Dean Radin, MS, PhD, Magic and the Frontiers of Consciousness

My guest today is Dr. Dean Radin - Following a career in classical violin, Dean went on to earn an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amhurst, a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After his graduation, Dean conducted research at Princeton and University of Edinburgh and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Presently, Dean is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell 50 years ago after the Apollo-14 mission.
Dean is the best-selling Author of four books: 
The conscious universe : the scientific truth of psychic phenomena, (2009).
Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, (2013),  reissued as The Noetic Universe, (2011)
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (2006)  
Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe,  (2018) 
Dean is also a musician.
I enquired as to the meaning of noetic. Dean explained that in its simplest form, it means deep intuition. And intuition is knowing without knowing how. But you know it with a deep conviction, that it is correct. You don't know how you know that or you don't even know where the conviction came from. But when you check, it turns out that you're correct based on some externally verifiable event or knowledge.
We spoke of Practical Magic, as something  science has been studying unwittingly in the form of psychic phenomena. According to this view consciousness is primary in the universe. This provides a worldview, where suddenly the mind is the most powerful thing that there is, in which case the mind is primary over physics, not constrained by notions of space, or time, or distance. Then Dean proceeds to delineate how the magical traditions fall into three different practices.
We discuss mediums and spirits, haunted houses and what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Maybe there's memory everywhere.
At one point in his life, Dean joined a secret government program that was looking explicitly at psychic phenomena. The US government was interested in it, for two reasons. One was that there had been reports primarily out of Russia and China, that they had secret programs going on using these kinds of psychic abilities. And we needed to know whether it was a threat.. But the other half of it was, they had also found people who were very good at clairvoyance, and they were using it for espionage. This and much more you will find in the podcast.

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Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, mediums, universe, books, science, esoteric traditions, psychic abilities, noetic, real, studying, physics, experiments, understand, mind, psychic phenomena, quantum mechanics, 
SPEAKERS
Speaker 2 (85%), Speaker 1 (14%) 
1
Speaker 1
0:03
This is Pushing Boundaries, a podcast about pioneering research, breakthrough discoveries and unconventional ideas. I'm your host, Dr. Thomas R. Verny. My guest today is Dr. Dean Radin. Do I pronounce your name correctly?

0:20
Actually Raiden.
1
Speaker 1
0:21
Okay. Thank you for that. Following a career. I'll just very briefly do a bio here if it's okay. Following a career in classical violin, Dean went to earn an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a master's degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After his graduation, Dean conducted research at Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 
Presently, Dean is chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell 50 years ago, after the Apollo 14 mission, 
Dean is the best-selling author of five books. The five books that I know of are the conscious universe, the scientific truths of psychic phenomena in 2009, supernormal science yoga and the evidence for extra ordinary psychic abilities.,2013.  Entangled minds extrasensory experiences in a quantum reality, 2006. The noetic universe, 2011. And the latest one, as far as I know, is real magic, and ancient wisdom, modern sciences and a guide to the secret power of the universe 2018. Have I got that right?
2
Speaker 2
2:14
That is correct. With one slight exception. It is that the noetic universe and the conscious universe are the same book. Okay, it was retitled in 2015 or 2016, or maybe even earlier, it was retitled because a company in the UK wanted to buy the rights. And they called it the noetic universe because at that time, a Dan Brown movie came out called The Lost Symbol, which was all about the Noetic Sciences. And so they were capitalizing on the success of that movie to use a previous book and I asked them, could I do a new edition because that originally came out in 1997. Right? And they said no. So I said, Okay, we'll do what you want me to do then.
1
Speaker 1
3:09
I know. That's the power of those publishers, right? Yes, yeah. Well, speaking of the noetic universe, well, why don't we start with that if it's alright with you? What is meant by noetic? Can you just sort of unpack that for us, please?
2
Speaker 2
3:25
Well, in its simplest form, it means deep intuition. So intuition is knowing without knowing how, you know, okay, a deep form of intuition is similar to the way that William James put it, that in noetic experience is where you know, something in an intuitive way. But you know it with a deep conviction, that it is correct. And of course, you don't know how you know that or you don't even know where the conviction comes from. But when you check, you turn, it turns out that you're correct.

3:58
When you say you check, how do you check for that?
2
Speaker 2
4:01
You verify that the information or knowledge that you gain is correct based on some externally verifiable event or knowledge that you later learn?
1
Speaker 1
4:14
All right. So when you write about the conscious universe, akin, can you tell me what is meant by that? What is it what is a conscious universe?
