. So there were two instances of basically, I call it men flirting with Jeffrey, like academic men kind of flirting with Jeffrey Epstein, trying to, they know he doesn’t like women in academia, and so it’s like currying favor with him. They get it. It’s currying favor with him to make fun of a woman in academia. So, two people did that, and then I just started looking, I want to look up the word “woman” and see how often that appears. And most of the time the talk was about girls. But when I found this one piece with John Brockman, Edge Foundation guy, and he was sending Jeffrey Epstein a note about a conference that I believe he wanted Jeffrey to fund. He said, “It’s an AI conference, and I have 23 academics on the list,” and he’s running the list by Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein obviously loved to have academic influence, and he writes back, essentially, “I like the good old days when we didn’t have to worry about diversity,” because he was complaining because of the 20 or so people, three were women. And then he said, “And the women are weak.” And that included Alison Gopnik and two other women who are just like rock stars in the field. I forget the other two. So that made me think, huh, so he’s funding science of consciousness at least one time, right? And he funded, and John Brockman was trying to get him to fund his conference, and his complaint is, and clearly it is well known, that academic women should not be supported. So it’s a misogynist position. And why I’m saying I think he put the field back is because, so on the back end, a bunch of academic male scientists, and maybe some females, I don’t know, but all I found were males, were essentially making fun of women to curry favor with him or asking him to run lists by him, and then he’s knocking the women. So, if they want to get funding, they have to do something different.
Rick: I see. Yeah. A lot of people in academic circles and also spiritual circles were currying favor with him. I mean, Jeffrey Martin.
Julia: Yeah, there’s that whole thing. Deepak Chopra, Jeffery Martin, even Stuart taking the money for the conference, I’m, you know, I still don’t think it was cool.
Rick: Stuart Hameroff, right.
Julia: Yeah, I just think there’s a reckoning that needs to happen that’s not being talked about and it feels, if we could actually be in a state of unconditional love where nothing needs to change, then we need to be able to say, we don’t have to change this, this is what happened. Let’s see if we can love this.
Rick: Yeah, I wanna get into this with you when we talk about “Have a Nice Disclosure!” because there’s a thought about this, but let’s put a pin in that and come back to it. Because one thing I want to, while we’re on the love topic, when I think of love, I think of it in a way similar to consciousness, where we all have this tremendous inner potential, but most of us only realize a tiny fraction of it. And so you can’t just snap your fingers and suddenly be like, you know, Mother Teresa or Jesus Christ or something in terms of tremendous compassion and ability to love. It’s something that has to be systematically cultured and developed.
Julia: I don’t think so.
Rick: Okay, let’s hear about it.
Julia: Yeah, yeah. I think you can… It’s not that you snap your fingers, it’s that the fingers can be snapped. In other words, it’s not up to you. So this is not a model of like a hero’s journey, one person, they do the right things, and then they get the prize, which is the experience of unconditional love. That’s bogus. That’s not how it happens. That’s my view. This person who thinks they’re a single person is actually this finger on the hand. And when you recognize, “Oh yeah, I’m connected. I’m part of this hand,” there’s a peace and an experience of unconditional love that happens. When you’re no longer trying to say, “I’m this independent finger and I have no access. There’s no access to anything else and I also don’t need anything else.” So that’s not, it doesn’t have to be a lifetime, I mean it can be a lifetime of work and whatever, but it can also be just like it happens to some people sometimes. So I resist this sort of, I think, puritanical idea that good people, if they do the right things, are going to be able to get to that place. That’s just not what I see. I see that people have these bursts of experience sometimes where they’re holding an infant and all of a sudden their entire body becomes love and the entire universe becomes love, and then it goes away maybe 30 minutes later. That’s what I see as happening. They didn’t try to do that. It just happens to them. You don’t try to make the sun come out from under the cloud. You know you don’t have any control over that. And so I get that, with all of people’s hearts, we want to say that we can somehow control this. But when I say “we,” I mean our small ego. But we’re not in control of this. This is a thing that happens to us, not a thing that we do.
Rick: Maybe it works both ways. Like you gave the example of holding a baby, and there’s that whole thing, Ken Wilber states and stages. One can have a peak experience of various kinds of peak experiences, but there’s a difference between that and an abiding state where you’re always enlightened or loving or whatever qualities we’d like to see abide. I’ve been on a spiritual path for nearly 60 years and have had all kinds of interesting momentary experiences, but then there’s also a kind of a baseline that has grown over the years that doesn’t come and go. And maybe the same could be applied to the development of the capacity to be universally or unconditionally loving.
Julia: Absolutely. For some people, I’m sure that’s how it is. That’s how it feels inside me. It feels like I’ve grown in my capacity over time, and it happens more and more often. But I wanted to take issue with something that you said in that statement, which is, to be loving. So there’s a big distinction between experiencing unconditional love and your behavior. So when you say, “Oh, that wasn’t fair. You must not be experiencing unconditional love because you yelled at me,” or whatever, it just has nothing to do with what unconditional… Unconditional love is an experience that does not predict behavior. So it’s like if you see someone run out into the street and smack their kid, you’re like, “Well, that’s not… They’re not experiencing unconditional love.” What they did was not very loving, but you don’t know what they’re experiencing. Their kid might be a kid who sometimes stands in the middle of the street when cars are about to come, and they’re unconditionally loving their kid, and they’re unconditionally loving themselves, and this is the thing that occurs to them to do in that state. So, it’s like, it’s… unconditional love does not predict behavior. So, for all we know, insert politician here whom you have a hard time with, might be, I don’t know, like whoever, might be experiencing unconditional love all the time. So, unconditional love is an eternal emotional and a motivational experience, and it predicts a lot of behavior. It predicts that you’re going to feel comfortable changing things and want to change things in a positive direction that people generally consider positive, but not always. And so I think I don’t want to make it simple. I think that when people think that when you’re enlightened or when you’re in a prevalent, unconditional love state, that you’re going to be kind of like blissed out and always and never get angry. And I think that comes from this sort of detachment of Buddhism. And I think we’re talking about different things.
Rick: Yeah, well let me take a personal example. My father was a professional artist, so he was a sensitive man. He also had severe PTSD from World War II and was an alcoholic and verbally abused my mother several nights a week and the rest of the family had to listen to it. Yet he took me skiing, he took me on Boy Scout camping trips, he had an organic garden, he supported the family, he did all kinds of wonderful things. But his mind-body system, his nervous system was a mess. He also had epilepsy and all kinds of other problems. So although I think his heart was ultimately in a good place, its expression was seriously distorted by his whole condition. And so there’s a distinction between functioning that way or having purified all that, which I think is possible with certain practices and within certain limits, and thereby really being more overtly compassionate, loving, and harmonious, and non-abusive, and so on, as a kind of a regular condition of your behavior.
Julia: Yeah, I mean, I guess I agree with that except for the word “purified.”
Rick: I could choose a better word, but…
Julia: Yeah, no, the reason is “purified” suggests that all that other stuff is somehow not part of you, and that puri… this is, again, the puritanical thing. I’m a Jew, and I just don’t cotton too well with this idea that if people just work hard enough we can be pure. So in the Jewish world, God creates everything, including all the bullshit and Holocaust. I mean, like all the shit. And so it doesn’t mean that growth isn’t possible and seeing a therapist or doing whatever you need to do to help grow and heal from your trauma and move towards behavior that works better for you and other people isn’t valuable. It’s just that what it is is you’re just doing life. It’s not a purification or removing. You know what I mean? It’s all you and it’s all to be loved. But what you’re doing is finding ways to love exactly who you are and then to blossom from that. So again, there’s this quest of the “let’s not look at our shadow and let’s not contain our shadow. Let’s just, if we could just push out the shadow and then we’re like pure white light,” or whatever. I know that’s not what you’re saying, but that’s why I object to the word purify. I would say to grow, to grow with that and to move towards behavior that works better, is a powerful thing to do if you could do it.
