Marjorie Woollacott Interview

Summary

The conversation explores meditation, spiritual experience, and the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than the brain. It also examines the tension between materialist science and evidence from near-death experiences, reincarnation, and other phenomena that challenge prevailing assumptions.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can meditation change a person’s understanding of consciousness and reality?
• Is consciousness independent of the brain?
• What evidence challenges a purely materialist view of the mind?
• Why does mainstream science resist research into spiritual and paranormal experiences?
• How could a broader view of consciousness change the way we treat the planet and other beings?

Key takeaways

• Direct meditation experience can challenge deeply held materialist assumptions.
• Scientific curiosity requires openness to evidence that does not fit the dominant paradigm.
• Near-death and reincarnation accounts raise serious questions about brain-based consciousness.
• Materialism can discourage scientists from investigating important anomalies.
• Seeing consciousness as widespread may encourage greater care for nature and other beings.
• Senior scientists can help protect young researchers who study consciousness beyond materialism.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there’s a Donate button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Marjorie Hines Woollacott, PhD. She has been a neuroscience professor at the University of Oregon for more than three decades and a meditator for almost four. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation for 35 years. She’s co-authored a popular textbook for health professionals that is in its fifth edition and has written more than 180 peer-reviewed research articles, several on meditation, the topic that motivated her to write the book Infinite Awareness, which I have the audiobook of right here.

As a neuroscientist, Marjorie had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire world changed. Marjorie’s journey through years of meditation has made her question the reality she built her career upon and has forced her to ask what human consciousness really is.

Her book Infinite Awareness, which won several awards, pairs Marjorie’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, she breaks open the definition of human consciousness to investigate the existence of a nonphysical and infinitely powerful mind.

So that’s some of the stuff we’re going to be talking about today. Welcome, Marjorie, and thank you for your patience. We just went through about half an hour of technical difficulties before starting.

Marjorie: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah. So I already sketched out a little bit of how you got your start there in terms of being a materialist neuroscientist. What tempted you to go and try out meditation if you’re such a hardcore materialist?

Marjorie: Well, first of all, I should say that I had truly been a materialist all the way through college and my PhD, and became more and more embedded in that reality because that’s what university graduate programs do in neuroscience. They really strongly motivate you in that direction.

Then what happened is that, at one particular point, my sister and I were at my parents’ home for a Christmas holiday in Sedona, Arizona. At that time, there had been a terrible collision of two aircraft in the air, and everyone had died. I was frightened to death already of flying in airplanes, and I found out that, of course, I was leaving home to go back to Eugene on an airplane in a few days.

As I was going to the airport with my sister—and at that time it was before all of the TSA regulations, et cetera, so she could walk all the way down toward the ramp to the airplane with me—she said, “I know, Marjorie, that you are really anxious, but I have something that can help you.” She said, “Here is a mantra,” and she gave me this mantra, which was “Soham.” She said, “It works for me. I’ve meditated with it, and I think it could work for you.”

At that point, because of my nervousness about the flight, I said, “Okay, I’ll try it. I’ll try anything.” I started repeating it as I got on the airplane, and what was amazing to me is that I suddenly calmed down. My normal white-knuckle takeoff and landing was gone. When I was in the air, I felt it was so beautiful to watch these clouds floating by down below me. I’d never experienced anything so beautiful in my life.

So that was my first little opening to, “Wow, maybe there is something to meditation.”

Then what happened, of course, is that the next year I had taken a university position in Virginia. My sister said, “Look, I’m up in the Catskill Mountains of New York with this meditation master. Would you like to take an intensive meditation workshop for your birthday? Your birthday is coming up.”

I said yes. She reminds me that I turned her down a little bit later, and finally, at the last minute, said yes again because my boyfriend thought that my sister was what he called a bubblehead—someone who was a meditator and didn’t really understand real science.

But I went, and in that retreat I had an experience that totally changed my whole worldview. I’ll share it with you just briefly.

What happened is that, on the first morning of the workshop, we were told that the Swami would be coming around and initiating every individual there. We were told that this initiation would be a spiritual awakening, and it was going to happen through the Swami’s touch.

When I was sitting on the floor of this meditation hall, I could hear the Swami coming. When he came to me, my eyes were closed, but my senses were otherwise fully engaged. When I felt his fingers between my eyes and on the bridge of my nose, I had a sense of utter certainty about the event.

What it felt like was that a current of electricity went from his fingers down into my body. Though my eyes were closed, I had the sense that it was like a current of electricity, like a lightning bolt, that had literally come down and stopped in my heart. It began radiating out from my heart this incredible sense of love and joy, and a feeling almost like nectar flowing through me.

I’m home. My heart is my home.

I think what was interesting for me is that my mind, in that moment, did not say anything scientific at all. It said, “I’m home. I’m home. My heart is my home.” It was almost like I had found this whole new part of myself that I never knew existed.

I think what was interesting for me is that my mind, in that moment, did not say anything scientific at all. It said, “I’m home. I’m home. My heart is my home.” It was almost like I had found this whole new part of myself that I never knew existed.

What then happened is that this actually changed my entire life. I went back home to my university position in Virginia, and the very next morning, without any effort or willing it, I woke up at 5 a.m. and got up to meditate. I’ve been meditating day after day after day; in fact, it has never ceased.

So it was like, all of a sudden, in that one moment of this initiation, I turned 180 degrees to a whole different view of the world.

Rick: So you had that experience, but how long did it take you to get around to thinking that perhaps consciousness is more fundamental than the brain? In other words, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, but is somehow independent of it, the way radio waves are independent of a radio?

Marjorie: Yeah, it took me many, many years. I should say that, from that point on, I began, of course, watching my own mind in meditation and really trying to make my own inner laboratory, as a scientist might do, my way of discovering what my own consciousness was really about.

But still, because I was doing my neuroscience every day in my laboratory, I literally led a schizophrenic life—two different parts of my life together. I’d go into the laboratory in the morning and talk to my colleagues and my graduate students from a totally materialistic perspective about the brain and neurophysiology. Then I would go to my meditation courses, where I might teach meditation or yoga, talk to my friends in meditation, and there I’d be talking about energy centers in the body and my own experiences.

I couldn’t figure out how on earth to put these two things together. I recall one event that really drove my husband crazy. We went to a dinner with my neuroscience colleagues. My husband happens to love things like energy medicine and acupuncture and other things of that sort, and he began to talk about his favorite topic. I got a kick under the table from him as I politely helped him change the subject, because I was so worried about losing my credibility with my colleagues who were scientists.

I think that’s what kept me, for a long time, from actually exploring meditation further, because you sense in science that if you bring up this sort of work or if you do research in this area, you will be considered a weak neuroscientist. That is something that keeps you from really exploring this in more depth, at least in a public way.

Rick: Yeah, there might be something to that. I mean, if you’re branded as a kook, then you might have a harder time getting support or getting things published or anything else, right?

Marjorie: Exactly. So I waited until I was a full professor and was probably within about eight or nine years of retirement to say, “Okay, now I’m going to start doing research on meditation in my laboratory. I have my credibility established, I have my grants, et cetera.”

Then I began to do very interesting research, for me, on really trying to understand how meditation changes our brain. That was my first foray into trying to put the two worlds together.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed Swami Sarvapriyananda of the Vedanta Society a month or two ago, and at one point I brought up the point that perhaps, in 300 years, it will seem antiquated that science and spirituality were ever considered separate from one another—that they would have evolved into a sort of unified pursuit of knowledge, some of which uses objective methodologies and others subjective methodologies. He said, “Oh, I think it’s going to take much less than 300 years. I think it’s fast approaching.” What do you think about that?

Marjorie: I think it may be. What’s been fascinating for me is that I felt, first of all as a neuroscientist, this incredible inner need to actually write that book, because it was partly for me putting my two worlds together and saying, “Okay, what is the research out there that might say that consciousness is more than just the product of the neurons in our brain?”

As I did that, I was first amazed at how much research is out there. For example, PubMed is the research site that the government has that shows all research in the area of neuroscience and medical work. There were many, many articles showing that consciousness appears to be primary, right there for all scientists to read. But we scientists don’t believe those could be true, so we don’t even look on PubMed to see what research is out there in relationship to near-death experiences or other things like that.

Rick: Yeah. Now you’ve started this organization with several people and with some rather renowned people on your board of advisors, which I believe is—what is it called—the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. I think its aim—you can elaborate, but I think its aim is to help facilitate the paradigm shift from a materialistic worldview to a more consciousness-being-fundamental worldview, or whatever.