2
Speaker 2
4:25
This was a title that the editor of the book thought would be a better title than the one I originally had. originally wanted to call this the subtle mind. Oh, yeah. No. So you don't want the word subtle on anything because people won't get it. So I said, Well, why the conscious universe? And he said, Well, the one of the implications of the phenomena that you're talking about is that consciousness meaning subjective awareness is not just something that is inside the brain. It is somehow spread out. It transcends the brain, in which case Is there doesn't seem to be any constraint to how far it goes, in which case maybe it covers the entire universe. So there's some degree of awareness, perhaps in the universe itself.
1
Speaker 1
5:13
So, of course, by the universe, I suppose we mean all the planets and stars and all that stuff that's out there. Yes. So like, How could How could a planet How could Mars for example, be self conscious?
2
Speaker 2
5:31
Well, if you take a pan psychist approach, everything, all elements of matter and energy already have a component of it, which has sentience. This I mean, we experience a certain form of awareness internally. Pan psychism says that that is simply part of the fabric of reality. It is, of course, how an atom or a planet might feel about itself is something that we would know as human, but it would have elements of subjectivity to it.
1
Speaker 1
6:04
I like that phrase, I'm going to write that down elements of subjectivity. Yes. That's nice.
2
Speaker 2
6:13
And of course, this is one of the outstanding problems in science today. How do we account for subjectivity from a materialistic perspective where we assume that everything can be described in purely materialistic ways. And so I'm noticing among lots of colleagues now from lots of different disciplines, that the this so called hard problem, as a philosopher, David Chalmers has talked about it, it's becoming apparent that we can think of science as being a really excellent and effective way of understanding physics from the outside, you can look at things from the outside. But what we're talking about here is something like physics on the inside. Right we and the classic way of describing is when you taste a lemon, you know very well what it means to feel the taste of a lemon. But if you look from the outside for like from a neuroscience perspective, you can trace all the way down, probably down to the atoms inside a neuron. And that doesn't tell you anything about what it what it feels to taste a lemon. So this is physics on the outside physics on the inside. And it's the ladder, which is the real puzzle here.
1
Speaker 1
7:28
So then you would have no problems in terms of let's say, calling the cells in our bodies intelligent.
2
Speaker 2
7:38
Well, intelligence may be something quite different. I would say that the cells have a degree of sentience to them. Intelligence we more normally think of as things like cognition and ability to do mathematics and that sort of thing. Would there be something like intelligence I imagined so, but it wouldn't be something like what we imagine that we think about in terms of intelligence.
1
Speaker 1
8:08
Alright, well, that's very, very interesting. Certainly, certainly, a different way of looking at reality is not what, what does your scientific research tell us about psychic abilities?
2
Speaker 2
8:24
Well, again, there's there's kind of an outside way and an inside way of looking at that issue. from an outside perspective, we can do surveys and ask people, what are their experiences like? And what do they believe? So when you look at those kinds of surveys, you find that if you ask people, have you ever had a telepathic experience or a precognitive dream? Those surveys do not do as well in terms of the percentage of prevalence, then if you simply describe an experience without using those terms, so if you say that, have you ever felt that you heard the phone ring and you knew instantly who it was without even picking up the phone or hearing a ringtone or something like that? Or even better, just out of the blue, someone you haven't thought about in 20 years comes to mind? You don't even know why. And then you get an email from them. So if you describe these kinds of experiences, in those ways, the prevalence is extremely high. So it's it's not a simple majority, it is almost 100% Like in the 90 90% level. So you then can take a conventional explanation, say, well, it's coincidence. It's, it's, it's confabulation. It's problems of delusion. It's lots of, you know, probably a dozen different possible explanations. And so, the next step though, is you can say, well, what if that actually is the way it appears to be that there's some kind of mental connection there's actually getting information from it. distance or a future? How would we know that? Well, that's where the science comes in. So in order to test whether these things are objectively true, we go into the laboratory under controlled conditions, where you can do it tests that involve things like telepathy, and the feeling of being stared at without being able to sense them in any ordinary way, and pre cognition and a whole range of experiences that people would call psychic. And then you take the results of those experiments, and you do what you do in any other area of the life sciences, you do meta analyses to see if the effects are repeatable. And you go through that whole exercise. And by the way, there's about 140 years of experiments in this domain. And you end up with a conclusion that some cases of anecdotes that people tell you, in principle, actually involve real psychic effects. But in any particular anecdote, we can never know because, you know, there's so many other explanations that are possible. But we know that in principle, yes, these kinds of effects can occur.
1
Speaker 1
11:05
So the example that you gave about a telephone call coming in, and before you pick up the telephone, you kind of know who is calling? Is that what the sentiment?