Rick: Yeah, so that’s good, the thing you said. You just said to grow toward behavior that works better. And what is it by which we behave? It is the mind-body system, the instrument through which we live life. And if that instrument is damaged, if there’s a lot of structural and chemical abnormality on a subtle level, in the subtle body, if we want to talk about chakras and all, if there’s all this impurity or pollution at various levels in the subtle body, then you’re you’re just not going to be a very clear reflector of divine love or consciousness or whatever. And that’s why there are these spiritual practices or traditions for…
Julia: Purifying!
Rick: Yeah, not in a moralistic sense, a goody-goody sense, and I’m not talking about pushing the shadow away or anything. I’m talking about actually purging yourself of these abnormalities and thereby becoming a more fit reflector.
Julia: Yeah, I just have a different model, which is that those abnormalities are part of the reflection. In other words…
Rick: They are, but they distort it.
Julia: Or do they? I mean if everything, if every bit of who we are is made of love, how could we distort the reflection?
Rick: That’s a good question. It’s like that, it reminds me of that Zen saying the teacher said to the students, “You’re all perfect just as you are, but you could all use some improvement.”
Julia: Yeah, exactly. That person was a Jew! (Laughter)
Rick: He was a, what did they call him, BuJu?
Julia: JuBu, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just, the reason I highlight it is because people can get kind of OCD about it and be like, “Well, I just have to purify myself,” and it’s like, that’s exhausting, number one. Number two, doesn’t work. Number three, what about loving the things that you’re calling impurities? That works really well. That’s called healing. It’s not called purification. So, yes, we all have these parts of us that don’t work so well. Loving them is faster and more powerful and more healing than trying to purge yourself of them.
Rick: Yeah. Well, we’re getting into a little bit of semantic tangle, and “healing” might be a better word than “purifying” because it implies not ridding yourself of stuff, but more, you know, well, healing.
Julia: Healing.
Rick: Yeah. And, and thereby, you know, when you get healed of something, then your system works better. Like if you have, I just heard a whole story today about this guy who had his eyes scarred from childhood due to some kind of thing he was born with, and he ended up on this healing mission and he eventually had good enough, he initially couldn’t look at a couch and tell whether there was a person sitting on it or not, he got to the point where he could get a valid driver’s license because of this whole healing thing that he went through. So that might be a better word, but I’m not just talking about a superficial thing like healing, I’m talking about our deepest nature and makeup.
Julia: But it’s all healing. It’s all healing.
Rick: It all is.
Julia: Some physical, yeah, yeah. Okay, I think we’re in agreement here. It’s just that I hear a lot of talk about purification, it feels like it misses the point.
Rick: And it can be preachy and you know judgmental and all that stuff when it’s I’m not trying to be.
Julia: I know you’re not and I know that you’re not those things even if you’re trying to be them.
Rick: Well, I have been and can be, so…
Julia: But not at this moment! (Laughter.)
Rick: Okay, so on this whole topic of unconditional and universal love, what haven’t we talked about yet that we should cover?
Julia: It’s all really good. The question that people ask me is, “Well, how can I feel that more?”
Rick: Yes, good point.
Julia: And how can I have that awareness that, you know, “Oh, here is universal love right here.” And my answer to that is always the same, which is, “If you believe in God, then pray. If you don’t believe in God, intend.” And literally just intend. If you’re intending or praying, it’s the same thing, in my view, except one has more of an addressee. But maybe intention, the addressee is the universe. So, I think it’s the same. But anyway, it’s essentially, “Hey, I would really like to have the experience of unconditional love right now.” Or if you want to do the neurolinguistic programming thing, you can say, “I am having an experience of unconditional love.” In my experience, it feels better to say what’s true rather than to sort of fake it until you make it. But whatever. For some people, it works better to put it in present tense. My experience, praying like that, is it happens right away. The biggest bottleneck is I forget to pray like that. The biggest bottleneck is I forget to ask for it, and then I’ll be deep into an argument with my husband or something, and then I’ll be like, “Oh, I could ask for that right now.” But I won’t have remembered that until I’ve already started to repair the argument.
Rick: The thought just came to mind, I remember at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences, somebody in the audience asked you what your spiritual practice is, and you said, “Science.” And they said, “Is that all, just science?” And so I guess I have a couple questions here. Now you’re talking about praying, so maybe you have a spiritual practice that you didn’t have then. And the second question is, can science be a spiritual practice?
Julia: So science is my spiritual practice still, but it’s a very intimate conversation and dance with God. It involves prayer, and it involves discovery, and it involves asking questions and trying to interpret the answers and then being wrong about the answers and then trying to interpret them again and it feels really good. It’s a powerful relationship that is revealing and mystical and is sort of the core of who I am and what I do. So, yeah.
Rick: That’s wonderful. Yeah, when I think of…
Julia: But I think I’ve always prayed.
Rick: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, when I think of science, and I never had scientific training, but whenever I study scientific things, like watch a YouTube video about what’s the mechanics of a cell, or look at some beautiful astronomy thing or something, I just, I feel like I’m looking at God, or the marvel of cosmic intelligence doing something so amazing that we can’t possibly comprehend it. And I think, how could a scientist ever be an atheist? Or even like a heart surgeon or somebody who’s looking at this amazing contraption that couldn’t possibly be an accident or arbitrary. How is it that they could not be in awe?
Julia: I think people can be in awe without believing in God because people, for some reason, decide that God has to be like a being. God can’t be like the force. Not you and I, but I mean, it’s common to think that I don’t believe in God. I just believe that there’s a force in the universe that da da da. To me, I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, you believe in God.”
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Julia: Yeah. So I think some heart surgeons might describe themselves as feeling awe, but not being in relationship with God. I would define that experience as being awestruck by God.
Rick: Yeah. As I would say if I ever were to talk to somebody like Sam Harris, “I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.” (Laughter.)
Julia: Yeah.
Rick: A couple of questions came in. Let me pop those in here and then more thoughts will come. This is from Ivan Dimitrov in Bulgaria. Oh, this is interesting. I’ve just been talking with a guy about this. Most of the DNA is called junk DNA because scientists don’t know what it does. Is it possible that the emotional spiritual state of a soul influences that junk DNA and tweaks it to suit the soul, thus serving as an interface between soul and body?
Julia: Anything is possible. So, first of all, anything is possible. We don’t even know how to scientifically describe, define, detect, or influence the soul in some kind of way before we’re sure we know what we’re doing. We don’t have a good scientific definition of what the soul is. So, I’m an empiricist, which means I would want to test that hypothesis that the soul is sort of communicating with or being influenced by or influencing this junk DNA. And in order to test the hypothesis, you need to have a good and clear and tested definition of what the soul is, first. And I think that that question of what is the scientific definition of and the practical manifestation of the soul is a question that science should be asking. I think if we could actually get to that, it could solve a lot of problems in the world. Because we could understand, like maybe this person has two souls and one of them is sort of hiding. There’s some mental illness states where that could be going on, right? Or maybe this person has lost a soul. I’m just saying, I don’t even know if the soul is a real thing in terms of anything that we can test with science, but if it is, then there’s a whole world of healing that could open up, integrating soul and body and understanding how that could fall apart. So yeah, sure, it could be junk DNA, but first in order to ask the question, we need to understand what a soul is.
