Dr. Dean Radin | Real Magic, Parapsychology, & The Lab Tested Results

00:13 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man Until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view You'll find the more you think you know, less you really do Where would we be without THC? We know the lying to us just don't know to what degree. Where would we be without THC? The highest side, Chad's show. Greg Carlwood and company.

01:01 Alright, Hiresight Chatters. We've talked about magic enough by now to know that despite today's popular worldview that it is all silliness and superstition we occupy just a small sliver of time in which that is actually the case and humanity really has a long rich history of experimentation documentation and dramatic results when it comes to lost esoteric arts But we do seem to be stumbling out of the darkness once again, and the tide does seem to be turning as the materialist worldview starts to crumble and a greater number of mainstreamers start to admit there's something more to this consciousness thing than they previously thought.

01:37 And the savvy ones among us realize that this admission is just the first crack in the dam, and it's only a matter of time before precognition, divination, the power of will and communion with the spirit world all come seeping back into society from the proverbial Pandora's box that I suspect powerful people would rather remain closed. Well folks, these are the topics offered up on the higher side altar today as we welcome Dr. Dean Radin to the party as our guest of honor. Dean is currently the Chief Scientist at The Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Associated Distinguished Professor of Integral Transpersonal Psychology at The California Institute of Integral Studies

02:17 But along the way he's held appointments at AT&T, Bell Labs, Princeton University and SRI International just to name a few. For nearly four decades he has been at the forefront of consciousness research and along the way he has authored over 250 articles and three popular books entitled The Conscious Universe, Entangled Minds, and Supernormal He's been on dozens of popular shows including Oprah, Larry King and now the higher side chats which we call the true media trifecta around here. Coming in hot with the release of his latest book boldly spelling it out for us colleagues in the title so there is no mistake

02:54 It's called Real Magic, Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. And I'm psyched to talk about it today! A true titan of consciousness research, the papa bear of parapsychology and modern magi shouting from the mountaintop of academia to boldly declare that magic is real – a god among men… Dean Radin welcome to The Higher Side. Wow, that's some introduction. Well thanks man but you know it's your life I'm just giving them the cliff notes and this is really exciting so glad you're here big kudos to Gordon White, The Great Wizard from Down Under for getting us together. I really did love your book and i am excited to see how its received

03:35 Your background is obviously very impressive and I hoped maybe you could elaborate a bit on that to kick this off because we've talked about things like the Stargate project and the research that went on at SRI, but i understand you were kind of at ground zero for at least some of that including a government briefing on some of the top secret remote viewing research at the time. And I believe you even worked with Hal Putoff and Ed May I mean for us here, this is pretty exciting stuff man. This is a pretty impressive resume. Yeah it's exciting! I don't have the same level of excitement as you have in your voice not because I don't find this stuff fascinating because I've been spending my career on it and I'm not blasé about the phenomena either

04:21 But it takes a lot now to really make me pay a lot of attention. I mean, i've seen a lot of weird things so my threshold is a little bit higher now. Yes well I do like a high threshold for weirdness and im sure you have the doors blown off so to speak alot more than most With the range of experiences in your bio, I am not surprised that you've gotten hard to impress. And just to further that point can you tell us anything more at least about that chapter that gets close to The Stargate Project and SRI and The Tentacles Of Military Intelligence because i'm sure most listeners are familiar with names or terms but they don't know the depth

05:03 Well, I spent one calendar year as part of the SRI research team. It was before Stargate. Stargate of course is one of the many code words used by that program over the years when I was here it's called Grill Flame and the mission of that program was more or less the same over 20 It was using psychic espionage basically. A lot of the operational missions were handled by the army in their top secret facility near the headquarters of the NSA and the research side was in California, Menlo Park where SRI International is

05:45 And our mission was not so much operational, although there were a few cases of that. It was mostly to do threat analysis which means that the military and intelligence community is always concerned about whether one of our adversaries is ahead of us or coming up with something that we need to pay attention So we would do analysis of reports from China and from Russia, and from other places in the world to see if there was anything that we needed to worry about. And we're talking here about similar kinds of research so at the time we suspected that the Russians had their own version of a remote viewing secret team

06:26 Later, we learned that they didn't in fact. In fact they were funded to a tune of more than 10 times what was being spent in the United States. We suspected and we still suspect that China has had a program for very long time and other countries we know at least are tracking these kinds of phenomena. So every major country in the world concerned about their neighbors is always tracking what do we know about these phenomena? Is there something to worry about, is there something that could be exploited? That's what the interests of governments are and that's partly what I did. I also ran a few experiments got to see the research side of trying to learn more about what remote viewing was

07:11 how to shield against it if possible, how to make it better, how to select people who are really good at those kinds of things. Wow! I mean so impressive and obviously we clearly know there was a chapter where military intelligence was very interested in PsyFX but there's a common dismissal that well sure they tried some goofy stuff out but the results weren't great so they moved on But we know that a lot of this stuff is real so that can be right can it? Well, the underlying question is are technical decisions always politically correct? And the answer is no. There are lots of times and I've seen this again and again working in industry that there's a problem that needs to be solved to come up with a technical solution and it's not followed. So why not? Well for reasons that have nothing to do with science or technology

08:06 some maybe sometimes having to do with finances or somebody doesn't want to be embarrassed about it, you name it. There are lots of reasons that come into play on how things get done so in the case of remote viewing it absolutely was useful It kept being useful for the entire length of the program and there were dozens of government agencies that requested help In terms of we need information on factor X can you help us? and it was useful in that context as well. So why did it stop? My suspicion is that, and of course who knows what actually happened but I can only speculate that the CIA was put in charge of administering a program and it became publicly known and they were embarrassed and they wanted to stop

08:59 So, it's very easy for an agency to stop something. They can just create a review as they did which says no maybe there is something going on but it's not useful for intelligence purposes and that's then their way to get out of it. But in fact, it is useful people continue to use it I don't know if there's another classified program going on? It wouldn't be surprised if there were but I don't know about it. I do know that other countries are closely tracking these kinds of phenomena and many of them will have individuals under contract. So this is not part of secret programs but just individuals who get money in some way, one or another way and offer advice when they're requested to so that's probably what's going on

09:46 Right, and like you say I mean just studying the American history with this stuff is so fascinating. Just to then realize that there's probably huge archives in vaults from Russia and China as well that are probably even more full it is no small thing! And I guess to get into the book a little bit more You say real magic falls into three categories mental influence of the physical world perception of events distant in space or time and interactions with non-physical entities. And what I love about your journey is that we seem interested in the same questions, which are things like okay if magic is real we've tested it and gotten results what does that say about reality? What are the mechanisms behind consciousness that could make something like this work? And I really think those are the best questions to be asking wouldn't you say?

