To explore with one of the most prominent minds in
parapsychology the nature of consciousness, the condition of
science and the many mysterious lives of magic as a means to
change the world. This is Neon Galactic.
I'm James Falk Thanks for joining us.
Excuse my long silence. Technical difficulties and
demonic gremlins apparently combined dark forces this past
week to addle my hard drive and prevent publication.
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days are likely numbered. So, as I was saying, the snafu
Dragons have since been slain. The show goes on, and today
we're blessed with a guest who has done more to establish the
reality of sigh phenomenon in his career than virtually any
other researcher still working in the field.
Dean Radin, longtime parapsychologist and chief
scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a research
enterprise founded by astronaut and visionary Edgar Mitchell
Raiden's new book, The Science of Magic.
How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality is several things.
It reviews the exhausting evidence for Sigh phenomena,
indict the debunker class for its stubborn refusal to engage
with that evidence, then reminds us that a language and syntax
already exists by which society might understand and utilize the
reality of sigh for better living.
That language, of course, is magic with AK.
If you prefer to distinguish this modality from the top hats
and rabbits that illusionists long ago made famous.
Raiden's book reviews the experimental evidence and
character of Sigh, then translates those methods and
categories into the rather comfortable diction of sorcery.
The book reminds us that though we may be entering a new
paradigm for science, humanity has long understood and even
deployed psychic capabilities in a broad range of earthly, at
times even cosmic pursuits. He shares those ready made
notions with a new audience, giving his readers a clear path
into an efficacious age of mind over matter.
Along the way he describes the likeliest natures of reality
given the magical facts and underlines how such an exotic
subject relates on the ground to the broad spectrum and
vocabulary of everyday human experience.
Magic made real, then useful and finally practical.
Abandoning the self serious and rather gothic aesthetic so
common to those writing about magic and mind powers, Raiden
does much of the public's ontological heavy lifting here
by reminding us that even where the biggest mysteries in the
universe are concerned, there is as yet nothing new under the
sun. And he does all this with both
levity and charm. So the dark arts work to crack
you up. Thus truly abracadabra.
Welcome to the show Dean. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you, that was a a nice introduction.
Well, thank you. I deeply enjoyed your book.
I enjoy all your work. Of course, I think that I meant
it when I said that I think you've done more to prove the
reality of PSI than almost any other man in the field right now
or person in the field, not to be, you know, gender specific,
but your new book. Let's start there.
Can you sort of describe for us what your mission was and taking
on this book and what you hope to accomplish by reminding the
public that PSI and magic are very much related phenomena?
Well, so the previous book on a similar theme I I published in
2018 called Real Magic, and that was more or less an introduction
for the public on what is the status of cyber search, which
has been going on since the late 1800s.
And then to show that the basic phenomena that we study are
essentially the same as what the Western esoteric traditions have
called magic. The difference primarily being
that cybersearch is a scientific enterprise largely focused on
proof orientation, which means does this exist?
Do these phenomena exist? And then secondly, on
understanding the process involved and coming up with
theories to help describe it that would be compatible with a
scientific worldview. Whereas magic traditionally was
a practice. It was, it was like the the
pragmatic application of psychic phenomena in a wide variety of
uses. But also like most of our
historical documents, over the years, it becomes elaborated.
So our sense of Harry Potter is today influenced by her.
Yeah, our Harry Potter today is what we think of magic and the
way that entertainment portrays magic.
And so it's it's huge elaborations over what is likely
to be true. What we see in the laboratories
is real, but rather small effects.
We see it mostly through statistics, but that So what we
see a lot of things through statistics if if they have to
have a lot of variance in that. So that's, I mean, from a
scientific perspective, that's irrelevant that we we're
interested in this. Does this exist?
Well, yeah. So if PSI exists, magic is
essentially the same phenomena seen through history and
different cultures, then it essentially means that there's a
resurrection of magic that's happening.
Eventually. Science doesn't like to to use
the word magic because it's a placeholder.
We will come up with new names that won't.
We won't use magic anymore. We'll use some other name which
will be basically the same kind of phenomena.
And all of it, including psychic phenomena, is helping us
remember that what we are taught about who and what we are like
There are books that have titles like You Are Your Brain, Full
stop. That's not completely correct.
We, we are more than our brain. We still don't have a good
handle on what we mean by consciousness, but all of this
is revolving around the meaning of consciousness in some way.
And it looks like it is bigger to, it's difficult even to know
what label to attach to it. But it's, we are more than our
brain and our consciousness seems to be spread out in the
universe. And I think just today or within
the last couple of days, an article came out and a journal
published by the American Institute of Physics, which is
like mainstream physics, which the author is presenting a
theory or or a proto theory about how consciousness may be
fundamental meaning more fundamental in the physical
world, which is philosophical idealism.
And that maybe the physical world as we experience it
emerges somehow out of consciousness.
So it's presented in the in the public adds for this thing as a
new theory, new radical theory proposed, blah blah blah.
It's not new. It's been taught by in
philosophy for thousands of years.
Exactly. It's.
What? Is new.
What's new is that it shows up in a mainstream physics journal.
So they go back to the book for a minute.
One of the the opening gambit in the book is that it's no longer
that we might eventually see some sort of paradigm change
eventually, someday. We are right in the midst of it,
and it's so obvious now for anybody who's paying attention
that we're beyond the knee of the curve.
That means that that when consciousness is seen as a
serious scientific topic is already settled.
That's already the case when things like sigh and magic also
start to penetrate into the academic world and to the
scientific world is imminent. Now, I don't know whether that
means next week or 10 years from now, but it's I can feel it
palpably that that's where we're headed.
What is going to be the mechanism for that, do you
think? I mean, like, because when I
read your book, it's almost frustrating because you describe
so eloquently the massive amounts of evidence that have
accrued and the statistical, you know, assuredness of the
phenomenon by virtue of, you know, all of the combine studies
throughout the last 100 years. And it's like you have to be
wearing blinders not to accept that there is something going
on. And you mentioned to the, you
know, the effect size. And maybe that isn't as dramatic
as some folks would like. It's not like Harry Potter.
But there's something that consistently happens.
That evidence is out there and it's been out there for a long
time. And yet you have people like you
quoted in your book who are like, I'm not even going to look
at the evidence because it's impossible.
So therefore it doesn't happen. You know, the just full
shutdown. What can possibly breakthrough
that? Do you think that hasn't already
occurred? I guess?
Yeah. So there's a probably a parallel
here with what is happening with the UFOUAP business and that
there are more and more academics who are willing to go
public with their ideas. And we've done surveys where we
specifically asked scientists and engineers, have you ever had
experiences that fall into one of these 25 different
descriptions? All of them were psychic, but we
didn't use any terms like that. We just said, did you have the
feeling of being stared at and then you turn around and the
person is there, Those kinds of things.
So each one of them potentially could have an ordinary
explanation, but we've also tested these in the lab and we
know that there's also an actual psychic explanation for each one
of these things. So, and we we asked people how
many of these 25. And among scientists and
engineers at elite universities around the world, which you
would expect to be the most skeptical, 93% said, yes, we've
had at least one of those experiences and on average 8.
So the, from an experiential point of view, the game is over.
We, we know that these things happen, happens to everybody,
every, every strata of society and education.
But there has been a very, very strong taboo.
The woo woo taboo has been around for a very long time.
Yeah. So it's, it's pushed by what we
can call it's a kind of conventional scientific
perspective, which is skeptical and proper.
And also by religion, many religions think this is all
demonic, so you shouldn't do it. And so you have pressure from
both, both sides that have been trying to corral what will we
talk about in public. And it's completely culture
bound. So I've, I've gone to India and
talked to universities there and it's like, well, it's not even a
big deal. In fact, the existence of
psychic phenomena is so well accepted that there's basically
nobody in India who's studying this stuff because if well, it's
self-evident. Why would you want to study
that? It's like studying air or
something. You know what, what are you
doing? So the, the culture, boundless
of it is very clear. And, and what we can say is the
Western educational system, it's sort of like the the US and big
chunks of Europe are still extremely skeptical about this
stuff that is not true elsewhere in the world.
And so there's an advantage to studying these kinds of
phenomena within a very skeptical academic setting.
You know, I mean, this is not not the case everywhere in the
public, people accept this. But even within the public,
there's a taboo about what you talk about.
Some people are comfortable talking about these things.
But as we know, anybody who portrays themselves as a
psychic, whether real or not, the image as society puts on
that person is tinfoil hat. Well, look at the parallel with
UFOs. For a long time it was Farmer
Bob with a tinfoil hat. That's the image that was being
pushed. So they have to step back from
that a little bit and say, well, who's pushing it?