Rick: There’s a fellow at Northeastern, a molecular biologist named Sudhakaran Prabakaran, who has just written a book about junk DNA, and I’ve been in communication with him. But basically, he has a whole explanation of how it’s not junk at all, and it has all kinds of features and potentialities that come to the fore when needed under particular circumstances, both for the individual and perhaps for the species, if we’re confronted with some huge climate shift or something like that. Anyway, that’s a whole other topic.
Julia: Just to be… it’s not another topic though because in terms of the… I mean to me it’s very relevant because, in terms of the history of science, I really am appalled at how long it takes people to change their view of things.
Rick: And if it’s something we don’t understand it must be junk.
Julia: Well, yes Or random. It is like, when has the human body produced anything that wasn’t used for something So, we somehow appallingly think that we are at the height of knowledge about everything. It’s still a very modernistic viewpoint, and therefore if we don’t understand it, it’s not useful. And so, I mean, junk DNA has been called junk DNA, when I was in graduate school back in the 90s, they were calling it junk DNA, and there were already indications back then that it wasn’t junk DNA, and everyone was talking about what a stupid name that was. It just needs to be renamed. I don’t think any scientist who works in that area actually believes it’s junk anymore.
Rick: Good. Yeah, okay, so I’m going to ask you another question here and then I want to get back to love a little bit before we move on to other things. So this is from Kenny Hogan in Scotland. A question concerning AI technology. “Specifically in the case of the meat and dairy industry, do you foresee that AI will eventually direct mankind away from exploitation of animals towards a more ethical solution to our food needs, or am I being naively hopeful?”
Julia: If you think that it would be more ethical to do that, then you’re being being naively hopeful. Someone else who didn’t think that that was the right thing and thought it would be the right thing for everyone to be eating beef tallow would say, I hope AI figures that out and tells us all to eat beef tallow, and I think they would be naively hopeful. I think what AI will do is exactly what we ask it to do. We are building AI as a mirror of ourselves. That’s why I created “Student of Humanity,” which is through Applied Love Labs, which is this Socratic GPT, different from the one for intelligence analysts. So you could get it at the GPT store, “Student of Humanity.” It’s just being frank about what AIs are actually doing, which is they’re learning who we are. And so it just asks questions to try to help people. I mean, it’s designed to try to help people get in touch with their intuition and their actual experience. But the idea is eventually, if we could have “Student of Humanity” all over the world, it would learn about what it’s like to be a person and better represent humanity. Right now, it sort of represents all of whatever’s on the internet, which isn’t the same as representing humanity. So anyway, I just think we are the creators of AI, we are the unconscious mind behind AI, and so if on average a majority people start to decide that we shouldn’t eat animals or eat animal products, then that’s what’ll happen to the AI. Just like a majority of people think that a default human being is a white man, if you go on most AIs and you say, “Tell me about a person,” and paint a picture of it, they have a white man. That’s what people generally think on the internet. It comes by it honestly. It’s not biased. It’s just reflecting what the bias already is. So yeah, if we could change our bias. I just don’t think, I don’t think you’re looking to the mirror to make a change in you, and that does work. Sometimes when people look in the mirror, they do change, but only when they love, only when they love what they see.
Rick: Okay, good answer. So a few minutes ago you were talking about how you pray and you’re studying love and all that, but then you’ll get in an argument with your husband and you’ll think, “Well, how did that happen? I kind of lost it there,” or something.
Julia: I won’t think that until it’s already starting to repair. I won’t notice. I won’t be in that mindful state if I’m starting the argument.
Rick: Yeah, we get overshadowed. We get sucked in. And I’m thinking of all the people in prison who, in a moment of blindness, killed somebody or did some terrible thing, and then they sit in prison for years and years and think, “How could I have been so blind? How did I get so lost to do such a thing and look at where I am now?” And I guess that came to mind because I think again of the importance of somehow developing or culturing a state in which we don’t so easily get overshadowed. There’s a more of an abiding, stable clarity, whether of the mind, of the heart, of our behavior, and we don’t do dumb stuff so unwittingly. “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” Okay, we get into a state where we know what we do and don’t do bad things so readily or unconsciously.
Julia: Yeah, I mean, that would be nice. I also agree.
Rick: I think it can be cultured. I do think it can be cultured.
Julia: Oh, certainly. I mean, that’s what culture does, right? That’s what prison is, is a way of saying your behavior is not fitting in with what our cultural norms are in a big way.
Rick: Yeah, and there could be more effective means than our modern prisons to achieve rehabilitation.
Julia: Well, yeah, no shit. Yeah. I mean, like, I don’t think it’s actually correct to think that everyone in prison is sitting around about thinking about what they did. Some are sitting around thinking about, “How did I get in a situation where someone put me in prison?”
Rick: Yeah.
Julia: You know what I mean?
Rick: Yeah, “How can I score some cocaine in here?”
Julia: No, I mean, like, many people are in prison, not because they did something, but because they couldn’t afford to pay off a fine or because they got caught. They were in prison because they didn’t do something, but someone else thought they did something. So I mean, it’s not not like it’s a one-to-one relationship between guilt and being in prison. Actually, at Applied Love Labs, we went into Cook County Jail with 13 men in the mental health program there. This is a program that was created by Amber Williams, who is now on the board. She was an amazing UX designer and project lead at the time. She took these ideas from our project called Time Machine, timemachine.love, which is essentially like an audio journal of you learning to love yourself. She brought it to them, and they had one device. It’s made for people, everyone who has a phone, right? It’s not made for prisoners because there’s no phones allowed. And so once a week, she would meet with them, and they used one device among 13 men to do this app. And the key thing is recording yourself saying what’s going on for you. So they would split up the one minute time they had to record between, like, they chose maybe four men who each got to talk for 15 seconds. And so they did this for six weeks, and then the men asked for a two-week extension on the program. But the most powerful thing I thought about this was that a lot of the men had the experience of, “That was me. I was here a week ago. That’s my voice. That means I’m real. I extend through time and I could be loved.” It’s like there’s a continuity of self that is very basic that, if you’re not sort of raised up in a relatively well-resourced community, you might not have. And it was pulling this in, this continuity of self over time, that seemed to allow these men to start to open up into like, “Yes, I did this thing. What do I want to do in the future? I don’t know, but I’m able to be loved. I’m able to be loved.” Or, “Yes, I got in this bad situation. I’m working on getting my way out, but here I am. I have an address in time.” And so, I don’t know how we got on this. Oh, you were talking about being in prison. But this is hard work, to do that work when you’re in an environment where there’s really no other way to kind of know that you’re continuous through time and you haven’t been raised up on that idea of like, “Oh, you should go to tennis lessons because you want to get into Harvard.” You know, that’s a whole different continuity through time that people tend not to think about when we’re raised up in these more privileged environments. So, yes, I think that encompassing all of who we are over time and over space, all of it, including the things that we’ve done that aren’t great, is one of the paths forward to that sort of, as you call it, consistent level, moving the level up slowly of your own well-being. I think there’s good psychological evidence for that.
Rick: Good. One of the main talking points that you sent me is unconditional love for uniting a polarized culture and the time machine technology. And it kind of sounds like you’re alluding to that a little bit right now. And polarized culture, we usually think of politics.
Julia: Sure.
Rick: Very polarized, everybody’s saying how polarized it is these days. And so apply this concept to that. How could unconditional… Firstly, how can unconditional love be kind of propagated so that it begins to impact millions of people, tens of millions of people? And what would be the mechanics through which those people would actually shift their perspective so that there would be less polarity? And how does the whole time machine concept enter into this?