10:36 Sure, they're also the most difficult. The reason why I think most academics stay away from these topics... No, I should correct myself. One of the things that I discovered in the process of looking at the esoteric history and magic was a surprise in how many academics actually do pay attention to these topics but they pay attention to it in an historical way Or in the way that people believe in certain things, but not as magic as real. It's okay to talk about these things in historical context or how different cultures shaped the ideas and that sort of thing, but not to imply or even mention that you might think some of these phenomena are real. That's taboo. You can't talk about that. That's also why when the CIA was outed essentially and people knew about their program while this is a taboo, we can't talk about taboos in public so it has to go away

11:33 So, from an academic perspective say if you entertain the idea that maybe these things are real academia has adopted the same scientific worldview that most scientists and most people in the secular west have adopted. This is materialism it carries a certain degree of assumptions about the way things work and the workings of reality itself and its very difficult to take notions of magic or psychic phenomena which are basically the same thing It's difficult to figure out how do we take notions of particles and fields and forces as we know in physics, and make those explain these kinds of phenomena.

12:14 And it's so difficult that many scientists would say, no. It's impossible! You cannot do that and that is a reason why the taboo is sustained because then somebody would say well ideas of magic are clearly superstition they're impossible according to the laws of science therefore anybody who talks about it must be foolish or delusional The problem is that empirically we know that these phenomena do exist So we're presented with a challenge. And one of the things I tried to do in the book then was to flesh out the nature of the challenge and then offer solution to it. Right, and I do think you did a great job walking the reader through the data that we do have in the studies that you have been apart of as well as the results. And I think it belongs on anyone's shelf who could use that reference or reminder of these possibilities

13:07 And of course I do sometimes wonder how we got here with the materialist worldview being so pervasive. I don't know if it seems totally organic or more of a conveniently injected net to get caught up in, But even on an individual basis, I think we sometimes forget or we go through cycles of denial and belief because there seems to be an odd psychological thing where people tend to repress or suppress even their own first-hand experiences that confirm some of these aspects of life. And that too is a pretty curious thing. Well these ideas are scary

13:44 Right one of the things that everyone imagines is that they have sovereignty at least over their own mind. And their own actions so what are the reasons why we see in entertainment world that the occult is almost always treated as a horror film there are exceptions but usually you end up with spooky things being horrible, is because your personal sovereignty is violated. So people know secrets about you that they shouldn't know, people can influence your behavior at a distance possibly your health at a distance nobody is comfortable with those ideas and yet those are some of the implications these phenomena being real

14:27 It's also probably related that when some people are actually driven to be psychotic about this, they become obsessive about it. It is very common for schizophrenics who talk about these kinds of phenomena and to complain that their thoughts are being manipulated by other people so this also then overlaps with mental illness So there are lots of reasons why in our everyday ordinary lives, we want to keep these kinds of concepts at bay because they're frightening. On the other hand, there are lots of other things about reality that are frightening like commuting on a highway and somehow we deal with that but this has its own particular gloss on it that has been pushed upon us by

15:12 centuries or millennia of religious concepts and the last couple of centuries scientific concepts. all of which are saying either don't pay attention to this or it's demonic. So you have two big pushes in society that are saying, you know what? Just stay away from that stuff. Exactly and then you can control the language and marginalize it even more I mean even that association with mental illness I think in the distant past That was thought of differently of course and people can i thought oh this person is connected in a different way there might be some insight there and then maybe they ended up being the witch doctor their community right but. If we're gonna tackle these categories of magic one at a time if you're gonna talk about intention or force of will are manifesting reality this sort of thing,

16:04 There are massive implications when you start to unpack what that means, that we can actually influence the physical world for people who might still be skeptical of such a bold claim. Talk to us about some of that data, some of that research, the experiments that confirm these ideas. Well there's several classes of studies mostly within parapsychology that have looked at the role of intention in manipulating the inanimate world and the animate world So, classes include the use of inanimate things like electronic random number generators. That's been a favorite thing to use in the last 40 or 50 years. Before that it was the tossing of dice and actually the tossing of dice is interesting because

16:50 It was known all the way back to the time of Francis Bacon, which is the origins of what we think as science 500 years ago. 300 years ago where he was already talking about the force of imagination and suggesting that if you wanted to know whether something like that was true, you could toss dice and see whether your intention showed up more often than not. This is really interesting because it means at the very origins of science that the people who initiated this approach to understanding reality were already thinking how can we take these interesting essentially magical concepts and test them?