Like what? What?
Where's that coming from? Some of it, as I think I I
mentioned in the book, is a disinformation campaign very
similar to the same campaign with UFOs.
And so now you say, well, why would there be a disinformation
campaign? What are they trying to hide?
Well, during the Cold War, at least for the psychic side, it
was clear that we had a Stargate program going and we knew the
Russians did, and we kind of suspect the Chinese did as well.
Those programs are probably still going both in the US and
everywhere else. But there's somewhere between
embarrassment and pressure from religious fundamentalists who
say this is demonic and we don't want the government to pay for
it. So again, it's all completely
culture bound. That's unfortunate.
It also is tantalizing because, you know, as one who follows the
UFO subject quite closely, you know, you see all of the, you
know, sort of conspiracy theories and the actual fact of
legacy programs potentially that have been embedded in secret
government, you know, hangers for for decades.
And you have to wonder that there, you know, there was the
Stargate program and its follow ONS that we're doing remote
viewing work. But how deep does the psychic
rabbit hole go within government?
I mean, you know, we can imagine all kinds of things you hear
about psionic children potentially being taught early
through like gifted and talented and education programs that
maybe we're trained up to be, you know, pilots of these things
or at least to, you know, communicate with them.
It just raises all these questions about how
fundamentally aware is the government of these facts and
what does it mean that they are still trying to keep it secret?
Do you have you ever come across anything like that that seemed,
you know, as someone who is obviously, you know, very good
and accomplished an experimentation in this field?
Have you ever come up against a program that seemed like it was
government funded, that maybe had some moral, you know, qualms
or issues surrounded with it that you kind of got a bad taste
in your mouth about? Well, in the Stargate program,
we were somewhat aware that at least in the Russian program,
that they were not adverse to seeing whether an individual
could affect another person's mind or body for for health
reasons or just to influence their decisions, that kind of
thing. And we didn't do that.
In fact, the director of our program for a long time was
completely convinced that any form of psychokinetic influence
did not exist. And so that wasn't part of the
program at all. The, the only thing we were
looking at was essentially clairvoyance and its new name,
remote viewing and trying to figure out why are some people
very, very talented in that domain and others are not.
And we, we never figured out what that was.
Today with genetic methods, we have a chance to, to look for a
possible genetic underpinning for that kind of talent, because
we know that talent in virtually any other domain does have a
genetic basis. I mean, you don't even need to
go to genetics. You just look at the sons and
daughters of great basketball players, you know, and every
other domain, that's the way it is.
So it's always a combination of nature and nurture.
So the nature part is the genetics, the nurture is, are
you brought up in an environment that would help push that, that
predisposition? Because if you're not, you may
never know that you have that talent.
So, so are there programs that are using nefarious means to, to
use psychic abilities? If there are, I don't know about
them. So I, I've been out of the
classified world for a long time now.
And I do know because somebody told us about a month ago that
the government does have a remote viewing program because
she told us in a in a public setting and she would know it's
almost certainly not classified because in those, in that
context, you just don't say things like that.
So that means that it's quiet, which in many ways is actually
better than classified because in a classified system, there's
all kinds of rules of what you can say and what you can't say.
And you, you, you don't talk about it except that there are
millions of people who have the right classification to know
what you're doing. And so if you want something to
really be quiet, you have two choices.
You either put it into the deep black where only people who are
read in on the project can under and know that it's there, or you
just make it private. Just like a, you know, company
will have proprietary information.
Well, we have no idea what they're doing at this point and
you can't get it either. There's no Freedom of
Information Act. Exactly so it can stay buried
for the long term and there's no oversight ultimately.
Which seems to be the case with the legacy program with UFOs,
yeah. Exactly right.
And if the 2 are related, like has been claimed recently, I
could see that there would be, you know, complementary programs
and development that, you know, would be off book and doing
things in secret. You mentioned the genetics of
it. And I just had a thing that I
saw on X which I wanted to ask you about.
It claims to be claims that you have discovered the genetic
route of psychic ability. And I wanted to ask you how I
mean, I'm not if that's true, I've never heard that before.
But then also, how closely examined have we looked at the,
you know, the genes behind this sort of thing?
And are we honing in any sense where we can begin to, you know,
identify what that genetic mechanism might be?
Do you remember who wrote that on?
XI don't. It was a video quote and it was
just something that I saw on my scroll and I'm like, I'm going
to talk to him. I should mention that to him.
Well, OK, so we we do at the institute.
They call it Gene 7 or something like that, or yeah, I don't
know. It was weird.
Well, OK, we, we have a program we call Side Genes at our
institute. And this is interestingly, you
know that Gary Nolan from Stanford is one of the main
figures in the whole thing, UFO thing.
So Gary came to our institute one day and said wouldn't it be
interesting to look at the genetics of not only psychic
people, but people have UFO contact experiences.
And there's a number of reasons for that which I'm not, I'm not
clear yet whether that's public information.
So I won't repeat what Gary what Gary said, but.
It, it, it did encourage us 'cause we've been interested in
this for a while and encouraged us to get a grant to study
people who said that they were psychic from psychic families.
And then we vetted that they actually have some talent versus
people who never said they had any psychic thing happen and,
and no one in their family ever said it either.
So we found a very small group of people, like a dozen on each
side and got their DNA into the full genome and did a
bioinformatics comparison between the two.
And we found a difference. So with a, when you find a
difference in a very small case control study as this is, you
never know is that was that a fluke?
Most statistically significant, but it's too small to make any
conclusion. So we've just recently submitted
a new analysis where we got the DNA from people who did 23andMe
and ancestry.com, those kinds of places which you can get your
genome. So we, we got that from about
100 people and they all filled out a questionnaire and
different kinds of experiences that they had.
And so now we're looking at the correlation between the various
snips, the little pieces or sequences of the, of the genome
versus how they responded to these various questions on what
kind of experiences you had. And again, we find that there
are some snips, little sequences that are related to different
psychic abilities. The same ones as before.
No different ones that This is why we need $10 million to do
this, right? Of course.
So like, like I, I have frequent discussions with people who are
looking at the genetics of schizophrenia, which is now
pretty well established. There are genes that are passed
down and if you have it, unfortunately likely to get
schizophrenic at some point. So those required 10s of
thousands of cases and controls. That's how you find what those
genes are. And it's not a gene, it's
constellations of genes. It could be hundreds of genes.
But we also know through similar studies that there are
constellations of genes that end up with different kinds of
intelligence. So the two categories are called
crystalline and fluid, which sort of tell what we're talking
about. South.
A crystalline intelligence is like a highly analytical person
and a fluid intelligence is someone that's very creative and
sometimes they don't know a lot. They they don't necessarily
overlap. So you can have people like
either under that spectrum and they have different sets of
genes. So again, the a large chunk of
our personality, our predilections, food allergies,
you name it, medical issues do have a genetic basis.
Some people don't like to hear that because then it sounds like
we're we're destined to have certain problems and certain
talents and you got it or you don't.
So, you know, it doesn't give us the sense of free will and
flexibility that we'd like to imagine.
And it that complaint is does have a real basis because
there's also an epigenetic element here.
So training, practice, context, what you eat, environment, all
of that. It also makes a big difference.
So you're not. Going to activate sometimes
those genetic triggers, right, But and that can be a bad diet
or whatever, yeah. Yeah, so the the environment
makes a big difference. Even personality and who you
deal with all all of these things make a difference.
Again, it's nature and nurture. So you're not locked into your
genetic basis. On the other hand, if you're not
probably 610 or above, you're not going to play professional
basketball no matter what you do.
Maybe. There are a few exceptions like
that, but they're extremely rare.
Very unusual. People who are able to be in
professional basketball and not be at least 6 feet tall.
I can't think of any off hand but on the.
Other Spud Webb might be 1, maybe I don't.
I'm not a basketball guy, but the name sounds.
Yeah, well, I'm not either, but you know, you wouldn't.
Have you ever been in the in the in the same room in proximity
with actual basketball players? It's like looking at giraffes.
I mean, they're, they're mutants as compared to the average
population. So OK.
Same, by the way, is true for for football players and also
professional wrestlers. So I was once on an airplane.
There was a bunch of professional wrestlers there and
they were so big. I didn't know that a person can
be that big. I mean, just massive.
I felt sorry for them because they all look exhausted.
Probably because you know what they do anyway.
But they're also fitting into an airline seat.
If you are that large, there's got to be a massive challenge.
