Exploring the Reality of Magic: Insights from Dr. Dean Radin

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[Music] [Applause] thinking

aloud conversations on the Leading Edge of knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey mishlove

[Music] hello I'm Jeffrey mishlove today we'll be exploring the reality and

significance of magic and I mean magic in the esoteric sense of the word my guest is Dr Dean Raiden who is currently

the president of the parapsychological association he is the chief scientist at The Institute for noetic sciences and is

a distinguished professor at the California Institute of integral studies he is also the author of The conscious

Universe the scientific truth of psychic phenomena and entangled Minds extrasensory experiences in a Quantum

reality and supernormal science yoga and the evidence for Extraordinary psychic

abilities and most recently real magic ancient wisdom modern science and a guide to the secret power of the

universe once again this interview is being conducted on Skype so now I'll switch over to the Skype

video Welcome Dean it's a pleasure to be with you in fact I've been looking forward to doing this interview for

quite a long time uh so I'm delighted that you're with me I know in your book real magic you start out with a very

striking statement that caught my attention which is that you've been researching magic the esoteric forms of

magic for 40 years but it was only in the last year that you realized it yeah that's strange isn't it yeah uh

I I I guess I was uh probably a bit overstated in that I always knew there's a relationship between Magic and psychic

phenomena but I really never thought of it in that sense we' we've been trained to ignore magic but then I thought well

I don't know the relationship is so close that it's almost silly to ignore it well in in fact in my experience

Paras psychologist at least certain Paras pychology have been overtly hostile to the esoteric Traditions they

often say we have nothing in common except this weak sigh that we're both interested in but we use the scientific

method and they obviously do not yeah and the they uh are the people who gave us science as we know it today

so the the best example I can think of is Francis Bacon who's probably the father of empiricism who was very

interested in these topics and even wrote about testing of what he called the uh the force of imagination which is

what we'd call a psychokinesis today yeah so this is deeply part of both science and psychic phenomena from the

very beginning MH will you report a very striking personal experience that I think really got your attention as as to

the nature of magic and uh perhaps you could recount that you mean the four part synchronicity yeah that yeah so

this uh I I don't know that this is Magic or not cuz I don't actually know what magic is for that matter I don't

know what psychic phenomena are either except that they're they're uh they seem to be related in some way so the

synchronicity is that uh in the near 2000 when we started the boundary Institute dick sha

and I and a few others Ed May was there uh we were looking for a place to uh put our offices and it was the height of

the.com craze and So within Silicon Valley all the prices and the leasing rates were were enormous so we kept

looking further and further away we ended up in Los Altos which is the suburbs of Silicon Valley and found a

nice office in an office complex and then rented that so I forget how long it was but maybe a week or two later I was

looking at the list of other kinds of organizations that were in the same uh Office Park and one of them said uh

cquest Inc uh which I thought was uh we all thought was an interesting synchronicity because

after all we were involved in cyber search and this cquest Inc didn't say anything about what they did and I

passed to the office and it just said sidequest ink and no one was in there so I had assumed at that point that it

meant something like Personnel Services or something of that sort PSI uh so then another couple weeks go

by I walked to the office in a slightly different way and I noticed that the office adjacent to ours is called squ

labs and now it was more interesting because what is a Personnel Services Place doing with the laboratory so again

day after day i' go past see nobody was in there the blinds were closed about a month later finally I saw that there was

somebody in there could just see through the blinds and see that there was a man standing at the desk so I knock on the

door I'm all prepared to introduce myself the door opens there's a man standing there and he put up my hand to

shake his hand say hello I'm and he finishes the sentence by by kind of croaking in a strange way Dean

Raiden and yes I never saw this guy before didn't know who he was uh and he he looked like he was in the middle of a

stroke I mean he really looked quite shocked and so I was concerned about this and I I wasn't quite sure what to

do but after a few minutes he settled down and I asked him well what's what what are you doing here and he said well