2
Speaker 2
11:18
It could be? We usually use the phrase telephone telepathy as a way of describing the experience, then what would be
1
Speaker 1
11:28
go ahead? Well, sorry, what is pre sentiment? Because it's used? Yeah.
2
Speaker 2
11:34
Yeah. So pre sentiment is like pre cognition, except pre cognition implies you cognize, you know, consciously what's going to happen, pre sentiment is that you pre feel it. So you don't have a cognition, you don't know what it is, but you have a feeling of usually something bad is going to occur. So premonition is kind of similar term.
1
Speaker 1
12:02
So you have your last book then was, what about five years ago? Yes. Are you? Are you working on a new book? What's next in line for you?
2
Speaker 2
12:15
Well, for a while, I was thinking about writing a book on Practical Magic. Because the whole point about the book on real magic is that if you look at the esoteric traditions, and you are able to describe what magic is, in terms of the practices that people used to do, it turns out that is almost exactly what science has been studying in the form of psychic phenomena. And so I'm able to say, well, we have this large body of scientifically valid evidence suggesting that some of these things are real. And oh, by the way, it's almost exactly what people have been talking about in terms of magic forever. So I make I make the connection then between the esoteric traditions and this branch of science.

13:04
So what do you mean by magic?
2
Speaker 2
13:08
So if you look at the worldview of the esoteric traditions, we're talking about hermeticism, the Kabbalah just the whole range. They, they would be what a philosopher would say, is a form of idealism, that consciousness is primary in some way. And so that provides a worldview, where suddenly the mind is the most powerful thing that there is, in which case is the mind is primary over physics, then it is not constrained by notions of space, or time, or distance, or all of that. It's simply not. So the magical traditions and fall into three different practices. The practice is a practice of divination, which is perception through space and time, which is perfectly fine under an idealistic model. There's the practice of force of will, which is the books called grimoires, which are books of spells. They're, they're all about. Another way of thinking of it is that it's destiny engineering, you have a certain wish, and you want that wish to occur. And then you do some kind of spell some kind of practice and try to make that happen. So that's I would also call it force of well. And the third category is called theology, which is a combination of Greek words, which means God work, but what it actually involves is conjuring spirits, or invisible entities of one type or another, and getting them to do things on your behalf or simply communicating. So you have three categories of practices, divination, Force of Will theology, and in each class, you have different kinds of experiments that have been done, not on magic, but on various kinds of psychic phenomena. which fall into the same three classes. So my term then real magic is that this is not Harry Potter. It's not fiction. And it's not Harry Houdini, it's not stage magic. Those are pointers to something that in the esoteric traditions were considered to be real. And science is slowly beginning to catch up to the notion that some of those practices were actually based on real things. It's not the movies. You know, the problem with talking about these things from a scientific perspective is that the moment you say magic, most people think about stage magic. Exactly, yes. And then if they say, No, it's not that it's the real stuff. They'll say, Well, that's ridiculous. That's, you know, that's what we see in the movies. Well, no, anything that we see in the movies is not the real stuff. It's an elaboration. And we're talking about what is the underlying reality, if any, for the real kinds of phenomena? And it turns out that yeah, there there actually is some objective evidence that you can see in a laboratory, which is consistent with what people talk about as real magic.
1
Speaker 1
16:06
All right, trying to put this through my own filters here. So I have no difficulty with the first two groups that you discussed in terms of magic. But the third one, when you talk about spirits. I question about that. So do you do do you believe in spirits,
2
Speaker 2
16:30
I put myself into a position of agnosticism when it comes to spirits. And the reason is that there's roughly eight different classes of experiences, and a few of them are experimental classes, would suggest that something like that is going on. There's a problem with that evidence, though, we're talking about near death experience out of body experience, reincarnation, data, mediumship, all that stuff. The problem is that all of them can be reinterpreted in terms of psychic ability. So I'll give I'll give one example. So we've done a number of studies with mediums. So at least in Northern California, where laboratory is, it's easy to find mediums or like everywhere, every side street as a medium. So what we do is we find people who have a good reputation, and they've been doing mediumship as a as a profession for at least five years. So that's like our first stage of vetting if they can do something, bring them into the lab. And then there's a number of double and triple blind experiments that you can do with mediums to find out if the information that they're getting is verifiably