Dean Radin is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and cofounder and chairman of the biotech company, Cognigenics. He earned an MS (electrical engineering) and a PhD (psychology) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in 2022 was awarded an Honorary DSc (doctor of science) from the Swami Vivekananda University in Bangalore, India.
Transcript
Adam Jacobs: Dr. Radin, thank you so much for joining us today. I've been looking forward to talking to you for quite a long time, and it's a real treat for me that you're here and available. I've just completed one of your books, which I found to be absolutely fascinating, and have a series of questions, this is your wheelhouse, and I'm excited to discuss magic with you, the real variety. And in order to launch that off, there's a series of what you call synchronicities that took place when you were moving into one of your offices. You said there were actually four of them that happened sort of around the same time. I have some questions about those, but I wonder if you could just for the audience recount exactly what happened.
Dean Radin: What happened was that we were looking for a new office for a new nonprofit that my colleagues and I had created to do cyber research. We called it Boundary Institute because we didn't want to let anybody know what we were actually up to. Boundary is boundary between Mind and Matter. So this was during a hot time in Silicon Valley, and it was difficult to find anything directly in the center of the valley. So we were going out to the suburbs and we found a nice spot eventually and got an office and not exactly a strip mall, but a mall that had a bunch of different offices in it. So we moved everything in, and for a long time, for months, I was the only person in there because I was getting everything established. So one day I walked around the rest of our area to see what other kinds of people were in their offices, and there were real estate people and financial people.
And then I noticed that around the corner from where our office was, we were right on the edge. There was an office that had the name Quest Inc. And I thought, well, that's a good synchronicity because we're doing cyber search even though we're not advertising it. And that's Psi Quest. Well, okay, we thought Psi probably meant PSI, personnel Services Incorporated, or something like that, or maybe investigations we didn't really know, but we figured. It's just a funny coincidence. Time goes by. About two weeks later, I walked to our office in another direction and I noticed that next door to us is an office with a tiny little sign on it that says Quest Labs. So now it becomes more interesting because we're a laboratory and we have a laboratory next to us that says Quest and obviously is related to that other place. So we're wondering, well, what is that?
So I knock on the door and you can just peek through the mini blinds and you couldn't see anybody in there. So I did this over the next couple of weeks to knock on the door and see if there's anybody there. Finally, a knock on the door, someone is there. So I see a man coming towards the door and I'm preparing to say, hello, I'm your neighbor, introduce myself. The door opens, and I begin to say, hello, I'm your neighbor. I am about to say my name. And the man who is staring at me with a look of shock says before I have a chance to say my name, Dean Radin. And of course, yeah, I don't know who this guy is, I don't know how he knows my name. The long story short here is that he was doing PSI research as an independent business.
He was a former Apple employee who designed the original Apple Power Book, the first Apple laptop, and he decided he was more interested in cyber search. So he cashed out of Apple, created this organization, and was in the process of trying to locate me so I could be on his board of advisors or board of directors. He had no idea where I was because hardly anybody knew, first of all that I was in California at that point, and they certainly didn't know that I was creating this new nonprofit. So he didn't know how to contact me, and he was involved in a magical practice, and it's a variety of yoga nidra, which is the yoga of sleep. And this particular practice, you sleep for three hours, and then you wake up for three hours and you go back to sleep for three hours and you do this over 24 hours.
So after you do this cycle a couple of times you get into a very weird state where it's difficult to tell if you're dreaming or if you're awake. And all through this process, you're holding an intention. His intention was that I would somehow show up for him, and what he didn't expect was that the door would open and I would be there. So this is his synchronicity because he was intentionally pulling me, and then there I was in the flesh. Meanwhile, I think I have free will. We all think we have free will. Apparently, in that case, it wasn't as free as I thought. And so the next synchronicity was after we calmed down and explained who we were and what we were doing. Of course, he freaked out when I told him that we're actually next door and we're doing the same kind of stuff that he is.
And I said, well, what I've been working on the past month or so in my office, which is adjacent to the wall, it's on the same wall as his office. I was drawing pictures of what I wanted to have in the laboratory, which would be a certain kind of electromagnetically shielded room and certain equipment in it and things like that. I was drawing it on the wall or on the whiteboard, and he said, oh, come with me into his office. And he then ushered me into the room that had the electromagnetically shielded chamber and the equipment and everything that I was drawing on my side of the wall with of course not having no idea what he was up to.
So that was a synchronicity for me because I was pulling that into my awareness and manifesting it by literally drawing it on the wall, and it was on the other side of the wall, the actual thing. So this was a series of synchronicities, which is a little unusual because it involved two people holding intentions that if you think of this in gravitational terms, would be accepting, pulling us together. And up until the moment that we met, neither of us had any conscious awareness that any of this was happening. We were just going about our daily lives and doing things, and then suddenly it all collided, and that was this series of synchronicities.