I'm doing what you're doing what do you think we're doing well you're doing parisology said you're also doing

parisology yeah he was uh one of the lead designers on the Apple power book which is one of

their first laptop computers and they cashed out from Apple and did what he always wanted to do which by the way is

what a lot of people would rather do which is to study psychic phenomena except that he wanted to do it as a

business it's a for-profit business and he had ideas about how to do that so the reason he was so shocked when he opened

the door is because he had been engaged for a month in a Tibetan dream yoga practice where you can manifest what you

want and the practice involves uh 3 hours of being awake and then 3 hours of sleeping and continue this cycle for

days and days with the idea that during your waking hour hours you're consciously trying to manifest the thing

that you want and then you they go into your dream state and the unconscious helps pull

it so what was he trying to manifest me he was trying to to get in touch with me

now he didn't expect that I was going to show up at his door but he did hope that he would find a way to contact me

because he wanted to me to be on his Board of advisers for his business and at that time nobody knew I

mean hardly anybody knew that I was in Silicon Valley especially not with a new organization out in the suburbs of

Silicon Valley so there wasn't any way somebody could have found where I was there was maybe five people who knew

where we were at the time so uh so I felt uh somewhat disoriented when he told me that because

I thought I had free will uh to both uh get that office it wasn't just my decision it was decision of a bunch of

us uh and I thought I had free will to go next door and knock on the door and you know that sort of disorientation was

the the notion that somehow he brought me into existence at that time in place cuz that's what he

wanted so the second part of the story is after he settled down and told me the story and we both recovered from our

shock he said uh would you like to see what I have here the laboratory said sure So it went in and it saw a

fabulously equipped Laboratory with a a large electromagnetically shielded room and inside the shielded room was all

kinds of need equipment including a special leather Rec reclining chair which is a kind of uh apparatus I like

to have in the lab one those zero gravity chairs uh so this was my turn to be

shocked because what I had been doing for the prior month in my office which was adjacent on the adjacent wall to his

his uh laboratory wall was drawing on the board the things that I wanted to go into our laboratory which included most

of the stuff that was in his shielded room including that leather chair so I had brought into manifestation what I

had been thinking about the previous month and didn't know that it was on the other side of the wall from where I

happened to be so this is it's four parts of synchronicity that gets Wilder and Wilder along the way and in

retrospect I mean we we discussed it at the time uh it it was kind of shocking in retrospect it's almost it's

a little strange that it not even more shocking I mean we were kind of stunned at the time but then people have said

afterwards well did did you then create a collaboration I mean you're two people working the same and the answer was no

we didn't we were so disoriented by the whole thing that we basically went about our business and we're friendly with

each other and would say hello occasionally but we never collaborated so this may be what I mentioned in in

real magic is when you're encountering something that is that is really high on the

magical scale it's kind of frightening it it's if you could it could cause you to even forget that the

event took place uh and in worst places you deny that it ever happened in my case I'm not

denying it and I certainly didn't forget it but it it didn't as I said in retrospect it didn't have the effect

that you might think it would afterwards it was more like oh that's weird and then we go around our our everyday

business weird is an interesting word it comes I think from the Celtic tradition and I think it's another word that means

magical actually wyr D Yes actually the the origins of the word is fate it's it's almost a a synonym with

fate but it's it's a magical kind of Fate it's like you're you're you have a certain destiny that is going to play

out and if you notice it and if you can discern what that Destiny is you can make things happen that look magical but

it actually is just playing out your fate well it also seems as if the yian notion of synchronicity comes uh to to

the four here as well as the concept of psychokinesis right how does something happen how do you make something

happen I don't know but somehow that's that is what the magical Traditions are about intention can somehow shape

probabilities or something like that and uh cause events to nicely come to pass so you point out

in your book that uh Magic of this sort is real it's intermittent it doesn't work 100% of the time and you also point

out that there are many different spiritual Traditions that post warnings about magic and at the same time various

religions that warn people not to mess with magic also engage in magical practices right every religion that

involves prayer is doing a psychokinetic practice uh or they're doing a theurgic practice so if you're praying to give

honor to some dismod Ed invisible intelligence out there that's theor MH if you're doing an intercession prayer