Marjorie: Exactly.

Rick: And so elaborate on that a little bit, because that’s what we’re talking about here, but you’ve actually gone and helped to found an organization to do that.

Marjorie: Right. So Gary Schwartz, who’s a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, and I were the founding members of this organization. Then we invited onto our board people who have been doing studies on consciousness for the last, often, 40 years. I mean, Larry Dossey is one of them, Dean Radin, Menas Kafatos, etc.

The idea was that we wanted to make an organization that really could help push this paradigm forward, partly by helping young scientists who wanted to go into this research area and giving them a little bit more credibility by supporting them through the tenure process or supporting them in grant applications and things like that. Because we think right now we need to have senior scientists who have that credibility actually support young scientists who want to get into this particular field.

So we’re really excited. We just, in fact, published our first volume, talking about our own experiences that got us into the area of consciousness studies, believing that consciousness is primary, and then the research that we have done to actually begin to show that that appears to be the case.

Rick: I forget who it was that said this—you may know. Someone said science progresses by a series of funerals because people are so entrenched in their viewpoint, in their chosen paradigm. It’s very hard for them to shift. You mentioned Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in your book, which I studied when I was in college. He talks about how people do become entrenched in their paradigms—paradigm meaning worldview, way of thinking about things—and that it takes a lot of anomalies, a lot of violations of that paradigm, to finally nudge them out of it or to nudge their community of colleagues out of it.

One good example being quantum mechanics, bringing up more and more evidence that conflicted with Newtonian physics, but that finally had to give way to a paradigm shift. So please elaborate on that a little bit.

Marjorie: Yes, I think that that’s really the case. I even see it myself. When I was a young neuroscientist, a lot of this research had already been done, but because we are so embedded in the materialist worldview, the materialist theory about life, we neuroscientists don’t believe there’s any possibility that another theory could actually explain our data, so we don’t even look there.

And I think that’s what Thomas Kuhn was really talking about. What happens is, when you do see an anomaly—I’ll just give an example—in near-death experiences, when somebody is in a hospital and an MD who is a materialist is trying to get their heart to start again after they’ve had cardiac arrest, they come back and say, “Hey, I was actually observing everything that happened. I was right above my body, and I can tell you everything that went on while my heart had stopped.”

The person simply pats them on the back and says, “You know, that was just an illusion because your brain was actually beginning to shut down. Your neurons were firing too much in odd ways, and that’s just a hallucination, and it’s not really real.”

And so the doctor won’t even entertain this possibility when the person is telling him exactly what happened in the operating room, when he had no conscious awareness, he was in a coma, and his heart had stopped.

Rick: Yeah, don’t confuse me with the facts; I’ve made up my mind. And then the person might say, “Well, yeah, but there’s a red sneaker on the balcony, and it has one lace untied,” or something like that. There’s no way they could have seen that, even by looking out the window, and then somebody goes and checks, and sure enough, there’s a red sneaker on the balcony of the hospital. That kind of thing. And there are hundreds of these things.

Marjorie: Hundreds of them. And I think what’s frustrating is that sometimes you’ll get a person on the news who has actually had a near-death experience and perhaps their doctor. What the news media always does, perhaps fairly enough, is try to find a scientist to explain the opposite point of view.

The scientist, I would say, almost never looks at the real data from that particular experience and what actually happened in the hospital because they know it couldn’t be true. And I think that’s the lack of curiosity in our current worldview. This is what Thomas Kuhn is really saying: We don’t have curiosity about possible alternative worldviews. And as you say, all we try to do is hide the anomalies or say they can’t be real; they have to be artifacts.

Rick: Do you think there’s something about modern education that cultivates this kind of narrow-mindedness, that you’re forced to specialize in narrower and narrower detail in order to become an expert in anything, and it kind of conditions you not to look outside the box that you’re building for yourself?

Marjorie: It’s an interesting question. On the one hand, you would think that because we have a liberal arts undergraduate program, we would actually be studying a broad range of topics. But even in our liberal arts programs, I think materialism is dominant.

I’ll just give you one example of that. When I actually presented at the American Academy of Religions at one particular point on these sorts of things, I realized that a lot of the groups in the American Academy of Religion are at major universities, and major universities are materialist in viewpoint, even among people in religious studies programs.

They’re supposed to study religion from the outside, by critiquing it from the outside, and you don’t want somebody as a professor who has actually had spiritual experiences because they might be biased. So we have an odd thing in academia where we are culturally materialist in almost every single area, including religious studies.

Rick: Yeah, I wonder if this is a remnant of the scientific revolution and the divorce from the dominance of religion back around the time of the Enlightenment. It’s a sort of overcorrection toward more of an extreme materialism, and that we may now be swinging back to a balance point that could appreciate both the material and the nonmaterial.

Marjorie: Yes, I’m hoping that really will be the case. As you say, I think we are getting more and more people now who are in the area of science, have had their own spiritual experiences, and have begun to do research, who are saying, “Wait a minute, we really need to look at what other people might call artifacts and anomalies and say these are real, and we need to expand that worldview to include them within it.”

Rick: Yeah, and this is not just an academic discussion or an interesting philosophy-of-science issue or something. I mean, it has dramatic implications for the condition of our world. Because if we regard the world as mere dumb stuff, mere matter, we can do whatever the heck we want with it, and what does it matter?

But if we regard the world as imbued with divine intelligence, then we would no sooner pollute or rape the planet in various ways than we would do something really invasive to our own arm.

Marjorie: Yeah, and you really make a good point. In fact, what I noticed when I was talking to all of the people on the board of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences was that they all had exactly that view.

Interconnected Consciousness and Planetary Care

Part of the reason they are becoming so vocal about this is that they are really concerned about our planet. When you have this separatist point of view, where we are the only beings on this planet that are conscious and nothing else is conscious, and maybe even we’re just machines, then you have a different view than if you think that we are all connected—that everyone is connected to each other, and we are connected to the animals and the land.

Part of the reason they are becoming so vocal about this is that they are really concerned about our planet. When you have this separatist point of view, where we are the only beings on this planet that are conscious and nothing else is conscious, and maybe even we’re just machines, then you have a different view than if you think that we are all connected—that everyone is connected to each other, and we are connected to the animals and the land.

If everything is conscious, everything is sacred.

As you say, then you suddenly realize: If everything is conscious, everything is sacred. Well, then you may want to treat things differently. And if perhaps people cycle back again and again, as often Native Americans and others think, then maybe you want to be treating the world really kindly for the generations that are coming in the future—and for you, who are coming back in the future, etc.

Rick: Yeah, I saw a cartoon once. Some guy was standing outside of a bank, looking at a sign that said, “First Reincarnation Bank: You can’t take it with you, so leave it with us until you return.”

Yeah, well, there are several themes here. I mean, there’s reincarnation, there’s out-of-body experiences—out-of-body experiences which people have—and there’s near-death experiences. Well, there are two: out-of-body and near-death. They’re actually slightly different.

Marjorie: Yeah.

Rick: And in your book, you cite examples of people who were completely checked out—flatline, no brain waves, no heart rate, body temperature brought down to 60 degrees or something for some dramatic surgical procedure—and yet they were fully conscious of what was going on in the operating room.

And then, with reincarnation, there are all these stories of little kids who recall past lives and can confirm all kinds of very specific details about what kind of plane they were flying when they crashed in the Pacific in World War II and things like that.

Those are just two good examples, but those are the kinds of anomalies we’re talking about here, which those who really want to keep the blinders on can dismiss as woo-woo. But they keep getting more. Gallup and people like that have done surveys showing that a lot of people have had these kinds of experiences, so I don’t know how long they can keep the lid on that box.

Marjorie: I think what’s funny is that it partly is, as we were talking about before, the Academy or the scientists versus people in our ordinary culture. Because, as you say, when Gallup does the polls, they find that many, many people believe in spirituality and perhaps a life beyond just this material world. But if you look at the National Academy of Sciences, it’s something like maybe 7 percent of the scientists who have that view.

And they’re the people who are in control of our grants and publications and things of that sort. That’s why I think right now we’re having trouble moving this forward, because of the difference between our general populace and the elite group of scientists who are really governing where money goes and what publications are actually being published.

Rick: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of certain things that happen in the political realm, with certain lobbyists having an inordinate amount of control over politicians in violation of the public sentiment.

Marjorie: Yeah.