correct. And you do this, of course, under conditions where they're they're not. They're not near the person, there's their quote, reading, you use a proxy sitter. So the sitter is the client, the mediums doing their mediumship thing, the client typically comes in and says, I want you to contact my dead uncle Bob. Right? So the medium does that, except with a proxy. So the sitter is not there, there's someone in the place of the sitter, because they've mediums like to deal with humans. So this human is like a secondary pointer to the one that they anyway. So they get they talk to aunt, uncle Bob, the dead uncle Bob, you take a transcript of everything they said, and you get rid of any time that Uncle Bob has mentioned. And now you have another sitter come in. And they want to talk to uncle George, who's dead. And so they do the same thing. So we have a bob transcript and a George transcript. You take out Bob and George. And now you give both transcripts to each one of the sitters. And you say, Okay, you were looking for for information about Bob. And you have two transcripts, which one do you think is the one that corresponds to Bob, since you know him best? And you do the same thing for the senator who was asking about George. And so this is a 5050. game now. Right? This should be 5050. Well, a good medium will get around 60%. And so this is under conditions where they can't use cold reading, because they can't talk to the sitter. They don't know in advance who they're going to talk to. There's lots of this kind of blindness that goes on to make sure that they can't get it by ordinary means, and they still get 60% Correct. So if you do enough mediums and enough trials, you can very easily get statistically significant results showing that mediums of getting information from somewhere. And then you say, Okay, well, does that mean that there's an actual dead uncle Bob that's communicating, or George and the answer is no, because we know that telepathy between living people also exists. We know that clairvoyance exists we know that these various kinds of psychic things exist. Maybe that's what the medium is good at mediums internal experience is they're talking to dead uncle George or Bob I mean, they sometimes can see them, they can hear them. That's their experience. That doesn't mean that that is objectively what's going on because we don't have a way of looking through their eyes. So I'm agnostic in the sense that we know that some mediums are quite good at getting this kind of information, we don't know. And oftentimes, they don't know where the information comes from, per se, they can recognize that we're always creating the world. And whether it's objectively correct or not the only way we would know that is through consensus agreement. Well, the consensus here is they get the information, the information is correct, more often than you'd expect, we don't know that there is an independent entity. So I have colleagues who have studied this just as long as I have, and they're completely convinced that there actually is some kind of an afterlife, and there's communication going on. And there's some interesting cases, it suggests something like that. I also know, people like myself who know the literature quite well. And I've done experiments, we're still agnostic, because unlike working with living people, where we know what's happening, we actually don't know what's happening in this case.
1
Speaker 1
21:13
So I have heard, it said that the information is out there, like, you know, like an old, an old radio or television broadcast that has been put out into the ether. And it never disappears, it stays there forever, is able to tune into that. And it doesn't have to be a ghost or a spirit or anything like that. It's just the information is out there.
2
Speaker 2
21:40
Yeah, sometimes a location can become known for being haunted, because people pick up information about the location itself, that they otherwise wouldn't know. We call it place memories. That says though a place can have memories, I have had experiences like that before, very unexpected, where I would either feel a very strong emotion or gain information in some way I don't understand. That's associated with a location. So maybe that is what's going on. Maybe there's memory everywhere.
1
Speaker 1
22:17
Yeah, maybe there's memory everywhere. Yes. So are you going to write this book about magic?
2
Speaker 2
22:24
Well, the book real magic is talking about the science esoteric link, the book that people afterwards, from a popular perspective, they want to know how to use magic, like, what do I do? And of course, the, the genre of books called affirmations, and is very, very popular, people are always trying to manipulate the world. And so I thought, well, I could do that. And then I started looking like, what books are already available in that topic. And there's a male, there's a million books on this. So I don't want to I don't want to write a book, where I can already go to the library and find pretty good books on that topic. I only want to write something that hasn't been written before. Like, I'm really thinking that now I'll probably end up writing something else. But actually, I'm so busy doing so many different projects now that I don't have time to write a book. So it'll have to come later.
1
Speaker 1
23:17
I understand that I understand that. So you started as a musician? The violin, I believe? Yes. So how did you move from musician into the noetic? Sciences? How did that transformation happened?