Adam Jacobs: So obviously that's pretty wild, and I think that your average person who heard that would be like, that's a great story. And a lot of people have had some sort of serendipity along those lines, but maybe not as direct and intense as that one. But my question for you is, you talk a lot about intentionality in the book, and I like the way you described manifesting something into reality by drawing something onto the fabric of reality itself, so to speak. What are the limits of that intentionality? Meaning when I was just thinking, I was looking, watching some of the Olympics over the last few days, but I was thinking, well, if I held the intention to become an Olympic pole vaulter, for instance, in the next Olympics, I think the chances of that, no matter how much, no matter how perfectly I have it in my head and draw it and think it and meditate on it, it just can't happen. And many other things can't happen, at least from my vantage point. Therefore, why is it that you, one could manifest one thing and then not another thing? Where is the distinction between what's possible?
Dean Radin: Yeah, I would not say that anything is impossible. I would say that the idea that you could be in the Olympics next time and be in a pole vault, it's possible. In principle, it's pretty unlikely. So I think the question that comes up here is an important one because if you're in a war zone and you don't like it and you want all the invaders to go away, you could be wishing up a storm and it's not going to change much. And so why is that? Especially given that if you have more minor things and a more safe life, that those things seem to be manifest. And so there's several reasons. One is that anytime you do a manifestation that involves other people doing something, you're automatically clashing against other intentions. So in the case of saying, I think I'll be in the Olympics next time, there's a whole bunch of other people who have exactly that same intention.
And so if you imagine this in some kind of a space, they are like arrows pointing at each other all trying to get to the same goal. They will interfere. It'll clash. And in the magical traditions, there's this whole tradition of banishing magic and other ways of deflecting other intentions and other influences specifically because of the recognition that especially for people who are very sensitive about these things, you can feel the other intentions. So it's a little bit like saying, I'm going to swim across this fast-moving stream and I want to end up over there. You can do it with an enormous amount of effort maybe, but the current is pushing hard. And so here it's multiple streams going all over the place, every intention, and they can easily get in the way. So that's one factor. So it's clashing intentions. The other one is that all aspects of magic seem to work on probabilities.
So there's a probability that you can push things in the direction so that you can end up where you want to go, but a probability is not a certainty. And so if you look at equations of magic, like Peter Carroll is well known as being a chaos magician. He came up with equations of magic based on his experience, and what he showed is that the magical act of doing an enchantment or spell or something like that, it has multiple factors in it, and all of the factors have to be optimal in order to get a discernible effect. Everything really has to come together, including highly focused intention and belief and attention and lots of other factors. Motivation. It all has to be optimal in order to get especially a big effect, but even rather small effects. Well, not only do you need to optimize all of the things that you know about belief and attention and so on, but you also have the unconscious, which by definition you don't know what's going on.
So you might think you want to be a pole vaulter in the Olympics, but part of your unconscious is saying, that's stupid. I don't really want to do that, and that can squash the entire thing. So this is one of the reasons why in the magical traditions and also involving any kind of psychic effect it's important to have a practice like meditation or something. So you can at least get closer to unconscious desires and feelings and fears and other things that can get in the way. Otherwise, you could have optimized everything else, and the unconscious will come into play and say, no, I'm not going to do that. And then the probabilities go way down.
Adam Jacobs: Okay, that makes sense. But let me continue that by bouncing a little bit of a theological concept off you. So it says in the Mishna that you should “make your will like His will (capital H) so that he will make His will like your will,” which seems to say don't worry so much about what you want and what you want to manifest. Rather adjust yourself so that you are in alignment with all the big-picture desires, and then subsequently things will work out the way ultimately that you want. Since you two are in sync, should it not necessarily be about what we want? I know that a lot of magic is about making things happen. What if in the grand scheme of things, that's not really the goal? What if the goal is just simply to learn how to get good with the flow and then allow things to unfold? How does that strike you?
Dean Radin: Yeah, it's a great question. If we only knew what He with the capital H wanted for us, which is not directly knowable, right? So the way, I mean the counter to this is you take certain politicians who are extremely narcissistic and they feel that they're completely in flow with what the universe wants. The universe made me be this person so I can do whatever I want because I'm the universe. Well, from an outside perspective, that's crazy. Well, how do we know that our own wants and needs are in the flow without being crazy? So one of the ways I try to separate this is the difference between want and need. So I want to have a Ferrari, I don't need it so that the colors, the underlying sense of what you're talking about is flow. I don't need that. What I need is food and shelter and a few other things. The motivation that's associated with that is completely different than I want to have a Ferrari.
