Latest / Tracking Wisdom / Exploring The Science of Magic - Dean Radin
Transcript
- 0:03You're listening to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast exploring the universal truths that we see woven through culture, consciousness and the human experience.
- 0:18Good morning everybody.
- 0:19Welcome back to another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast.
- 0:22I'm Ryan.
- 0:23I'm Peter.
- 0:24Today we are talking about Dr.
- 0:26Dean Radin.
- 0:27For those who don't know Dean Radin, he has degrees in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology.
- 0:35He's been working in the field of psi phenomena and research for approximately 40 years.
- 0:41He's chief Scientist at the Institute for Noetic Sciences, exploring interconnection between the personal inner space and the shared outer space reality.
- 0:53He's Distinguished professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies and also co founder and chairman of Cognigenics, developing non invasive intranasal RNA interference platforms to modulate the neural circuits underlying mood, memory and cognition.
- 1:14He has his new book out, the Science of Magic.
- 1:16How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality.
- 1:20So we watched two different videos which of course will be linked in the show notes.
- 1:25The first one was the Science of Magic, Mind Matter and Meaningful Coincidence.
- 1:30That was with Dr.
- 1:31Bernard Beatman who is a psychiatrist and self proclaimed coincidence expert.
- 1:38And connecting with coincidence is the channel.
- 1:41Then the second video was the Science of Magic with Dr.
- 1:45Barudi Sisuvong on the On Transcendence channel.
- 1:50I did want to open with the elephant in the room.
- 1:53The question that gets posed to Dean Radin or which is is psi phenomena real?
- 2:00And he makes a great statement, I think which is there's a real difference between the idea of existence versus efficacy.
- 2:10And he cites kind of the basic science into applied science.
- 2:15So for him the work he's doing is looking at statistical deviations that would be outside of what would be expected in random chance.
- 2:26And for that there is measurable influence from attention and intention on random number generators or on the material world essentially is the implication those effects in the laboratory are quite small but a practical.
- 2:47High pie statistical significance.
- 2:49Exactly.
- 2:50So his statement is essentially these influences are real, but in the clinical laboratory environment they're very small.
- 3:02He posits that because of the controlled environment and because of basically clinical ethics, we can't use the motivations in say the real world in normal day to day experiences, ethically can't be reproduced inside of the controlled environment due
- 3:25to like having to put people in say life or death situations.
- 3:28So basically people experience strong side effects in real life because of their high investment in whatever the issue being affected is.
- 3:43And it could be a life or death situation, but it's at least a high emotional investment.
- 3:50Correct.
- 3:50And These are circumstances that you cannot ethically recreate in a laboratory setting.
- 3:56Exactly.
- 3:56So the point he makes is that in terms of statistical significance, they're undeniably real.
- 4:04If, I mean, if you subscribe to this scientific model of the like, if we can show statistical significance, then we're demonstrating to a high degree of confidence that this effect is what we call real.
- 4:17So in that sense they are real, period.
- 4:20Given that that meaning of air quotes real.
- 4:24And the issue is one of what you might call translational research.
- 4:28In other words, how do you apply it?
- 4:30How do you make it practical?
- 4:32Exactly.
- 4:33I think the interesting thing is, or rather maybe the takeaway is that we should incorporate the idea that psi phenomena are real into our thought processes rather than having a dismissive, superstitious or anti superstitious attitude.
- 4:57Right.
- 4:58And of course it pulls me back to quantum physics where of course nobody understands it.
- 5:06I mean, I don't know if you've seen the video where the guy's teaching quantum physics and he says it's an intro course and he says, I don't understand quantum physics.
- 5:15And so that's the good news is I'm here to teach you I don't understand quantum physics.
- 5:21And by the end of the course you will be able to not understand quantum physics.
- 5:26But that, as we've said, it's, it's been applied successfully.
- 5:31Right?
- 5:32We live with the products of it because people have been able to do essentially the translational research, the exploitation of this information into physical technology.
- 5:48Right?
- 5:48But if people said, well, this is silly, it doesn't make any sense, and that would not have happened.