or an intentional prayer for something to happen that's psychokinesis and so you're right that

this is part part of the bread and butter of virtually all religions and even not in a religious context the

whole affirmation shandre is exactly the same way MH so on the negative side uh as Jean Paul SRA once said hell is other

people in which case the the moment you you get the sense that you have power over other people it becomes extremely

seductive and that seduction makes you Darth Vader if you do something to override the Free Will of someone else

that's almost the definition of black magic and that's what Many religious practices and even just esoteric

practices remind us that if you try to or succeed in overwhelming somebody's free will you will pay for it well it's

interesting to compare the scientific study of Paras pychology which if if we include psychical research goes back to

1882 with the history of magic itself which is actually much older goes back at least to ancient Egypt maybe four

5,000 years probably back to Shamanism even even longer so although the traditions of magic have not to my

knowledge Incorporated the scientific method at least not very much uh they have a an ancient folk tradition and

there is a sense in in which folk ways are like science you know when things don't work they get discarded and when

things do work they become incorporated into a folk tradition yeah so I would say

that even the very Mo the most ancient magical practices within Shamanism were still a kind of

empiricism and if you you're working spells or doing ritual and they never seem to do anything well you don't keep

doing that so this is not to say that the grimo which have thousands of spells in them that they're all uniformly

correct a lot of them are Superstition uh but I would say that not all of them are Superstition and it

raises the the possibility and I haven't done this yet but it raises the possibility of taking a famous grimoire

and actually doing the rituals and seeing what actually happen so bring it up to date in terms of what we know

about scientific methods today and try it just try it again now in many cases they pretty most of the Spells are

benign but a huge number of spells are actually black magic because they're love potions and money potions and

things that would require the world to bow to your wishes in a way that would affect other people and so we may want

to go through a grimoire and take the ones that seem relatively benign and work with those and set the other ones

aside well you also refer in your book to something you call Gray magic and and specifically as I recall it it was what

is known as a binding spell uh can you elaborate on that yeah the binding spell is the idea that you place a constraint

on somebody else so that their actions cannot harm other people so there are uh which and warlocks who are putting

binding spells on Donald Trump for example to prevent he him or his administration from harming other people

and then so this is black magic in the sense that it's directly aimed at somebody else but for the the benefit of

of all so it it does go it's somewhere between white and black so it's gray magic and uh also I suppose uh for

people who are students of magic well there many different Traditions there's Egyptian magic and Tibetan magic and

magic in in the Hindu vadas and Western medieval magic they all seem to have very extensive lineages

and and literature and history and uh mostly similar but of course there are differences in each case right and by

the way contemporary practitioners of all of the ones you just mentioned yeah so so the uh it's true that a a

scholarly overview of magic would would the way Scholars dive into a topic is to look at the nuances of cultural and

history and language and so on between the different methods but because I'm writing a fairly short book here and and

I'm not a scholar of magic what I wanted to concentrate on were the similarities mhm so I I attemp to do a synthesis of

roughly 10,000 years worth of of material uh and that's why I I vastly oversimplified for for the purposes of

this book well I seem to recall an earlier conversation I must have had with you oh over a year ago probably in

in which you said you really started out to write a book about the scientific method and it ended up becoming a book

about magic well it was always about uh science and Phil philosophy basically

about the assumptions within the scientific worldview and this was this book is basically the uh Western

esoteric version of my previous book supern normal which is more about the eastern esoteric Traditions so this

partially just rounding out the Western and Eastern look at it but whereas he talked about the cities as far as