Adam Jacobs: Yes.
Dean Radin: So one of the ways that this expresses is I know people ask all the time about manifestation. I said, well, I want a gold-plated Mercedes. I want it. And so I use that as a demonstration of a manifestation. Can you get it? Well, in principle, you optimize all the things and the way that I said, and you want to have it happen. So one of my friends is a witch, and we were discussing the difficulty, the difference between want and need. So she said, I will satisfy your want. And so it is a gold plate of Mercedes. I didn't say I'm going to be inside it and drive it around. You want it? There it is. It manifested. So then one day I lost it. It was on my desk. I couldn't find it, and I was complaining about this in an interview, and my brother happened to see it.
He sent me another one. This is a gold-plated sports car, Mercedes. And again, it's not the real one, but I didn't ask for the real one. So if I somehow needed to have a real one, well then it's low probability, but who knows? So part of this also is about clarity. Generally what you want may or may not be clear enough in order to get it. People ask me all the time, can I win the Powerball lottery? Well, why do you want to do that? What are you going to do when you win it? And oftentimes they haven't. It's not really clear in their mind. They're thinking of yachts and houses and everything so well, those are wants. What do you need from that? If that becomes extremely clear and they could actually justify it to themselves, why do you need this? I need to make a hospital to treat people who have dementia because of blah, blah, blah, that has a totally different spin on it, that then even though it seems unlikely, is much more likely than simply winning the Powerball because you need a yacht or you want a yacht.
Adam Jacobs: Yes. Okay. So I see that it opens up a can of worms. I think your answer makes perfect sense. It opens up a bigger question about what really doing what counts as our needs is love a need. I mean, you can survive without having any love. You can reproduce without having meaning. What really counts as a need, and that is worth exploring. I don't think necessarily we have the answer cut and dried at the moment, but I do think it's a fascinating question and just something to keep in mind for people who are exploring real magic, how to use it, and what the regulations should be in terms of trying to bring things about. And I think your overall point is it should serve a good purpose, a good purpose for you, and presumably a good purpose for those around you. And then it seems to me more likely to come about than if it's not that way. Is that fair to say?
Dean Radin: Yeah, it's the should or could have woulda problem. These are difficult questions. And one of the reasons why black magic is called that is when you want or need something that will influence somebody else or many other people else's in a way where they don't give permission or knowledge. So sometimes people say, well, can I use magic or whatever for healing somebody? And the answer is not unless they give you permission, because you may be overriding some aspect of who they are. And so that would be black magic, even though you're doing it with kind and beneficial intention, it may not be that way. So it's true. It's a very complicated issue here that is somewhere between ethics, clarification, and values clarification. It becomes very complicated the moment you're dealing with anyone else. And so think about what sort of manifestations or things, anything that you want to create that does not involve anyone else. Very, very few.
Adam Jacobs: And you would put prayer into this category also? Yes. Right. Okay. So most people would not associate that with the word magic for sure. And also would not think that it's a bad thing possibly to pray for someone's healing without their permission.
Adam Jacobs: So that's an interesting question. I haven't thought about that much because your assumption is of course, that everyone wants to be healed, but that's not necessarily the case.
Dean Radin: Well, or take somebody who is suffering from extreme pain, right? Well, what does that mean? So one way of healing is that they're not going to die from it, but it maintains suffering, right? Maybe what is best for them and what they actually want is to die. Well, is it okay to pray for somebody to die? I don't know have answers to these questions, but it just shows how complicated it can be.
Adam Jacobs: Yeah. Agreed. Let me pivot for a moment into yogic practice. This is one of the things that you explore a little bit in the book, and you talk about what I consider to be maybe the most extreme version of it, which is the concept of levitation. A phenomenon that I think if I had to guess, I'd say 99 out of 100 people on the street would say that that's impossible. It's not true. And yet I do know that there are accounts from medieval times and accounts from the present, especially in the East where this phenomenon does seem to occur. So my question is, if we would like to demonstrate that there is this capacity that a human being has, why not simply in the same way that you do research on all other kinds of phenomena, why not put a camera on somebody, have witnesses taking notes, and just for once and for all, just demonstrate that this is a true phenomenon
Dean Radin: Because it doesn't seem to happen in the laboratory. It doesn't happen under controlled conditions. In addition, there are lots of videos of people who claim to be levitating, and you can't really tell what's going on in a video. But one time I was at the TM Center University in Iowa, and I was invited to watch a team of the world's greatest yogic flyers because the transcendental meditation people for years who are promoting yogic flying as part of an advanced city course. And what they mean by flying is jumping. Now they're in full lotus position. They're hopping. They're hopping in full lotus position, which is really tough to do, getting into a lotus position without causing serious damage, and B, trying to do anything in there other than escape from the pain. So you assume that a yogi can get into that position, they can stay there comfortably.