Rick: What was I going to say? Oh, yeah, one thought that occurred to me as I was reading your book—I don’t know if I ever thought of it this way—is that you can’t really be an atheist and a scientist. You could be an agnostic and a scientist, but if you really insist that you’re an atheist, you’re saying, “I’ve achieved certainty about a particular thing,” whether or not there’s divine intelligence or God, and yet I call myself a scientist.

And scientists just don’t—well, they shouldn’t, anyway—have such certainty about things that are always open to refutation. In the case of the spiritual realm, there have been thousands of years of cultures offering refutation.

Marjorie: You’re right, and I think one thing you’re reminding me about is Richard Feynman, again one of the most amazing scientists and physicists that we know about in this country, and a Nobel Prize winner. He said something like that. He said, “My philosophy is the philosophy of doubt. I want to doubt everything so I can be curious about what other possibilities might actually be out there to explain a phenomenon.” I think that’s what we’ve lost right now in our scientific milieu. So many of us—and I was that way again before my experiences with spirituality—were absolutely certain that the materialist paradigm was the only paradigm. We had no doubt and no curiosity about looking further.

Rick: Yeah, I think there’s something here that might pertain both to religious fundamentalists and to scientific fundamentalists, which is that doubt is scary because it threatens the foundation upon which you think you rest. It begins to shake that foundation, and you want certainty; you want security. Everybody does.

In the case of religious people, they might say, “Well, that’s the devil. I don’t want to hear that. I’m a fool for Jesus.” In the case of scientific people, by the same token, they don’t want to hear or are not willing to take seriously anything that is outside what they consider to be their foundation, because it’s threatening.

Marjorie: The humor about that is that many Nobel laureate scientists, as they reached their seventies and moved toward the end of their careers, began to shift toward saying, “Ah, consciousness is fundamental, and I was wrong.” Sir John Eccles is one example. He said, “Wait a minute, I have studied the brain and synaptic transmission all of my life”—he had received a Nobel Prize for that—and now he’s saying, “I really believe that, in fact, the mind and the brain interact, with the mind actually being primary and being able to affect the brain, and vice versa.”

Immediately, his colleagues said, “He’s getting older. He’s getting senile now, and that’s why he’s doing these sorts of things.” If you look at a number of Nobel Prize laureates, as they’ve hit their seventies, they’ve shifted their philosophy and begun to say things about consciousness being primary. I wonder why it is that we younger scientists would then say, “Oh, no, no, this person is just getting senile or weak-minded.” I think that’s very sad.

Rick: Maybe they’re becoming wiser as they get older, or the veil is thinning a little bit.

Marjorie: Yes, exactly. Or maybe they’ve had a real experience of consciousness in that way, and they’re trying to incorporate it into their own worldview.

Rick: Yeah, and of course a lot of the founders of quantum mechanics talked that way, considering consciousness very significant and important. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle seems to indicate that consciousness can influence material reality. But certain sciences seem to be farther ahead than others. I don’t think that the popular mentality has caught up with quantum mechanics.

Marjorie: No, I think we still live in a Newtonian worldview in terms of our experience, because, as you’ve even talked about with me a little bit by email, we see the solid chair, we see the solid table, and that seems to be a real experience.

We don’t understand what the quantum physicists are really saying: basically, they have the idea that everything exists in this probability field, in this sort of smeared-out potentiality that only when we observe it does it come down to a particular point in space that actually exists. That’s hard for our minds to wrap themselves around.

Rick: Yeah, I was interviewing somebody a few weeks ago, and she was referring to a physicist who got so immersed in the understanding of the nonphysicality of the apparent physical that he was afraid to walk across the floor. He wore these great big boots to give himself more surface area, so he wouldn’t fall right through. I think he was getting a little nutty, but if you really understand what matter is, you realize that it isn’t.

Marjorie: Yes, yes.

✨ Consciousness as a universal field

Rick: It just appears to be. That’s true. All right, so let’s talk a little bit more about the whole notion of consciousness being primary. We’ve alluded to it, and we’ve brought up NDEs—we’ve got a little something going on here with the dog—we’ve brought up NDEs and out-of-body experiences and all that stuff, but that is more of a thing where the individual perspective, or the individual perceiver, somehow gets separate from the body.

But it doesn’t say anything about consciousness as a field, as a universal substratum or foundation of the universe. So let’s talk about that a little bit.

Marjorie: Well, I think that many scientists have been alluding to that, and I want to maybe even start with Eccles, because he was again working with Beck, a quantum physicist. They were really talking about the fact that nonlocal consciousness can interact with the mind and the brain.

I think that Henry Stapp has done a lot with that, and also David Bohm, who was a student of Einstein. Those two physicists have really been looking at these things, especially David Bohm. I love the way he talked about this idea that we literally live in a universe of interconnected consciousness and that everything is enfolded within everything else.

He talks about the implicate order, which simply means this enfolded nature of the universe, so that what I’m experiencing right now is probably connected in some way to something else that somebody else is experiencing miles or hundreds or thousands of miles away, and also in time as well. Space and time are totally interconnected.

Therefore, we can’t really talk about individual entities that exist separately from each other. Everything I do affects you and affects other people. When you have that notion, as David Bohm did, it really changes the way you look at your interactions with other people and with the world. Again, you feel, with that interconnection, a sense of compassion toward everything around you, because it really is connected to you as well.

Rick: Yeah, do you talk about Indra’s net in your book?

Marjorie: I don’t talk about Indra’s net in my book, but I did write an article about Indra’s net and that idea that everything is connected to each other. I think it’s so amazing that this is part of ancient Indian philosophy, and yet it’s exactly what quantum physicists like David Bohm and Henry Stapp are saying today.

Rick: Yeah, and this interconnectedness that Marjorie is referring to has to do with the notion that everything is infinitely correlated. In other words, every single point in creation is in some way directly connected with every other point in creation.

Like a net, there’s just sort of this complete, intimate inter-correlation between everything—just one contiguous wholeness that is functioning or interacting with itself, within itself. There is really nothing other than that, and that self-interaction gives rise to the appearance, for people like us, of there being something other than that. But in fact, there isn’t.

Marjorie: David Bohm gives a beautiful example that I’ve been really contemplating as I was preparing to talk with you. It is the example of a particular device that has two glass jars in it, a turning device, and some glycerin. They put simply a drop of glycerin between the two, and then they turn it.

What you find is that the drop of glycerin begins to spread out with continuous turning until suddenly you can’t see the drop at all. You just see a mass of whatever the dye color of that glycerin is. But then, when you turn it in the opposite direction, slowly but surely it turns right back into that glycerin drop.

He said that this is his example of what he would call the implicate order. When I was thinking about that, I thought about karma, again a term that we use from Eastern philosophies, meaning that everything has a cause and effect. We often can’t see the cause of a particular effect happening in our lives.

What I was thinking about is that if the image he’s giving within the idea of the implicate order is true, if we could unwind our glycerin jar, we would perhaps be able to see the particular moment that caused the effect we’re seeing right now in our lives. It could be a particular person who is now very angry at us about something, and we wonder, “Why on earth is this person angry?” Or it could be a particular political situation that is happening right now, and we wonder, “Why is it happening?”

It sort of helps me explain what really might be going on: somewhere, many years ago, something happened that was the seed of the events that are actually occurring.

Rick: Yeah, we can see, or guess, or perhaps even get some hints that seem feasible. But as it says in the Gita, karma is unfathomable to human intellect. The complexities of it are just beyond human intellect.

That raises an interesting question: if it’s unfathomable to human intellect, who or what keeps track of it, if it’s a real thing? In the same breath, I could ask, who or what keeps track of everything?

Why is it that in my body there are massively complex processes—and boiling it down to the molecular or atomic level, there’s all this amazing stuff going on—according to laws of nature that seem to be infallible and unalterable? Why should it be that way? If the universe is random or accidental, that doesn’t seem like an accident to me.

Marjorie: Exactly, and I think that’s why materialism doesn’t really seem logical to many of us who are looking at this. More and more scientists are actually talking about the understanding that consciousness exists in every single particle of the universe.

I think it’s been interesting to watch science move forward. At first, people like me who were neuroscientists were saying what we called, in a certain sense, “promissory materialism”: eventually, we would find the neurons in the brain that were giving rise to our conscious experience.

Finally, more scientists—in fact, I think I mentioned in my book that Christof Koch is one of them—are saying, “Wait a minute, maybe I was wrong. Maybe, in fact, every single particle of this universe has a certain amount of consciousness.”

An electron has perhaps a crude amount of consciousness, or a grain of sand does, but they still have conscious awareness at some low, low level. As you get more complex organisms, you have more consciousness and more ability to perceive and interact with the universe.