- 5:54And presumably that is the case with psi phenomenon.
- 5:59Right.
- 5:59Like we just keep on insisting it doesn't exist.
- 6:02So you can't work on it.
- 6:04So it doesn't work.
- 6:05Why?
- 6:05Because it's not real?
- 6:06Because you're not working on it.
- 6:08Like, yeah, it's circular.
- 6:10Yeah.
- 6:10I did find that was something that resonated with me, that I found interesting was this idea of existence versus the efficacy.
- 6:21Because when we think about psi phenomena conceptually, I think we think of conventional media representations in fiction and stuff of what it looks like and these grand air quotes, powers that come with it.
- 6:38And it's, I'm sure, also fueled by cultural and within those.
- 6:44I don't know what kind of field or communities you would call that, but.
- 6:49Right, maybe paranormal.
- 6:50Yeah, I mean, it resonates very much with our experience with awakening.
- 6:55Right.
- 6:56Where there are cultural stories about what awakening is and therefore it's maybe not unreal, but extremely rare.
- 7:07And I would say.
- 7:09I would say for most people, extremely rare to the point of being unreal.
- 7:14Like, oh, sure, it happened in ancient times or to these people or someone up on the mountain thing, but it's not really relevant to us in everyday life, life, which we've come a long way from there.
- 7:25I think one of the things that's compelling about him is that he always presents from data and he never comes across as being particularly excited.
- 7:38He's like a very dry kind of personality.
- 7:42And it's just like, I'm really interested in studying this stuff and I keep on finding that it's real.
- 7:48And, yeah, to my personality, it's a very compelling way of communicating that he has.
- 7:55So I.
- 7:55Yeah, I really want to read this book, his latest book now, Science of Magic.
- 8:00Yeah, yeah.
- 8:01Which he.
- 8:01He does use the term magic quite a bit to describe psi phenomena and the historical mystical experiences that are documented in various written forms that I guess historically would have been called magic.
- 8:17Right.
- 8:18And he's sort of taking that vernacular probably to be a little bit provocative, but then adding the scientific backing behind.
- 8:27There's some relevance here.
- 8:29Yeah.
- 8:29I mean, I think, yes, in part it's to be provocative, but I think also it's to kind of show the reach of the science that we think that science and magic are so far apart.
- 8:45But I think the point is that what we think of being this thing so distant from reality is really not that far from current science.
- 8:57Right.
- 8:57And of course, Arthur C.
- 8:59Clarke's quote, you know, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- 9:05Right.
- 9:06You know, how we live every day with this magic that we accept because it's physically put in our hand, you know, and the wizards say, oh, just do this.
- 9:19It works.
- 9:19You know, and we don't.
- 9:20It's like, because we can pay for it and we can buy it.
- 9:23And you're talking about mobile phones, all kinds of technology.
- 9:27I mean, smart house or whatever, you know, AI types of technology, where a few years ago, you know, certainly decades or 100 years ago, it would have been, oh, my God, these people are doing magic.
- 9:40Yeah.
- 9:41And he even brings that up in one of the videos.
- 9:44That idea that the meaning of material has changed, particularly with quantum mechanics.
- 9:49And you know, what we do understand of quantum mechanics, while there's still a lot to be understood pre1900 or whatever, if you were to describe the things that we understand about quantum mechanics, it'd be completely rejected from a
- 10:06materialist point of view.
- 10:07And, you know, that the ongoing unfolding of what we know of reality continues to point us towards, as he calls the science of magic, which I think is something we've touched on in a lot of these videos, where
- 10:23the more we look into this, the more other scientists are looking into it.
- 10:27There's evidence there.
- 10:28I was just thinking that I kind of see him almost as a translational research or a bridging approach from the scientists who are building off of quantum mechanics that we've been listening to, who are starting to think about
- 10:49the idealist paradigm.
- 10:50Right, right.
- 10:51And saying that what quantum mechanics is teaching us is the.
- 10:57That causality is not necessarily essential.
- 11:01I mean, that's what magic is.
- 11:02Right.