Can they then hop about a foot up? Well, yeah, if you practice it a lot, you can. So I asked them, well, has anybody actually ever hovered? Because ballistic jumping is one thing, but hovering is another thing. The answer was no. No one has been able to do that. So they asked the Maharishi, who was alive at the time, well, why not? And the answer was that society wouldn't allow it at this point. To paraphrase it he said, for this to occur, it has to be done in complete silence. So nobody, like other people's intentions, can't get into the mix and start saying, that's stupid. I'm not going to allow it to happen. Or it's in a society where everyone kind of expects, oh, okay, well now he's floating. So we live in a much more secular and skeptical society today where people could easily freak out if they saw that for real as opposed to a movie, and that may be preventing it. That was the explanation.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not true. But the fact is, at this point, if somebody said, I can levitate, I would say, okay, send me a video of you doing it. And then of course from the video, you can't tell much, but you can look at frame by frame and try to figure out if it's a trick. Most of the time it's a trick. I've seen people do it as a trick, and it's pretty obvious. The next question is, if they pass all of those preliminary steps, could you do this in the lab on demand? Usually not. But if they pass that, they say, okay, come to the lab. We'll have 14 cameras. We'll sit you on a scale that measures weight. We'll do all of these things for somebody who's going to try to do it as a trick. At that point, they will not be able to, and they bail for somebody who's delusional.
They might think they're going to do it, but then there's a danger on our part, from the investigator's part, because they believe they can do it. Their internal sense of it is, I'm floating no objective evidence that that's happening. In which case we're in a position now of being accused of faking our measurements or something, because the difference between internal conviction about something and external measurements of it doesn't always match as you'd find in any court case involving eyewitness testimony. So we don't do that. It's just it's too difficult to be able to find somebody who can do it for real on demand and actually capture it in a way that would convince anybody else, including ourselves.
Adam Jacobs: Fair enough.
Dean Radin: But that is not to say it's not possible. I think it is possible. We just are not there yet.
Adam Jacobs: Okay. You mentioned how you do research. I wanted to ask you something about your institute, which is called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And in looking at your website, just to quote from that for a second, it says, “we are inspired by the power of science to explain phenomena not previously understood, harnessing the best of the rational mind to make advances that further our knowledge and enhance our human experience.” So my question is, what's the difference between that and just science? It sounds, I mean when you spell it out, it sounds like, okay, you're researching phenomena that we don't understand yet. It's not like we understood particle physics hundreds of years ago, and then we came to understand it. Certainly, the conversation that we're having right now, technologically, it would've been considered magic not so so long ago, and yet it's part of the natural world. So are you just doing science that you have to give a different label to, or is there something fundamentally different about the science that you're doing?
Dean Radin: No, we're all traditionally trained scientists in traditional disciplines. So we're doing science. We do the same thing that every other scientist does. What you're talking about then is two things. One is every discipline of science has its own name. There's a gazillion different disciplines, and it says something about the specialty that you're in. So our specialty is noetic experiences, and they have other names, mystical experiences, psychic experiences, and on and on and on. Psychedelic experiences. They are experiences. So in that sense, it falls into a category of psychology. We're studying something having to do with the psyche, but the reason why we have a small private institute doing this rather than seeing it in every university is because science is also a social activity. And any social activity, there are taboos. There are some things you're supposed to do and some things you're not supposed to do.
Well, for long historical reasons, both from the religious side and the scientific side, these kinds of experiences, meaning experiences that suggest that we can perceive through space and time and that our minds can manipulate the world in various ways, have been suppressed for about 500 years, that you're not supposed to do that from the religious perspective. It's either considered to be supernatural and or demonic. And so you don't look at that. It's like, don't question God, don't test anything. So there's pressure from that direction and from the scientific side, a case can be made that during the Inquisition, in the Enlightenment period, Galileo helped define what science was—making a distinction between the objective world and the subjective world. The objective world was the world of physics, things you can measure that you can see, and all of that, that's like the physical world, the subjective world were qualities like what you see and what you smell and things like that.
And at the same time, more or less, the same time, within about 50 years, the Council of Trent, which was created by the Pope at the time, helped define what is it that will be in the church and what will be not in the church. They had this long thing called the Forbidden Books, the list of forbidden books. So part of the distinction that was made at the time was the church will handle everything to do with the human spirit, which in today's terms would be psychology experiences and what Galileo said as subjective. And so historically, Galileo probably saved himself from being executed by the Inquisition, by saying, oh, what I'm doing is just physical world stuff that has nothing to do with the human spirits, just like out there stuff. And he escaped the wrath of the Inquisition. He still ended up in house arrest for the rest of his life.