Then you could imagine that if every single cell of our body has an element of consciousness, they would be interacting with each other at this beautiful level of consciousness interacting with consciousness, as part of this world David Bohm was talking about—this implicate order.

Rick: Yeah, and if we say, okay, every atom, every molecule, every particle, every cell, everything has some degree of consciousness, then let’s also ask: What is that particle actually? What is that cell? Is there any materiality there, or if we look deeply enough, do we discover that actually there is nothing but consciousness there, which, interacting with itself, gives rise to the appearance of particles and cells and galaxies and everything else?

Marjorie: Yeah, and you raise a really interesting point. I think that’s where I talk in my book about some of the Indian philosophies that have a way of trying to perceive that as well.

Rick: Like Kashmir Shaivism.

Marjorie: Like Kashmir Shaivism, this idea that this non-local consciousness, which one might call God if we want to use that term, but we can simply call it non-local consciousness, this infinite consciousness of the universe, can be at one point transcendent and then at another point say to itself, in effect, if we use an anthropological term, “I want to experience myself. I want to become something.”

And then how it can basically contract down through that intention to finite minds, for example, of the universe, and then more and more into sense organs and into material parts of reality without ever losing what it truly is in its own essence. And so what you have in Kashmir Shaivism is called tattvas, these levels of contraction going all the way from infinite awareness that is totally non-local and non-material, down through the individual minds, limited awareness, and then down into our own bodies, our own beings, and the world around us.

✨ Filtering infinite awareness

Rick: Yeah, which brings up two points. One is something you alluded to a minute ago, which is the evolution of increasingly complex forms, more and more capable of enabling consciousness to have or be a living reality. That’s one thing. And another is, with the tattvas, it brings in the idea of filtering, which we should talk about now. Go ahead and define it.

Marjorie: Yes. I think, first of all, this filtered theory of consciousness is one that was actually proposed in the late 1800s by William James, whom we consider the father of psychology. Now, most psychologists ignore what he was talking about then related to consciousness because he was showing that he wasn’t just a materialist.

But his point was that if we as human beings did not filter all the information that was coming into our awareness, first of all, it would overwhelm us and we wouldn’t even be able to function in this world. So evolutionarily, we would have to do this in order to actually be able to stay alive as a species. In fact, all animals would have to do that.

So the understanding is that this is a way, in fact, of efficiently living within this physical universe. But the point is that when you filter down all of this information, you are also filtering out non-local awareness.

Meditation, Near-Death Experiences, and the Veil of Awareness

And the idea is that perhaps—and this seems to be the case when you look at a number of experiments in this area—when a person actually quiets their mind down, whether it’s through meditation or through a near-death experience, when the heart stops and the mind then stops functioning, the brain stops functioning, somehow you actually have some sort of veil becoming more transparent between our limited, filtered awareness and this much vaster awareness around us.

And the idea is that perhaps—and this seems to be the case when you look at a number of experiments in this area—when a person actually quiets their mind down, whether it’s through meditation or through a near-death experience, when the heart stops and the mind then stops functioning, the brain stops functioning, somehow you actually have some sort of veil becoming more transparent between our limited, filtered awareness and this much vaster awareness around us.

Some people, it appears, seem to have this ability more than others. So we have people who appear to be psychics, who appear to be able to know what’s going on someplace else in the universe, someplace else in the world, or in someone else’s mind, who seem to have a more transparent veil, we might say, at one point or another than someone like myself.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, you’re probably too much of a purist to have done this, but if a person—if you take LSD, for instance—you wouldn’t want to try to live that way all the time because so many filters are ripped away. There’s just too much going on, and if you do that and then go and try to drive a car or do some normal thing, it’s just overwhelming.

And there’s another example. Oh, yeah, like going on a six-month meditation course and then trying to go into town to buy toothpaste or something, if you haven’t really grounded yourself and integrated what’s been going on on the course.

And yet, as you were just indicating, there are people who not only have thinned the veil with regard to having psychic experiences, being able to talk to deceased relatives or whatever, but, like the Swami who initiated you, have thinned the veil in terms of being able to sustain unbounded awareness in the midst of activity. I think that’s the most significant thing for our consideration.

Marjorie: It is, and I think that’s one of the things that I have become more aware of as I’ve begun to do this research and also to continue to explore meditation.

As I read about people, for example, like my own meditation teacher, Swami Muktananda, or Ramana Maharshi, or many other sages of the world, what seems to happen is that they have a kind of co-consciousness. They have this sense of being aware of things going on around them in non-local consciousness, miles away from them, that type of thing.

And at the same time, they can be right there with you on the material level and be talking to you just as they would ordinarily talk to anyone else. So there’s something about what we might call the enlightened master who seems to be able to hold both simultaneously in their awareness and move back and forth easily between these different levels of what we might call conscious reality.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to talk about this a lot. He had this whole theme about boundaries and boundlessness, where it’s necessary to have boundaries in order to be efficient. If, in a business, for instance, you have to do things according to certain routines, but routine work and the sort of calcification of boundaries kind of confines you and kills your genius.

And so what you want to be able to do is cultivate unboundedness and boundaries at the same time: the ability to maintain unboundedness in the midst of the most precise focus and details.

Cultivate unboundedness and boundaries at the same time.

And unboundedness would mean not only being able to know something that’s going on miles away. In fact, it might not mean that at all. It would mean that consciousness itself, which is without limitation, which is as much on the other side of the universe as it is right here, becomes known as one’s identity. That becomes the foundation, or the predominant quality, of one’s experience.

Marjorie: And I think that’s sometimes why you hear a person who’s really an enlightened master say something like, when you ask them, “How often do you meditate?” or “How many hours a day?” they say, “Really, my meditation is 24/7. It’s like I’m always in that state,” unlike myself, where I go in and out of my meditation experiences as I go to meditate each day.

Rick: Yeah, there was a saint in Rishikesh named Tatwale Baba, and someone once asked him, “Do you sleep?” And he said, “What would happen to the universe if I slept?”

And then they said, “Well, you should come to London. You’d make such an impression.” He said, “I am London.”

Marjorie: That’s right. A very different experience from my own, somewhat more limited reality.

Rick: Yeah. So obviously, statements like that, one is speaking from the perspective of the universal Self, which we’ve all heard—probably everybody watching this has heard that’s what we really are.

And yet we’re a person. I’m Rick, you’re Marjorie, everybody else is who they are. They have their identity, they have their families and all that, and you can’t really sacrifice one for the other, although that’s generally what happens.

And it’s usually the unboundedness that gets sacrificed for the boundaries, but you can cultivate the ability to have both simultaneously.

Marjorie: Right. And I think that, as we were talking about, would create a very different world in which we live if we had more and more people having that sense of that non-bounded reality for more of their time.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, how could you possibly hate and kill people or animals or the rainforest or anything else if you saw it all as part of what you are, as part and parcel of your being, your nature?

Marjorie: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so as we go along here, if there’s anything that comes to your mind that I’m not bringing up, you go ahead and bring it up. Otherwise, I’ll just keep kind of prompting you, now or at any time.

I want to talk a little bit—you throw some terms in later in your book: panpsychism, panentheism—and there’s this fellow, whom I don’t think I wrote down in the notes, who talks about great minds and little minds and so on.

Marjorie: Paul Marshall.

Rick: Paul Marshall. And I found that fascinating. I really liked that portion of the book. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What is meant by those terms, and why is that significant, and so on?

Marjorie: Yeah. So when we talk about panpsychism, when I talk about it, what I really mean is that consciousness exists in all aspects of the universe. That’s typically what philosophers and scientists mean.

So this would mean, for example, that in fact in a grain of sand, in an electron, in the individual cells of your body, there is consciousness within them. So, pan—everything; psychism—consciousness or mind.

Then the other word that we were talking about was panentheism, and that is a word that I think a number of scientists and philosophers are now beginning to use instead of panpsychism, because what that implies is that everything is—first of all, consciousness does pervade the entire universe, as in panpsychism, but also consciousness transcends the universe.

So the universe is in consciousness and consciousness is in the universe. You have this understanding of transcendence—it’s always there in its non-local awareness—and immanence; it’s in every single part of the universe. And I think that’s the one that feels most real to me.

And one of the things I loved about Ed Kelly talking about panentheism and why he feels it’s important, in his book Irreducible Mind, is that he said that in this case, what you imagine is that consciousness is truly both eternal and temporal; it’s both being and becoming; it’s both potential and actual; it’s absolute and relative.

So you begin to see then this beautiful sense of the paradox of being both-and. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.