They they had a squeeze in, yes. Absolutely.
So a question I have for you that I mean, sometimes when I'm
considering this stuff, my own internal skeptic kicks chimes in
and I and I hear things like, you know, we're bound in some
sense by our genetics in terms of our personality and how our
mind works and how intelligent we are.
But then there's also the idea that I've come to really embrace
enthusiastically is that our personalities or our minds are
dispersed in a larger, you know, consciousness and that this is
all sort of emergent the world from consciousness.
How do you rectify the two in your own thinking?
Well, as long as we are embodied, we're we're stuck with
the physical structure that we have.
So it, while you can be a philosophical idealist and
imagine everything is emerging out of consciousness, that
doesn't necessarily mean it's your consciousness.
Like you can make a distinction between little C consciousness,
which is sort of my experience, and big C consciousness, which
is the whole shebang. So I'm a little piece of
something much larger, at least that's my perception of it.
In which case maybe the physical world does emerge out of big C
consciousness in some way. But I personally don't have much
control over that. I can control in the sense of
minor magic, minor psychic stuff, things sort of here and
now, but big things like I think I'll create a universe today.
I, I don't think I can do that. So, and maybe it's my belief
structure that's preventing me from actually doing it.
I hope not, because then if you got one person's a little bit
off, they can just decide, well, this, this universe is finished
now. I would prefer that wasn't the
case. So while we are embodied, we
have certain capabilities, we have certain limitations.
And so to deny that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Even if it was an illusion, it doesn't make any sense because
it's, it's like we're constantly reminded of it.
We know about our physicality and what it can do.
So is there a genetic basis then to talent?
We can measure it, we see it. It doesn't seem to be an
illusion. It doesn't go away if we don't
like it. So this is the, you know, we put
on your, your hard science hat and say, well, even though yes,
consciousness may ultimately be the fundamental ground, there's
only so much where we can push against it and, and simply
decide that that's not the case. That doesn't mean, of course,
that there isn't. And then then a measurable
effect of consciousness on the physical world.
It's more as, as John Wheeler said, it's a participatory
universe. We are engaged in some sort of a
dance. And yet both sides have
limitations on it. So the Super, super psychics
that we hear about, they're a little bit less.
They're looser in terms of the limitations.
They're able to push the world maybe in larger ways and
occasionally spontaneously. We do see large things happen,
but it doesn't seem to be under conscious control.
It makes me, you know, it's sort of that question of how much of
does the, you know, the awareness or, or sort of the
higher self shape its own vehicle in in the housing, you
know what I mean? Like if there is a sort of a
larger Uber being that is encapsuled within our our meat
suits, maybe there's some shaping that happens pre birth
or or whatever else that reflects some of those deeper
interests. Those are questions we can't
answer, obviously, but fun to think about.
Well, and I mean, even just look at the placebo effect, your,
your belief can change how you are physiological,
physiologically operating and you can make yourself well or
I'll depending on what you believe.
So this is all still from a mainstream perspective.
It's all like inside the body, It's psycho neuro immunology.
It's like inside. But we've done studies looking
at can you affect somebody's nervous system at a distance?
Yes, you can. And they're completely unaware
of it, but you can measure that it's happening.
So we could also influence somebody else's behavior, or
actually more like attention. We can affect attention at a
distance and likely behavior too.
Although I don't know that anyone has actually done an
experiment like that. OK, put that on my To Do List.
I was going to say, where's the notebook?
Well, so it'd be simple tasks like you know there just pick an
object at random in meanwhile you have somebody trying to
influence and pick that one. Well, there have been tests like
that. There have been there like ESP
tests where from one perspective you can see it is purely passive
to a classic. One was done by Charlie Tart
years ago where you take 8 playing cards and you arrange
them on a circle and now you're trying to mentally influence
other people at a distance who had the same cards and to
arrange them the same way on the circle.
So there's two ways of thinking of it.
One is they get a mental picture of maybe I should put this card
over there and I want to put this card over here.
The other way of thinking of it is I'm going to influence you to
put the card over there. Well, discriminating between
those two possibilities is not so easy in an experimental
context, but nevertheless, I can imagine we could figure out ways
of doing experiments where you're literally trying to
influence somebody to do to, to pick something, to do something
as a decision. And I would suspect that that
would work. Your book has an example and
maybe I'm misreading what you're talking about, but do you guys
seems to influence someone to call you or call someone late at
night that wasn't on their typical call list?
And when they called, they're like, I don't know why I felt
like I needed to call you, but I did.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. That's about as close to magic
as as we've ever done. So people know about remote
viewing, people. Many people know about
associative remote viewing. This is manipulative remote
viewing. And it, it was created almost
from a theoretical perspective where we're looking at how do we
know the difference between a precognitive effect, where,
where it looks like there's some kind of information from the
future that ripples backwards in time.
So it's retro causal versus a causal push, which we can call a
psychokinetic effect, which is forward in time.
Well, so we're talking about effects that are pushing through
time in the forward and then something from the future coming
back. And it from an experimental
point of view, it's very difficult to know which, where's
the influence coming from? And if you go way down into the
quantum world, the present is influenced by both the past and
the future. Future boundary conditions and
fast boundary conditions are both kind of reverberating to
make the present, at least from that micro perspective, this is
not so strange. The question is, does it also
work in a macro scale? So manipulative remote viewing
is using precognition of a future event to 'cause that
future event to, to actually happen.
So that's, that's how we did it. I mean, I have the description
in the book. I hope it was clear enough so
that, you know, if you wanted to try it, you, you could just
follow the, the steps involved and see if it works.
So in that case, a highly accurate remote viewing would
predict that a random number generator would produce a
certain output in the future. Otherwise it wouldn't close the
causal loop that a precognition creates.
And so we did that experiment. The random generator gave the
right number, we gave feedback, it closed the causal loop,
everybody was happy. And then we freaked out because
it worked. So the larger question is, what
else can you force happen in the future?
So a colleague of mine, very, very smart, very straightforward
physicist who it would be the last person in the world you'd
imagine would be completely on board with remote viewing and
all of this stuff. But nevertheless, it's part of
this invisible College of lots of people are interested.
So he did an experiment where he did a a precognitive remote
viewing, got very good results in it.
And the thing that would have to happen in the future to close
the causal loop was for somebody that he randomly selected from
his contact book to call him at a certain time on a certain day.
And so that so that that was the setup.
OK, so that person, so we, he was in a pub with some friends
and at the appointed time the selected person called him.
Everybody was thinking what in the world is happening?
But more importantly, the person who called was very angry
because if somebody would never call him before, would certainly
not call him at 10:00 at night and was angry because he didn't
know why he was calling, but he felt compelled.
And so this suggests that there is a way to influence people and
which makes us uncomfortable because, you know, we and of
course, the other example I give in in the book is my own
synchronicity where I was manifested to appear to somebody
else. And I, I think I have free will
and I didn't feel like I was compelled to do anything.
But nevertheless, I show up at a door, the door opens and the guy
practically passes out because he was willing that to occur.
So yeah, all of this if if you start thinking about the
implications throughout strong psychic phenomena, whether it's
spontaneous or not, it does it makes you feel destabilized.
And that may be yet another reason why a lot of this is
suppressed, because it's a little bit freakish.
And I hear from people all the time who have premonitions of
airplane crashes and things like that.
And then they all feel very guilty afterwards that they
didn't let anybody know because as though it's unlikely that
they caused it, but at least that they didn't, they didn't
know where to go or how to tell somebody that they had this
premonition. So.
Sound like a total nut job. I mean, obviously that's part of
probably resistance to acting on those things is like people are
going to be like, what are you talking?
About well, not only that, but if you do it and which may
involve a crime, you can be charged as how do.
You know, yeah, yeah, absolutely aforethought or whatever.
To get back to magic a little bit.
I'm interested in terms of your own personal journey.
You've been doing this research on PSY and you've done a lot of
it. At what point did you begin to
look to magic personally as a way to kind of experiment with
the forces involved? Was that a conscious decision on
your part to say, well, this is working in the laboratory, maybe
I can do some things in my own personal life to kind of make my
life better by doing some of these things that I think may
work on the same principles. Or how did that happen?
I think I had been doing that all along.
I I just didn't think of it as magic because we have done lots
of experiments looking at the role of intention in pushing the
physical world around. Mostly about things like my
career, my grants and all of the things, sort of everyday things
that you would think about as as a person.
And then basically just operationalized those same kinds
of things and experiments. So it's not different.