2
Speaker 2
23:36
Well, at the time, it was probably an accident. I can make up a reason retrospectively, but I don't I mean, who knows what your life is, when I started the violin when I was five? Was that my choice? No, it was my parents said this would be a good thing for you to do. So okay, did that turn out to be have some talent in it. And so I continued for the next 20 years with the expectation of myself and my parents, that I was going to be a professional musician. Because that's up to that point. That's basically all that I knew. And I was good at it. Somewhere along the lines, I realized, and no one ever told me this. And they should, that if you're going to be a professional musician, you are essentially an athlete. You are making your living with your body. And I've never been particularly strong. So I don't have the kind of stamina that you need in order to be a successful athlete. So it was wondering, for example, like people go out and exercise and they feel all pumped up and energized and stuff, all I would feel is exhausted. So whatever my genetic makeup is, is not set out to be an athlete. And so I would play an hour to four hours a day, every single day and I just was exhausted by it. So I figured this if there's anything else I can do, I should do that because otherwise this is not for me. So I start bid asking around when I first went to college, to friends of the family, you know what, what else could you do? Because I didn't really even think about anything else. So a number of our friends were engineers. They said, Oh, well, I like to take things apart and figure out how things work and stuff. I could do that, I guess. So I went into electrical engineering. Because at that point, I actually had been putting together radios and television set and things like that, I like to do that sort of thing. So I stayed in electrical engineering through my master's degree until I realized, I don't want to be an electrical engineer. Like I don't understand what it would be like to do that. But I don't even like it that much. So I switched into, at the time, there wasn't a curriculum for artificial intelligence. But that's what I wanted to do. So the I had two options at the University of Illinois, one was to stay in electrical engineering and worked on the hardware side of making new machines for AI. And the other was to go into the software side, right. So as it turned out, there was one professor in educational psychology whose interest was what we would today call artificial intelligence. That's why I switched. So I didn't know anything about educational psychology. I just knew that this professor was interested. And then so I went to him. So that's what I mean by the difference between having a life plan where you sort of you're narrowed in on exactly what you want to do that these are more or less sort of accidents along the way to figure out what do I want to do? Well, sometime in as a teenager, later in college, and in graduate school, because maybe because I grew up in a artistic household where I was a musician, and my father is a sculptor, my brother was involved in drama. My mother was doing yoga way back when that we always had a lot of books around in the house. And I was reading about the mystic masters of the east and about yoga and things like that, and wondering like anybody would wonder, are those stories even possibly true? Well, I didn't have psychic abilities that are and are those experiences that I read about when I read a lot of science fiction and a lot of fairy tales. And I figured, well, I don't know what's interesting. So I discovered when I was around 12, or 14, somewhere in there, I spent a lot of time in the library. And the librarian noticed that I was reading all of these books and magic and science fiction things that she said, Oh, you know, there is, there are other books you might be interested in. There were books on Paris psychology, which I had never heard of before. And so it opened my eyes to the notion that you don't have to take these kinds of ideas on faith. But you could apply methods to figure out whether or not it might even be true. And when I look reading these books, I found Oh, there is evidence, some of these things are really true. And at the time we're talking about, usually JB Rhine is was the most popular person at the time. So I always had in the back of my mind that if it was possible, to do work in an area where you're studying these kinds of mental effects. Well, that would be fun. So having that in the back of my mind, every time there was an opportunity that came along to study either as a, as a hobby to do these kinds of things part of work, I would do that. So that's what I did. So the reason why this became an actual profession, is because at the time I was at Bell Laboratories, yeah. And I had already been reading the literature quite a bit. And I ran across the idea that of mind matter interactions through various kinds of experiments. And one of the projects I was working on at Bell Labs at the time was, why do complicated machines fail. And the reason this was part of part of my job was because the division that I was in, was looking at why the switching computers that control the telephone network, they're pretty reliable. They're made to be Tripoli redundant. So they basically can't fail. But they do fail. And when they fail, the AT and T was losing million dollars a minute in revenue just through that one computer system that failed. And so there's a lot of effort then to say, Well, why why is this Tripoli redundant thing failing? It should it's made, so I can't do that. Well, so there's roughly 90 90% of the reasons for failure were figured out. But there was always like 10% leftover we have no idea why this has failed. And I thought, well, maybe there's some kind of mind matter interaction thing going on. Maybe a highly anxious person is somehow interfering with the behavior of the computer. So I proposed to him management to study this possibility. And fortunately, they were open minded and said, Well, that sounds interesting. Go do it. So I took the opportunity then to take a small amount of my time at Bell Labs, to visit other laboratories. At the time, we're doing this kind of research, and I got equipment to do it. And I started doing experiments in house. And I was able to confirm that what I had been reading about these mind matter interactions, I was able to get the same results, which on the one hand, I was thinking, That's ridiculous, because like this is this uneven part of mainstream science. And if it's true, it's like it changes everything, it's it says, We've totally missed something really important about the nature of mind and matter. So I went to a conference and presented the results. And shortly thereafter was recruited for what at the time was a secret government program that was looking explicitly at these kinds of phenomena. So the US government was interested in it, for two reasons. One was that there had been reports primarily out of Russia and China, that they had secret programs going on using these kinds of psychic abilities. And we needed to know whether it was a threat. A lot of it was about threat analysis. But the other half of it was, they had also found people who were very good at clairvoyance, and they were using it for espionage. So it was the process of being recruited for and then finally ending up on that project that completely convinced me at that point, because I was able to meet very talented individuals who had these these abilities, that not only is this stuff real, it is a lot more robust than is generally known when you're dealing with talented people. And that it represents a major scientific puzzle. It's telling us something about who we are our potentials or relationship to the universe to reality, that almost nobody is looking at. From a scientific perspective, it's saturated with within the esoteric and religious traditions, but science somehow has just set it completely aside, like it doesn't even exist. Or you could go to the DSM four or five, or whatever it happened to be at the time and say, Oh, no, these people are delusional. Well, we were saying no, that some people actually can do this stuff. So at that point, this was now in mid 80s, I decided that if it was possible to have a career, where this was what you were doing as a scientist, and preferably not in a classified environment, because there you can't talk about what you're doing, that that's what I wanted to do. So it took me until it was 35, to figure out what he wanted to do. But then I figured it out. And so since then, pretty much full time, that's what I've been doing. So, in a in a public environment, not a classified environment.