The other thing that I think is also interesting is, in talking about consciousness being primary, one of the philosophies that Paul Marshall, whom you just mentioned, really adheres to is what he calls idealist monistic philosophies.

Idealist philosophies are simply those philosophies that say mind is primary, consciousness is primary—that’s idealism. And then monistic simply means it’s all one, like in Kashmir Shaivism, where basically you have these tattvas that contract down into the material world, but you don’t lose anything during the contraction. It’s all there, and we can be aware at any level of those tattvas at any moment we want to.

Rick: Yeah. So, in other words, manifestation from the unmanifest to fully manifest is simultaneous. All levels of the manifestation are there at all times; it’s not like they’re sequential and one is lost as the other is gained, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Marjorie: Exactly, exactly. And so, I mean, the beauty is that then when you think about meditation, what you’re working on doing is moving your way back up the tattvas toward that pure awareness.

And it’s not that you lose your physical body in that moment; it’s still there. But you have now moved your awareness to also encompass this highest level of awareness.

Rick: Yeah. I suppose a good analogy might be an ocean, where ordinarily you’re just swimming on the surface waves, and there are all these layers of depth in the ocean that you’re not aware of.

And your capacity to appreciate more of the ocean, more of the full range of it, grows until you can sort of see the whole thing from top to bottom—which is not the analogy; it kind of breaks down.

Marjorie: Yeah, but you’re not the waves on the surface either. All of those undulations of our mind that make us feel happy or sad, all of those sorts of things, in pain or in joy, are just the surface.

And when you can actually experience that you are truly the ocean and not just the surface waves, it really gives you a different feeling, too.

Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and even though this might sound like a bit of a heady conversation we’re having, everything we’re talking about here is not merely conceptual; it’s meant to be experienceable.

Marjorie: Yeah.

Rick: And so no one should think that this is just philosophical entertainment or something.

Marjorie: Yeah, and you were talking a little bit about Paul Marshall again and his particular understanding, which I again have as a figure in my book, about the fact that there is one great mind. And again, it’s not just Paul Marshall who thinks this; many people talk about the one mind that we’re all part of.

But what he says is that within that one mind, what we see is that there are all the different activities going on, and in fact it contracts down into all the little points of awareness, which are all our own little minds. But we have the same abilities that that large mind has, and so everything is happening within the contents of the large mind.

So I’m perceiving a tree, you’re perceiving a tree. We may perceive it differently because our epicenter of focused awareness is in a slightly different place, but still, all of that is happening within what he calls the numinous consciousness of the mind. Numinous meaning that sort of suchness, the real consciousness that we are a part of.

Rick: Yeah, and this kind of helps to resolve that issue, that argument about whether the universe comes into manifestation only when it’s perceived, or whether it’s somehow there even if people aren’t perceiving it, because there seems to be a sort of an objectivity to the universe that’s not dependent upon individual perceivers.

The tree is there; I go away, somebody else sees it, and it’s still there—the same tree, not a different tree, not just a total fabrication of their imagination as dreams might be. The bird lands in it, and the bird sees the tree in its own way. So there’s a certain kind of stability or structure, or template, it would seem, to the universe that we all perceive to different degrees and in different ways according to our capacity to perceive.

Marjorie: And I think you’re right. And I think there’s an interesting paradox as we’re talking about that, because when I think about Kashmir Shaivism, it’s like Kashmir Shaivism is saying the same thing. It’s like this nonlocal consciousness contracts down and becomes material reality. Material reality is real in a certain sense, but it’s also part of this nonlocal awareness.

At the same time, once that material reality is absorbed back into consciousness, it’s gone again. And so how do we deal with the fact that my mind creates something in its own reality—a thought that seems very, very real in the moment—and then it’s absorbed back into consciousness and it’s gone again? So it’s real and it’s not real. I mean, it’s somehow mind-boggling for me even to contemplate.

Rick: Yeah, but I think what’s cool about this kind of discussion is that sometimes consciousness might have a sort of plain-vanilla connotation, where it just seems like this flat field of nothingness. In fact, it’s sometimes referred to as nothingness, emptiness, and all. But if everything is consciousness and if we look at the universe, then it would seem that, wow, consciousness has a lot of qualities to it.

There’s all this incredible richness and variety and creativity and immense, incredible detail, and so on. And so it would seem that inherent within consciousness, like whatever is the DNA within a seed, is kind of an infinite field of all possibilities—an infinite potentiality for unimaginable creativity and diversity.

Marjorie: Yeah, and I think you’re reminding me too about a lot of people talking about Kashmir Shaivism and the whole understanding of this nonlocal consciousness, which is called Shiva in Kashmir Shaivism. The idea is that when you’re nonlocal consciousness and you’re totally transcendent, there’s nothing to experience.

And so it’s imagined that consciousness says, “Let me become many so I can experience myself and enjoy myself.” And then, of course, it can be absorbed back up, but the manifestation is required for the enjoyment, the experience.

Rick: They use the term Leela. You studied Sanskrit; you actually have some kind of degree in Sanskrit.

Marjorie: That’s right.

Rick: That’s pretty cool, on top of everything else. Yeah, and Leela means play, and so it’s like there’s no fun in loneliness. The Creator says, “Hey, let’s stir things up a bit. I want to have some fun.”

Marjorie: Exactly, and of course, then, as we are each part of that consciousness, we do exactly the same thing in our own world and create our own beautiful world around us in one way or another.

Rick: Yes, being created in the image of God as we are. Yeah, it’s like—go ahead.

Marjorie: You mentioned studying Sanskrit, and I think one of the reasons I did that is because I was really trying to put my neuroscience understanding and my meditative understanding together and integrate them.

I think when I began to read these texts, like the Pratyabhijna Hridayam, which is a Kashmir Shaivite text about how consciousness actually creates the universe, it sounded so much like David Bohm and other quantum physicists talking about the universe.

I think one of the sutras was something like, “Consciousness, out of its own freedom, is actually a source and the power of everything in the universe.” And I love that idea: that it’s our freedom as human beings, or as this nonlocal consciousness, that can create, out of our own highest consciousness, everything that exists around us—our whole play, our whole story of our lives.

Rick: I had a conversation recently with a friend who insisted, or at least posited, that meditation doesn’t necessarily change your personality or your behavior, and that a lot of the changes we see in long-term meditators are just normal maturation.

She cited examples of some—must have been her son or some of his friends—who were falling in with a bad crowd and doing wild and crazy things like teenagers will do. Now many of them are multimillionaires and just doing really well. They didn’t meditate; they just grew up.

And yet, let’s talk a little bit about how meditation actually changes the brain. If it really significantly changes the brain, it must be significantly changing the way we function in every way, including behavior.

Marjorie: Yes, and I think that that’s a very good point. There have been a number of neuroscientists actually looking at this, and one of them that I’ll mention is Sara Lazar, who is actually at Harvard University’s Medical School.

One of the things that she did was a study in which she brought ordinary people into her laboratory and looked at their brains using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, before they were trained in meditation. Then she looked at their brains again after they were trained in meditation, and she found that there were actually significant changes in specific parts of the brain associated with emotional regulation, memory, and attention.

Meditation and Protection Against Cortical Aging

She also did another study that was cross-sectional, looking at a population of meditators versus nonmeditators. She looked at both young and older people, up to about 50 years of age, and what she found was that the cortex thins with natural aging. But in meditators, the cortex did not thin, and the meditators’ cortex looked like that of younger people in the specific areas related to executive attention, function, and concentration, which is what we’re really working on in meditation.

So to me, that says that both in the short term and in the long term, meditation has a powerful effect that you don’t see in nonmeditators.

Rick: Yeah, probably most people listening will have heard the term neuroplasticity, and I’ve interviewed Rick Hanson, who talks a lot about that, if you want to look up that interview. But what do you see in people who have been meditating for 30, 40, or 50 years? I mean, how much of their brains have changed compared to the norm?

Marjorie: Well, when I think about what you’re talking about, I think about Richard Davidson’s research with the Dalai Lama’s monks. I think he showed that they also have different frequencies when they go into meditation, called gamma frequencies, that appear to be associated with what he would call loving-kindness meditation or compassionate meditation.

When they go into that type of meditation, it’s like their brains instantly move into a whole different frequency of brainwaves. You don’t tend to find that in people who are newer meditators. It takes, I think, perhaps a while to change those frequencies.

But I want to mention something else. There’s another person who did research in Germany about brainwaves and meditation, and he said he thinks it’s a little bit more complex than we often think.