17:31 So that urge from Francis Bacon is still alive today where we see whether we can influence dice, influence random number generators, influence the structure of water, influence people's behavior their physiology and in our own work recently were using optical physics equipment to look at quantum observer effect. Many many different kinds of targets have been used many have been replicated by independent groups And if you look at the preponderance of all of the data using different kinds of targets, of intention. At least in my reading of it, you come to a pretty strong conclusion that yeah your intention affects the world but what we don't know at this point is well how does it do that? This is part of the problem when we ask questions like well how does it work are there force beams shooting outside of your head

18:28 Do we have gravitational waves that are somehow manipulated by the mind? What does that work, all of it immediately is asking questions about physics as we understand it today. And there is nothing in physics maybe slight possibility within quantum mechanics but there's really nothing that most physicists would immediately go to and say oh yeah its because of this We don't know what we have is data saying it happens but without having the immediate second question, which is well then how does it happen? That leaves most people on the fence who have looked at the data. So it's real you don't know yet exactly how it's real right well baby steps I guess and uh one of those studies that I just found really interesting because of the implications and because it seemed to

19:20 I guess take very little input to get some measurable results was the blessed food experiments that were done. Can you tell us a little bit about how this worked because it's a pretty crazy thing to wrap your head around? Right, so this came about because we know that in every culture people will bless food and beverage sometimes in a religious context and many times not. You just go to a bar and people are doing blessings for anything you can imagine, so the question is why are they doing that? Well part of it is simply a drinking game where we'll come up with the word that somebody says and start drinking

19:59 But a lot of it is more than that. It's about the notion that your intention either gets into the thing you're eating or drinking, this is partly a matter of gratitude when its done in prayer context but also in a context I see among growing number my friends who are combination of gratitude for food we're about to eat or drink plus I hope it doesn't give me tomain poisoning In other words, I want to influence the food in a positive way so that I ingest it well. You see this now in a number of restaurants as well where there's intention on the part of the chefs and all the people who prepare the food so that the food carries their intention. And, so they play happy music and they might be dancing around in the kitchen and there is concerted effort to somehow imbue the food with that idea. So since it's so common we thought well we can do an experiment

20:59 using a gold standard double blind controlled trial to see whether it actually does anything. Is it purely psychological or maybe not? So the first thing we used was chocolate, we used chocolate partially because a guy came to us and owned a chocolate plantation so he had access to it and also because when you do a clinical trial its very difficult to get people to both volunteer and comply with the nature of the task It turns out when you do an experiment involving chocolate, you have to beat people away with a stick because everybody wants to do it. And they're also going to be in very high compliance. They will do what you ask them to do because it involves eating chocolate. So we got a big batch of chocolate some of it was blessed by a Mongolian shaman who I know from Mongolia from Buddhist monks at a Buddhist temple in Wisconsin

21:55 And a third method, which is more controversial in that it involves meditators meditating on an electronic device which then supposedly can broadcast the same intentions. So we use those three methods to bless the chocolate in such a way that anybody who ate the chocolate would feel more energy less fatigue or vigor and so one. The idea was mood altering blessing And then of course there was controlled chocolate which is exactly the same but not blessed. So under double blind conditions it means that the people who are getting the chocolate don't know which kind of chocolate they're getting, they know it might be blessed or it might be controlled, they don't know. Anybody who's handling the chocolate like to people giving it to them, they don't know either so there's no way for the participants to know what they have even accidentally they can't know

22:49 So, we recruited 60 people in the San Francisco Bay Area to do the experiment during one week because when you're measuring mood, mood is very sensitive to changes in weather, to things that may happen on the news and so on. You need to have a uniform context for everyone to do this mood experiment And then each person on each day of the week over seven days, the first two days they would just record their mood using a standardized mood reporting scale at the end of the day. The three middle days of the week they would eat the chocolate at 10 AM and 3 PM And in the last two days, they would record their mood again. So we have seven records of mood and the three middle days of the week they're eating the chocolate and a hypothesis is that people eating the blessed chocolate will have improved mood so that's what the analysis was and that's what we found. A statistical improvement in moods and the people eating the chocolate under double-blind conditions

23:48 So from that, a colleague in Taiwan contacted me and said could we do a similar experiment in Taiwan but not using chocolate because apparently they don't eat much chocolate in Taiwan. Rather they drink a lot of tea so we did a similar experiment using oolong tea which was blessed by members of the senior Buddhist monks at a temple And in this case, we're able to get 200 people involved. 100 got the Bless Tee, 100 got the Control Tee and again under double blind conditions, we saw that the people getting the Bless Tea reported improved mood. So the third step on this... Mood is an interesting thing to measure because it varies by all kinds of different factors so we wanted to find if there was an objective measure that we could see as a result of a blessing

24:41 So, we had the same Buddhist monks bless water and then there was the same water set aside that wasn't blessed. And then the water is used to hydrate plants actually seeds of Arabidopsis thalianae. These are little mustard plants they only grow a couple inches But they're interesting plants to use because their genomes are fully known. They were one of the first plants to have their full genome produced and it's used as a analog of human health. Because, as you may know the genes in humans and animals and plants they're huge overlaps so certain diseases in plants have analogues is the same diseases than humans So that's why they use to plant There's a lot known about these plants and we selected a kind of plant that has a mutation in it That increases or decreases a protein called cryptochrome

25:39 Cryptochrome is interesting because that protein has been shown in Arabidopsis plants to probably be working at the quantum level. This is this whole domain of quantum biology, which is looking at quantum phenomena in living systems. So anything that is operating in a quantum fashion and the living system becomes of interest because it suggests that these strange deep physics spookinesses happening in living systems so this protein cryptochrome is operating within this plant. It actually is in all humans and plants, it's one of the proteins that makes us sensitive to light, to blue light in particular as part of the diurnal rhythm in us that's the protein that responds so you can get a mutation of the plant where there's more cryptochrome or less cryptochrome So it responds more to blue light or less to blue light

26:37 And we use that to see whether or not there might be a quantum phenomena going on which was sensitive, or unusually sensitive, to the intentional blessing. Again this is now triple blind conditions because the water was blessed then we had control water it was then given to people who deal with the plants they had no idea what kind of water they were dealing with They took a bunch of different measurements of the plant under two different kinds of water So the third level of blindedness was that I got the data and I didn't know which was which either. I was only told at the very end of the analysis

27:13 So what we found was that the plants that got the blessed water grew much more in the various measurements that were being taken. And in particular, it grew much more in the plants that had the accelerated amount... Actually, it was a mutation that had more of this cryptochrome in it than the normal plant and that is a hint then but not only does the blessing work But it seems to work better in a plant that has more of this protein which is operating at the quantum mechanical level. So we were both able to replicate that the blessing did something and also start to take a step towards trying to understand why did that happen? In this case, it suggests that there was something about a quantum mechanical effect that may have been the reason.