It's in the and even the idea of magic, like the relationship in
magic and PSI. I'm certainly not the person,
the first person to realize that there have been a few other
books and more importantly within Cy research, within
parapsychology, at least at the professional level.
The idea that the the debate as to whether we are shaman or
scientists has been talked about a very long time.
Because when you get in you, you begin to get interested in these
kinds of things. You realize aren't the phenomena
that we're talking about like basically a shamanism or
magical. Well, of course it is.
That's exactly what we're looking at.
But there's even a taboo within cyber search.
You don't talk about it. It's like Fight Club.
You don't talk about Fight Club. And so the Fight Club here is
how do you portray what you're doing to very skeptical other
academics so that you're properly scientific?
Well, you don't talk about UF OS and you don't talk about psychic
stuff. And there's a whole bunch of
things you don't talk about. It's the social contract that we
have of what we're what we're going to express publicly.
Nevertheless, I think virtually everybody who becomes seriously
interested in Sai phenomena, especially if you're involved as
a scholar or scientist, you're very well aware that they're the
magical ideas and what we do in the laboratory are essentially
the same thing. But you're quiet.
You, you don't draw that. You don't draw attention to that
because it would not look scientific.
Well, I got tired of that because the the fact is that
what we're doing does overlap with magical ideas to a very
strong extent. And the fact that some academics
are uncomfortable with that is their problem.
It's not mine. And like I was mentioning
before, I think it gives people a ready language that most
people already kind of know or at least have some familiarity
with to discuss these things and actually have the exactitude
rather than being like having to create a whole new nomenclature
around, you know, this new mysterious aspect of reality.
There's structure that already exists.
And so therefore people can kind of get acclimatized.
A bit of a danger though in making the the connection too
obvious and that is that from a from a lay perspective, magic is
still imagined as though it's entertainment like manifestation
is very wildly popular thing and psychokinesis that we study in
laboratory is essentially the same thing, just on a micro
scale. But it when it, when you push it
into the occult world, in the magical world and witch talk and
all of that stuff, the claim is large effects.
Typically that's not what we see in a laboratory.
Now there is a, there's a difference going on.
The magic is real world stuff, real world motivation, desires
and so on, which tend to be bigger.
Just in general, just in terms of the push in a laboratory,
we're we're working in a completely secular environment.
Where the motivations are imposed by the experimenter.
So the from the subjects point of view, they could care less.
It's just like they're going to do it because you ask them to do
it and maybe you give them a little bit of money or maybe
they're a student getting credit on a course, but much, much
lower motivation and meaning associated with these
experiments. So it's not too surprising that
the results are much smaller. The difference is in a
laboratory, we it's under high control, so we're able to
exclude all of the conventional explanations for a result.
Whereas in the real world, most people, especially operating
magicians, they don't care how something happens.
They want fill in the blank and they want that and they don't
really care how it happens. And so there's huge room for
things to be coincidence, to somehow be a synchronicity, to
be actual physical, psychokinetic, whatever or
chance. I mean, it doesn't matter as
long as the outcome occurs. Well, from a scientific
perspective, that becomes less persuasive.
And so we, we don't want to make it sound as though Cy
researchers are doing magic in the laboratory like Harry
Potter, because that's not what we do.
It's still science using the same methods and tools and
techniques and whatever. But but nevertheless, the
phenomena are more or less the same.
That's that's, I mean, that's one of these stories in in this
book. And it seems like that one of
the most compelling aspects of your argument in the book was
really the potential for what might arise out of all of this.
I mean, it just seems like we're barely scratching the surface of
methodologies for the deployment of this stuff, even though we
have this history of magic and whatnot.
I mean, the modern world has never really embraced this
stuff. And so when that does happen, as
I'm sure it probably will, there will be an explosion of study
and innovation and progress in this regard.
And it makes you wonder, you know, the future could be a very
exciting and different place than what we're living in right
now. And that's really, you know,
electrifying in a way. And it's kind of scary in
another way because the purposes that magic can be put to our
limitless. And, you know, like you were
saying before, if people can remote influence or do things of
that nature, that can potentially be scary.
And in fact, people may be already doing it.
And I have questions about sort of what might be incidental A
cult where people just innately understand things about belief
and intention and have the kind of personality where they can
make magic happen just by virtue of their the force of their
personality. And I think there are some very
public people in American Society right now who may have a
little bit of that kind of magic power because of the virtue that
they affect that they seem to have on the rest of the world.
And those effects aren't always good, you know, How do we combat
that kind of power if it materializes?
Yeah, unfortunately humanity does not have a great track
record on using knowledge that comes out of the scientific
world and creating technologies. So some of it is is nasty
business coming out of a profit oriented society.
Like we will take something and just push it as hard as we
possibly can. And then people don't want to
lose the money from that. And like the oil industry is a
good example. We could be putting that money
into something that doesn't foul the environment, but people
don't want to because they're already quite wealthy with the
with the way it was. And lots and lots of examples in
the medical business as well, where something is invented and
turns out not to be so good, but you know that.
But at least they are in most cases.
I know a lot of people in biomedical research and to a
person, they are trying to help people, help humanity, help
individuals. There's always questions and
uncertainty about about medicine because it's still a practice
more, more or less. It's not really, it's not a
science yet. And we're kind of moving in that
direction. But there's a lot that's still
very uncertain because people are different.
The problem is that when all of the human vices come into play,
especially greed, the the whole system gets completely screwed
up. And so, yeah, we developed.
There are already people very interested in developing psychic
technologies. Well, what would those be used
for? Well, it could be all you can
think of. A whole bunch of positive things
and a whole bunch of negative things that becomes a brave new
world. It it would change a lot in
society. So one of the reasons, one of
the of the outcomes of being interested in the side genes
project was if we did develop and we we knew what, whether it
was an intron sequence or an exome, meaning the, the protein
creating version of genes or the epigenetic switches.
If we discovered which ones would like, which switches have
to be turned in order to make somebody a super psychic, Is
that a good thing or a bad thing from a scientific point of view?
I became interested in is it possible?
Like could we make some sort of compound and create people like
that, which is the The Wrath of Khan from Star Trek?
Can we do that? We are we are able to do that
now. I mean, we don't have all of the
all of the answers yet what to do genetically, but we can we
genetically manipulate people to create enhanced people.
Yeah, we're very close. So I create, I Co founded a
company to do that. And so it sounds a little like a
paradox in that this is completely mainstream
materialistic manipulation of of brain genetics.
And yeah, I'm studying consciousness that goes
throughout the universe and doesn't care where it happens to
be. But again, the reason why it
actually makes sense is because first of all, there is a genetic
basis to talent. And we have the ability to do
genetic manipulation. And if we had a lot of super,
super psychics to work with or we can create one on demand, we
would know way more about the nature of the phenomena that
we're dealing with. Because otherwise it's really
difficult to find someone who is extremely good at these psychic
tasks and can do it on demand. That's that's what you need in a
laboratory in order to make fast advances.
So this would provide a potential way of doing that.
Who would be the potential market for the for that kind of
technology or manipulation? Everywhere, everything you can
imagine. Anybody who needs to make a
decision, anyone who wants to make a new kind of metallic
alloy, Anyone who wants to advance a scientific area.
Anyone who is interested in pulling knowledge down from the
rest of the universe and being able to understand it to the
extent where they can then use it, which is like potentially
infinite as far as we know. So you're basically talking like
taking a medicine of some sort or a like a, a potion, you know,
to use the nomenclature and enhancing whatever genetic
ability they have with the intake of that particular.
That would sell like gangbusters.
You're absolutely right. There would be no limit to the
desire for. Are you looking at the real
estate yet? Because that's a sure path to
major dollars, man. Let's put it this way.
The the compound that we've developed, which is real tested
and published in major journals is an intranasal delivery system
for RNA interference edits. So you, you spray it up your
nose, it gets into the brain, diffuses through the brain.
And the, the point of all this is to up regulate or down
regulate certain receptors in the brain.
So we just take just one example is where we're focusing on 5 HD
two a which is a serotonin receptor.
The serotonin, that particular receptor is the primary receptor
in a whole bunch of psychiatric problems, including memory
deficits, so like dementia and Alzheimer's.
So the, as we know, unfortunately, that if you begin
to lose your memory, you're still an operating person, but
you don't, it's you, you can't function anymore because you
don't know who you are. You can't remember anything.
And so we've developed a method that would treat that in several
ways. One is it would reduce anxiety
at the same time, it would increase memory.
And it does that by going into the hippocampus, which is part
of the brain that is encoding memories.
And the one of the reasons why dementia happens is because as
you age, the the hippocampus starts to become hyperactive.