Very often, as you may know, we say, “Oh, well, when we start to meditate, we start having alpha rhythms compared to, say, beta rhythms, our normal waking consciousness, and then it might move to theta rhythms, et cetera.”

He was saying that it’s actually more complex. When he asked meditators to meditate using different types of techniques, one might be simply not even meditating, but closing your eyes and letting your mind wander, versus closing your eyes and simply having what we might call open awareness, where you’re simply aware of everything in the room but you’re not trying to judge it or make comments.

The next one was going into awareness where you’re into the equivalent of a void—like you’re trying to go into a place of non… what would we call it? Nonspatial awareness. You’re literally trying to go into that place of pure stillness.

He said it was during the meditative periods of pure-stillness meditation that the brainwaves actually dropped down to a very low level. And I was thinking that reminds me of people in near-death experiences, where the brainwaves drop down to a low level.

So maybe there’s also something not just about the frequency of the waves, but about the amplitude. When we really quiet the brain down, that’s when we have these experiences.

Rick: Quote the first two verses of the Yoga Sutras for us.

Marjorie: Well, Chaitanyam Atma is one of them, which means the self—my own inner self, my essence—is consciousness. And the other one is Jnanam Bandhaha, which I love. It means knowledge is bondage, but it really means limited knowledge: the knowledge that we have of our limited world around us is bondage that keeps us from understanding our true nature.

Rick: But I thought what you would quote was Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodha.

Marjorie: Oh, I’m sorry. Okay.

Rick: And then the second verse: “The seer is established in the self.”

Marjorie: I was doing the Shiva Sutras, and you were doing the Yoga Sutras.

Rick: Oh, Shiva Sutras. Yeah, Yoga Sutras.

Marjorie: So I did the Shiva Sutras, yes. So, the Yoga Sutras: you’re right. Yoga is the stilling of the thought waves of the mind, and then the seer actually rests in his own nature, which is exactly what we were talking about with that meditation experiment.

Rick: Which is why I thought to ask you that.

Marjorie: You were perfect.

Rick: Yeah, so good point—that there’s something about meditation that stills the mind, or at least most types of meditation are designed to do that. And a still mind is better able to reflect pure consciousness, just as a still pond is better able to reflect the sunlight.

Marjorie: Exactly right. And I think that’s when people like William James talk about that veil thinning and actually rupturing, so that you can see consciousness through it—nonlocal consciousness through it. That’s what’s happening when the mind becomes still.

Rick: Yeah, and then that raises the question: well, okay, I really want that. I want that still mind so I can experience pure consciousness, so I better not go anywhere. I’m going to shut myself in my room and close the drapes.

But that brings us back to what we were talking about a little while ago, which is that you need to cultivate the ability to have that silence rock-solid in the midst of the most dynamic activity.

Marjorie: Exactly, and I think that’s what we all notice in meditation. I think I talk in my book about when I first began meditating and I was watching my mind. We were told, well, you’re supposed to be looking for this place of a still mind, and I couldn’t find any stillness in my mind. It was thought after thought after thought.

After many, many months and years, I began to notice a brief moment of stillness between thoughts, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s that place.” Then, gradually, year after year, you expand that place so that you can have more and more stillness in your meditation.

Testing subtle and nonlocal realities

Rick: Yeah, so we were talking earlier about science and spirituality as two separate tracks for gaining knowledge, and I kind of like the theme that they’re actually having a symbiotic relationship with each other, at least ideally, where science can bring more rigor and empirical qualities to spirituality, and spirituality can bring tools to our attempt to understand the universe that science lacks and won’t ever actually be able to create if it just thinks in terms of creating material, electronic, or other apparatus.

That’s just a kind of a theme of mine that I like. I think it also, again, has relevance to our culture at large and the direction humanity may be going, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.

Marjorie: Well, I think it’s absolutely true, and I think that’s what we were trying to do with the AAPS, the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. We’re saying spirituality doesn’t have to be separate. We don’t have to be living in two different worlds.

All we’re saying is that consciousness, which is something that scientists can actually begin to measure in different ways—its qualities and its properties—must be considered part of our material world. We’re simply asking our fellow scientists to be a little bit more curious about how our individual mental activity, our mind, and perhaps non-local consciousness can actually affect our brain, and how they can carefully begin to measure whether we can interact with other people in a non-local way.

Experiments have been done already by many scientists like Dean Radin, as you were mentioning. The issue is, if we could get more scientists from, for example, the National Academy of Sciences or the National Institutes of Health to fund research in this area out of their own curiosity, I think we could move forward so much more quickly in this area. It just takes real curiosity rather than always adhering to our old paradigm of materialism with our blinders on.

Rick: Yeah, I sometimes like to think that spiritual practices such as meditation could be used as a scientific research tool for exploring subtler realities. But the problem with that is that, in regular research using ordinary tools, those tools are very clearly defined and carefully calibrated. When you publish a paper, you tell them all the instruments that you used and everything, so somebody can go and pick the same instruments, calibrate them the same way, and do the same experiments.

But with meditation and spiritual practices, it seems like such a messy field. There are so many different practices and traditions, and every human nervous system is so different and has all kinds of different experiences, even practicing the same thing. Do you sometimes lament whether spirituality will ever be able to achieve the kind of scientific rigor that the ordinary sciences have achieved?

Marjorie: I think we can, but I think part of the issue is a little bit like—well, in fact, I want to give the example of medical research. There’s something called the randomized controlled clinical trial, which is supposed to be the gold standard of trials for, for example, determining if a pharmaceutical drug really works for cancer.

But the issue with those trials is, in fact, they’re the worst type of trials to use because you’re taking people with all sorts of variations on this type of cancer, giving them exactly the same amount of this pharmaceutical drug, and then expecting to see a significant result across this giant population of people.

If instead you were to pick only a certain number of people and give them perhaps the amount of the drug that is necessary for them, which could differ across the population, and perhaps different subtypes of drugs for the different types of cancer they have, you might find much stronger effects.

So you’re mixing up big effects and tiny or nonexistent effects, depending on the person you’re with. That’s what happens a lot with meditation research. We’re perhaps actually looking at people with very different proclivities and/or experience with meditation, and we’re expecting to see the same sort of results.

I would say that if you actually picked—and this is what people are trying to do, I think, in a lot of this research on consciousness—those people who naturally have a proclivity, for example, toward being able to be aware of what I think of as remote viewing, some researchers are doing that type of research, and they pick people who are experts in it.

Then they simply very carefully determine how accurate that person is in actually describing a site that’s many, many miles away that they’ve never seen before. I think when you do it in that careful way, then you begin to have much, much stronger results.

I think that’s all we’re asking for as scientists beginning to do research in this area: really take the time to do that type of research in a very carefully controlled way.

I want to mention one other thing that we talk about. If you design an experiment as somebody interested in non-local consciousness—say, remote viewing or something of that sort—and then you give that experimental paradigm to a skeptic and say, “Look at this experimental paradigm. What do you see missing in this paradigm that would keep it from being the strongest paradigm possible to answer the question?”

Then you have them give you that information, and you redesign it so that they are happy with the experimental paradigm and you are happy with it. Then you run the experiment. I think your skeptic will come on board and say, “Oh yes, now I can really trust your results.”

Rick: The tattvas have to do with gross and subtle, don’t they? Gross, subtle, or subtlest?

Marjorie: Yes, absolutely, right.

Rick: The reason I ask is that it seems like with modern science—Western science—there’s really no concept of gross and subtle. There’s a concept of big and small, and you can use tools to look into the smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, and get down to up quarks and down quarks and all that stuff. But this whole idea of subtlety is lost on them. There’s no consideration of it.

And yet, in the Eastern traditions in particular, and even in the West, there’s an idea that there are these different lokas or realms, and that those realms are populated with all kinds of beings. They might actually be among us, but we can’t perceive them if we don’t have the subtlety of perception to do so, and so on.

That’s kind of fascinating. I mean, if that’s really the way the universe works, then science is constraining itself to a very thin crust on the surface of reality. Even if they look at that thin layer of crust in minute detail and see its tiniest particles, there’s a whole realm of potentialities that they’re not going to find because they’re not using the right tools, and yet spirituality does provide such tools.

Marjorie: That’s right, and again, I think that when we say spirituality, what we’re really meaning is that there are either particular people who are better than others at, for example, going into that state of non-local awareness, or that there is training. We know now, because there’s been a lot of work on training in meditation, that you do get better and better with training.