- 11:03Magic is things that happen outside of our known causality.
- 11:09And so these.
- 11:12I don't want to call them hard sciences.
- 11:13I mean, in a way they are because they're dealing more with aspects of physics and biology, but thinking about the nature of consciousness and what the implications of their work are, or rather what the implications of understanding consciousness
- 11:31are on their work in biology and physics, maybe, but they're not working on what the implications of that are for human experience.
- 11:41Right.
- 11:42They're working on.
- 11:43Recently we saw, like, how does DNA work?
- 11:46Right, right.
- 11:47What?
- 11:47Raiden works with human experience.
- 11:50So he's in an interesting space and he's been doing the same kind of thing for decades.
- 11:57Right.
- 11:58So, yeah, he kind of sits in an interesting position, I think.
- 12:02But so.
- 12:03So, I mean, he describes himself as a fully employed scientist for 40 years in the area of psychic phenomena, which is what he was interested in.
- 12:13He's currently at the Institute of Noetics Sciences, which was founded by an astronaut based on that astronaut's experience of seeing the planet from space and having that kind of transform, transformational experience that we tend to call awakening, but
- 12:30just having this deep understanding that our conventional reality is not real.
- 12:36Yeah.
- 12:37And founded this institute and eventually made Dean Raden chief science officer, I think.
- 12:42Yes.
- 12:43But he didn't start out that way.
- 12:44He started out at something like Bell Labs.
- 12:46Yes.
- 12:47When he was in Bell Labs, he was doing what he was told, you know, but he also said, hey, I'm interested in this other work.
- 12:54And he was given permission to do that research, and then he was given permission to present at a conference.
- 13:01And he's like, I'm just going to do this on my own, but, you know, I don't want to do it without your blessing.
- 13:05They were like, yeah, go ahead, that's fine.
- 13:07And then he was approached basically by the government at, like, at his.
- 13:11After his first presentation and I guess basically the CIA or something like that recruited him into what used to be classified but is now declassified as Project Stargate.
- 13:23Stargate Project.
- 13:24And they were like, investigating remote viewing and teleportation and all this kind of stuff.
- 13:31And now that's been declassified, there are people teaching methods based on the declassified Stargate reports.
- 13:39Cool.
- 13:39I don't.
- 13:40I haven't seen any of that yet.
- 13:42But, I mean, it sounds like you can get it from the horse's mouth.
- 13:46In Science of Magic, where he introduces specific practices for you to experiment yourself, I think is the way he says, yeah, cool.
- 13:55I definitely want to read that.
- 13:58He had a couple of really interesting experiments that they've conducted.
- 14:05One was on the chocolate experience where they did a double blind, random control trial where there was this premium chocolate.
- 14:16Some of them were blessed or had good mood vibes, injected through intention and attention into it.
- 14:26And so they did this in a double blind, random controlled trial and, you know, used standardized mood reporting and found that the blessed chocolate statistically had significant improvement of the mood.
- 14:41Yeah.
- 14:41Which to me, I mean, I wrote like Italian culture and soul food and stuff where I was like, these.
- 14:48The secret ingredient is love.
- 14:49Is love.
- 14:50Yeah.
- 14:51I think that's interesting.
- 14:52And I wonder how much that impacts the life quality of those people.
- 14:58Especially thinking like, of Western, traditional, American, industrialized, industrialized food.
- 15:05It's not just the ingredients.
- 15:07Right.
- 15:08But is it being made kind of with love?
- 15:12Right.
- 15:12I mean, is it being made purely to maximize flavor?
- 15:16Right.
- 15:17Or is it being made to nourish someone?
- 15:19Right, yeah.
- 15:21And I mean, thinking about junk food and as kind of the epitome of industrialized food.
- 15:27Sure, Right.
- 15:27It's purely just to max flavor.
- 15:30And it even claims like, like, flavor blasted and like, crank up this.
- 15:35And it's purely about kind of the direct physical experience of putting the thing in your mouth and chewing on it.
- 15:43This just came to me right now because I didn't make the connection before, which is processed food.