1
Speaker 1
33:07
So, I think we are talking about two different related but two different phenomena. One is that you can read about in quantum mechanics, where the presence of an experimenter influences the outcome. Yes. Right. And but then the other one is sort of psychic espionage or or reading or influencing the minds of others, consciously, which is a little bit different from the unconscious effect that an experimenters mind may have on the outcome of an experiment. Would you agree with that?
2
Speaker 2
33:50
I would change that slightly. I would say that quantum mechanics has two, two elements in it, which are the reason why it's often called Weird by in the popular press anyway. Okay. It's weird because unlike classical mechanics, if you observe a quantum system, its behavior changes. So that's one. The second element of it is it's non local relationships. So quantum entanglement suggests that things are connected non locally, not only spatially but temporally as well. So the connections are outside of spacetime. Well, as it turns out, psychic phenomena have the same to weirdnesses exactly the same. There are non local effects. And the not only the presence but the interaction of an observer with a quantum system changes his behavior. So quantum mechanics as we currently study in physics today, is looking at the very elementary extremely precise ways to show that entanglement is real and show that nonlocality is real and observer effects are real. What we're seeing with sight phenomena is not yet closely linked into and as an explanation for why we see these effects. But I would say that it is not a coincidence. That is physics has kept going, that it is found the same to strange things that we're finding in human experience, which which we call psychic, that it's not a coincidence. Some people will say, it is a coincidence, you're describing one mystery with another. And I'm saying no, they're both a mystery. And they're the same mystery in slightly different ways. So I use quantum mechanical metaphors to describe I think, what's going on here. And quantum mechanics is not the end of physics. It's in some respects, the beginning of interesting physics. And so I actually expect that I've been predicting this for many, many years, that as we learn more and more about how quantum reality in a large sense, how that understanding of the physical world, which is much more comprehensive than classical mechanics. And I will also put in relativity here too, because relativity is telling us that space and time are constructs, essentially, and related to each other. That as physics advances, deeper and deeper into the nature of reality, we will find that it converges more and more into the space where psychic phenomena will have an explanation in rational terms. We're not there yet. But when you look at the progression of science, in general, and in particular, in physics, and even more so now, in quantum biology, you're finding a direction that will eventually converge. And so people then ask me, Well, what when do you think that's going to happen, and I say it is happening now. We're right in the mix of it now. So just within months ago, there, there have been reports showing that the behavior of water molecules in the brain under an MRI can be demonstrated to actually be quantumly entangled in the brain itself. But the brain, of course, has enormous amount of water in it, at least h2o, and the h2o molecules are behaving as though it is the equivalent of a Bose Einstein condensate. Now, of course, when you are in an MRI, you're doing massive magnetic stimulation and so on. But the behavior than of the water molecules is not what you'd expect by a classical system. It's, it's what you'd expect by a quantum system. So on that basis, you can begin to see how not only do we know that quantum behavior exists in avian navigation, Magneto avocation and photosynthesis and a few other areas that have been found, it almost certainly is actually true in every living system. And not only just neurons or the brain, but probably the entire body. If you accept that as a possibility, and I think that is true, that automatically says that, it's that we evolved. So that part of us is brain centric. But the brain is not only in your head, there's quantum elements of it, which are everywhere. So this leads in, among other reasons, we're conscious universe, it's like it is literally everywhere in space and time. And so whatever we think of as the normal senses, it's some of that information is coming not from these senses, but from somewhere else. And so this is what I think we will eventually come to that we'll have a better understanding of how quantum phenomena manifest and in the body and the brain, we, as I said, will have something like somewhere between mathematics and a rational explanation as to why some people seem to be extremely good at being able to perceive information that is simply not here and now but there and then. And then on the other side, we will have a better understanding about why there's something about the observer effect. This is like being on the inside of quantum mechanics, there's something about being in the inside that can affect a quantum system at a distance at a distance. And if the quantum system at a distance happens to be another brain, well, then you have entanglement between brains. That's basically what my third book was about. Entangled minds.