It was that close to not being good, but he escaped it. And so from that point on, science was afraid, very afraid of actually entering into this space. And so you have science and religion both from their both directions saying, do not go there. So when you look at the academic world today, there are roughly 15,000 institutions of higher learning around the world. Of them, roughly 40, have a faculty member who's interested in this topic, publicly known to be interested, not even necessarily in doing anything about it, but just interested. Well, 40 divided by 15,000 is a very, very tiny percentage of academic effort looking into these kinds of things.
That's why we're an independent institute because it's somewhere between impossible, although not really. It's really difficult to be able to do this kind of work within the academic structure because the assumption is many, many generations of professors have assumed that this, we don't do that. So the strange thing about taboos is that as soon as a taboo is identified, there's lots of people interested in it, but you don't talk about it. And that is happening in the academic world too. Lots of academics or just as interested in these topics as anyone else for the simple reason that they have the experiences except that they can't do it. So yeah, that's why we have a separate institute.
Adam Jacobs: There's something sort of disheartening about that in terms of science itself and its ability to follow conclusions all the way to the truth. And I guess one would hope that science does not have taboos, but of course, they're made out of human beings, do science and humans have their proclivities. But you do a very convincing job of laying out data that I think if more people were aware of at all, and I'm very interested in this stuff, and I was just learning about it as I was reading it. So for instance, you mentioned Jessica Utts, I think it's how her name is pronounced. YA statistician who says the following. She says, “The data in support of pre-cognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if it pertained to something more mundane. Yet most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at the data.”
So first question about her, as I've heard about her from DOPS, the Division of Perceptual Studies, I know she's worked with them. Does Dr. Utts have a horse in this race at all? Is sh on the side of the independent thinkers or is she somebody who sort of works on this and wants it to be a particular way? And two, it's just as a corollary as she says, they won't even look at the data. Is there more of an unscientific approach than to shun information as the scientist?
Dean Radin: So first of all, Jessica, when she said that it was part of her presentation as president of the American Statistical Association, she said that to the gathering of several thousand statisticians at the annual meeting. And the rest of that passage that you were saying was what would you rather believe? Another couple of experiments or dozen or a hundred experiments or a single personal experience said to statisticians who specialize in the analysis of data? Well, you can guess the answer. It was a single personal experience. The thing is that a lot of surveys show that including academics that they have these experiences. So a lot of them are already on board with the idea that something weird happened. I don't know what that is. When I started looking it up on the internet, it looks like psychic spooky stuff, and I can't talk about that to anybody because my colleagues wouldn't like it.
What they don't realize is their colleagues have exactly the same feelings, but they don't talk about it there. And I have anecdotes I can say about that. This is absolutely true. People right next door to each other in the same department, in the same university independently contact me and tell me about their interest in psychic stuff. And then I hear all that. Do you know? So-and-so because they're at the same university. Oh yeah, they're next door. They called me too. So one of those episodes has led to a monthly call now for 25 years, every single month among a group of very prominent academics at a major university where we discuss these things every month.
Adam Jacobs: Wow underground.
Dean Radin: Completely underground because they're prominent. They don't want anybody to know that this is their interest and the level of interest goes up to the National Academy of Sciences. So the taboo is everywhere. So now I forgot what you're saying. I had Jessica on the mind, right?
Adam Jacobs: I'm just curious if she has a position, is she with you or is she with the other side? Does she have a horse in the race?
Dean Radin: Anyone who looks at the data long enough gets a horse in the race. And so she began out of curiosity, about the same time I didn't, this is back in 1985, I worked on the government's psychic research used for espionage in a classified program way back then, and that's where I met her. So she was brought in as a statistician to help in the evaluation and design of experiments. I was there on staff at the time doing other things. And so we both were introduced to a level of psychic functioning at that time where neither of us thought that that was even a possible thing.
I mean, how often do we meet somebody who's extremely talented in one of these things? It's pretty rare, but we were able to see this happening in real-time in front of us. In which case, after a while, you either become so skeptical about it that you can't believe anything anymore that actually becomes a pathology at that point. Or you, after a while, certainly as a scientist, you're saying, well, I don't understand that data. I can't really explain it very well, but I do know about the conditions under which it was collected, and I'm convinced that that's a real thing. And so what scientist is not going to be pulled by the curiosity and then figure out what in the world was that? That's where for me, especially as a scientist, I'm attracted to things that don't make sense, not to the things that do make sense.