28:01 That is just mind blowing i thought it was interesting when I heard about the chocolate and the tea but you're right those results are a little subjective i mean measuring people's feelings on a scale of one to ten i mean that's not so black and white but to have something as objective as. plants growing with blast water. It's amazing to look at the chart you reproduce in the book, it's right there! It's pretty wild man but that's the data we need for the Michael Shermers of the world ya know? What can you say about that?" Well the usual reaction would be well can you do it again as we described in the book this study was actually repeated

28:40 12 times. We did the experiment four times each time with three replications, so we're pretty sure it's a real effect but no one else will believe it until they do it themselves and that's just par for the course in science. Somebody reports something that seems a little odd What usually happens and what should happen is others will say, I don't know if I believe that or not. And they'll try it themselves and they either will replicate it or they won't. That becomes the arbiter of truth essentially as I think it should be Absolutely. And so if we have the data to show that we can influence our reality, and that gets into this just intention field of magic? What does all that look like under the hood because there are some university studies that you talk about besides the ones with The Blessed Food and there's also one at the Princeton Pear Laboratory. What can you tell us about

29:35 the most ideal conditions or mind state for effective success and intention manifestation. How can we maximize this for ourselves? Because there have been some things that the subjects themselves have repeated enough to kind of formulate some kind of paradigm for success, right? Yeah, there's some recipes and interestingly what you see in the magical literature... This goes way way back are a couple of things which people have come up with saying that if you want to do the magic, you need these things. Some of that has been tested in the laboratory not because it was interested in testing magic but simply because there were psychological effects that could be tested in the lab so the number one method or factor which seems to influence these kinds of things is belief. So belief is closely associated with a psychological trait of openness

30:31 people who are open to experience, open to new ideas have higher belief in the efficacy of magic or a psychic effect. They do better and these kinds of tasks even in the laboratory In magical traditions they do better as well but they do better in the laboratory under control conditions too so in the PsyLab this has been called the sheep goat effect where the sheep are the believers and goats are non-believers And the experiment typically is very simple. You take a classroom of people, you separate them according to their prior belief about whether they believe in ESP say

31:13 then they all do exactly the same experiment. And then you look at the data afterwards separated by the sheep and goats, and a prediction that you can make is that the sheep will do better than the goats. Typically the sheep will get a significant positive result, and the goats will either get nothing or they'll get a significant negative result. In magical practice what you find also is for people who are doing various kinds of sorcery or casting spells you don't want to do it in public. This is partially because you need to maintain absolute belief that this is going to work and the moment you make it public what you're doing, somebody's gonna come along and say well that's nonsense! Your belief is then going to be challenged and that will challenge the result of the blessing itself or the spell. And we tested this actually in the experiment involving tea

32:07 because one of the questions we asked people getting tea, and of course they didn't know whether they were getting the blessed tea or not. We asked them well what do you think you got? Did you believe that you're getting blessed tea or not getting blessed tea? Well it turns out that the effect of the blessing was very significantly modulated by whether or not they believed that they were getting the blessed tea or not so the way to see this is take out all other people in the experiment who are in fact getting blessed tea So they didn't know if they did or not, but some of them believed that were and some of them getting the blessed tea believed that there weren't. Now the statistics on the mood level of those two groups you get a huge whopping effect in people who got to blessed tea and believe they were as compared to people getting the blessed tea and believed it they were not for the people who thought they weren't getting the blessed tea got exactly the same result than people who are in fact not getting the blessed tea. So the separation occurs

33:05 Even in that case, and this is exactly what you see in the magical literature as well. Yeah, I mean that really does sound like classic placebo effect type of stuff and that's what that is kind of is intention and belief. And what all that says to me is that you are manifest in your own reality whether you want to or not whether you believe it or not because just your preconceived notions about it is what enters into your reality so if you want magic to not work guess what? You got your wish! Yeah, so some of that is explainable as a psychological effect. I think a lot of placebos are related to the psychological effects too because we don't see the world as it is. We see the world the way that we want to see it and the wanting is basically filters and blinders that are there all the time. It's very difficult to get rid of them

34:00 But it's beyond the psychological factor because after all, the experiments we were doing were placebo-controlled. Right? The people did not know if they were getting the blessed tea or not and yet their belief still modulated to a very significant degree whether or not their mood was affected So, this suggests that just as in the standard sheep-goat experiment even in the domain of psychic phenomena which is transcending pure psychology the same factor still holds. So from a pragmatic perspective it doesn't matter too much unless you're doing experiments and magic or force of will where you really want to change the world in some way not simply what your perception of the world is but you wanted to change

34:46 Well, then you need to maintain these very strong levels of belief and guard against others who will try to make your belief change. Absolutely! I'm with you This might sound like kind of a weird one but to revisit something in your background and your resume, I know you have that degree in electrical engineering and you have that AT&T Bell Labs chapter of your career. There seems to be a little overlap between what we call paranormal and the electrical world. We see ghost hunters using these devices and trying to make contact and who knows to what extent that is real but

35:24 You do get, or at least I get some sense that Psy research and the exotic properties of electricity things like Tesla was working on. He actually apparently said he got some of his ideas from other intelligences which it's hard to verify those claims now but it gets into the weird world of electro-gravitic crafts and all that. I guess I'm just curious Do you think that the Psy research and the electrical engineering aspects of your background are in any way interconnected or overlap? Well, it certainly overlaps in terms of my ability to create experiments and devices and circuits that have been used in the experiment. Whether electricity is involved in some way in these phenomena I'm not so sure. Ultimately if you think about the original Maxwell equations and the Heaviside equations and what's left out of standard electrical practice and what we're taught about electricity