39:30
spooky action at a distance.
2
Speaker 2
39:32
Yeah, except maybe then we won't have to call it spooky anymore.
1
Speaker 1
39:36
Right, right. Amazing. Very interesting. So how long have you been sort of into this the last 15 years, 20 years? How long have you been studying for years? years? So may I ask, how has that influenced your life like your personhood? How has this knowledge affected how you think and feel and behave in the world?
2
Speaker 2
40:07
That's a very good question. It would have, it would help if we had multiple lives. So we had a control system because, you know, I've been inside it in over a long period of time. So the way that that question is more often asked, which I have an easier answer for is, well, why is it important to know this? To answer your question, your first question, though, I found that I tend to get bored pretty easily with any one topic, especially topics where there's already a lot that's known. I feel. Yeah. And so one of the reasons why I was not sad to lose to leave Bell Labs, which many people can see is like, at the time, the pinnacle of, of big science. Now, who wouldn't want to work there? Well, yeah, it was intrinsically quite interesting. But I could already tell after four or five years that I knew exactly what the rest of my life would be like, at Bell Labs, you're well paid, you have golden handcuffs, you know. And I was I would simply bored, I got depressed at the idea that I'm going to, I'm going to continue doing this really making a better telephone. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's it wasn't for me. So I've always been looking for something that is so challenging. That actually, it requires maintaining a position of very high ambiguity, where you don't actually know what answers are yet. So where do you do that? Well, it's at the leading edge of what's known in the West, and I've put it as not just the leading edge, it is the bleeding edge of the unknown. That's where you're never going to be bored. Because you don't have answers yet. It's all fun of exploration. So that's when I just when I learned that that was even possible, I decided I want to be involved in an area of science, that is not only not going to be boring, but it's also meaningful, in a larger sense. And so that meaning comes about because after reading about history and problems of civilization, and all of it especially getting worse now, why is that? And so a case can be made, that the way that civilization has evolved in the way that the world is like spiraling out of control, is based on our assumption of who and what we are in our relationship to the rest of the world in the universe. Right. So if we had gotten our assumptions wrong, maybe that's one of the reasons why this isn't working very well, we need to better simply better understand who we are. And so I decided that, besides the psychic phenomena certainly is very challenging. It was something about the notion of consciousness, that there was also something that we need to figure out better what that is, and whether we got something wrong. So I didn't spend much time thinking about philosophy when I was in school. The older I got, the more I realized, I should have been studying philosophy all the way along, especially the philosophy of science and the philosophy, or the sociology of science, and the history of science, because all of them are absolutely critical to actually to beginning to understand these kinds of questions. But if you're a fledgling scientist, you almost never encounter those ever topics, because you have so much to learn that you don't have time to figure it out. It's only later after you kind of grasp the nature of what you're doing that you realize, oh, so that's what the philosophers were talking about. You know that that's why it's necessary to look at the assumptions and figure out what's what's right and what's wrong. Some of the assumptions about materialism are absolutely correct. I mean, it makes we've done all kinds of amazing things through reductive materialism. Some of it simply does not work. When it comes to understanding subjective reality. And it completely fails. When you take the idea that psychic phenomena are real. And they totally fails. If you accept that some mystical experiences are also exactly the way that they sound. So a mystical experiences, your subjective experiences is that you and the universe are one for a materialistic perspective. That sounds crazy. That can't be and yet, that's what's been reported by people throughout history to the present day is something we've missed. So what did we miss while you started looking at the other philosophies? I'm not sure for awhile. I was very interested in idealism as a possibility, because it matches magical traditions very well. That is what the esoteric traditions are like. I'm my current favorite today is dual aspect monism, which also can be found in the esoteric traditions because it essentially says as Carl Jung had the term of Gunas, Mundus, there there is one thing from which mind and matter and lots of other things emerge. We know Minds Matter, because we're familiar with it. But lots of other things might emerge, too. And we don't even know what that is. So why is it important that one of the first presidents of the institute where I work, gave an example of this, he said that the way that a lot of the world works in a way to a lot of science works as well is that you encounter a problem and you try to fix it. So the problem in the story is, you're walking along in the forest, and you come to a stream, and you find that there's a whole bunch of babies in the water floating downstream. And so the way that the most problems are solved as you start getting people to pull the babies out of the water, right? I mean, I think Bill Gates in this case, right? People need vaccines, and they're helping people with malaria and with anything and throwing billions of dollars at it perfectly laudable. But it fails to ask the question of, well, how did the babies get into the water in the first place? So you need to go upstream and find out first principles, what happened to make this problem occur? To my great surprise, we hardly ever look at that. Right? So the climate is spiraling out of control, and we have vast inequalities and wealth and so on will we want to fix that, and a lot of nonprofits, that's what they kind of do. Our institute is taking a broader approach on this and saying, We want to go back upstream, and look more carefully at what consciousness is taking as a working hypothesis that consciousness is non local, at minimum, and that it has it can do things like it's causal in some way that we don't currently understand, with a kind of a underlying faith that if we understood that better, we probably would end up with making a lot better decisions, because we wouldn't end up with a whole bunch of babies in the stream. The other thing is that, of course, every philosopher knows this, but I didn't until I started looking into it. That the the our current way of thinking about reality, and our role in it is completely nihilistic. There is no purpose or meaning to anything, it's all random, you die, it's over. That immediately leads to this quip that sometimes said that he who dies with the most toys wins. Which is a nihilistic way of thinking about reality that this leads to greed. It leads to the sense that there's not enough for everyone all of that. Well, if that philosophy is wrong, even slightly wrong, well, then that quip is wrong and in greed is wrong, too. So I'm preventing myself from being bored by studying very interesting phenomena, but it has much larger implications. So it's the combination of the meaning of what I'm doing and the interest from a scientific perspective. And what I'm doing that makes me very happy that I've been able to do this as my job for the past 40 years.