Eastern magic goes uh in the western tradition it's more about what we would call called Harry Potter type magic well

you uh have been doing paraschou I have to say you're probably up over a hundred published studies at

at this point and uh what can we say about how the findings of parapsychology inform our appreciation

of the magical Traditions well if you you categorize magical practice into three types uh

divination manifestation or force of will and theery and now you cast what we have

studied in parapsychology against those that's a perfect match so divination is all about perception through space and

time well we know what that is in Cy search uh manifestation or force of will is

psychokinesis and Poltergeist and things of that sort and theor G is studies of medium ship and channeling and

near-death experience and that sort of thing so it's not as though there's something left out all of it is

contained within the studies that we do and it's I think it's more of a uh a sociopolitical reason why the handbook

of parisology in the 21st century which is a nice snapshot of the state-ofthe-art doesn't have the word

magic in the index it does have one article which talks about ancient magical ideas is in

the context I think of shamanism but it's not a thing it's like not even a topic that that we would talk

about probably because we're wearing hats of scientists and Scholars and you don't talk about that stuff so I figured

it's it's ironic that within a field that's has a strong taboo which prevents people from talking about it that we

have a taboo within the taboo and I decided I don't like taboos so that's why I talked about magic and I know

you're getting even today some push back from other Paras psychologists who are very embarrassed uh that you're bringing

up the subject they think that it's associated with the worst most pernicious

superstitions some of it is it's true but but it's also undeniable that the the relationship is there MH and so uh

would it matter for what we're doing in terms of our perceive credibility of the field and I would say it doesn't matter

at all MH because the perceived credibility of the field from a mainstream academic perspective is that

it doesn't have any credibility so how could you make it any worse what I'm trying to do is simply in a sense raise

the scholarship of of to look more carefully about what it is that we think we've been doing and more importantly to

look for Clues within the esoteric Traditions as to ways to think about the phenomena that we've been studying well

this brings us into the theoretical area and uh there you you raise some very interesting arguments you suggest that

reality as we know it is much more malleable than we tend to think well that is what anything in

parisology suggests right I mean the one of the summary statements that one can say about the entire database that we've

collected is that uh there's a relationship between subjective and objective that they blur into each other

that that like a one-sentence statement of implications of any kind of sici phenomena well the same is true of magic

that's basically what it says too that the world is malleable that the subjectivity can in some way interact

with objectivity so it's just cyber search by a different name uh it it doesn't have

the the same tools that we can bring in a scientific sense so the level of confidence about any particular magical

practice is not quite as high as what we can say about an experimental series but that the phenomena are basically the

same I think is is very clear mhm you um yourself have conducted some very interesting studies looking at this

relationship between objectivity and subjectivity uh involving Quantum physical

effects well actually every experiment that we that we've done not just me but within the field that involves

psychokinesis is exactly that it's it's looking at how is it that some idea inside of your head is reflected in

the behavior of a physical system which could be human being at a distance that's what it's all about so yeah so

I've done that many many colleagues have done the same kinds of experiments well a actually in in my experience it seems

as if most parasyche has focused in on the perceptual side of uh the equation

experiment in psychokinesis seem uh rare to me I agree that today that is the case

but that is primarily because uh most of the people doing these studies are psychologists so so they either don't

have interest in the physics side or uh maybe it wouldn't fit in with what they're doing uh if you go back into

1970s there are many more physicists involved in this study and not surprisingly they were interested in

psychokinesis mhm so I I have have training in both of those disciplines so I flip back and forth depending usually

on what the funding is well let's talk about the double slit experiments that you've

done okay so the the first uh experiments that used Optical systems of both single

slit inter feters and double slit uh whereby um um now I'm forgetting his name Stan Jeffers

from York University uh and Mike ibison who was working at the parab at the time so in

1998 they published two studies involving a double slid system uh Stan Jeffers is known as a major skeptic and

he reported no results and Mike Edon was at paay and they reported positive results paer being the Princeton

engineering anomalies research center right mhm so uh somewhere around 2008 or so I I ran

across that paper and I thought oh okay one of my strategies for doing this by the way is that I figured that in order

to try to push the envelope into the mainstream it's not to try to break into the mainstream but simply push it a

little bit you have to talk the language of of the of the discipline that you're interested in reaching so I thought okay

I can do an an optical physics experiment and the first one was with a Michaelson

interferometer uh where we would simply see whether you could change the interference pattern by interfering with

the optical path with your mind now we we should talk about why the double slit is significant for that purpose right

well so but the Michaelson interferometer is essentially the same as a double slit it's just a different