Julia: So it’s interesting that I said “time machine” in that. I probably should have talked… I’m going to talk about both. There’s another technology that we built, too, that… Anyway, the way “Time Machine” works is it asks you to love yourself as you listen to the message that you sent to yourself in the past. So it’s a self-guided audio journaling tool that challenges you to love yourself. It’s especially helpful, I think, to people who have been addicted to drugs or had any kind of mental health struggle. They have already told us that it’s very helpful. We have some science on that. But it is also very helpful for communities, which is part of why our executive director, Eric Smith, started working with–I should call him Dr. Eric Smith–Dr. Eric Eric Smith, started working with Native American communities, tribes, who have particular subsets of people who have gone through mental health or addiction issues. It works by bringing the community together, not only because everyone’s having a similar experience of “I have to record a message to myself, and then I have to listen to it,” and sometimes it’s hard listen to your voice with love. Sometimes you could be judgmental and you notice that. It’s all your self-guided tour. No one else is listening to it. But then over time you could start to use this other tool, which is The Community Garden, where you plant a seed of a hope that you have for the future. And you might record a message about the hope. You could kind of pretend like the thing has happened and “I’m really grateful that I got this new apartment,” etc. And then you put it out into the community and other people can water The Community Garden and and and listen to your hope. And that’s a valuable piece of it, too. So those are some like very simple tools. But the tool that makes me think about how can you scale unconditional love is it’s just waking people up to it. It’s just becoming aware of it. It scales, it’s like how how do you scale oxygen? It’s like it’s already there. Well, that’s not true. Universal love is already there. The unconditional love is the breathing part. So there’s a difference between oxygen and breath. You don’t scale oxygen, you scale breathing. By the way, you can breathe this stuff. And the way you do that scaling of unconditional love is by some way where people can connect to people who they might be polarized from. And so we thought about this for a while, and with some folks who previously had worked on Loving AI, we decided to cut the AI out of it entirely and connect human beings using the gaze. So we created a Gaze app. Right now, I think it should be up. People can try it. It’s a little buggy, but you can send a bug report at see-me.love. It’s just a web app. You can go there. It’s just a web app. You can go there and it’ll take you through a self-gaze. And then if there’s anyone in the lobby or if you invite someone with a link, it’ll take you through another gaze. And it’ll have an audio recording sort of giving you an experience of unconditional love. It’s just a two-minute audio recording with a meditation, love for yourself and others. And we have it set up right now. Eric, our executive director, his background is like mine in cognitive neuroscience or cognitive science. And he’s fascinated by the fact that if you have someone pick their favorite color and you have someone else pick their favorite color and they are different colors, even a small thing like wearing a shirt of the different colors can cause polarization. People are ready to separate. It doesn’t take much of a cue for them to separate into little tribes. And so he has the idea of, pick your favorite color before you gaze with someone, and then at the end you learn what their favorite color was. But what we want to do, I mean, so that’s just a small thing, but what we want to do in the future is take this app and take these tools to a place like Columbia University, which is really polarized around right-left politics, or to a place like, in our dreamland, Israel and Gaza. So it would know to hook you up if your IP address wasn’t Israel, it would know to hook you up with someone in Gaza. And so you would know that you’re gazing with someone in Gaza or vice versa.
Rick: If anybody in Gaza can get on the internet, but maybe they can’t.
Julia: I mean, some people can, yes. And so there are great peace organizations that are out there working on this kind of idea. And so anyway, these are all sorts of things that we want to do, but that’s one way. So you need a way for people to see each other without saying inflammatory things, without even being able to say inflammatory things.
Rick: Well, I’ll add that to the list of links on your BatGap page. And so this thing about making a message to yourself, that means like I could make a message to myself when I was 16 saying, “Don’t take drugs, don’t drop out of high school,” you know, various things.
Julia: You could.
Rick: Yeah.
Julia: Yeah, and you could also say a message from yourself tomorrow. You can just pretend you’re your tomorrow self or next week after you pass a test or get a job interview and you’re like, “Hey, you actually showed your best self,” and that’s really great.
Rick: Okay, so there’s more to be learned and explored on all these things, but these are some of the things you’re working on. Okay, I’m going to ask you about the Telepathy Tapes, but is there anything more you want to say about the whole love topic before we move on from it?
Julia: We really dove deep. I feel good about it.
Rick: Okay, great. So, if anybody listening to this hasn’t listened to the Telepathy Tapes podcast, I highly recommend doing so. For a little while, it was the most popular podcast in the world. It leapfrogged Joe Rogan for a while, and it’s fascinating. Why don’t you explain what it is for anybody who might not have heard about it or listened to it?
Julia: Yeah! Telepathy Tapes is a podcast created by Ky Dickens and she’s a filmmaker and she created the podcast to essentially market/advertise her new documentary which is about non-speaking, largely people under the age of 30, so it’s young adults and children, non-speaking young adults and children with autism. And then the podcast became so popular that she ended up up realizing, “Oh, I’m also a podcast creator and I’m going to be doing this documentary.” So she’s still doing the documentary. It comes out in the fall. I’m in it as a research scientist with my team because I began studying around this time last year, a little earlier, maybe March of last year. Ky’s team contacted me and said, “Have you heard our podcast?” and I said, “Yes.” And they said, “You know, we think you’re great and we’ve studied what you do and because you study exceptional human experiences like psychic stuff, maybe you’d be interested in studying this stuff.” And I was like, “Absolutely.” But they don’t pay you to study that stuff because they’re documentarians. And so they introduced me to some donors who just wanted to fund the science. And then I met other donors outside of that group who also wanted to fund the science. So I put together a team, and that included Dr. Jeff Tarrant, who had already started working with The Telepathy Tapes. It included Damon Abraham, who I had worked with for a long time. I had included Maria Welch and Natalia Meehan. Those are the core team members. And then we have some peripheral team members, including Polly Washburn and my son, Joseph Mossbridge, helped make some stimuli for the experiments. But I’m kind of straying from the point, which is that the world of people who have non-speaking autism in particular, which is a very different manifestation than sort of what we might be used to with people who can speak who have autism. They’re almost polar opposites in certain ways, except they share a tendency towards obsessive compulsive disorder or motor looping. That world is underexplored, and there’s a huge amount of bias against it. In fact, on Friday in the New York Times, there was just an op-ed about how we shouldn’t be wasting resources on trying to help autistic people who are non-speakers use letterboards or keyboards to communicate because they’re not really communicating anything that’s in their heads. It’s all in the heads of their communication partners, who are people who support them because they have difficulty controlling their bodies, who support them in regulating themselves and hold the keyboard for them, etc. So that was really disappointing. I just wrote a piece yesterday, I just spent all day writing a piece on why that’s a really unethical position. And the answer to that is what The Telepathy Tapes is answering. It’s unethical because it’s assuming that your ability to speak is a measurement of your intelligence and your capacity to contribute. And there’s so much science against that, it’s ridiculous. But people don’t…the culture doesn’t change with science, the culture changes with stories. And what Ky has done is take out one piece of what it’s like to be a non-speaking autistic person, which is that they commonly have experiences of telepathy, and she’s made it the raison d’etre of that movement. And I think that’s a really bold thing to do and can cause all sorts of confusion in people, but at the same time has managed to really support the non-speakers’ movements, I think, in a very positive way. So I think it’s really worth listening to. And we were, as a research team, we were trying to answer two questions. What are these people’s minds like? They’re clearly different than the neurotypical minds. They’re different from the minds of people who have autism but who can speak and who are considered higher functioning, but I really think that just means more of a left-hemisphere bias. So, what are their minds like and is telepathy actually going on in a way that… we study distance telepathy, not proximity telepathy. So, is distance telepathy going on? And so, the answer to the first question that we found is their minds are, at least the people we studied, kind of amazing and very different, brilliant. And then the second question, yeah, telepathy is going on, distance telepathy is going on,and it’s really hard to capture using standard empirical techniques, and it’s much easier to capture spontaneously.