- 15:48And I mean, I think there's probably a lot of biochemical evidence that processed food has biological detriment just in its composition and its lack of nutrition.
- 15:58But the industrialized function is the chef.
- 16:02In that instance, it's not just homemade, where you're feeding your family and you're providing and you have this emotional connection to the dish.
- 16:13We eat stuff that comes out of basically a machine with people who don't know the consumer and.
- 16:21Or care about the consumer.
- 16:23And I think that's.
- 16:24That's interesting.
- 16:25It just kind of came to mind how in the context of this and the other experiment he had talked about, which was water, the ice crystals.
- 16:35Crystals.
- 16:35There was a Japanese researcher who had been working.
- 16:39I mean, he was experimenting with water, but not in a rigorous way, I think.
- 16:44Yeah.
- 16:45And that he was practicing giving positive thoughts to the water and then freezing it versus giving negative thoughts to water and then freezing it.
- 16:55And then comparing the resulting ice crystals and that positive mental energy produced very aesthetically pleasing ice crystals.
- 17:05And negative went the other way.
- 17:08And Dean said.
- 17:09Or I think he approached Dean.
- 17:11Right.
- 17:11I think he did.
- 17:12I think he went to Dean and said, how can we do this more in a more rigorous way?
- 17:18And Dean said, yeah, we can do double binds and blah, blah, blah.
- 17:21And so they.
- 17:22They blinded the water samples and how people were influencing them, and then they blinded the ice crystal scores.
- 17:33Like, who.
- 17:34Who was looking at the ice crystals and where those ice crystals came from.
- 17:38And then they.
- 17:39They used standardized measures of like, aesthetic, like positive emotional response.
- 17:46Basically, you look at this thing and you find it pleasing or you don't find it pleasing.
- 17:50That's how they scored the aesthetic value of the crystals.
- 17:54It sounded like they did it twice.
- 17:56The first one was double blind.
- 17:58And then they did a triple blind.
- 17:59That's right.
- 18:00That's right.
- 18:00And then the triple blind was put out, basically.
- 18:03I mean, I guess like on a website kind of thing, where people would rate the crystals on aesthetics and have.
- 18:11Absolutely no connection whatsoever.
- 18:13Exactly.
- 18:13It was just like, look at these pictures.
- 18:14Which ones do you prefer?
- 18:16And there was statistical significance that the ones that were given positive energy, so to speak, had more aesthetically pleasing crystalline structures.
- 18:27I think that's interesting.
- 18:29He uses, as you had mentioned, random number generators.
- 18:32It sounds like.
- 18:34As sort of like the probe or, you know, the capture device to find the statistical significance.
- 18:40And these aren't just off the Internet, random number generators.
- 18:43They're validated to be random.
- 18:46So there's computer generated random numbers which are pseudo random, and then there are random numbers based on radioactive decay.
- 18:54That's what it was.
- 18:55Which are genuinely random because it's based on radioactive decay.
- 19:00It's not based on a model of randomness.
- 19:03But he said that they had evidence of attention and intention having impact on the radioactive decay of.
- 19:12That's what I took away from.
- 19:14That was.
- 19:15Which is crazy.
- 19:16So I downloaded.
- 19:17I think I mentioned this before.
- 19:18I just on a whim, came across an app.
- 19:23Basically, I got it because it sounded like it came from Raiden's research.
- 19:28And what the app does is it assigns each user a random number generator.
- 19:35And just by assigning it to a random user on the, you know, in the interworld, it associates that user's mental influence with the generator and then they track what happens and then the app gives you a notification when
- 19:52your data is trending.
- 19:54Meaning more coherence.
- 19:55Exactly.
- 19:56The random number generator assigned to you has now become statistically significantly less random.
- 20:04I don't try to interpret it in any way, I'm just participating in as like I contribute to this research in some way.
- 20:10But one thing that's intriguing is apparently they have a way of predicting earthquakes.
- 20:17Like that's one of their projects.
- 20:19And I've gotten a number of notifications, let's say successful earthquake prediction.
- 20:24And I have not dug into it.