Optical configuration they're both interferometers so the reason why n aerometer is interesting is because uh

if you if you gain information about the path that the photon takes as it goes through the interferometer whether it's

a double sit or Michaelson or MOX Ender or a whole bunch of other methods if you know where the photon is going then it

behaves differently than if you don't know and the knowing part is interesting because it's it's even not that you

literally know because you've seen it or you've taken a measurement or something it's said if you could know in principle

which is very strange if you could know in princip principle where the photon goes by the method by the apparatus

Arrangement it behaves differently than if you cannot know in principle so what I'm adding on to this then is to say if

you could know through Clairvoyance what the path of a photon is through an interferometer that should change its

Behavior it should No it should no longer be wav like it should be particle like that that's what you that's what

physics 101 tells us because we're dealing with this fundamental Paradox in quantum physics known as W particle

duality where something like an electron or a photon uh changes its very nature according to how the experiment is set

up right and so this is not a resolved issue I mean there are plenty of people have opinions about why this happens but

no one really understands it and the book that I usually recommend when people want to know about this in more

detail is uh is called um oh now oh Quantum Enigma Quantum Enigma is a a good book written by two physics

professors on this notion of how is it that somehow Consciousness or information or knowing seems to change

the behavior of photons or Elementary particles so so the double sit experiment I I first did the Michaelson

and then the double sit because it's considered the most beautiful experiment in physics is voted as such by members

of readers of physics Today magazine uh and it's it's a very

Elementary and easy way to demonstrate that somehow knowledge of which path information changes the behavior so we

simply set up a double slit system I worked with a a opto electronics engineer who very kindly built us the

first version of this uh and it was a fairly small portable device and we started doing experiments we asked

people to imagine that they could see where the photons were going and pretty quickly we were getting results

suggesting that the interference pattern was changing in the direction as though the observation the mental observation

was so-called collapsing the wave function that was the first idea about what was happening here because you can

point back to people like John Von noyman and many other founders of quantum mechanics who said yeah

Consciousness is unavoidable related in some way to what is happening in the physical world and you may be able to

see that in a double apparatus but after conducting 17 experiments looking at the with

different interferometers different lasers different experimental ideas including one that one series of

experiments which use single particles single photons uh it became increasingly clear

that it wasn't as simple as observation collapsing the wave function because if that was the case you'd only get results

that would go in One Direction namely you you would only get more results that look like particles rather than waves

and in many experiments we did see that but not all of them sometimes we got a reversal a significant reversal as as we

see often times actually in parasal studies you you do a study you think you finally figured it out you do it again

and you get a significant result in the opposite direction so this either means that our intentions are not stable that

we we we think consciously that we're trying to get a certain result but unconsciously we were in some kind of

self-defeating mode and making it go backwards that's possible the other possibility is uh that especially in the

double sit experiments because we occasionally would get a reversal of the effect significant reversal that it was

not simply collapse of the wave function it was much more like we see in other psychokinetic effect effects where

there's something there's some influence going on but it is not stable according to your intention and even when we ask

people who are involved in these experiments did you keep the same strategy and intention throughout the

experiment and the answer is well they tried to but they couldn't because even experienced meditators start going into

mind wandering mode quickly and so one of the consequences of that is that often times a meditator would say

well you're trying you're giving an a concentration period of only 10 seconds that's way too quick I can't you know I

can't get into that quickly enough so I'd rather have like five minutes to kind of concentrate on it and I said no

I don't think so because we've done studies these same studies with the EGS and we can tell that their mind begins

to wander within a matter of seconds yeah so do like a like a major shot of your intention for 10 seconds

sometimes 20 or maybe 30 seconds and that's it and now stop and relax so it'll go back and forth between these

two conditions and very short bursts which is something that people generally don't do so we don't have people who are

experts at that but we do that to try to limit the degree to which people's minds will begin to

wander well in the esoteric Traditions typically a person will spend months years usually

practicing various forms of meditation concentration visualization uh so that by by the time they're really proficient

at at these things they have many many years of uh practice and trial and error behind them and of course parapsychology