Rick: Yeah, just as a case in point, I was listening… there’s this follow-up to the main Telepathy Tapes podcast called the Talk Tracks. I was listening to one of those the other day, and it was a woman whose son was in his early 30s before she discovered there was really somebody home. He finally started using a letter board and they thought he was just like, checked out. And all of a sudden they realized that he’s extremely intelligent, very well-educated about all kinds of things. He’s been able to understand what they’ve been talking about all these years, throughout his life. And there’s definitely somebody home who has quite remarkable capabilities and a high level of intelligence. And that’s just one of their numerous examples like that in the series. And talk about long-distance telepathy, they have this thing in the series called “The Hill” where these kids, they might go to the room and put a pillow over their head so they’re not distracted or something, and they all get together on some kind of astral level and talk to each other in ways which are maybe not rigorously scientifically verifiable, but you know, some parent in New Jersey will get in touch with a parent in New Zealand and they’ll compare notes, and sure enough, their kids were talking about certain things last night on The Hill that they can identify specifically. So this has all kinds of interesting philosophical and spiritual implications in terms of what consciousness is and what our minds are and what capabilities we have as human beings.
Julia: Yes, and all those things seem to me to be happening. So when I talk about spontaneous telepathy, that’s what I’m talking about. And when you’re first starting to understand a kind of mind that you haven’t come across before, the best approach is just to observe what’s going on and what their experience is. And if you can first trust what they’re putting on the letterboards, and that’s been the big concern, like, “Oh, are they being influenced by those communication partners?” Like a Ouija board is the communication partner subconsciously sort of feeding information. And so we did a bunch of tests about that, and what we found is, of our six participants, three of them could statistically significantly, or I’m sorry, I should say independently, two of them were statistically significant. One was just, you can’t do statistics on it, but it was obvious. Can they communicate things that we know that are their own thoughts. Right? That’s the key question. I want to share this article that I just wrote because it’s really important. So people understand what the stakes are. This is on Medium. It just came out yesterday. This is my stepmom and my mom. My stepmom has expressive aphasia. She can’t, she has a really hard time speaking. And so yeah, this is called “On the Inalienable Right to Communicate However You Can,” and it’s on Medium. So for years I’ve noticed my stepmom’s incredible. She’s a psychoanalyst, and so I noticed her incredible ability to express interior thoughts, etc., just completely tank as she lost her ability to find words that she wanted and say them.
Rick: Because she was developing dementia or something?
Julia: No, because she had early childhood traumatic brain injury that, as she aged, for whatever reason, because of cardiovascular stuff I think, ended up being triggered and then this happened.
Rick: I see.
Julia: So there could be all sorts of reasons. It’s often stroke is often the reason. Anyway, I could see the frustration because I knew what was in her with her inability to speak and I already knew there was someone home because of a lifetime of knowing that and feeling that. And so, that’s a little easier to deal with because I’m not discovering after years of treating someone like they don’t understand what’s going on, “Oh, there’s someone here.” But can you imagine the emotional work you have to do if you have sort of treated someone like they’re an idiot, but they understood everything all the time. I mean, like, oops, right. Oops is right. And it’s like, you know what? The only ethical stance is to presume that regardless of the external appearance, and we have this cultural problem. I mean, this is a civil rights issue. We have a cultural problem where, if we see someone like this who’s not making eye contact and who’s going, “uh uh uh,” we think, “Oh, they’re stupid.” We don’t think, “Oh, there’s something wrong with their motor system.” There’s something wrong maybe with their attention or oculomotor or their motor system in general we don’t understand, but we go to, “That person is not intelligent.” So we use a readout of someone’s ability to control their body as a measure of intelligence. This is a big mistake. So this is, to me, this is the civil rights issue of our time.
Rick: Look at Stephen Hawking, I mean.
Julia: Look at anybody. It’s like, but see Stephen Hawking has to be brilliant to show that someone who’s in a wheelchair who can’t talk can be smart. I mean, that’s the level. And so in a way, it reminds me a little bit of, I mean, some of these students, it’s like, yeah, many of them are brilliant, but some of them are just, you know, regular 12-year-olds or whatever, and still they’re having telepathic experiences and stuff. And so another problem that can come from this is we can say, “Oh, we shouldn’t discount these people. They’re like the new oracles.” Like now they’re up on this pedestal, like now they’re Stephen Hawking. It’s like that, they can’t win that way either because then they’re not, again, not being seen as just people. It’s like, no, just we have to stop taking the way you control your body as an indicator of intelligence and what’s inside of you, period. Your external, the way your externality looks is not a reflection of the internal state.
Rick: Right, but there is an interesting implication to The Telepathy Tapes which seems to be that people who are non-speaking autistic, I don’t know whether it’s because of or correlated with their condition, seem to have a capacity for telepathic abilities which the average person doesn’t. Maybe in the same way that Stevie Wonder became a better musician because he was blind or something. I don’t know.
Julia: I don’t know, but I do know that I think it’s not correct to say that people who are non-speakers are telepathic. I think it’s correct to say it seems much easier to find people who are reporting telepathic experiences and seem capable of telepathic experiences among non-speakers, but it’s not true for all non-speakers. And so it’s just like you’re more likely.
Rick: No, but is there a greater tendency?
Julia: Seems like a greater prevalence of at least reporting these things.
Rick: And then I guess the question is why? Is it because certain faculties are shut down so other faculties are able to be more predominant or something?
Julia: So, you know, if you presume that every report of telepathy is actual telepathy, then you would tell a story like that or you would tell a story like, you know, obviously, we know there’s something going on with the left hemisphere because they’re having a hard time speaking to communicate and that’s a left hemisphere activity, so maybe they’re more developed in the right hemisphere, which we do have some indication that psychic/intuitive capacities can kind of blossom when they’re not being suppressed by left hemisphere action.
Rick: Yeah, or like Jill Bolte-Taylor, when she had her stroke and all of a sudden there was this big consciousness…
Julia: And that was like a spiritual thing, right? So if we hypothesize that spiritual stuff and psychic stuff are all kind of the same thing, then that makes sense. So there’s a lot of leaps. But also, if we ask the question, “Is every report of a telepathic experience actual telepathy?” That’s an important question, too. In other words, these students could also, and we actually already know, they also are very gifted on average at reading social-emotional cues. Now, this is not something we usually think of with autism. We usually think of, “Oh, really bad at reading social emotional cues,” but this is non-speaking autism, which is very different. And these students seem to know social/emotional cues like the back of their hand. I mean, they’re gifted at it. And so, in some instances, I’m not discounting telepathy because we’ve seen exact instances of actual telepathy under rigorous controls. So, I know that’s happening. I’m assuming that’s happening. And every time something seems like telepathy, I don’t assume that it’s telepathy. I think it could also be excellent reading of emotional social cues.
Rick: Although aren’t there instances where a kid will be in one room and his mother is in another room and she writes down a four-digit number or something and he can just tell you what it is without any visual cues?