And that's probably true across the board. We want to know what's not within our textbooks at this point, what's outside of it. And there are two different kinds of personalities then that go into science. One type, we'll look at the textbook and say they can absorb it and you can love it after a while because it creates a very nice picture of the way things are. And then it becomes very, very difficult to see beyond it. In fact, there's resistance to seeing beyond it because it means some of the things that you learned in the textbook are probably wrong, and that means you have to reconstruct this whole world image that you created. The other kind of scientist is more like me where I'm saying, well, this is like a model. I don't want to mistake the map for the territory. This is the best model that we currently have about the way things work.
Some of it is probably right and some of it is definitely wrong. We don't know yet exactly which ones those are. But as science expands and becomes more comprehensive and in every direction, up and down and everywhere else, we very often will find that some things that we thought were true turn out either to not be true at all or to be a special case of something which is much more interesting and much more comprehensive. So I get annoyed when I hear sometimes a neuroscientist would say that the brain is the most complicated object in the universe. I become less annoyed when they add one additional word, which is the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. That's the way it should be said. But if they leave that part out, what it's suggesting to me is that they don't really have much of an imagination at all.
They've never read science fiction or anything. I mean, what's wrong with them? But because scientists have different personalities too, some will fall into certain categories where they fall in love a little bit too much with prevailing theories, and it becomes blinders after a while. So I'm an empiricist. I am 99% an empiricist. I'm driven by the data. I have to have hypotheses and proto-theories in order to figure out what makes sense to do next. But I don't, I don't love them. I take them as working ideas and just go as far as they'll lead me.
Adam Jacobs: I like that. I'm running slightly late on time, but I really want to get in two and a half questions. So let's see if we can do it.
Dean Radin: Well, you can cut out other stuff. Well,
Adam Jacobs: We'll see. But so far I like everything. So it's okay if it's a little longer. But you talked about something called the Global Consciousness Project, and you say there are six classes of scientific experiments with overall positive evidence, and those are telepathy, remote viewing, pre-sentiment, implicit precognition, random number generation, and this last thing the Global Consciousness Project. And you say that this project achieved something called a result over seven Sigma, which I understand to be a very, very, very unlikely thing to occur. Can you just give a sketch of what that project was and why the results are as significant as they are?
Dean Radin: Okay, so we need to go back 50 years to, it's actually more than that now, but around 50 years ago, where studies on mind-matter interaction at that point, were using electronic random number generators. So these are devices that are designed to be like electronic coin flippers. They produce bits, not heads and tails, but zeros and ones and random sequences, and are truly random in the sense that the source of the randomness is not like a computer or software algorithm, but rather a physical cause. And most of these generators use a quantum process—quantum randomness, which is considered fundamentally random. So you and you can combine them now that they look like a little memory stick. I mean, it's just a tiny little thing, but they're really, really good. They create good true random numbers that is used as a target for mind-matter interaction because we at this point think that what's going on is that the mind is able to manipulate probabilities.
sSo a random sequence is a probabilistic sequence. In an experiment you would ask somebody while looking at a graph of results on a screen, make the device produce more ones, and if it did, it would start creeping up. Now make it to produce more zeros. It would creep down and now don't do anything and it should sort meander a round chance. Those kinds of experiments have been done with hundreds of times huge amounts of data and that kind of experiment and it works. It's a very small effect, but if you collect enough data, you will eventually find that the data drifts in the direction of the intention. So after many, many years of doing that kind of experiment, my colleague at Princeton at the time was Roger Nelson, and Roger was thinking about what does it mean to intend? Well, intent has actually two pieces to it. You have to first attend and then you can intend, well, the attention is simply paying your attention to something and then you put a spin on it as to what you want to do want once I want zeros, but you have to attend as well.
So he thought, well, I wonder if a tension alone would create an effect. Does attention on a random system create coherence or order or something like that? So he started doing experiments that he called field consciousness experiments where you take a random number generator, and put it in the vicinity of a group that is doing something mentally coherent. So a group of meditation people doing a choral group, people in an orchestra, even people watching a movie or anything. So he did that and he was finding that the data would deviate from chance while the group was being coherent. And so one of the ways of doing this, for example, is you put the random generator in a room where there will be a meditation going on and you record it before the meditation, during the meditation, and then after everybody leaves. And so you see chance behavior before they arrive, and now they're doing, the meditation is deviating away from chance and it goes back to chance behavior afterward.
It's an indication something about the behavior of the group made a difference. These devices are made so they're impervious to changes in the environment, which is an important thing because when a room full of people is going to get a little bit hotter and a little bit more humid, and you don't want your electronics to be pushed by that. And so they're made in such a way that that is not going to happen. I mean, I can describe it in technical ways, but it's not necessary. So from that, I started replicating those effects and was able to see it on large TV shows. One that I did was during the OJ Simpson reading of the Verdict, which is one of the first times in modern, actually, any history where hundreds of millions of people were listening or watching something live where the event of interest was one second guilty, not guilty.