Laboratories don't usually work that way no the the only person usually in the laboratory studies that I do who have

thousands of hours of practice is me mhm when I bring in other subjects some of whom may be very experienced meditators

they've never done anything like this I still find that meditators do better because better than non-meditators

because at least they have some attention training they can do the task better than somebody who has no training

at all but you're right that for especially for focused intention work very few people actually do that and for

for long periods of time as a practice where I I've learned to do that because I've done so many experiments of this

type and I've used myself as subject repeatedly to test the system that I kind of have a a internal sense of what

it even means to do that so in some of more more recent experiments we're using what amounts to magical tricks to to try

to to help people do the task so what I mean by this is we're we're currently do an experiment using a plasma ball these

are the these little balls you can buy that ours is 8 in in diameter and has a nice plasma stream display and it's used

as a decoration they're using it as a PK Target so in in order to help people concentrate on the task which is to move

the plasma in One Direction or the other we have an effigy plasma ball it's the same size as the actual ball it's it's

not turned on but we ask somebody to try to move the plasma in certain direction which you can do if you touch the ball

if you touch the ball it'll draw the streamers to it so you touch the Effigy ball in the direction that you want to

move the plasma streams in the actual Target which is in the Next Room actually in our shielded room this now

embodies the task it's no longer a purely mental task it now you have to do something and it's essentially the same

idea as in Voodoo or as in any kind of magic involving an effigy and we find that even for people who are not

particularly practice in this kind of intention taking it outside of your head helps the process and we're getting

interesting results in that experiment well one of the main features of magic is the use of ritual and ritual can

involve words it can involve music it can involve costumes uh and set and and and setting

the uh magical practices typically to my understanding pay a lot of attention to those sorts of details in in getting

results so that might be an area it sounds like you're beginning to explore that with the Effigy

ball yeah yeah I I've always thought it would be useful to create a kind of ritual uh that the subjects would go

through but without freaking them out right you're not going to start chanting in ancient Aramaic or something because

actually people I live in Northern California probably people do that anyway some people would be into it for

sure yeah some people would be into it but I still the I I view the the scientific experiment as a ritual MH it

already is a ritual I mean the the whole process is ritualized in many ways so so the Effigy is one step in that

direction MH uh other forms of what might be considered minor ritual is that we're we actually are fortunate and that

our laboratory is not that easy to get to right we're we're at uh the Institute of

noetic Sciences earthrise Retreat Center which you can get to it's a Hilltop yeah it's on the hilltop off the

highway and basically in in the the transition between Marin and Sonoma counties MH so you have to do a

pilgrimage to get there once there it's not clear where the laboratory is it's not marked

intentionally so when we bring a subject into the lab uh we we go down a winding path and we

go into the basement of somewhere and we even staff members who have worked at Earthwise many of them have no idea

where the laboratory is so they of course they' like to do the experiments like anyone else does and even for them

it becomes a ritual like walking into the forest and finding a secret place almost like an ancient alchemical place

that's it's in the basement all of that I think helps for the the the theatrical part or the

ceremonial part of getting somebody into a different frame of mind in the process of getting ready to do the experiment

and I think maybe that's one of the reasons our experiments tend to work pretty well well one of the Intriguing

features of parapsychology is that some experimenters such as yourself have really good track records and there are

other experimenters who seem to have uh the opposite effect anytime they walk into the laboratory things stop

working yeah which of course raises the whole experiment or effect idea I I think there definitely is something to

that there's something about the interaction with the with the participants I try to take myself out of

the picture at least as far as the direct participant and that I at least for the past 15 years or so I've had

research assistants actually run the subjects I almost never do that anymore it's partially because I don't have time

to do that but it's also intentionally to keep me as separate as I can get from being accidentally a subject in the

experiment itself now I know in your book you also point to certain uh advances I'll call

them that are taking place theoretically such as the uh writing of Bernardo castrip where he's really challenging

the whole materialistic metaphysics that most scientists subscribe to and is suggest ing that uh from a philosophical

perspective Bishop Barkley was was correct in in saying we don't know anything outside of our own