- 20:26I haven't like, you know, gone any further other than downloading the app and participating in.
- 20:32I haven't done any further investigation to what, what are you guys doing and how are you doing it?
- 20:37But one of the things he had mentioned was an experiment or you know, a collection of data around transcendental mutation and TM communities and the effects of say crime rates and stuff in those areas.
- 20:53Yeah, so that's the other thing I want to say about this app is that it also uses population data, so it aggregates data to nearest cities and so it says, you know, my city is trending, for example.
- 21:08So.
- 21:09Yeah.
- 21:09Anyway, he mentioned and described a few experiments that they've done which had quite interesting results.
- 21:17The thing I found most interesting was this idea of retro causality.
- 21:24What he described was you take the random number generator and you record it over a period of time unobserved and it just runs and then you play it back in the controlled setting trying to influence it with attention
- 21:42and intention.
- 21:43And he said the finding was that the influence was comparable to in real time.
- 21:51So you already collected this information.
- 21:54It was unobserved though, and retroactively try and influence the randomness.
- 22:02And they were able to find similar results as if it were done in real time.
- 22:07And I thought that that was a really interesting finding.
- 22:10Yeah, that is really crazy.
- 22:12Yeah.
- 22:13And I mean I think it kind of flies in the face of Penrose and his sarcastic weather on the distant weather on the distant planet.
- 22:23Yeah, I mean, well, it's interesting.
- 22:25So.
- 22:26So Penrose tells the story to say consciousness dependent collapse of the wake function doesn't make any sense because if it were real then this is what would happen.
- 22:35Right.
- 22:36I guess also kind of goes to the Schrodinger cat.
- 22:39Right.
- 22:40Which is Schrodinger saying, well, it doesn't make any Sense because this is what it would mean.
- 22:44So I guess that's the thing is that we're starting to do experiments to say can a cat be alive and dead at the same time?
- 22:53Right.
- 22:53I think nobody used to do those experiments and now people are like, well let's test it.
- 22:59Because then you could actually get some information, some kind of information.
- 23:03And that's what Dean's career is, trying to test that.
- 23:07But that the, the he was at the end of the last of the.
- 23:13OR on transcendence.
- 23:14Sorry, on transcendence.
- 23:16And he was talking about the implications of the idealism paradigm and separation being illusory and not as real as we believe it to be.
- 23:28And what is the effects or outcome on kind of society or what's the future of society look like.
- 23:36And Dean Radin was basically suggesting that the more we understand ourselves to be interconnected, this kind of goes to the similar thing that all of.
- 23:49Yeah, right.
- 23:50This universal message of altruism and connectedness.
- 23:56Right.
- 23:56Human cultural evolution into harmony.
- 24:01Yeah.
- 24:02So I think one of the reasons that I want to read the Science of Magic and I think this is true of Raiden's style overall is they tend to be research heavy.
- 24:14And I reading some reviews like this, some people were complaining, it's like he's just presenting a lot of data but that's what he does, you know, that's the bar.
- 24:23And yeah, I think the point is that I guess we're moving towards what Hoffman was saying where science is science, it doesn't have to be limited to the physical world.
- 24:41It's just a process, you can apply it to anything.
- 24:45But we've been locked in historically to you cannot study non physical things.
- 24:52And this crosses into kind of the belief of science where science now becomes.
- 24:59It's a belief system as to it's not physically detectable directly and therefore it doesn't exist.
- 25:07Right.
- 25:07I think the good news of all this is that Dean Radin had mentioned and I think what we're seeing as well is there is a paradigm shift currently happening.
- 25:19And you know, over the past 20, 30 years, more and more this idealism worldview is gaining popularity.
- 25:29If you read the literature and like the letters to the editor in scientific journals and stuff, you won't see scientists talking about psi phenomena.
- 25:39Right.
- 25:39But if you get a room full of 100 scientists and you say raise your hand if you've had this experience, 70% of them will raise their hand.
- 25:48They just won't talk about it in a professional setting.
- 25:51The other thing that keeps on coming to mind because I mentioned the evolution of harmony.