It like loses its coherence and starts going crazy and becomes
hyperactive and it can no longer encode memory.
So our compound when you push something through the nose, one
of the places it goes because it's two synapses away is the
old brain, which which is where the the limbic system is
including the hippocampus. So the.
Compound. Yeah, it's in the back.
So it goes to the hippocampus, it down regulates 5 HD two A and
causes it to calm down, takes the hyperactivity away and then
memory is restored. So we're at the stage now where
we're preparing to go into clinical trials.
So it's, it costs a lot of money to get where we are.
It costs way more money to actually get through the FDA
approvals and and then go into the clinic.
But but it's now it's just a matter of money and we know what
to do. So I mean.
Concretely enhances people's ability to access the field.
What would you call it? I mean, what's the what's going
on there? Well, we, we know enough from
both the genetics and the way that the brain works and does
various kinds of things that we do.
You know, there's there's a motor area and there's a visual
area and there's an area for memory storage.
So we we know enough from many, many decades of people doing
research on these things to know that if you could down regulate
these particular receptors in this portion of the brain, would
that help restore memory? And the answer is yes, as we see
in animals, because you biotech always starts with animals to
get it into humans. That's what the clinical trials
are for. We don't know yet at this point
what would that be like Subjectively, we're pretty sure
it would work because we've used human neurons in vitro in a dish
and we see the same effects in a dish as we do when we try it in
a mouse. So we know that the method
works. The next big step, which is
always the step in medical research, is it works in
animals. Is it going to work in a primate
and in a human? That's the sequence.
The typical drug, especially a new drug from the moment of
discovery to something you can go by, costs roughly a billion
dollars. It's incredibly expensive.
So we've accelerated the process a lot because now with genetic
medicines available, you can do things much, much faster.
And so it is similar to the way that the mRNA vaccines were
developed for COVID. So, you know, once you know the
sequence that you're trying to create, you can do it very
quickly now. And they've been millions and
millions of of doses very quickly as well.
So we, we can do this. We have the technology to do it.
Reminds me of that old TV show, the $6 million man.
We have the technology. We can rebuild him well.
So I mean, I just want to be absolutely clear, you're saying
that this nasal will enhance people's psychic abilities or?
No, I'm saying that what, what our, our compound that we have
now was designed specifically for dementia, for dementia and
anxiety because it would work for both.
That's that's what we're doing. So we're doing that partially
because there's a great need for it.
Absolutely. And and also because it's
relatively simple, it's a single receptor.
If we're talking about psychic ability, which would involve all
kinds of things different, lots of receptors, we're going to
talk, we're talking now about a polygenetic trait.
So that means that the compound would be much more complex.
We don't know how long it would take before things happen.
No, because we're talking about literally changing brain
structure here. You change the structure, then
the function will change. When you change a receptor or
you down regulate receptors, it takes a while to kick in.
And This is why we're probably familiar with SSRI drugs so that
the like Prozac and so on, the way that they work and the, the
reason why it takes weeks for every day you take this
medication takes weeks to kind of kick in is because it's
literally changing the structure of the receptors in the brain.
So we're doing the same thing and that it takes, it'll take
probably 2 weeks or so before the effect is actually felt.
It's exciting work. Not only that we can do it,
we're focusing specifically on the, on short term temporary
effects. So eventually the, the DNA
doesn't change, so the body will revert back to the way it was
before. Because we don't want, we don't
want to permanently change somebody until we know that
they're able to accommodate this effect.
So we, so the, the psychic enhancement can be in a order of
maybe a month, take two weeks to kick in.
It would stay for a while and then it would eventually go
away. But we also have the capability
of making it permanent. And so that's where the wrath of
CON, that scenario is no longer science fiction.
At some point, we can probably do it now to a large extent, we
can make permanent changes in people in terms of their brain
structure, and they would become CON.
So for people who don't know Star Trek, they have no idea
what we're talking about. That's going.
Who? Who doesn't know Star Trek?
Right. Has the government been sniffing
around this at all? Are they watching what you're
doing? Or is it so far removed from the
actual side element right now that they're kind of?
What do you think? We're not talking.
We're not at this point talking about a company making this
psychic enhancement thing because nobody would ever want
to fund that. So we're that's why we're
focused on. That sure, you could probably
find someone who would want to fund it actually.
I mean like. There were people, there were
very wealthy people who a want to live forever and BA lot.
Smarter than they are. Exactly right.
Yeah, so. There's, there's a big push for
longevity research. And so yeah, we're talking to
them not about the psychic part because they, they don't care
about the psychic part. They care about can I remain
cognitively active and healthy for as long as I at least as
long as I can, which maybe I don't know.
Some limit 120 years maybe, but maybe forever.
We can figure out the regeneration part which there
are people working on that as well.
The ability to basically modify genetics is like the key, right?
I mean, that's part of what the like the magic of this is.
It's, it's a large, to a large extent, yes, but there are,
there are also, there are various kinds of clocks in the
body. And so some clocks simply run
out after a while. So it requires regeneration of
organs and regeneration of tissues and proteins and so on.
A lot of that is controlled by genetics, but not all of it.
Some would like environmental decay after a while.
So the, the idea that you can like grow a kidney, you know,
take, take a piece of your own DNA and grow a new kidney.
OK, well there's a fresh new kidney for you that that came
out of your DNA so. Rejected.
It's perfect for you. Yeah, it's perfect.
And we're that far away from being able to do that.
So if you're wealthy enough, I imagine people can already do
that, even though probably not in the public domain.
But yeah, it's, I mean, we can do those things again now.
So yeah, psychic, psychic enhancement.
There are already people selling various neurotropics, most of
which are basically amphetamines or caffeine.
We're talking about something completely different, something
which will be based on what we know from a scientific
perspective. Why are those people, and I'm
thinking mostly the people from Stargate, who I would privilege
to witness them doing what they can do, They're different
somehow. They have something different
that we're slowly catching up to figure out.
Why are they different? Question for you.
You mentioned that part of this conversation centered around
Gary Noland. Can you talk to whether or not
those populations directly overlap UAP experiencers?
You mean with with psychics and. Yeah.
With with this group that has the genetic markers that you,
you know, were able to sort of pick out, I guess there are two
different types of genetic differences.
But is that a related group to UAP experiencers or is that
unknown at this point? We we don't know that.
I don't know of any formal tests that have that have looked at
that. I would not be surprised if both
camps had unusual sensitivities. The there's also probably
morphological differences in the brain itself, and so you don't
you generally would not find a morphological difference in the
brain, meaning some brain structure is actually different,
unless there was a genetic component.
The question is whether that genetic component is the same as
with somebody who's talented psychically.
And so there are studies under way, including ones that we're
doing, which is addressing that very issue.
So. Put them in is 1 structural
difference that people often. That's a That's a difference
that would make somebody Their perception of reality would be
different. Their ability to process
information would be different. To get back into the metaphysics
a little bit more, I'm interested you talk about this
in the book, but I'm hoping to sort of dig a little bit deeper
in terms of what your ontological conception or
framework is for how all of this stuff is, is working.
I mean, we talked we threw out terms earlier like idealism and
you know, I've often talked about Neoplatonism, which is
sort of the same thing. But then you mentioned dual
aspect monism in the book. And there's also Jeffrey Krypel
is talked a lot about about that.
And then there's just sort of the, you know, the shorthand of,
you know, the universe's mind, sort of the hermetic or agnostic
sort of ideas of what reality is.
What do you think in your own thinking, and not necessarily as
proven by science, but seems the most intuitively?
Likely to produce a universe that allows for psy and psychic
abilities and and magic. That depends on what day you're
asking me. So when?
When I'm doing my work. That means you're learning
though. That means you're still actively
searching. Searching.
I'm agnostic. I I mean, I have no idea what
the actual answer is. So I have to be agnostic from a
a philosophical sense. So when when I'm working as a a
technical scientist who's doing stuff in the laboratory and
making things, I'm completely a materialist because I'm working
with stuff, right? It's material, it's physical.
Even in designing and conducting experiments, it's it's
materialism. So you step back from that and
you're thinking, you know, how would any of this stuff work?
Well, then that's where you start looking at, at panpsychism
and all the other possibilities. So the way I usually explain
this is that every two weeks on a Tuesday, I'm a full blown
idealist. Like I, I'm thinking this is
obviously the way that it works because everything else is way
too complex. But that's only every two weeks
on a Tuesday. Much of the rest of the time
when I'm not actually involved in doing experimental work, I'm
more like a dual aspect monist. So a dual aspect monism says
that ultimately that there is what Carl Jung called the unis
mundus. There's one world, there's one
kind of thing where everything emerges out of and we don't know
and we can't know yet. Maybe in a mystical state, you
might know it, but we don't know what that one state is.