36:22 There may be something going on there. I've been interested in things like scalar waves, which was part of the possibly missing factor and how we think about electricity today. I'm not quite sure what to make of all that. You know there's a lot of folklore about it. There is not very much science done in it and I tend to rely on the science more than the folk tales, although by the same token my whole book on magic here is looking at what amounts to folk tales that go back for somewhere between 10 and 50 thousand years. And as they sometimes say, The Old Wives Tales are oftentimes more interesting that we think because those old wives were just as smart as we are today! So what did they know that we didn't know? Well

37:10 part of the fun of trying to figure it out. Yeah, and I mean that's kind of you know if you're not sure i'm definitely not sure but it does seem like I've talked to guests who talk about secrets in both areas that lead to some of those similar places if you think about maybe contact with entities being a multi-dimensional affair some people think that its properties of electricity that might be off the radar that actually open up those gateways or allow for those bridges to communication with something non-human, I guess. But that is the realm of Theurgy which is another fascinating aspect of magic and probably the one that's least tested in the lab? I'd assume. Well, Theurgy has been tested in the form of mediumship studies investigation near death experiences we're currently doing an experiment involving channeling

38:03 So it has been investigated in those forms and then in a more popular sense, people doing electronic voice phenomena and instrumental transcommunication. or attempting to push into that direction as well. There's much less known, I would say with any certainty in those domains primarily because it is difficult to do experiments with invisible entities. The only way we can do that is working through channelers and mediums because they claim to be able to deal with those kinds of things And in those studies, a problem that has never been solved is we know if the medium does his or her work under double-blind conditions so they can't use cold reading techniques. But the information that they get is accurate. So the medium's experience is that they're talking to a dead person but the only thing that we can actually check

38:57 is whether or not the information that they're getting from whatever that is, is correct. Well then it could be clairvoyance, it could be telepathy to all kinds of other explanations that don't require the existence of a disembodied entity So the leading edge, I think in this domain is being done by people like Gary Schwartz who's trying to take the same approach used in electronic voice phenomena to a much more sophisticated level. He's using methods and optical physics to look at extremely small changes in the density of air for example. Methods of using lasers where you can measure very tiny differences in air density that you can't see but you can detect

39:39 And he will ask a medium to invite a disembodied entity to enter a little chamber and you can then measure it to see whether there's any disturbance in the air density as a result. That's just one of a number different experiments he is doing, and the claim is that yeah they're getting results which are consistent with the idea that there are independent entities which we can't normally detect but with this very sophisticated equipment you can see something The counter interpretation is that these are psychokinetic effects. And from my perspective on this, I would love there to be independent entities out there that would make things just more interesting but at least from a scientific view today the evidence is still on the fence as to whether or not there really is something independent or whether it's human-centric psychic effects that are producing these things.

40:34 Attempts at getting that confirmation to mention are very creative i guess that's the thing is you gotta figure out ways to get creative to try to decide what this is i've had my own experiences that made me feel like i was put in contact with something on human and it just does seem like one of the hardest things to prove because even initiate to follow the lemur for example and make contact with what they call the holy guardian angel there's still debate over if that's a separate being or deeper aspect of the self and it just seems so difficult to unpack, especially for a layman who doesn't have a lot of experience with meditation and altered states. If you're talking to people who are kind of experts in gnosis and meditation they might be more familiar with the subconscious than the unconscious mind and how alien it can actually seem which gives them pause when they're talking about multi-dimensional entities

41:29 if they're inside us. So it is really one of those difficult questions. Right, especially when you start talking about going into states of mind like gnosis or samadhi because that's where all the magic happens anyway. It's not happening at the level of ordinary awareness but at those deep levels even a whim can manifest right you're down at a level where the distinction between mind and matter. Beginning to blur to such an extent that your mind can have a momentary intention and not will cause in a literal causal way, it'll cost something to happen so if you are in the mindset of just on the ceremonial magic and you expect certain entities to show up

42:15 Well, maybe you made them show up. Of course there's a long history of independent entities being created like a golem. Yeah servitors and such? Yeah or servitors so maybe that is something where you have manifested it and you give it the appearance of an independent life of a sort maybe that's what happening and may be not So one of the things I'm talking about in my book, and then you can trace it back to people like Alistair Crowley and Peter Carroll as well. They're all basically saying science as a method of studying the nature of reality is really really good

42:53 the underlying assumptions, whether it's materialism or idealism or whatever. That's almost a philosophical issue but the techniques that are used are exceptionally good so why don't we use those to study the nature of magic? And in so doing maybe we can start figuring out these questions that have been around forever like does consciousness really survive death in the way that we would like to think? Like there is personality that somehow survives Or is consciousness like a drop of water that goes back into the ocean? Or what?" I mean, many more questions than answers. But at least if we use those techniques maybe we can get answers that are better than ones that have been around for 10 thousand years If you simply try to separate what is probably true from all of the esoteric traditions compared to what is probably superstition The majority of it's going to be superstition because nobody had any other way of knowing how to think about it

43:48 But fortunately, there is a thread that remains that is probably true. And that is exactly the same thread that we've been able to study in the laboratory and more or less confirmed that it's true And this kind of leads right into my next question, but when talking about theurgy before I've heard you say that this practice of calling up spirits to do something for you can range from successes and fulfillment of the tasks to all sorts of trouble. Of course we have to speculate here but i hear those vague statements about being careful what you wish for and what you get involved with and you don't want end up calling the wrong spirit... You know? You hear those warnings

44:27 I want to know the extent of that trouble, or really if we assume these are separate intelligences what are their constraints in reality? Do we even know?" I don't think we know. One of the reasons why i think it's dangerous is... We like to think that were fully in control of ourselves but we know that this not the case. We know that your unconscious motivations can override your conscious behavior very easily We know this is true because otherwise people wouldn't be smoking themselves to death and eating themselves to death and drinking to death, on and on. People have all kinds of self-destructive behavior which is mostly driven by unconscious and subconscious motivations so because we know that if you take somebody who's attracted to the dark side