- 25:56And I think there's a skeptical resistance to the idea of things getting better because it's easy to see how bad things are.
- 26:06And particularly in current environment.
- 26:09There's lots of concern about domestic and international events that are, like, really bad.
- 26:19And not to say that those aren't bad, but just to say you can't look at current events as a trend.
- 26:26That's what I guess I'm.
- 26:27I'm saying.
- 26:27And I'm thinking about my own personal experience as I find myself developing, where there's always backlash.
- 26:39So, like, I had a really good week a couple of weeks ago where I saw.
- 26:43And this wasn't just subjective, like, oh, I'm feeling so much better.
- 26:48I'm so much happier with the way things are.
- 26:50But there was, I think, some objective improvement and then had several days where it's like, oh, this is not good.
- 27:00Like, there's a lot of friction.
- 27:01Like, I keep on stepping the wrong way.
- 27:04And it seemed like, well, none of that nice stuff was real.
- 27:08This is what's.
- 27:09Like, this is the same old thing.
- 27:11These are my patterns.
- 27:13I can't get away from them.
- 27:15And then it stabilized.
- 27:16It restabilized again.
- 27:17So I'm not still in that rut.
- 27:19But that rut was bad, even though it was short relatively.
- 27:22But this is becoming a very familiar experience where there's a reaction of kind of the status quo of the system, meaning my personal system, where watching the behavior of my system, I can see it improve dramatically.
- 27:41And then there's a sharp kind of backlash.
- 27:44And then there's a restabilization.
- 27:46There's a new status quo.
- 27:47Sure.
- 27:48Right.
- 27:50And so what I'm saying is.
- 27:52Excuse me, is we're postulating that there's an evolution of humanity towards a greater harmony and that the presence of great conflict isn't a proof that that's not happening.
- 28:08Right.
- 28:08It's just a downtick point in the trend.
- 28:12Right.
- 28:12And I think there are many writers who point this out that the trend is amazing.
- 28:18Yeah.
- 28:19If you look at the trend and not at the current event, the trend is really astounding.
- 28:25There's a phrase in internal family systems that's parts are people.
- 28:29And so you have to approach them with patience and dignity and humility.
- 28:36And a classmate said, well, people are parts.
- 28:39And like, oh, no, no.
- 28:40I mean, parts are people.
- 28:42And I was like, yeah, and people are parts.
- 28:45Right.
- 28:46Because it's a fractal pattern expanding out.
- 28:49And this is.
- 28:50Dick Schwartz, who wrote Internal Family Systems, says this explicitly at the end of this book is like you can apply this process to any system micro.
- 28:59Yeah.
- 29:00It's like it works in your internal parts, it works in your role as a family part, as a community part, as a national part, as a world global part.
- 29:12And so, yeah, so what I was saying is given that perspective, I see how my internal trend is positive, even though if I measure at certain points is very negative.
- 29:27Sure, right.
- 29:28The subjective experience is like terrible.
- 29:31But looking at the trend, it's amazing.
- 29:33Like I've never had such highs as I've had.
- 29:37And so I just want to point to that same thing in the very, very, very, very zoomed out macro scale that I think we can see an evolution of human consciousness and society as being more harmonious.
- 29:56And many of the thinkers that we've talked about are saying the same thing.
- 30:03So that's just my perspective on harmony and disharmony in the world.
- 30:08Yep.
- 30:09Because the overall trend.
- 30:11Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 30:12I think that that's a great way and place to end the video or the audio, as it were.
- 30:20Thank you all for listening.
- 30:21I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
- 30:23We'd love to hear your comments and if you have any experience with Dean Radin's work or his concepts, we'd love to hear that as well.
- 30:31The videos and books and all the information resources that we used in this conversation will be in the show notes.
- 30:39I have noticed that in certain platforms show notes get truncated.
- 30:43So if that's not available in your particular platform, visit trackingwisdom.com and the full show notes will be there.
- 30:50Until next time, bye now.
- 30:52Bye.
- 30:55Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast.
- 30:57Join us next time as we continue the discussion.
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