But from it meaning it would the meaning that we experience
something as meaning to us some sort of relational something
that pulls our attention, has the capacity to split different
aspects of this one thing into different forms.
So dual aspect monism says that from an epistemic perspective,
meaning what we can know, there are two major ways that it
splits. 1 is mind and the others matter.
And because they're coming out of the same source, they're
correlated with each other. So the metaphor is two sides of
the same coin. So the two sides of the same
coin, you look at the hedge, you look at the tails, they look
really different. And if you weren't aware of it,
you wouldn't realize that they're actually like completely
correlated. And so in the neurosciences, we
see correlations between our conscious awareness and what the
brain is doing. It's a correlation.
Usually if you're a neuroscientist, you would say
the brain is doing it. The correlate, the direction of
causation is from brain to mind, mind consciousness, from the
psychic things. It's looking that some of it's
probably that way, but there's also a direction of from mind
back to brain and not only mind to brain, but mind to other
things that are, that are elsewhere.
So again, it's a correlation that's very tight and it would
account for basically everything that we call psychic.
And, and so it's easier to work with as a, as a philosophical
way of thinking about this because then it doesn't say,
well, there, it's not that the physical world is an illusion.
It really is there. It's just tightly correlated
with the mind in some way. And so why does the mind, why
does the physical world seem so stable and objects have certain
properties and all of the rest of it?
I would say most of that is because a lot of memory is brain
stuff. It is physical.
And so my sense of, of this, this bottle has a certain weight
and properties and things like that.
And this is not an advertisement for them.
It's just a bottle I happen to have.
It's, it's because that's what my memory is telling me.
And I'm, I'm, it's reinforced constantly when I pick it up, I
feel it, all my senses are engaged and so on.
So it's very, very difficult to imagine this from a idealist
perspective that I'm sort of consciously making it up.
So it's not an illusion. It's really there.
And the properties that I attribute to it are really there
too. And so then it's easier because
now I'm working with equipment which is really there, and I'm
doing stuff that's really there. It's just that the mind element
of it is something else. It's correlated.
So that as a philosophy of science is appealing to me
because it it helps give a framework for thinking about
what's going on. Whereas idealism is also
interesting, except I don't know how to imagine that the physical
world is emerging out of it. Which?
It would require, so I know there are a lot of people
working on these problems, scientists who are trying to
figure it out, and philosophers have been trying to figure out
for thousands of years. And maybe that is the answer.
But again, I don't dwell on it too much 'cause I'm an
empiricist primarily and I like to make and do things rather
than simply think about them. But, you know, the the beautiful
connection is that your work is what it's inspiring a lot of
people to be even be willing to entertain those kinds of big
questions, You know, and for me, that permission to be allowed to
suddenly realize that the world is not what we see just on the
surface, you know, this sort of material random accidental shell
was liberating. And that whole deficit of
meaning that people talk about in modern culture, I think
centers around that lack of it's like, we're not a part of
things. We're, you know, just scum on
the side of the boat. And so a little bit of meaning
goes a long way for for happiness.
Well, it it's true that that the materialistic worldview that's
adopted by science and it's been very successful, so we're not
going to throw it away, but nevertheless, it's a nihilistic
reality. It's a reality has no meaning or
purpose. And.
And so you can think, then what is the rational thing you should
do? If you live in a nihilistic
universe, you should grab everything you possibly can get
and to hell with everybody else because it doesn't have any
meaning at all. So then people say, well, no
virtue can be its own reward. Yeah, I'm principal, I guess.
But in the meantime, I'm going to grab everything I could
possibly get. So.
Yeah. So it's, you know, let's say we
we keep working at all this and eventually realize, yeah, it's
all material after all, it is nihilistic.
Well, well, then what? Well then is the world that you
see today. It's a lot of things are not so
good with that worldview. And so you then at that point,
yes, then virtue becomes its own reward because there is no other
reward at all. I don't think that's going to
happen because the trend, as I point out in the book, the trend
is a way from pure physicalism or materialism as the only way
of thinking about reality because it's simply there are a
whole bunch of things that don't fit that worldview.
And and it's has such strong inertia to it that it takes a
long, long time for that that ship to turn in many ways.
Exactly. Again, with a parallel with the
UFO business. So with the UFOs, the reason why
at least from the way it's portrayed typically, and this is
cross culturally, the people kind of don't want to think
about the consequences that we're, we're not the apex
predator on this planet. We're, we're bugs basically
compared to what we're seeing going on.
That requires a major shift in in who and what we think we are
and all the rest of it. It also requires a reawakening
of major humility among scientists who've been pooping
this thing for a long, long time.
And at some point, I hope I live long enough to see that happen
in Cybersearch as well, because it it exactly the same thing is
going to happen. It's just that it's requiring A
societal change and those things are very slow moving.
It's interesting that there's been a convergence, like we
talked about before, where there's the consciousness
discussion and there's also the UAP discussion, and they seem to
be coming from the same root ball in a lot of different ways.
I'm struck by a theory that was put out by Peter Levenda and his
Secret Machines books with Tom de Long about the flying saucers
being in effect, magic circles, sort of, you know, vehicles
through which people from extra dimensional space or time or
wherever else are able to access our reality through magic.
And he points to a lot of different occult influences on,
you know, military development and rockets and, you know, even
Nazi Germany and what not. But that correlation between
magic and the flying saucer is really, really interesting to
me. Do you have any thoughts in that
regard? I mean about the nature of UAP
and how it may relate to this discussion of magic and SIGH,
and how your research may help inform the UAP subject.
Yeah, so Jacques Vallet has of course written about this.
This is not something new. It's something been around a
long time. The miracle of Fatima in
Portugal is often raised as another example of something
like that. My, my current thinking is I'm
completely open to that as a possibility.
Even Carl Jung wrote about this. The, the UFO is like a, a
mythological manifestation that actually comes to life because
of, of collective consciousness. So that's possible too.
But from a, because I, I work with Hal Puthoff and when I was
at the Stargate program, I pay a lot of attention to what he says
because he's, he's one of the smartest people I know.
So in the the Age of Disclosure movie, he talks about the
possibility that if, if you had something with a huge amount of
energy in it, you can start doing space-time manipulation,
which would account for a bunch of the different characteristics
that people talk about with at least some kinds of UF OS.
The, the kind of blurriness of it, the way it moves so quickly
and has different space-time inside versus outside and all of
those kinds of characteristics. That makes a lot of sense to me
because that seems to be the way that these phenomena work.
Maybe not all of the phenomena because after all, people then
in the next breath are talking about these giant rectangular
black things that are hovering over.
Well, what is that? And, and what are these
rectangular things? And not the rectangular, but
the, the pyramid shaped things or the triangular?
I mean, there's just like so many.
Million shapes. Yeah, exactly.
Right. So some people then say, well,
there are actually many, many different ETS running around and
whether they're based from the Earth or from the some other
Galaxy or whatever, we don't, we don't know what it is.
But if there's actually, if we're saturated with them and
we're just not, they're clever enough to figure out how to
shield themselves most of the time.
Well, that's kind of disorienting as well.
Similarly to somebody taking DMT and now the machine elves are
everywhere and they've always been here and, and they, they, I
mean it, it is all becomes a way of becoming disoriented based on
our everyday experience 'cause we, we feel like we're an
independent individual. The thing we don't see anything
happening around us. But that's the story you get
again and again from the UFO world, from psychedelics and
from lots of other contexts. So it's yet one of the reasons
why I recommend in the book The Science of Magic, the people do
not from a book get interested in doing conjuring of spirits
because they could lead you down a rabbit hole very quickly, of
which it is, it is dangerous psychologically.
It may be dangerous beyond that too, I don't know.
But at least from a psychological perspective, it is
so disorienting and scary that I don't recommend people do that
unless you're working with somebody who knows a lot about
what's going on. So I mean, you're, would you say
that there's a existential danger there from actually
encountering something, you know, malevolent in addition to
there might be something that could impact you just in terms
of your own mind both. Both.
Yeah. Yeah, the psychological element
is clear. I mean, you can freak yourself
out pretty easily. I've seen that when people go on
things like ghostbusting adventures and see some sort of
shattery thing, that turns out to be some aspect of the way
your eye works in the dark. But nevertheless, the response
to it could be like panic. And so it doesn't take much to
get people panicked when they encounter something which is
which they don't expect. And the moment we get out of
every day here and now, it's easy to get panicked.