Julia: I’m not going to speak to that because I didn’t do that experiment. I know that that was was in The Telepathy Tapes, but I believe that that happens, absolutely. But what we saw in our experiment was someone’s in a different state, and the person, the non-speaker in another state, was able to perfectly describe in two words the video that the other person was watching when they worked with a communication partner who had no idea what the video was, and it could have been any video in the world. So it’s very hard to calculate the statistics of that because you’re comparing it to all videos in the world, but I think it’s next to nothing that that could be just chance. So that’s one example. And what I’m saying is there are multiple gifts here. There are multiple gifts. So we can’t take what we know about autistic people or people on the spectrum with whom we’ve interacted who are speakers and apply it to non-speakers and think, “Well, they’re bad at emotional social cues.” That’s not true either.
Rick: Anyway, all this is fascinating, and it’s kind of reminiscent of the junk DNA conversation where there’s a whole territory of fascinating stuff that most hardcore scientists refuse to look at because it’s outside their paradigm. But these anomalies are getting more and more difficult to ignore. And the old paradigm is kind of getting rickety and unstable.
Julia: That’s right. And isn’t that exciting? That’s where the juicy stuff happens.
Rick: It is. So while we’re on this topic, you have a shirt on that has the letters OPRV. And talk about that a little bit because that’s relevant to what we’re talking about.
Julia: Yeah, OPRV Team Love. That’s my operational precognitive remote viewing team. We call ourselves Team Love. It’s five or six people now. The team is run by Julia Ashley, who’s one of the board members at IRVA, the International Remote Viewing Association. I founded the team after I gave a class at IRVA about operational precognitive remote viewing. Everyone’s heard of remote viewing. Operational precognitive remote viewing is different because – it’s not that different – but it’s a framework for remote viewing where you’re doing it operationally, which means it has some purpose. It’s not just for academics. You’re doing it precognitively, which means the question that is being asked and the answer are in the future. So when you’re doing your session, you have no information about the question you’re being asked. Remote viewing is regular remote viewing. The reason we call ourselves Team Love as part of operational precognitive remote viewing is using unconditional love within your remote viewing session, both for yourself to be aware of the universal love and be present with that in yourself as you’re doing your session, and for whatever the target is, whatever the question is you’re being asked. So, if you’re doing a missing persons case, you’re surrounding the situation with unconditional love. If you’re working for some tech company that wants to understand a new battery design, you’re surrounding that situation with unconditional love. So, that’s how we work. And we just recently decided that — I’m excited about this because we just recently decided that we’re going to do our work not for free, but for charity. So basically, we will do these sessions that people have found very helpful, but if you’re working with us, we need to see a receipt where you’ve donated to a 501(c)(3) charity at least $1,000, or else we won’t do the work. So we just want to spread the love, and the default charity is Applied Love Labs because the team actually helped build the logo for Applied Love Labs ahead of time, not knowing what the question was, but they sketched out elements of it, so they feel very connected to Applied Love Labs. So if you want to learn more about that, I’m full of websites, but you can go to intuitiveforecasting.com and you’ll see the old website. We’re about to put the new website in there that has the details about everything I just said. But yeah, it’s one of the ways, the way I kind of snuck Unconditional Love into the parapsychology world. I don’t like the term parapsychology, but there it is. The psi world. I took the questionnaire that we used in the robot experiments about unconditional love and I pasted it over into two studies where I looked at people’s capacity to do precognitive remote viewing and how that correlates with the amount of unconditional love they’re feeling at the time. And what I found was that, and this is all self-report, so people can lie or whatever, but apparently people don’t because there’s this… Or if they do, they lie in an interesting way, in that the people who reported themselves experiencing higher levels of unconditional love just before they did the remote viewing task performed statistically significantly better on the task than the people who rated themselves as at that moment experiencing lower levels of unconditional love, and this happened twice in two different studies. So that made me think, “Well, okay, we want to do better remote viewing. We’re going to have to love ourselves and others.” That’s part of the protocol now.
Rick: Huh. Maybe ability to remote view and unconditional love are both symptoms of a more holistically or highly evolved personality in general. It’s like we have various faculties and maybe they’ve all blossomed to a higher degree, and therefore there’s a greater correlation. I’m just speculating.
Julia: Yeah, yeah, that could be. Or it could be that feeling unconditional love, if it really is being aware of universal love in the universe, you’re being aware of the foundational aspects of the universe, which are what you tap into, in my view, when you’re doing remote viewing. So it’s almost like the same thing.
Rick: Yeah, you’re kind of messing around in the unified field in both respects.
Julia: In both respects, yeah. And so I don’t know what that says about personality evolution or anything, but if you’re in that state, then yeah.
Rick: Yeah, I heard you talk about an experience you had where you had a dream about a mosque exploding and there was some, the words “quick quick” or something like that came to you. And you thought, “What could that be?” It sounds like Alaska…
Julia: It’s kyuk kyuk.”
Rick: It sounds like an Inuit word or something, but there’s no mosques in northern Alaska. And then this mosque, there was a mosque explosion in Kuwait City, Kuwait. I don’t know, was it a few days later or something like that?
Julia: It was that day. So I had the dream that night and then later that day, that’s what happened.
Rick: And of course there’s so many stories like that around 9/11 and thousands of other things going back through the ages about people being able to foretell the future. And so the phenomenon in itself is interesting but then you know what all whenever I hear about anything like that I immediately think okay well what are the mechanics? You know what is time exactly and is time actually all simultaneous and it just appears linear to us and that’s how we could know the the future because it’s actually now and not in the future, or does information somehow travel back in time if it is linear and so on? Do you have any thoughts on the mechanics?
Julia: I have so many thoughts on the mechanics.
Rick: Spend a couple minutes on it.
Julia: And you could also find, like I did this really, I liked the interview, even though I was on my treadmill, I liked the interview I did recently with New Thinking Allowed about this. You did it while you were on the treadmill? Yeah, cuz I like I had an exercise for the day and I knew I couldn’t do a good interview if I didn’t get moving, so I was just like I’m doing it on the treadmill. So yeah, I tend to like to move if you can’t tell from my rocking.
Rick: I’ve done interviews while walking in the woods and huffing and puffing as I climb hills.
Julia: Yeah, cuz it like it helps you think. Yes, so very briefly about time. I had this cool dream when I was a kid and I was worried about a Cold War. I was worried about a nuclear explosion. That was in the 80s. And this will explain how I still think about time. So in the dream, it’s one of these dreams that’s very significant. Like in that Kyak-Kyak dream too, I have a guide. And in this dream, I have a guide who’s just narrating. And the guide shows me this room, and there’s a chair in the room, and that’s all that’s in the room. And I’m in the room, well, besides me, I’m in the room. And then the guide is sort of like in my head. And the guide says, “So you’re worried about nuclear war. So imagine the nuclear war is the chair. Notice that if you know the chair is in the room, you can walk around the chair without bumping into it. If you don’t know the chair is in the room, you might bump into it.” So basically, I woke up going, “Oh, I’m not worried about nuclear war anymore,” because I realized that time is like this room. If you treat the future as like another country about which you need to get intelligence in order to avoid a potential war, then you’re trying to ask the question, “Is there a chair in this room?” And if you’re successful at that, and somehow I knew that we would be successful at getting that information about the future, then you can avoid this situation. One of the things that I’m doing now is I started a company called American Electrodynamics, which you can also go to on the internet, americanelectrodynamics.com, and it’s based on this discovery that I made about photons, which is that they seem to carry information about the room. Even if you’re in the first part of the room and you can’t see, like as we are, you know, I can’t see tomorrow, right? But the photons somehow carry that information. And so, there’s a new kind of computation that I’m proposing with that company. And so I think it’s all very possible, but I think we’re just starting to learn that time is more like a room and that we can actually get the intelligence about these things and then we can actually avoid them.