So I think, once again, it’s a matter of picking the people who have the natural proclivity and/or the training. Then I think we would begin to perhaps learn a little bit more about those subtle realms as we could objectively measure what they are perceiving, and then be able to say, “Ah, yes, is this real?” Because if they have non-local awareness, we can actually be able to perceive exactly what they tell us they’re perceiving in an objective way.

I think you probably know we’ve heard stories about Ramana Maharshi, and I think Swami Nityananda—Bhagwan Nityananda from Ganeshpuri, India—who would tell the people around them, “Oh, I know about something happening somewhere else,” and they would just describe it in a nonchalant way.

They were literally having remote viewing at that moment, and those are the things that you’d like to be able to actually quantify in a manner with people who do have those abilities. Then I don’t know how you could deny non-local consciousness if you could give example after example of that type of thing.

Rick: Yeah, and then there are other things that might be difficult to verify. I have friends who say that they routinely perceive subtle beings, like celestial beings, in our environment, doing things, interacting with people unbeknownst to those people, and so on.

That’s not something they could verify in any way, but I suppose, I mean, some scientific research projects can take decades to complete. You could take anybody, give them the right practices, and maybe in 10, 20, or 30 years they’ll actually perceive the same things.

Marjorie: Yeah, and perhaps, too, if there were a way of truly getting our minds to be as still as possible—literally watching what changes occur in our observational abilities as the mind becomes quieter and quieter.

I’m assuming whether they’re the Buddhist monks of the Dalai Lama or other people who have been meditating for long periods of time, one can begin to actually perhaps measure those changes in their level of subtlety of their own experiences.

I think it would be fascinating to have a long-term program with people over the years to see what differences there are in their ability to perceive these more subtle realms.

Rick: Yeah, another interesting idea is that the people who have these types of perceptions—the yogis and the meditators and everybody else—are still kind of a tiny percentage of the total population.

If you’re in that world, it seems kind of common because all your friends are that way. But if you’re in the general world, it’s probably not even on your radar. So it would be interesting to consider what society might be like if people having such experiences became the majority—not only in terms of how the world might change because of the influence of the majority of its population changing, but also what kinds of experiences and knowledge were taken for granted.

You might go to your friend and say, “Hey, I saw an angel this morning,” and your friend says, “So what else is new? Let’s go for coffee.”

Marjorie: That’s very true. Yes, yes. Well, I’m thinking right now might be a good time to put on the screen that image I have of local versus non-local consciousness in the brain, because in some ways it may lend itself to what we’re talking about right now.

Rick: Okay, it’s on now. I actually have it displayed.

Marjorie: Okay, right. In that model, I’m trying to show, first of all, the materialist view of reality—the one that I had before I actually had any spiritual experiences—which is basically that the brain itself is the creator of every single bit of mental activity. I’m really talking about what I would call my local awareness of my mind. What you see in that slide is what I would call basically one arrow going up from the brain to the mind, because most materialist neuroscientists say that the brain produces all mental activity. But there’s a big question mark next to it, and that is because we don’t know how the brain can actually create mental activity.

Every single neuroscientist who has tried has not been able to find a true neural causal effect of consciousness itself. They find correlates, but never anything that’s causal. The other model that I have is what I would call the energy-matter continuum model, where there is this nonlocal awareness that we’ve been talking about throughout our interview today that can contract down into the local awareness of the mind. I show a little filter there as an example of William James’s idea that we’re filtering that awareness down into a local awareness.

That local mind can also affect our brain, and vice versa, so you have arrows going both ways. But I think there we talk about, as you were saying, the gross levels. If we want material reality, or consciousness in the activity of our brain and the activity of other material aspects of the universe, then we have the more subtle realms of our local awareness of our mind. As those barriers begin to break down, we have the more subtle levels of awareness of nonlocal consciousness. Maybe that includes these other things, like remote viewing and so forth.

Rick: I don’t think this should be such a stretch for people. We have such a perfect metaphor in television and radio, where we have the electromagnetic field, which is spread out and ubiquitous, and then we have these isolated receivers that detect fluctuations in the electromagnetic field and translate them as music or whatever. There are different frequencies that you can tune into, just as we’ve been talking about different levels of experience for a human being and so on.

It’s a perfect metaphor. Consciousness may be more fundamental than the electromagnetic field—I’m sure it is—but there’s a similar mechanism there in a way. Some radios are old and rusty and don’t get a very good signal, while other radios get a much clearer signal. You can go on and on with this metaphor.

Marjorie: Yeah, it is a perfect metaphor for the materialists, too, who say, “Well, we know that, in fact, our brain creates all consciousness because if you have a stroke and you lose the activity of a particular part of the brain, that part of the brain dies, and you lose your awareness in that part of your visual field, for example.”

But your point with the radio analogy is that it’s just like actually having a part of the radio go out and then losing your transmission. It’s not saying that the radio was creating that transmission; it’s simply that it was allowing that to happen. It’s the same with our brain: it’s allowing the transmission of local and nonlocal consciousness to come into our everyday existence.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, you could take an AM/FM radio and perhaps remove some transistors or something that eliminated the AM capability, but it could still do FM. That would be like a stroke that shuts down the left side of your face, or whatever it does.

Marjorie: Yeah, so I don’t understand quite why that particular analogy isn’t embraced wholeheartedly by many of the neuroscientists who are more materialistic, because it seems very logical to me.

Rick: Well, it refutes their position if they want to be materialistic, so perhaps people like you are the ones who have to embrace it.

Marjorie: That’s right, exactly.

Rick: A question came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California. This will shift our topic a little bit. This will be fun to talk about. Do you have any sense of what it is that binds or localizes consciousness to a particular body? Also, in out-of-body experiences, do you have any idea what it is that is seeing from a point of view far removed from the physical body’s eyes?

Marjorie: Yes, very interesting. First of all, I want to say that, in terms of binding, if I were speaking out of my neuroscientist hat right now, we would say that there are particular neurons in the brain that appear to bind our entire awareness of a particular scene together so that it makes sense. People have actually correlated the activity of neurons in the brain with that binding property, and that’s sort of, again, part of our filtering property of our local attention.

But we’re really dealing with something much more than that. How, in fact, is consciousness perhaps—I’m trying to say—actually bound to this particular body? Maybe that’s really the question. Why is my awareness bound to this particular body? I don’t have an answer myself yet. I don’t know that there is a specific one, per se.

Then the next question was related to out-of-body experiences, and what is really happening—is that right?

Rick: Yeah, like if you’re in a coma and yet you’re watching the surgeons and can actually see things, but your physical eyes are taped shut and your brain is not functioning, what is it that actually provides the capability of vision?

Marjorie: Yes, and I think that’s why we really believe consciousness is primary. Scientists who have looked at those experiments involving near-death experiences have said that, in fact, you don’t need the sensory organ of your eye or your ear or your taste buds, and so forth, to experience all of these things. When those sensory organs have actually shut down, those experiences are still available to you when you are watching from above.

Again, it’s true that you are separated from the physical body, and yet some essential aspect of you—whether we want to call that, again, in Sanskrit, the Atman, or something else—is basically permanent even when the body is nonfunctioning.

Terminal Lucidity and Consciousness Beyond the Diseased Brain

I want to give a little bit of an example for the person, too, about what we call terminal lucidity. When a person gets older and has Alzheimer’s disease, their brain is diseased. We can look at the brain with magnetic resonance imaging and see that it looks really terrible. It’s shrunken and is no longer functioning. Yet, in the last minutes to hours of life, that person with that nonfunctional brain comes back to awareness, is totally lucid, says goodbye to their entire family, recognizes everyone there, and then dies.

One way people are looking at that is by saying, “Well, maybe what is happening is that consciousness is peeling away from the body at that moment. As it’s peeling away, it doesn’t need the body to actually use the perceptual abilities and the motor abilities the way it might have otherwise.”

Rick: I think one thing that helps explain it is the concept of the subtle body. The subtle body has faculties, just as the gross body does, corresponding to those gross faculties—subtle eyes, subtle hearing, subtle smell, and so forth. I think they’re called the indriyas in Sanskrit, aren’t they?

Marjorie: Yes.

Rick: So even without physical eyes, theoretically, a blind man who had the subtle body properly developed or enlivened could see.

Marjorie: In fact, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and probably many of us have had experiences of being in meditation with our eyes shut and, all of a sudden, seeing the room. Then there’s the whole out-of-body or near-death experience, as you mentioned.

Obviously, gross eyes are very useful for seeing a gross world, but there are subtle eyes, so to speak, corresponding to them, through which one sees the subtle world. When people see celestial beings, for instance, I don’t know if they’re seeing them so much with their gross eyes or with more of a subtle faculty that’s become enlivened. Perhaps that subtle faculty can function even without the gross faculty being available.