45:19 all kinds of bad things are gonna happen to that person because it's just gonna exacerbate who they think is in charge. And I think that this is largely where the danger of mental illness comes in as well because it's probably mentally healthy to not dwell too much on ideas that are associated with the occult, because it is so freaky. Right? The moment you start wondering about is the room full of invisible entities that are trying to do something to me... Well, you can't operate as a normal human being under those conditions. You need to spend at least as much time

45:55 becoming a well-grounded individual who's a contributing member of society as you are doing meditation or doing ceremonial magic, or whatever it is that you want to do. If you lose that balance its not good Right. Well, you know most valuable journeys are a bit dangerous nothing ventured nothing gained but obviously people got to be careful You don't want to go knocking on random doors in physical reality or on the spiritual plane because you don't know who's going to answer but But you know, knowing the level at which you've studied consciousness I'm curious if you've ever had a personal experience that felt like you were connected to something else or if there are any experiences in that realm that you could share to help us try to sort out this aspect of things. I haven't had those experiences. I have a meditative practice meditation for me is almost entirely a matter of anxiety reduction and physical relaxation

46:54 Occasionally, like of roughly 30 years of meditation I can think of a few minutes of which I would say this is probably what people talk about as samadhi. Meaning enveloped in some kind of strange loving light extremely calm very still the kind of bliss that people talk about constantly in Eastern meditation methods But I'm talking about a couple of minutes of that after years of practice. So, I don't practice to try and get into those states. I practice it because I think it's just a healthy practice to do so I am not naturally talented at least in the domain where you can start slipping between realities. Fair enough!

47:41 Well, you know on that subject to quote an aspect of your book where you're talking about the history. You say similar to the legendary origins of the Rosicrucians Blavatsky claimed that she was taught by secret Tibetan masters these were she said advanced adepts hidden deep in the Himalayan mountains working for the benefit of all humanity. Stories about secret masters can still be found in much contemporary New Age spirituality." And that obviously is so true, but it is again trying to separate the fact from the fiction have you been able to do that at all when it comes to The Tibetan Masters? Of course they just seem so foreign as to almost be

48:19 unpenetrable to someone like me here in Southern California, but I really am interested what's going on there. Do you have any idea from your research into them? I don't know it's a theme that echoes all the way down through history that they're these hidden masters who are working for the benefit of humanity and secret somewhere If there are such people, and I can imagine that there are some because the range of talent that we're talking about here is from Joe Six-Pack walking along the street to Olympic champions. So those two kinds of people are extremely different. The level of talent we're talking about is miles apart. It might as well be a different species of person

49:04 So if you're now talking in this domain, people who can achieve gnosis or samadhi at will and stay there as long as they wish. All kinds of strange things can happen My guess is that if somebody is at that level they are not going to be known publicly They're not gonna make a big deal about it They will probably for all outward appearances appear to be completely normal even someone that you wouldn't even pay any attention too And that's why the old phrase about meeting Buddha on the street, they're out there whether they are working together to do something. I don't know. I've met a few people who have come to the laboratory or clearly have skills that are not ordinary but they are unusual because I think those people generally don't want to have anything to do with science. They may have recognized for example

49:57 We're dealing with a kind of fire in the same sense as dealing with atomic energy that we understand is the real thing, it has certain properties. But if we ever gain a real control over it like we actually understand what's going on and can use it for things humanity may not be mature enough to deal with that kind of information at this point and we could end up blowing ourselves up. I mean, we're practically doing that every day anyway but you can imagine if we had now the equivalent of everybody has their own personal atomic weapon in their mind, we wouldn't last very long so a case can be made that for people working behind-the-scenes who have much greater ability than we do they're smart enough to realize this has to be done from behind the scenes and not in front because as they said

50:49 Humanity is still very much in its adolescence. It could be that Homo sapiens is simply too close to our monkey cousins to be able to handle this wisely, and maybe we need a Homo superior or maybe we need our machine robot friends to take over at some point and be our stewards, something like that. Right! And it is nice to think that there would be a collection of positive monks and magi sitting in a circle and meditating for the positive polarity of the planet, but you could also speculate about the negative side of that too. And you do talk about the mystery schools in your chapters on history obviously they faced a lot of religious and political persecution in the past and then moved deeper into the shadows but I've had a lot of guests who speculate that these mystery schools wielded a lot of influence today

51:46 And, you know we do have situations where both presidential candidates and Bush and Kerry were both bones men. You look at the who's who of the Bohemian Grove Club and you have to wonder if there is some magic involved in the power dynamics going on in the western world? I guess I would ask you, knowing what you know about the mechanisms and modalities of magical practice now do you see any indications that powerful decision makers of modern times would be using these techniques? Of course it is again going to be in these shadows and in the periphery but do you see any indication of such a thing?" Well, all I've seen is that. I know that there's interest at the highest levels in business and government everywhere that you look there is great interest but doesn't necessarily mean that there is also knowledge right

52:35 I know this because some of the books that i've written, I know who have read them and they're people at the top levels of the pentagon and government and so on. And i've always been surprised that someone's already read that book really? Well yeah! So people are interested in these ideas People who are positions of great power typically have to make decisions without enough information that's one of the joys and troubles being in charge. Specially in the military where you never have enough information to make good choices that involve life and death, So they become very, very interested in things like intuition and anything else that could help them make the right decision. So it's not too surprising that the captains of industry and the captains are the military in the intelligence worlds and politics will pay very close attention to any other source of information that they can get. This is why some of the psychics I know are basically under contracts or asked for information of this type

53:38 repeatedly and they're good enough that whatever information they're getting seems to be useful so they continue to do. So but again, that's quite different than having cabals of super adepts who are somehow controlling the strings of society from behind the curtain? I don't know if that's true or not right. I kind of suspect that like a lot with conspiracy theories that yes there have been conspiracies There have been things that people said that happened and it did not happen and vice versa. But when it comes to major control of the way that the world works, I don't think anybody's really completely in control on anything. The world is a very chaotic big system they think likes to resist control