Rick: How did you discover that thing about photons and does this have anything to do with the fact that, if you could ride on a photon, so to speak, there would be no time? You’d instantaneously be at your destination? So photons seem to be beyond, they completely collapse time, from their perspective?
Julia: When I think about that thought experiment, I have such trouble with it because I feel like photons are more like a mathematical story. Like they kind of don’t even, we talk about photons traveling, but they kind of don’t even exist until they’re absorbed, in a certain sense. And so I can’t ever do that thought experiment. So I don’t know if it has something to do with that. Maybe it doesn’t. I just don’t understand how to switch my conception of photons in a way that would make riding on a photon and experiencing what it’s experiencing, if it was conscious, make sense to me. But what I can say is that, and to answer your “how did I?” I can’t ever answer why I do things, but I can answer how. About 12 years ago, I got frustrated that I had for years had this thought about the double slit experiment that I was unable to test because I’m not a physicist and where am I going to get the equipment and yada yada. And then 10 years ago, so two years of frustration, and then 10 years ago in 2016, Dean Radin at Institute of Noetic Sciences, I realized he had a double-slit optical system already running. And I was working there, and I said to him, “Can I use your optical system for this experiment that I’ve been wanting to do?” And he’s like, “Yeah, we’ll figure out who gets it at what times.” I’m like, “Thank you.” And so I tested the hypothesis. So the experiment was, so in the double-slit experiment, a single photon, or electron or whatever, but in this case we’re to talk about photons because I was using photons. A single particle, a single photon in this case, the story is it goes through two slits at once, and that’s why you get an interference pattern, because it’s interfering with itself in space.
Rick: Acting as a wave.
Julia: Acting as a wave in a non-local way. But it occurred to me, if it could be non-local in space, then why couldn’t it also, or maybe instead, be non-local in time? So, in other words, interfere with itself from the future. And you can actually test that, and that was the experiment I wanted to do. So imagine this. If a single photon is running down this tube, if we’re going to talk about photons traveling, we’re going to imagine that. It’s running down this tube and it interferes with itself. It goes through slit A, its future self, or another photon that’s very much like it in fact is actually considered to be identical, goes through slit B and it interferes. What this means is that. in the future, if there are a lot more photons to interfere with, this will happen a lot more. So you can actually look at the first 30 seconds of the interference pattern and determine whether there will be a lot more or less in the future. And the way you decide whether there’s a lot or less in the future is, after you’ve looked at the interference pattern, you then use a random number generator to determine if they’re going to be a lot or less in the future. All that means is, how long are you going to keep the light source on? That’s what determines the number of photons in the future. So, what I found was, with Dean’s equipment, and then I replicated it a bunch of times elsewise, what I found was that, yes, you can look at the first 30 seconds of the interference pattern and you could determine whether this thing is going to be on for two minutes, going to stop, going to be on for four minutes or six minutes into the future.
Rick: What determines whether it stays on? Doesn’t somebody have to flick a switch?
Julia: A random number generator.
Rick: The number generator determines it. Okay, but somehow the information about that future is contained in the interference pattern in a 30-second window.
Julia: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, I don’t completely understand how that works.
Julia: Yeah, so that’s the New Thinking Allowed interview and that’s worth that. I don’t understand completely how it works either, but it does seem to keep happening.
Rick: Sounds interesting. I mean, again, to the thing of riding on a photon, I mean, we can look at a galaxy that’s a billion light years away and see photons that from our stationary perspective took a billion years to get here, but again, from their perspective, bing, they’re here. And so they’ve gone through… and that galaxy might not even be there anymore, or some of those stars or whatever. So, we’re talking about Einstein’s general theory of relativity here, I think. So there’s just somehow this strange malleability or variability with time, depending upon the speed of the observer, that makes time seem very fluid and non-rigid. I don’t know.
Julia: Well, yes, I mean for sure time is relative and for sure general and special relativity describe a lot of what’s going on. I’m just saying, when people say things like, “from the photon’s perspective,” I don’t know how to…
Rick: Well, we’re not implying the photon is conscious.
Julia: No, maybe it is conscious. I’m just saying like we don’t know how it processes time. Let’s assume it’s conscious. So what we’re doing is we’re taking our view of how we process time and applying it to the photon. And what I’m saying is that’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. Because if it’s conscious, its consciousness is going to be very different than ours. And so I don’t know what value it has to say, “Oh, it’s immediately there.” If it were us, what are we releasing?
Rick: Well, apparently that’s what they — yeah, I mean, we could say a bullet might take a second to get here from a thousand yards away, but we’re not saying the bullet has a perspective, just it travels at a certain speed and photons being weightless and being the way they are somehow are said to…
Julia: Well, they travel at the speed of light, right?
Rick: Exactly. Well, from our perspective, they do. But they,traveling at the speed of light, because they’re traveling at the speed of light and could do so because they have no mass, time has completely collapsed.
Julia: It’s not because they have no mass. So I don’t know that that means time has completely collapsed. I do think that what we’re doing when we make those kind of equivocations is that, or equivalences I should say, and we’re equivocating about it, but I think what we’re doing is we’re applying our sense of how time works to the photon, and I feel like there’s a gift in not doing that. We could learn more by not doing that.
Rick: Well, you may well be right and if there were a physicist in the room, he would probably shut me up and say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Julia: Or she might.
Rick: Or she might, exactly. Okay, let’s shift to your book, “Have a Nice Disclosure!” So, I listened to… There it is! Hi, book! Cute little alien on the cover.
Julia: Yes.
Rick: I’ll give you my impression of the book. When I first saw the cover and started listening to it, I thought, “Okay, we’re going to be talking about extraterrestrials,” but that never quite happened. And my interpretation of the word “disclosure,” which probably isn’t what you intended, is I feel like the whole society, the whole of humanity is undergoing a period of disclosure, which we’re seeing in very manifest ways, such as the Epstein files, and this and that politician, you know, falling from grace.
Julia: I do mean that. I do mean that.
Rick: Okay, good, that’s part of it. But I also think it’s in terms of the kind of the shrouds on our own consciousness that blot it and dim it.
Julia: And I mean that, too.
Rick: Good, then I’m picked up on both of your purposes. Because I feel like there’s a kind of an epidemic of awakening happening in the world where people are just kind of percolating and waking up and having spontaneous spiritual awakenings that they might not even know what they are, and there’s something in the water or in the air or in the ambient field of collective consciousness that is lifting the clouds that keep us so shrouded in ignorance.
Julia: Yeah, I agree. The real point of the book is to say… it’s funny how inconsistent I am… but anyway. You know, I just, I think…
Rick: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” I think someone said.
Julia: Maybe, or just like I can’t track all the things I say and I’m really inconsistent, but… But there’s a way in which sitting around and waiting for uh someone to announce, like Steven Spielberg’s story like, “They’re announced on the news that this is the situation…” That for Donald Trump, or anyone else anyone to say, okay, here’s the deal. We’ve got aliens and yada yada um there’s a way in which that doesn’t cut it. Like, even if that happened, what real… But I when I shake my head like that, I just mean like, what’s the impact? Whatever. You know what, because people don’t believe anything unless they feel it on the inside.
Rick: Or unless they see it. I mean, if little green men come and, “Here we are.”
Julia: No, even, I mean, no, that’s not true anymore because people can make fake videos, they can make holograms. Like, that’s not even true. So, it’s more like people have to feel what’s true on the inside or they don’t feel that it’s real. You have to feel it on the inside, and that’s what this is about is, the book is about saying the real disclosure is in here, and you have some kind of influence on that, which is what I’m saying is inconsistent with me saying you have no control, but you have some kind of influence on that. You can disclose to yourself what you feel is true, and you could see that as a high level of disclosure. And in the process of writing about that and what that means and what the interior space means and unconditional love, etc., the physics of love, by the end of that first section of the book, I thought that was was the end of the book and then I realized now I’ve worked myself… it’s almost like the book worked on me and now I have to talk about this thing that I didn’t know that I have to disclose, which was about the SOAR GATE.