So that that's why I said, don't, you know, don't start
reading books on the occult and get heavily involved in it and
get completely covered with tattoos, which don't appear to
be necessary to be a good magician.
But, you know, if you enjoy that sort of thing, that's fine.
Yeah, if you like the aesthetic, that's perfectly acceptable.
Yeah, it is interesting the sort of menagerie of UAP and NHI and
what all of it may potentially mean.
Like you mentioned that there are vehicles like maybe the Tic
Tacs who are actual, you know, you know, space-time vacuum
manipulators who travel through, you know, the universe that way.
There may be some, you know, the arrival of some kind of
spiritual elements there if that's a part of what reality
actually is. And then there was also the
point that you were making in the book about the tulpa, like
the the people at the at the Toronto Psychical Society that
they created to what were they, Philip and Lilith, that they
basically overtime manifested and these things took on sort of
agency of their own and manifested within their within
their laboratory. That's scary, you know, and if
you have the power of the, you know, the whole, like, thinking
world that is imagining something that could potentially
create huge, you know, phenomena in our lives that who knows
what, Yeah. That's just totally baffling to
me and. Yeah.
I mean, the, the our studies with the Global Consciousness
Project since 1998 show again and again that large scale
movements of attention around the world has a physical effect
on the world. Well, OK, maybe that's a
correlation, maybe it's causative.
We, we don't understand it well enough to know which is which,
but nevertheless it happens. So it's, it wouldn't be that
surprising that that relatively small group of extremely high
motivated and coherent individuals could create an
entity. I mean, there's a lot of lore
about that. And as you said, there are one
or two experiments that have looked at this in some detail,
including lots and lots of people who've done things like
like table tilting experiments and typical seances.
I know people that that are friends who have done this with
and they're able to, they're no longer doing it, but they were
able to move large heavy tables that were sort of dancing around
in the way that you read stories about this stuff and they've
taken pictures of it and yeah, it's dancing around.
What's happening then how does that happen?
Well, we don't know that how that happens.
But again, it points towards the idea that if you really, really
want to make a Gollum out of mud and imbue it in some way so it
it takes on the characteristics of a living creature, apparently
we can do that. Well, that's freakish.
So and by the way. There's an interesting parallel
here with the way that people are responding to AI chat bots.
They're attributing A tribute to the chat bot, that the chat bot
is actually not just a computer program, but it's sentient
because the way it responds. So maybe that's going on too.
So from a computational perspective, it's very unlikely
machine the computers are still deterministic.
If it was a quantum computer, maybe it's a different issue,
but a a computer program, however, however complex it
gets, can it actually become sentient?
From a traditional perspective, the answer would be no.
You know your your PC is not a living thinking thing.
But from a magical perspective, the jury's out.
We don't know what what what the limits are.
Well, my, my response to that because that's come up a lot
where people are interacting with their AIS and beginning to
have relationships with and even like sort of spiritual
mentorship kinds of dialogues with their AI bots.
And some people are having powerful experiences through
this. And I'm not one to second guess
them. The inevitably people point out
that, well, if you look at the programming of a chat bot, it's
not possible that it has become sentient.
But then I think of, well, if you have A at a seance and
tables bouncing up and down, I mean, that's something
otherworldly or immaterial manipulating matter in this
realm. The same thing could happen on a
small scale within a computer and you would get potentially
some, it would be just a, a vehicle for that kind of extra
corporeal communication and, you know, for if we accept a lot of
this other stuff, that's just as likely as anything else, you
know? And if you take a pan psychist
perspective, the computer does have consciousness already, just
the physical structure of it is already sentient.
The question is, well, can it kind of pull it all together and
become a single thing? Well, that's the same problem
for humans. Like if we're made-up of some
kind of sentient cells. Well, how did the trillion get
together and give me a sense of of unity for my We don't have a
good answer to that yet, but that is one of the issues.
That's the the big, the big hard question.
I was thinking of a question and I wanted to get it in.
Yeah. So you mentioned AI and I can't
help but like, you know, move 2 steps ahead in terms of our own
society and its development thinking.
Trump's administration just announced Genesis, which is the
Department of Energy's new whole of government effort to build.
And I think an AGI, right, Like they are going to go all, and
they're going to use novel sort of data sets that only the
government has. And it's going to be this
massive project, slightly scary. You know, I'm dystopian in some
ways. I I worry.
But my question is, how do you see technology and magic sort of
Co evolving? I mean, part of me thinks that
if we discover the power of consciousness and mind, then
maybe we begins to peel away from the technological direction
because so much of what we'd like to accomplish through
technology, we can accomplish in other ways that are more
organic, I guess. Or something you might buy at
the Co-op rather than, you know, Walmart.
But what do you see there? I mean how do you see them Co
evolving? And do you think AI especially
would be a helpful tool and ultimately getting at the source
of PSI stuff? Yeah, So if we are lucky, we
will avoid the science fiction scenario as portrayed in the
film Forbidden Planet, in which psychic technologies are
developed, but we're not developed enough in order to use
them wisely. So in that film, what happens is
that the people land on a planet where your thoughts and maybe
unexpressed unconscious desires come true because machines are
making it happen. And ultimately they all destroy
them. The whole thing, it becomes
destroyed because we don't have good control over our
unconscious. And the people who built the
machines destroyed themselves because of the same thing.
So our we have a long history of technology outrunning our
wisdom. And that's why I'm saying we'd
have to be quite lucky in this case not to accidentally cause
ourselves to go extinct because the the machinery is responding
to us in some way that just basically makes it happen.
Not necessarily in the scenario of the Terminator movies, but it
could be that could be something like that.
So, well, but so it's a step away from that and just in from
a scientific perspective, will AI accelerate our ability to
understand these things better? Absolutely, yes.
I use AI all the time now 'cause I like, I have the equivalent of
a PhD in statistics who can help when I need that and somebody in
electronics and somebody in physics and so on.
It's just like it's I, I have really, really smart graduate
students who who can help me make, make them do things.
So, so yeah, so does it, I mean, where, where where does that
stop? That's not going to stop.
I mean, unless we run out of electricity or something.
But even there, the people who are developing new electrical
systems are using AI too. So it it buoys everyone up,
everyone's and the part of this buoy of knowledge which is
accelerating very quickly. So yeah, that part will help.
Again, it does make me worry though, that that our history is
not so good in terms of developing new things.
So, and this is so first of all, there's a, there's the danger of
that which people involved in AI are well aware of.
The second thing that was the ethics of it.
Like we, we want to do something that is not going to end up
harming everybody. So I was at a place in Silicon
Valley when Sergey Brin gave a, a presentation back in 1998 on
Google. He was hoping to raise funds for
Google. And and so he gave the pitch and
the people who were listening to that basically passed.
They didn't invest because they thought, well, that's a stupid
idea that would never work. So the beginning of Google their
their motto was do no evil. Well, they dropped that after a
while. I would say probably, yeah.
And so, you know, you start out idealistic and saying we we can
change the world for the better. We can do this.
If something becomes wildly successful, somehow that always
seems to slip away because you're, when people are throwing
billions of dollars at you, it, it's just, it's like it power
corrupts and it, and, and so it's very, very difficult for
anybody to withstand that. I think there are a couple of
examples, but unfortunately very few examples where the power
does not corrupt. And so in this case is AIA kind
of power. Well, trillions of dollars are
being thrown at it today and there is definitely an AI arms
race going on around the world. So yes, there's a very positive
element in it and that it will, it'll push up our knowledge
quickly and we'll be able to solve real problems that are out
there. At the same time, it's going to
create new problems. And again, we, I don't know if
we need luck or grace or something to make sure that it
doesn't accidentally destroy us. And it seems like you were
saying before that magic has that same potential that I mean,
as we advance in that regard, if indeed we do so, then there's
going to be, you know, weaponization efforts and
everything else. So it'll be going through that
same arc of growth maybe at the same time, which creates for an
interesting landscape. Yeah, an AI assisted magic.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I can easily imagine that something like that could
happen. Yeah, well, I was talking to
Adam Curry the other day and we were talking about what he calls
a plant RNG experiment that they did.
Where they had a plant in one corner of the room and a random
number generator that seems to direct where the light would
point. And that over time the plant
seemed to draw more light on average than it should have by,
you know, 25% statistically. And he said that, but it's hard
to know where the, if any human intention basically manifested
that result or if it was life in terms of the plant, you know,
drawing it down. Well, having AI designed and
conducted experiments potentially can answer those
questions, right? I mean, like that's like where
there is no human intention. But then obviously we'll get
into can AI have intention that can be manifested magically,
right? It's like a nesting boxes, you
know a little bit. So I actually have AI have a
proposed design for a plant PK experiment that would, that
would get the human out of the loop.