Marjorie: Yeah, you’re also reminding me that in the one story I tell about an NDE involving Dr. Bettina Peyton, when she was in the hospital and her heart stopped, she said that at first her awareness was within the body. Her eyes were taped shut, but she could see up into the room, and she could see the IV poles above her and the blood actually being transfused into her.

Then she said her awareness shifted to above her body, and then it went even further away. You get the sense that, as you’re saying, there are really two faculties within our physical body. Even when our awareness is tied inside it and our eyes are taped shut, in certain cases—like this one, involving cardiac arrest—she could still see into the room. But then her awareness literally moved beyond the physical body, up into the top of the room, and then moved even further away.

So there’s some sense of different localities, different ways that the spirit we might call our subtle body can move through space very quickly once it is separated from the physical body as well.

Rick: Yeah, and I’m sure there are esoteric books that talk about what binds the subtle body to the gross body. I’m sure there are things in Tibetan Buddhism and many other places. I think we should be grateful that, in general, it’s bound, because it could be rather difficult to live life if it kept drifting off all the time.

Obviously, it does eventually drift off when the gross body dies. Then the connection is somehow severed, and off it goes, if we buy into the whole reincarnation bit.

It’s funny that many spiritual people—even people I’ve interviewed—have a problem with a lot of the things we’ve been talking about. They don’t believe in reincarnation, and they don’t believe in any sort of continuation of life after the death of the body. I always pick on Sam Harris in absentia because I haven’t been able to interview him yet, but he’s the kind of person who, along with his fellow atheists, espouses those sorts of notions, despite the fact that Sam is an ardent meditator.

I guess it’s the old experience thing: if you haven’t experienced it yet, then it’s easy to have a different concept of how things work.

Marjorie: You’re reminding me, too, that in these cases of end-of-life experiences, when someone is with the dying person, they often see light leaving the body from the top of the head or from between the eyes. Sometimes it’s like a tiny blue light—often called the blue pearl in Indian traditions—leaving from between the eyes and then going off somewhere, as if that subtle body is apparent to you as the observer and you see it leaving.

You’re also reminding me that some people who have near-death or out-of-body experiences feel as though there’s an energetic cord connecting them in some way to their body. Maybe that helps answer the person’s question as well. Perhaps some people do experience that, and somehow it keeps the subtle body connected to the physical body when both need to be connected in physical reality.

Rick: Yeah, and I think, judging from accounts that I’ve read, when enlightenment occurs, your subtle body is still associated with your gross body, but it has greater independence. As you were saying earlier, faculties of clairaudience, clairsentience, clairvoyance, and things like that often develop.

So the subtle body is able to extend its range of perception and influence while still being associated with the body in which you were born.

Marjorie: Yeah, I also would like to say to the skeptics, like the people who say they don’t believe in reincarnation—and of course I was one of them until I really began looking at the research—I say, just be curious. If they go to Ian Stevenson’s website at the University of Virginia, the Division of Perceptual Studies, they can find PDFs of all the articles he wrote throughout, I think, from the 1970s until he died a number of years ago.

These are carefully designed studies where children, again, as you know, at two and a half or three years of age, are saying, “You’re not my parents. My parents are from another town nearby.” Then they give all the information about their previous life. Ian Stevenson carefully documented what they had to say and then looked for the family that the child said they were from. He would find the family and further document the evidence without the families even talking to each other.

When you see 2,500 or more cases like this, your curiosity has to be piqued about the possibility of reincarnation. You have to say, “Well, how might I do more experiments to actually test whether this is real or not?” Just having that open mind.

Rick: Yeah, I saw a cartoon where a little boy is sitting on a couch next to an old man, and the little boy is saying, “Don’t worry, I didn’t believe in reincarnation either when I was your age.”

Marjorie: Exactly.

Remaining curious

Rick: Yeah, let’s see here. I thought I had another thought on what you were just saying, but maybe it’ll come back to me. So, we have maybe five minutes left. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you feel is important to you, that we’d like to touch upon?

Marjorie: I think what I really want to let people know is that we’ve only talked about near-death experiences and maybe reincarnation, that type of thing. But in fact, when you look at all of the research done by people like Dean Radin on the ability of the human mind to actually change the output of random-number generators, it is phenomenal.

It’s a small effect, but it is absolutely repeatable again and again and again across laboratories all over the world. When we see this and know that my intention can actually change the output of a random-number generator, or that I can actually change physiology within another person, there have been other beautiful studies done—in this case, with healers being able to change the output of the brain, or the activity of the brain, in somebody across a hospital setting who is in a totally shielded room.

We have to say that this actually gives us evidence for non-local consciousness. I don’t know how we can deny that when we see the effect of one person on another person or on another physical part of reality.

Of course, then you think, isn’t that beautiful? If we, with our positive thoughts, like healers, can affect someone else in a positive way, couldn’t that be used in a wonderful way for the whole universe? If we could begin to realize that our thoughts really do affect others, and the more positive, healing thoughts we send out to others in the universe, the better it will be for everyone around us.

Life is so much more interesting when you’re open to all possibilities.

Rick: Yeah, one impression I got as you were saying that just now is that life is so much more interesting when you’re open to all possibilities, when you just have an open, curious mind. You don’t insist that things have to be any particular way, which is not to say you’re going to become gullible or open to every woo-woo idea that comes down the pike, but you can maintain a healthy scientific attitude and yet be willing to explore anything.

Actually, the way I like to think of it is that everything any religion ever said, or any mystic or anybody else, can be taken as a hypothesis that might be interesting to explore. You don’t have to accept it, and you don’t have to reject it. It’s just, “Well, what if that is true? Let’s see how we could explore that.”

Marjorie: And it’s a reminder that in our Western view of science, we talk about always having alternative hypotheses whenever you do an experiment. Whichever hypothesis turns out to be true, you’re happy; you aren’t wedded to one particular hypothesis or the other.

I think that’s what I would hope my fellow scientists would do. They would say, “Okay, we have two hypotheses. We have the hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental, and the other one is that it’s not—that material aspects of reality are fundamental. Let’s now just very carefully and meticulously explore these with different experiments.”

Rick: Yeah, there’s a certain tendency, I think, for human beings to become a little arrogant or to indulge in hubris, where we feel like, “Oh, we’ve pretty much got it figured out. We’re such an advanced society; we really understand how the world works and all that.”

But, I mean, as all the good science-fiction writers hopefully have shown us, we’re children in terms of what might be possible. There could be civilizations out there which have existed for millions and millions of years and which have gone so far beyond ours that we can’t even conceive of what they’re like.

So we’re never going to get there if we blow ourselves up by thinking that we’ve got it all figured out, when we so obviously don’t.

Marjorie: Yeah, and I think I would also like to end by encouraging young people who might be listening to really think about how they might contribute in this way. If they have an interest in non-local consciousness and consciousness being primary, what sort of experiments could they possibly do, and how could they go into academia in a way that would allow these types of experiments to actually move forward?

Rick: Is there anything you’re doing that they can plug into, or is there any way in which you can help them specifically if they have the kind of attitude you just mentioned?

Marjorie: Well, I would say that one thing they could do is go to the website of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. As we begin to move forward with this Academy, we’re going to try to find ways of supporting young people interested in this sort of thing.

We’ll be having annual meetings. We also have a first volume coming out shortly, consisting of chapters from all of our board members who are scientists interested in consciousness being fundamental. So I think that’s a great way to start, anyway.

Rick: Good. Well, I’ll link to that on your page on BatGap, as well as to your own website and your book. So thanks, Marjorie. I really have enjoyed this time with you.

Marjorie: Thank you very much, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, let me make a couple of wrap-up points. So, you’ve been listening to an interview with Marjorie Hines-Woollacott, PhD. This is one of an ongoing series of interviews. I’ve done over 450 of them at this point, and hopefully we’ll do at least that many more.

If you would like to be notified when new ones are posted, just go to BatGap.com and sign up for the email newsletter, and/or subscribe to the YouTube channel. You’ll get notified both ways.

This also exists as an audio podcast, so if you’d like to listen to things while you commute or work out or whatever, you can do that. There are some other interesting things on the website; just check out the menus and you’ll see what’s there.

So next week is Ken Wilber. I’ve been wanting to interview him for a long time. That should be interesting. He’s a fascinating fellow, and we hope to see you then.

Thanks for listening and watching, and thank you again, Marjorie.

Marjorie: Thank you.