Consciousness everything we know is mediated by our Consciousness right all of all of our scientific facts are

inferences even ones that we consider to be the hardest of hard facts they're all inferences that we have to know and the

only way we know is through our awareness so as I I mentioned before one of the

reasons for looking at the esoteric Traditions is that you have 10,000 years of certain ideas that are practices

based on it like our our Technologies today are a practice based on the scientific worldview well magic is a

Technology based on an esoteric worldview it's it's exactly parallel so if we if we uh don't simply dismiss

the esoteric ideas is ancient Superstition of course A lot of it is superstition but maybe not all what you

come come up with and trying to develop a what what are the philosophical assumptions underlying those Traditions

it all comes down to Consciousness as fundamental that's idealism so I then take that idea uh and say well let's

assume that idealism is correct and apply it to what we know in parapsychology does it provide a better

way or at least a way of looking at the data and beginning to understand it and the answer is obviously yes because if

Consciousness is fundamental meaning more fundamental than physics then suddenly things like psychokinesis and

any kind of of Clairvoyance or whatever they all become obviously correct or at least they're they're they it's no

longer have to make a plausibility argument because it's built into the assumptions themselves MH the problem

with idealism that people often point out is that it can evolve into copsis and and then nothing is real

basically and that doesn't work either so that's why I came up with this idea of thinking about the scientific

worldview as a hierarchy of disciplines with physics on the bottom and things emerge from from on top of that and just

say let's continue to use exactly that same set of assumptions so we don't throw away any textbooks but we expand

our assumptions which is what science has always done and we're now adding a new layer below physics and we're going

to we're adding on the esoteric layer of Consciousness somehow there's some primordial awareness that's simply out

there and permeates everything and from that emerges space and time and everything else that we know from that

perspective scientific materialism is Alive and Kicking is not going to go away but it's now seen as a subset of a

lar a more comprehensive worldview which includes something like idealism as a container of this special case which

we'll call Ideal call materialism so when you're referring to Consciousness in this context you you certainly don't

mean individual Consciousness right or ego Consciousness I I use the terms of little C and Big C in in the book to

refer to little c as the thing inside your head that you call me but that is composed of exactly the same stuff as

Big C which is the container that holds everything mhm so I think this is what like the Hindu phrase of Atman equals

Brahman that's what it's pointing at you see that in many different religious texts that your awareness your

Consciousness is a piece of like a holographic piece of some kind of universal awareness MH uh so that that's

that's how I make the connection yeah now many magical Traditions uh tend to uh invoke various spirit spiritual

entities uh demons or uh deities or Spirits or of of various types sometimes ancestors uh how do you evaluate

those from a a materialistic perspective those ideas are very very difficult to understand like we're talking about

disembodied intelligences essentially well that almost doesn't make any sense to materialism what do you mean there's

a disembodied and intelligent you need a brain to be intelligent that sort of thing yeah whereas if you take an

idealistic perspective then suddenly because everything has the potential of being aware because it's all made up out

of awareness then you have a huge range of possible ways that awareness can manifest so human embodiment is one form

but a Giant Gas bag out in space could be another form so suddenly the idea of disembodied intelligence is localized

intelligences becomes much more plausible whether it's star people from Arcturus or whatever who knows but at

least it it creates a different way of understanding the entire range of theery which is all about this disembodied

Spirit thing in a way that materialism has a very difficult time withh uh another feature of your book is is that

you point to certain individuals who seem to have very very pronounced psychic abilities and you suggest that

these psychic Superstars uh that are rather rare but may also be the equivalent of the great

so-called magicians or Alchemists or Magi astrologers divers and so on in the past yeah so I use your example of the