54:24 I always wondered, for example that if i were a billionaire. I would be doing everything it possibly could to find out first of all can we do anything about climate change because if we cannot and it doesn't matter if you're billionaire you gonna die with everybody else so the notion of continuing to have economic inequality for people at the very top they can probably escape to comfortable oasis for awhile but not for very long. You need everybody else to continue doing what they're doing in order to continue to have a nice life, so that's why I think in this case collectively we make the same kind of self-defeating behaviors as individuals do and that's the pessimistic view of life on earth which is strange because I'm a chronic optimist. I wouldn't be doing the kind of work that I'm doing if I weren't chronically optimistic So I still think there is a way to get out of this

55:22 In any case, the journey itself becomes a fun thing to do. I hope we don't blow each other up that would be bad but from a cosmic perspective i'm sure there's semi-infinite number of other planets out there where people are wondering about the same stuff so maybe one of them will finally make it and if we're lucky it'll be us. Cheers to that! And I guess eating Campbell soup in an underground bunker isn't fun for anyone no matter how much money you got? Yeah And as we wind down, is there anything more to say just about bringing this into our own lives for people who are listening and maybe excited or motivated about what's possible? Obviously we need to get into a meditation regimen. Imagine our goals have already manifested in the future but without having anxiety about it any other guidelines for magical potency based on the data that close us out with

56:13 Well at risk of shameful self promotion i think my book and real magic will give somebody. a historical basis or context to think about these kinds of practices, enough science underneath it to show that there's good solid reason to believe that some of this is actually real. And then I echo what you've just said that one of the things they say again and again in the book is that the magic happens from a state of gnosis to deep meditative state for most people it takes time to practice to get into that state and there's now dozens and dozens of ways of learning how to get into those states which don't require even meditation. Neurofeedback is just one of many examples, in the old days we would call things esoteric because they were literally hidden away like the occult now

57:06 Almost everything that has ever been written and occult ideas and esoteric ideas are two clicks away in three seconds on the internet. So we can't complain that the information isn't available, it's like in your face if you go looking for it I would recommend that people find others who have more experience and are well grounded in these things to begin to learn from them. If that's not available, then there is tons of books out there that can give you an overview of what it is your going to be headed toward. I would suggest for a typical western secular type person that you don't start diving into grimoires right off the bat. It's partially because we freak ourselves out too easily

57:52 And if you're serious about going into these topics, then start with something a little bit more benign like learning how to do the tarot deck. Something of that sort. Right. Divination is a little less scary than direct contact with something seemingly non-human. Exactly Wow well this really has been amazing i got a ton of respect for your work and to pick your brain is a real treat for somebody like me. Of course remind the good folks where they can get more dean radin in their lives and what to expect from this newest book I mean obviously we talked about it but i believe its coming out april tenth correct? That's correct so it'll be available in paperback, ebook form and also the audio book

58:35 So the audio book, I was given four voice artists to select and I selected the person who read most of the Dan Brown books like Angels and Demons. His name is Mark Bramhall and he's as exceptionally good voice for this because he sounds like a very calm and favored uncle you know it has that resonance but it's not a hard voice its one that is inviting and I've listened to some of the clips that they've done in this, and he's done a really exceptional job for the audio book. So that can be bought any price that books are sold you can find me online at deanradin.com which will bring you to deanradin.org which will bring you to realmagicbook.com And that becomes my main website right now so on their website we talk about this book, all other books all of the podcasts and interviews and conferences and things that i speak at

59:32 as well as many of my publications, the journal publications are there and also a link to even more publications from journal articles for people who are interested in that sort of thing. Awesome! Well I love it you are a champion of the people my man and you're re-enchanting the world hopefully your colleagues take notice this new book and the tide continues to turn until then keep doing what you do and take care thanks very much And boom goes that dynamite people. Dean Radin, great guy! He's definitely walked some interesting lines been close to some hotbeds of legendary lore and alternative circles and it makes me feel pretty awesome just to be able to bounce my questions off him

1:00:16 I gotta thank Gordon for hooking this one up. Of course, Alex from Skeptico mentioned Dean a couple times when he was here. I know Alex and Gordon are both doing shows with Dean to help get this book out there because it is kind of big deal to have him have this decades long career and instead of saying PsyFX he's coming right out and saying to his colleagues come on guys, this is magic let's stop playing with the terms what do you think they've been talking about for centuries? This is it! And it's fine for us to say that stuff, it doesn't really mean anything. But it seems like Dr. Raiden has taken a big step forward in the face of academia... Really on behalf of the weirdos like us! I'd actually like to see the loose little podcasting family that we got here rally up and put a little power behind this book release

1:01:04 It's almost like you can see the dominant of wider inclusion that Charles Fort expected and Gordon resurrected. We are in those times, people! And not to toot my own horn but I think if you've been listening to a show like THC or Rune Soup or Skeptico for the last five years, you're better prepared for this than a lot of people. You're not going to bat an eye when scientists use the word magic You're not surprised when another political event is rolled out that matches a template we've seen before. You're way ahead of the curve, so let's let the world catch up to us in a sense right? Like I mentioned even with the conspiratorial topics i think it's the best medicine for our crazy irrational chaotic times and we're probably best prepared for this next chapter in The Big Game of Life

1:01:54 But isn't it nice to go through some real lab-tested results and see that, as hard as some of this might be to believe... Look at the BLUST food studies. Look at this voodoo doll study! It is wild! And I hope its the catalyst to get people more excited about strengthening their own abilities. I know it got me pumped, I actually bought the Muse device that Dean was talking about and maybe I do have some concerns about my cell phone recording my brainwave data The app promises that it's private, but I don't know. I just gotta pursue my own goal despite all that and that goal is better brain training and this thing seems to help If you're curious how it works You buy the device you download the app you wear this headband while you go through guided meditations as you listen You're hearing the sounds of weather

1:02:42 When you're losing concentration, the weather gets way more intense and stormy. And then when you bring your focus back, the weather gets calm. When you're really in the zone, you hear the sounds of birds chirping. So this thing shows up yesterday I did one session and actually achieved two bird chirps in five minutes which feels pretty good! I mean, i've been using headspace for a while but i didn't know how much progress i was actually making. You got nothing to really gauge yourself on Of course it's an overall process But It is an ingenious way To subtly inform the person when they're actually in the meditation zone And yeah! Its about the price of an xbox but i would like to think that its gonna be way more useful For my betterment plus company card right people?