So that meant that if you think of this as in terms of mental coherence among a huge number of people that would sort of increase and increase and increase up to a point and then maximize and then fall apart. And so what happened to the data? That's what it did. So I was running five random number generators at the time. I was in Nevada at the time, and that was taking place in California. Nevertheless, it showed an effect. So we started doing experiments of that type, and Roger got the idea, we can do this for events that we know that are going to happen, planned events, but we can't do it if something really big happens and we didn't have our generators running. That was the origin of the Global Consciousness Project where we created (Roger's son actually created) an internet structure that would allow for a network of random number generators operating continuously, which it is still doing now 25 years later, 26 years later.
It started in 1998. So we have data from random number generators located in major cities around the world giving data every second of continually all the way back. So as of today, there are about 120 gigabytes of data, and in terms of the number of bits, it's well into the trillions of individual random bits. I don't know exactly how many, but a lot. So we have used that because for planned events like the opening ceremony of the Olympics, predictably, millions of people are watching. We can say, okay, what we'll do is say, we're going to look at this event from this time to that time when we infer that a lot of people are going to be watching. So we do that, the event happens, and then we go in and take the data out from that portion and say, well, is it behaving according to chance or not?
Well, we did this for 500 formal events. Sometimes there were plans, sometimes they were not planned. And you notice that the sequence of this is not to say we're going to look for something weird in the data and then try to shoehorn it into some event. We always look at the event first and decide, do we think this is going to be, will this attract a lot of attention? And then we register it and then we take that piece of data out and we use the same analysis in every single case, the same kind of analysis, and see over time, does that begin to deviate from chance or not. So the seven Sigma result, which is odds against chance of 3 trillion to one, when you look at it on a graph, you see a progressive increase in odds against chance, just keep going up to 500 events. And then we stop the experiment when it was going to end, but it's still going. We still have the data from it. So we're able to look at other kinds of events that are no longer even part of the experiment. And we've since created what we call GCP 2.0, which is a much, much bigger network and much more sophisticated in terms of the hardware that we're using.
So what all of that is saying is that there's something about, there appears to be something about the coherent attention of millions or billions of people around the world that is causing a measurable change in the physical world. And we're seeing it in the random number generators because that's what we're measuring. But our suspicion is that it is some kind of a mind-matter interaction like two sides of the same coin, in which case everything in the physical world is changing every time billions of people are thinking along the same lines.
Adam Jacobs: There are huge implications to that of course. So the fact that you got such a significant statistical result, I would think that would be on the cover of Nature and the Lancet and Global News, but I guess we're not ready for that just yet.
Dean Radin: Well, we've already discussed taboos, and the taboos Science is a social enterprise. Science is just as much politics and pigheadedness and everything else in there. It is the same as any other kind of social agreement. And so some things are simply considered beyond the pale. However, notice that in the 1960s with the psychedelic revolution, there was way more interest in these kinds of things. There were lots of laboratories doing psychic research and so on. That went away for political reasons largely. But it's come back so that we have the psychedelic renaissance meditation is now mainstreamed. All of that is leading to a new rush of interest, not only in the kinds of work that we're doing but also more importantly in philosophical worldviews. So science is based on a materialistic philosophy. We are now seeing major thought leaders in physics and in the neurosciences and psychology talking about alternatives like panpsychism and idealism and all these other things.
And so that's extremely important because the reason why the Global Consciousness Project doesn't show up on the front page of Nature or somewhere else is because it doesn't match a materialistic worldview. It doesn't make any sense at all from that perspective. If you take it from an idealistic perspective, of course, that would be completely mainstream. So again, we're talking about what this is a combination now of sociology and philosophy, which are tightly coupled when it comes to how science views the world. And it is changing. It's changing very quickly. So I just sent the manuscript off from my second book on magic, which will come out sometime next year. And it again, similar to my first book on magic, is saying that none of these ideas make any sense at all from the prevailing scientific worldview. But that worldview is changing, as I wrote in real magic from that was five years ago till now.