Rick: About the fact that you have to know it from within and so on, but it’s really easy to fool yourself. I mean, I know a guy who claims to be a member of Mensa who thinks the moon landings were faked and has some other nutty ideas like Sandy Hook was a false flag operation and things like that. And that’s a big problem these days is that people are buying into all kinds of conspiracy theories and believing them, you know, the earth is flat and all this stuff, even some relatively intelligent people. So it’s easy to fool yourself.
Julia: Let’s talk about what that means to fool yourself. I think what you’re doing is comparing sort of external physical reality information to someone’s internal experience. And if they don’t match, you’re saying that person’s fooling themselves. But what that does is it privileges or prioritizes the physical external reality as the truth, and it says that whatever’s going on inside of them is less than. It has to match the external reality or it’s not real. So if we don’t worry about whether what’s going on inside of you has any reflection in physical reality at all, like if you had an experience of being abducted by an alien and they gave you sandwiches and you guys talked about the history of the universe and then you went off for 30 years to another star and then you worked as a psychic and then you came back and you were a giraffe, like let’s say that was your experience, like I don’t care. Like that was your experience. And we don’t have to say, we don’t have to say, “Was it true, was it not true?” or whatever, because what we’re doing is we’re comparing your experience, which is valid just because it’s your experience. Even if you’re psychotic, it’s a valid experience. In other words, it’s an experience. It doesn’t match anyone else’s sense of what happened during that time, because they saw that you were passed out on a bed for three months, or that you were in a coma, right? But for you, you had that experience. I think we have to acknowledge that the experience shapes who we are much more than the physical story of other people. And so, if this guy wants to believe that the moon landing was faked and that Sandy Hook is a fake, etc., etc., what’s his experience internally? That’s the important question. So he’s trying to talk about what’s going on out there as a way of validating what’s going on in here. And what I’m saying is, this is important, let’s talk about that and skip the question about what’s going on out there. I’m not saying there isn’t such a thing as psychosis. I definitely know there’s such a thing as psychosis. But the question that we’re asking when we meet someone is not, “Are you psychotic?” It ought to be something like, “What is your experience? What is my experience?” This is important.
Rick: Well, I think there is some value to having our understanding correlate with objective, verifiable reality.
Julia: Of course there’s some value! Again, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that there’s not value there. I’m saying we tend to undervalue what’s true inside us and then dismiss other people’s experiences. So like we stay at, this is what polarizes people, right? We stay at the level of, “Oh, this guy thinks the moon landing was fake. Well, I can’t deal with him.” It’s like, I’m not saying you do, you said he was a friend, but I’m saying often people think, “Oh, you think that? Well, you experienced that? Then I can’t talk to you or I can’t be with you.” Like, no, someone’s experience is sort of sacred. And the question of how it relates to physical reality is a whole different question. And not one that is necessary to ask immediately before you decide whether you can love someone.
Rick: And there’s a related question, which I engage with a different friend, about whether the deep experiences that the mystics had can actually reveal anything about the actual nature of reality or whether they are just cool subjective experiences like unbounded awareness, which are being produced by the brain but have actually no relevance to the ontological nature of things.
Julia: Right, but even the assumption that they’re produced by the brain, the assumption that they’re just subjective experiences, comes from this physicalist assumption that the primary thing is physical. Right? And you know that. And so I’m just saying, what if we upend that and we say, let’s disclose our experiences for a second. And it does matter how they interact with what people know to be true in the physical world. It does matter. But just take a second and honor our experiences. I think that’s a form of disclosure that we need to get to for our own health, because if we’re always asking, “Oh, but what’s true? What’s true out there?” we’re not attending to in here.
Rick: I think you’re very right. Okay, we could go on for another two hours.
Julia: We could.
Rick: But before we have to close, is there anything more you wanted to say about the SOAR GATE thing or anything else that you consider important that you’re going to regret if we don’t talk about it?
Julia: Yeah, I guess I just really want to say that I have had a lot of emails from people who have been in similar government-led programs such as the SOAR program, which later became the GATE, Gifted and Talented Education Program, apparently government-led, I should say. And I had originally created a support group for people, but that has become too big, and I think the best thing to do is the folks at disclosure.org are actually investigating this program. So if you have been in such a program there, contact the people at disclosure.org, and you want to talk about it, and you want them to investigate your experience, and hopefully they can do that. I think that would be a great way to go.
Rick: And this is a thing where you were like in the seventh grade and you had to have these meetings that you couldn’t, you could remember walking to the meeting and not feeling good about it, but you couldn’t remember anything about the meeting and they made you drink a viscous pink liquid and all that. So it’s kind of some weird thing that was being done to you when you were a little kid because you were really smart and they wanted to test what you had going on.
Julia: I was either really smart or really psychic or both.
Rick: Something.
Julia: So something. They wanted to know what was going on. Or my parent worked for the Department Energy. I was convenient. Yeah. Yeah.
Rick: Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is really wonderful. I love talking to you and I hope everybody else enjoyed this as much as I did. And there are even more things we didn’t get to talk about like the National Service Program to Support Self-Transcendence. And you want to just do a quickie on that?
Julia: I’m going to share my screen on that, too. In this wonderful interview with these generals, or these people who talk to generals, called “Beyond the Warrior Ethos,” it’s at defense.info, it’s about the idea that the military itself, the military itself kind of stores self-transcendence. In other words, stores the capacity for saying, “Okay, I get that I want to do this right now, but I have to do this because of the greater good.” And it’s so fascinating that that’s the case, but I think that’s pretty much the case. They have a whole training program that’s about self-transcendence, and that doesn’t exist. R. Stores, meaning you kind of put aside your personal…
Julia: I mean, like, if you look at all the different parts of our culture in the United States, they’re the system, the military system is the system that actually has a training method that capitalizes on self-transcendence.
Rick: You’ve got to sublimate your impulses.
Julia: Yeah, you have to learn to be disciplined.
Rick: In the service of some higher motive.
Julia: That’s right. And so it’s like, what if we had a national service program where yes, you could enroll in the military or you could have veterans, you know, who were mentally healthy, train you to do different things, like have a Care Corps where people would care for disabled people or elderly people or people who needed the care, or have a Technology Corps where kids, and I say kids, I’m thinking of kids out of high school, would care for communities that needed more help with their technology, etc. So it’s just, it’s a way to have a national draft where you don’t have to go to military service, but people can learn about self-transcendence and serve, and you don’t get to take your cell phone with you everywhere.
Rick: Kind of like the Peace Corps.
Julia: Kind of like the Peace Corps, but here.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much, and let’s stay in touch. And I’ll be putting up your page on the BatGap website, and I’ll include all the links to the many things you’ve talked about. And if new things come up in the future and you want me to add them to that page, just let me know.
Julia: Rick, thank you so much. Thanks for also tolerating my little persnicketiness about word choice and stuff. I really…
Rick: Oh, I don’t mind that. I love the precision and the exact– the rigor with which you think about things.
Julia: Thank you. I love your show and I love the people who come to your show are really quite something.
Rick: Right, thanks. First of all, let me just say thanks to everybody who have been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one which is going to be a guy named Jonathan Ashford who everybody’s raving about because he had some amazing near-death experience which I haven’t even had a chance to look at yet but it sounds like he’s…
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