1:03:34 But this did light a fire under me, let it happen. We could all be stronger mentally, physically, dietarily... Let's incorporate some of this insight into what we do. I mean personally you should get the Muse device, get better at controlling your mental state and take Gordon's sigil course at Rune Soup You do these couple of things and you actually work on your magical timing, and develop a good strong monthly sigil regimen and daily meditation habit. I mean damn! You are gonna be pretty far ahead of the curve. Throw in a little astrology and i'd say you got the goddamn reins

1:04:12 Anyway, I think overall the alternative world is getting a bit paranoid and losing its sense of discernment sometimes. A lot of accusations going around and I never really want to get to a place where I'm shut down to the idea that good people can work in government research or that deep state interest in a person's work automatically makes them some nefarious character by default We need allies that are more academic than us sometimes When I look at a career like Dean's, i think man you know had not been so resistant to everything the system had to offer good and bad wouldn't that have been pretty fun path to walk? A pretty fun career. You can go the academic route and still ruffle feathers and still have a good time And we don't want to lose those kind of people by being overly critical or suspicious We dont wanna yawn Irving everyone! And that is probably something you could use as a verb at this point

1:05:07 But of course I wanted to ask Dean a little bit about those chapters of his life. I wouldn't be surprised if there's stuff that he isn't going to tell us, but that is the world we live in! So let's appreciate the nuance and i hope you enjoyed it hope you learned something. I tried to weave back and forth between the actual data and research and then some speculation on what that might mean casting our goals and intention into the future and seeing the effects ripple back... That is pretty damn interesting too It's a concept we've heard when we talk to magic people, but... To test it and see it in results is just icing on the cake. Of course, it is hard to really wrap your mind around how you measure that but hopefully You were able to follow Dean's description So fun show all-around Real magic Get it for the sciencey skeptics in your life and watch the data melt them down to your level

1:06:02 The book actually launches today and it is so rare that a higher side episode is actually ready on that very day. So something's working the magic has all lined up I think its ready to boldly and proudly come out of the closet that it's been stuffed into for so long, In other higher side news, I got another copyright strike on YouTube for another old show. See? I don't even have to do anything and I knew that after the first strike! They can just comb through and find enough reasons to ban me without ever putting out anything new It's not like I even have a chance to change course... Not that I would but you know i'm pretty much damned from the start once that starts happening

1:06:43 But I have a two-week ban, so you will not find this show on YouTube. And I'm probably done there entirely! How can I not be? But it is very frustrating to know that that is a chunk of the audience, you know 10 000 or more people That I can't even communicate with now to say hey You're gonna have to come to the website And yes if it were me, I would figure it out and how would go to the show's website? But you're talking about a large number of people and they just do not always act the same way Believe it or not

1:07:19 YouTube, I can say from experience is its own beast and those people are not the ones who are usually getting involved in your wider arc of things. They're just on YouTube That's fine but those people who like to watch conspiracy material on YouTube need to see the irony and understand that it isn't going to last Maybe i never should have had shows on youtube? I looked the other day when I got this copyright strike at the statistics much AdSense money I haven't been able to get in the last six or seven years. And it does make you sick when you see those kind of numbers all at once, but it should have been a red flag six years ago! I don't know we do what we can, We go where the people are, we just try to do the best show we can... But if you know someone who listens on YouTube and might not follow me on Twitter might not ever look at my Facebook which who cares? Those are stupid corporate platforms too

1:08:20 Let them know that we're not gonna be on YouTube again, and when the two-week ban is up if it even is up because they might give me my third strike before that point all they're going to find is basically a short upload that's gonna explain that were done. And tell them urge them to get the show in other ways I think it's really fucked up for YouTube to be built from the ground up as a platform for people to talk about anything and everything, and then once you dominate the space... You change the rules of the game. I'm not saying i'm surprised but it's just shitty Anyway, I've said before sign-up for plus not only do you get more show But we also don't have to worry about Google in YouTube and all this stupid corporate shit join The inner circle And I will keep self hosting

1:09:10 In this week's Plus Show with Dean, we got into the way magic works in nonlinear time and that data that supports that notion. The science of sigils developing and getting familiar with your deep mind. Neurofeedback devices like that Muse one I mentioned and how those can be great training wheels The model and distinction between Big C consciousness and Little c consciousness. Psychic levitating robots, man I wanted to get the psychic levitating robots in the first hour but there was just so much stuff! I asked him some questions about ceremonial magic as well... And one of the most fascinating chapters of the book Merlin level magicians those people through time who have just had extraordinary abilities in these realms a lot of names that wasn't even familiar with

1:09:59 So all good stuff? April starting out with a bang, Tracy Twyman not messing around, Dean Radin definitely serious as well. So abracadabra and hallelujah I've done my part! Big thanks Dean big thanks Gordon and to the spirit allies i don't even know i have your move dismissers of the dark arts quarantiners of consciousness and naysayers of the new paradigm it is coming but it's your fucking I can't stand, can't stand to fight. I've sliced down my brain into two at a time. I ain't gonna take on your proven wrongs and I can't stand to die. I spun you into mine

1:13:11 The high sides to value. You're not afraid to do the time, yeah! Yeah! Oh-hey-oh!