PK Man Ted Owens as a more contemporary version of what looks like a real life Lin mhm able to do large scale things

more or less on demand whether they're PK or precognition who who knows but big stuff and they also used uh St Joseph of

copertino as an example of a levitator and DD Hume as another example of somebody who's able to do amazing stuff

with thousands of witnesses MH so if if you go through the the whole Litany of cases where there individuals who seem

to have really remarkable abilities it is extremely rare So it maybe we're talking about one in 100 million or even

one in a billion people but that leaves room over our history that occasionally you'll have

somebody who is not just psychic but super psychic in many ways and especially when it when it

comes to the the uh s perception that's probably not so rare M so I mean there we're talking about

maybe 1 in a thousand or 1 in 10,000 people who are really talented at it so it's relatively common from that

perspective and most people even untrained can get a little bit of evidence enough to convince themselves I

remember one time I gave a a workshop in Jamaica and there this was mostly composed of British people who are going

to Jamaica for um for vacation for this workshop and so I I did a remote viewing uh exercise where people had to guess

what the next picture would be and so they they all made a sketch and they drew things one of the people in the

group was a very proper British solicitor so an attorney but a high level attorney attorney in the

government and he did a a an okay drawing of of the thing that was the target he was just shocked he couldn't

get over it for days and he kept showing people look look look what I drew and this is the target it's like he had a a

mental breakdown or something from my perspective I was thinking well yeah that's sort of normal

people can do that from his perspective it was it was transformative so it's not that rare whereas these these major

figures in history are able to do things like literally levitate that's pretty rare that's

pretty rare yes indeed but I suppose one could say you know highly developed disciplines such as Athletics

uh you you have a whole sociological system that that funnels people in so you're going to get uh you know great

athletic Stars the Michael Jordans of the world and the Tiger Woods and so on are able to rise to the top and

everybody uh can see them and applaud what they do because there's enormous social support for that but in Paras

pychology and even in the esoteric Arts uh I don't think we find that so much I think this is because uh when somebody

does something that's strongly magical people initially have of a shock reaction but then they fear it yeah

because of the the moment that you have the the idea that somebody can read your mind you become transparent to them

that's frightening for most people the moment you have the idea that someone can affect you like your body or your

thoughts or your behavior that's even more freakish so most of of these kinds of abilities tend to frighten people and

anyone who has those abilities even to a relatively minor extent if they can avoid becoming Darth

Vader they learn very quickly to not demonstrate it this of course is part of the at least the magical traditions in

the East where you don't talk about the cities in the west it's also true that the sorcerers would would work in secret

so part of it was the secrecy protects the nature of the intention but part of it also is that it is

dangerous to be seen as somebody who has these abilities well it's it's just as true today I'm sure as it was in the

medieval times we it's only about a little over 200 years since witches were burned at the stake here in the United

States and they still are elsewhere in the world today yeah so it's dangerous so because of people's

fear people's fear right so of course the witch burning is part a a social uh issue as well I'm sure the vast majority

of people who were burned as witches were not in fact doing anything like that but the fear element is undeniable

yeah and and the case that you described at the beginning of our conversation of uh running into this fellow from cquest

I believe was the name of his business where he had deliberately endeavored to uh invoke your presence and there you

are knocking at the door uh it could have been a wonderful opportunity for collaboration but uh it became a missed

opportunity I suppose because of various subconscious factors some of it may have been that

yes the initially the I don't think I felt fear initially it was more like disorientation yeah I was thinking about

I thought I came here purely by myself but apparently not so there's a little of that uh I think it was more a

pragmatic issue of we were in the the process of raising funds and he was in the process of raising funds in a very

different way for a different purpose so our our directions as a nonprofit We couldn't collaborate too closely with a

with a for-profit because it would throw off our entire financial status so that was part of it as well I I see well Dean

Raiden it's been a real pleasure having this discussion with you you're doing very important work for the field of

Paras pychology and I'm sure uh you have more books to write and more research to do so I hope we can have future

discussions and uh keep up with all that you're doing as well I'd be happy to come back thank you Dean it's a pleasure

to be with you [Music] [Applause]

[Music] book three in the new thinking alloud dialogue series is UFOs and UAP are we

really alone now available on Amazon you can now download a free PDF copy of issue 7even of the new thinking

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