48:28
Do you have any children?

48:31
I have no children? No.

48:34
do you have students you teach?
2
Speaker 2
48:37
I have avoided management and teaching successfully for really my entire career. Although I do have, how many do I have now? I have three doctoral students. Because I have a, an appointment at a university. So I am expected to do something for that. So I have doctoral students.
1
Speaker 1
48:59
So then circling back to my previous question, what is it that this knowledge, this wisdom, that you have acquired over the last 40 years? How do you transmit that to your students?
2
Speaker 2
49:19
I do it through many, many, many interviews like this. This is not quite number 700, but it's getting very close. I do it through the popular books that I write through the documentaries that I do, and through scientific articles that we publish. So I have do a lot of outreach, not just the students but to everyone everybody's a student. But I don't have the patience, I think, to do classroom teaching. I did as a graduate student because that was part of that's how I got paid. That's how I got went through graduate school, but I never really enjoyed it very much.
1
Speaker 1
50:02
Well, this is all very, very, very interesting. I just have one more question then. Based on your studies and the subjects we have talked about what does being human mean to you?
2
Speaker 2
50:31
I can say that that is a question that no one has ever asked me before. So I don't have a prepared rift for it. 
50:40
I guess number 699 is different.
2
Speaker 2
50:43
Yeah, well, that's good. Yeah. I can usually predict in advance based on the nature of a podcast, what where the person is coming from or what they're likely to ask. So I, of course, looked up your other podcasts and something about you. And I figured, well, this will be a little bit different. It often is people who have medical or psychiatric training. So what does it mean to be human? Well, we are meaning machines, we live on meaning as much as we do on nutrition and everything else. And so each of us is trying to find a way to make our lives meaningful, in some way. So in my case, I, I figure that each of us has certain talents, my I took a long time for me to figure out that my talent was not going to be a musician took 3035 years to figure that all out. And so, I guess for me, then, what we need to do is what as Joseph Campbell, once said, that when asked us very similar question, like what do I do, I'm human, I have abilities, you know, I'm living whatever. His his advice was, follow your bliss. And that's what I've done. You need to first of all, figure out what your bliss is where, where do your passions lie? What do you want to do? How do you want to contribute to the world in a way that's meaningful to yourself and to others? And so my my bliss is twofold. One is, I have a need to learn everything. Which is, which is part of that is associated with the idea of being bored. Like, once I learned something that is boring, why do I need to keep doing that I don't want to do it anymore. So I have a need to absorb information from everywhere all the time, which is also a problem. And then I don't have much free time to do anything else. But accompany along with that. If you pay any attention at all, to what's going on now. And in history, you see an enormous amount of suffering, most of which is completely unnecessary. And so I want to find a way of doing what I'm doing that can help relieve suffering. So what does it mean to be human, for me is a combination of following your bliss and hopefully at the same time, figuring out a way for other people to follow their bliss too. Because it's basically as important as it is for you.
1
Speaker 1
53:18
Beautiful, thank you. Just just great. Just really great. Our time is up. So let me thank you, Dr. Raiden. for taking the time from I'm sure it's a very, very busy schedule, to share your insights with me and our listeners. And I wish you the best of luck in your continuing, continuing work and both work on yourself and work on consciousness of the universe. Thank you again. You're welcome. Take care bye bye.