It is changing so much faster than we think in terms of a paradigm shift, the shift has been happening very slowly. It is now on the knee of the curve. It is changing very rapidly. And what I then can predict is sometime within the next 20 years or so that the kinds of things that we've been talking about will no longer be seen as beyond. The pale might still be controversial, but it'll begin to penetrate into the scientific mainstream because the whole worldview will begin to, it won't change. One of the things that my colleagues don't like is that you say, well, you're going to have to throw away all the textbooks. That's a fear that materialism is wrong, and it's not wrong. It's been very effective. What will happen is that it will expand and become more comprehensive. Just like all of our theories and all of our philosophies, all of it always expands. So the expansion here is that materialism and the way science has worked will be seen as a special case. It's exactly what Galileo was saying. It describes the external world really well, but it's missing half of our existence. Well, the other half of our existence will then be looked at in a new way, and suddenly psychic and mystical and psychedelic and magical experiences will no longer be excluded, and it'll only have taken us 600 years
Adam Jacobs: To get there. I look forward to that personally. That's exciting. In two minutes, tell me if you can answer this. You talk about something called effortless striving, which you define as “you must absolutely want the desired outcome more than anything you've ever desired, a passionate, obsessive, overwhelming desire. But at the same time, you must also maintain zero anxiety about it.” What an incredible state of mind to achieve, it seems to me, and one that I think a lot of people would be interested in. So I know we don't have to do this justice, we'd need a lot more time, but if someone's interested in attaining that state of mind, how would you suggest that they go about it?
Dean Radin: Meditate. Because within meditation, you calm down the emotional push underneath. You can be highly intensive, very high intensity mentally, but without all of the emotion and rest of it that comes into play, which easily overrides everything else. So you first have to achieve samati, you achieve this internal state of absolute stillness, but you're still there. You're aware of what you want to do in that state is put an intentional spin. I now wish to levitate, or you, of course in the yogi tradition, they would phrase it differently, but essentially that you put a spin on this state of pristine, calm. So that's the effortless part. And the striving is an intentional spin. So it's like pure awareness. And then once you're comfortable and able to maintain that state for a while, you just put in a tiny bit of flicker.
I think I would like that. And so for the meditative models, especially within the cities, the notion is that in an ordinary waking state, I want this pushing emotionally doesn't get down into the space where these things happen. The same is true in the magical traditions. You want gnosis that's the same as samati. The power of whatever's going on here seems to be in deep mind and deep world, deep matter and deep mind, they're sort of in the same place somehow. So you can try to force it to happen from an ordinary state, and it doesn't generally work very well, or you can bring your mind down to that state, in which case the distinction between mind and matter actually begins to dissolve. So from that perspective, I want this gentle push to bubble up into everyday awareness, and it could be gigantic.
Adam Jacobs: Gotcha. Okay. Learn how to meditate. Got to put that on my bucket list. And finally, I understand that you are an accomplished violinist, is that correct?
Dean Radin: I was on the concert violin track for many years, but not since I was 25.
Adam Jacobs: So I also have a music background, and I'm wondering what your feelings are, and this is my last question for today, but what about music as a vehicle for achieving states of higher consciousness? Is it effective? Is it better or worse than other approaches that people can take? And is it being used these days for this purpose?
Dean Radin: Yeah, the last part of your question's, interesting. I don't know anyone who is using production of music or music performance as a kind of meditation, but experientially that is exactly I think the reason why I'm so interested in these things, because especially with stringed instruments where you're doing all kinds of things at the same time in order to make it sound like something that anybody else would want to listen to. I've calculated one time, I probably spent 20,000 hours from age five to 25 just practicing. And you're learning intonation, you're learning micro-movements and your muscles and all of that. After about five years of that, you incorporate it much into your unconscious because otherwise, you can't remember four or five hours’ worth of repertoire. You can't do it then. So in incorporating it within the unconscious, it means that some portion of your awareness has brought in a very complicated sequence of things, which you also need to be able to listen to in real-time in order to make sure that you're doing what you said you're going to do. So I found that after about five years, I could practice. I could read a book and I could watch TV at the same time.
And it did not feel like multitasking. I wasn't multitasking at that point. I'm sight reading, I'm playing, I'm reading a book, and doing something else because I was incorporating it all to become automatic.
That is similar to what a meditator will say. After five years of discipline practice, you're meditating all the time. You don't have to sit down and start doing breathing, whatever. It becomes part of you, and that's one of the reasons why it becomes transformative. So I would say then somebody's practicing an enormous amount of musical performance for a long time. It is incorporated into you. We know that it changes brain structure, it changes all kinds of things. And if I had to guess, then I would guess that the reason why the kind of topics that we're talking about don't seem weird to me. It seems like these things, of course they exist. Why would they not exist? I take my scientific skills to study it in a way to be able to show it objectively. But internally, I'm saying, well, that's obvious. And that comes about, I think because of so many years of doing the equivalent of meditation without even knowing that's what it was.
Adam Jacobs: I feel the same thing. So Dr. Radin, thank you so much for your time and insight today. I learned a tremendous amount, and I am continuing to learn from the study of your work. And I really hope that what you are teaching and exploring will become more widely known in the very near future and that you'll be very successful with explaining to people what it is that you're discovering. So thank you for your time and thank you for being here.
What If Magic Is Actually Real?