And it's true. It's, it's always been a
difficult problem because we're humans and we're doing stuff
well. So the, the idea is this, that
we infer that what if, if a plant wanted light that it
would, it would make the light point towards them, but they
don't want light all the time because they have diurnal
rhythms too. So then they'd want to push the
light away. Well, how do we know that we're
making the assumption that that's the case?
Well, so it turns out that people are doing plant
Physiology, have there all kinds of instruments that can infer
does this plant's chlorophyll need light now with the energy?
Well, there's there instruments that you can shine a light at a
plant and then you take a spectrographic response of the
of the fluorescence that happens and you can tell from that does
this plant need energy now from chlorophyll?
Well, that gives you an objective measure that the plant
wants light. And so if it turns out that the
random generator is doing its thing and turning the light
towards it, when that happens, you have a way of seeing what is
the plant actually want. You have the same thing for
water, same thing for nutrition, all kinds of things.
So you put this complex of sensors and random generators
and whatever, stick it in a closet for months and maybe you
get to see the data, but probably not you.
You let the thing run for a couple of months and then later
you analyze first of all, the plant still alive and second was
the random generator doing its thing at the time that the plant
needed that thing. Well, that that's, that's not
completely getting you out of the loop because somebody had to
design it in the first case, but at least you now have objective
correlation measures to say, well, if that thing happened
when it wanted it, so that's pretty good because I don't know
when it wanted it, it knew. So anyway, so that's that's on
our drawing board and we may end up making that experiment.
I love the implications of that whole question because if that's
if that's what's actually happening in the plants and has
some effect on whether or not light is drawn to it.
It says something about evolution and how, I mean, all
kinds of things sort of open up. I mean, is there, it explains
for one thing, the short timeline for the complexity of
all of, you know, life basically like in the short timeline it
developed because it wanted to. I mean, basically is what it
would boil down to, and that is fascinating, right?
So our, our prime directive is, is living organisms is to
survive. So, so when it gets, it gets hot
and heavy and our motivation is really high and we can change
the environment to push in that direction.
It's true that we're looking at a way of accelerating evolution
really fast at which, among other things, would would
potentially say to go back at least hundreds of millions of
years, if not longer than that, that creatures like us might
have been around. So the the stories about ancient
alien blah blahs, it could have been us and they could still be
here, but they're just living in the ocean or something.
Exactly right. And that goes back to the UAB
question again. That's lovely.
Last question I wanted to ask you about, we'll call this a
wrap after this, but one of the things that when you're dealing
with the magical worldview or sort of the magical pursuit and
my studies, which are rather limited, but I've done, you
know, a fair amount of reading. There's always this question of
the Mystic versus the magician, right?
Like there's good character that arises through the discipline,
pursuit of unity with the godhead or whatever you want to
call it. And it requires training and
diligence. And you know, you, you grow as a
person. You've, you know, sort of figure
out how to be a good human being.
The converse of that is that the magician is, you know, sometimes
seen as like a selfish kind of activity, like you're
manipulating the innate reality in order to get what you want.
How do you think that? I mean, is it dangerous that to
basically pull magic out of that kind of dichotomy and have it be
just another tool so that it's open to the manipulation of
people who might be using fear instead of love as a motivator
or a sense of power for, for their magic?
And I mean, is that just a ridiculous question because of,
you know, we're moderns now. We don't have to worry about
that kind of thing. Or you kind of get where I'm
going with the question. No, that, that's a beautiful
question. It's a very important question.
And in fact, about a month ago, I was invited to give a talk at
Harvard Medical School for a conference where there's a well
known guru called Sadhguru with millions of followers.
So I asked Sadhguru that very question.
And I put it in the context of virtually every spiritual
tradition says that if you practice whatever it is, usually
meditation of some type, you do it long enough, you're going to
bump into these psychic things. And so don't pay attention to
the psychic things. They will occur.
They're like guide rails along the way that will tell you that
you're developing, but don't pay attention to it because they're
seductive. And you will end up being a
magician without the, the, the advantage of the mystical
wisdom, because it's true. If you go like all the way
through, you become a better person.
You're a different person than you were when you started,
Whereas you could, if you get stuck in the magic area, it's
all about power and control and whatever.
And that's not good for anybody except maybe you.
But even for you, it's not that great.
So, so I said, well, you know what?
The yes, we understand that the humans are, are seduced pretty
quickly by these kinds of powers.
And so it kind of makes sense from a spiritual perspective, if
that if you really want to become a better person and stay
on the spiritual path, do not dwell on the fact that you're
getting these these powers. So he so so yeah, I mean, he, he
said, yeah, that's basically the story.
But then I said, but I'm a sigh researcher.
My interest from a scientific perspective is understanding
what is like. How do these magic things work?
What does it say about us and as humans, to say nothing of if
those effects are real, it means that the spiritual path is true,
or at least we have more confidence in it, which would
help draw people on that path, which ultimately would be a
really good thing. Yeah, exactly right.
It was a very frustrating conversation for me because he
would not, he would did not want to go to the place where he said
that Cybersearch could be very valuable for that reason.
And the reason I think he said that we kept going back and
forth on this was because we are weak.
We are weak, weak people. And we don't have this good
history of taking knowledge and using it only for good stuff.
So if we get into the stage where now we have a, we have an
arms race based on what amounts to magic, that's not going to be
good for anybody. And it's, and so the science
that I mean, I've, I've, I look at this as a basic scientist,
I'm interested in how things work and why it works and all
that stuff. But the knowledge, if it is used
badly, could go in a wrong direction because it's true.
It is a force of nature. It's like a, it's a thing.
It's, that's the way that things work.
We gained a really strong handle on that.
It could be bad. And so from the spiritual
tradition perspective, I think they knew that they could kind
of get it and which is why you don't want to collapse into
magic. And so I, I feel conflicted on
that. So, you know, do we learn as
much as we can and keep it secret?
And so I the. Answer right I mean.
Well, I was arguing that it's better to know than not to know,
and he was pushing back on that. You know, it's OK to know, but
maybe you don't want to share what you know, or maybe
sometimes it's not good to know. So, you know, I, I still don't
know what to make of that. It was, it was filmed or our
conversation was filmed, but I don't know that it'll, it'll
ever be shown anywhere because, because that it was, it was an
unresolved conversation. It's an important one, but I I
don't know how to resolve that. I know that you can.
I mean, time will resolve it one way or the other, although I
think that like keeping that that the spiritual context
around it, even if just as a, you know, you know, metadata or
whatever, just to keep that in the conversation.
So it doesn't just become this is a new technology totally
divorced from spiritual principles.
I think you're right that it may prove a draw, you know, because
it once people realize that there is something to these old
philosophies and that power can be had, there will also freedom
can be had there. And maybe that's the the the
right competitor, you know, if people realize that do you want
freedom or power, that's where they.
Have to make the choice. Fortunately, there there's
there's a good ending to this, I think, and that is that there
our institute is Institute of Noetic Sciences.
So what is noetic? Noetic is talking about a form
of intuition or deep intuition where you know something, it
just appears and you know with certainty that it's true and it
is true. But this is like like psychic
information. It's just so you're, you're
connected to the universe somehow.
If somebody has that kind of experience, whether it's a
psychic or near death experience or a mystical experience,
whatever it is, or even psychedelic, in most cases, it's
an immediate transformative experience.
They become a better person. The the jargon is they become
pro social, so they could have been total jerk beforehand.
They something happens like a near death experience and now
they're totally different. Which when I've talked to
psychiatrists about this, they say, well, that's impossible.
You know, you're, you're kind of locked in on your personality.
Well, no, this is like the reverse of PTSD.
Something happens, you are flipped, and you're flipped into
a version of humanity that is exactly where we want to end up.
Yeah. I mean, so those experiences are
extremely important to understand.
Well, why does that happen? How do we make it happen if we
wanted to? How do we learn as much as we
possibly can about psychic and mystical and magical things
without collapsing into that but kind of moving and moving on and
say, oh, now we understand better who and what we are and
how we interact with the world? Good.
There's more. The latter keeps going.
Let's let's go with that as well.
So that that's kind of my hope of, of the way that we go.
From your lips to God's ears, I would say thank you, Dean, for a
fantastic conversation that was epic and I appreciate you and
all your work and your book was fantastic so.
Thank you.