Episode 97 – Dean Radin, Ph.D. on Double Slit Experiments, Consciousness & Parapsychology

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Dean Radin, PhD, is the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and has held reign there since 2001. After earning his MS in electrical engineering, and his PhD in psychology in 1979 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he’s left a cosmic trail of documented studies in the human consciousness continuum.

Radin has authored or co-authored more than 250 peer-reviewed technical and popular articles, appearing in journals ranging from Foundations of Physics & Physics Essays to Psychological Bulletin and Journal of Conscious Studies. He was featured in a August 11, 1996, NYT New York Magazine. He’s even written satire for the Journal of Irreproducible Results — Yes! It’s out there!

Radin’s three books — The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena; (1997); Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences In A Quantum Reality; (2006); and the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award winner, SUPERNORMAL: Science, Yoga, & the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (2013) — are still used as launching pads by parapsychologists and quantum geeks alike. All books have been translated into a dozen languages worldwide. His fourth book, on the subject of magic, is due out in early 2018.

Before joining IONS, Radin held appointments at Princeton University (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research – PEAR); the University of Edinburgh (Parapsychology Fellowship); the University of Nevada; the Interval Research Corp; and SRI, International, where he was part of classified military research, a la Men Who Stare At Goats. He’s been president of the Parapsychology Association twice. Previous to his parapsychology research, he applied his engineering know-how in R & D at both AT&T Bell and GTE labs.

So far, during his IONS tenure, Radin spent a month in 2010 lecturing in India as the National Visiting Professor of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, a program within the Indian government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development. In 2013 and 2014, he gave invited lectures in Kuala Lumpur at the International Center for Leadership and Governance, an organization supported by the Central Bank of Malaysia. In 2015, he spoke at the Australian Leadership Retreat, a confidential program for Australian government, business, education, and military leaders.

Radin has appeared on dozens of TV shows, ranging from BBC’s Horizon to PBS’ Closer to Truth; to Oprah and Larry King Live&. He’s given more than 350 interviews and talks, including invited presentations at Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Princeton, and the Sorbonne; and for industries, including Google, Johnson & Johnson; and for US government organizations, including the Navy and DARPA. All of this from a man who originally dreamed of being a concert violinist … until he was blissfully blinded by science.

“The universe looks less like a big machine than a big thought” – Dean Radin

The Poetics of Noetics

Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell founded IONS in 1973, not long after returning from an awe-inspiring trip to the Moon. As his capsule floated past the Moon, he was “engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness.”

“On the trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity. We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.

“You develop an instant, global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”

Can we send members of our US congress to the Moon and back, STAT?!?!?!

But in all seriousness, Radin’s mission is very much aligned with Mitchell’s vision with IONS: “To create a shift in consciousness worldwide — where people recognize that we are all part of an interconnected whole and are inspired to take action to help humanity and the planet thrive.” A noble and necessary mission, indeed. Radin’s life work has been all about this. Part of his mission entails getting people on board with it. In his book The Conscious Universe, he explains the stages of acceptance of ideas, especially in the scientific community.

In the first stage, skeptics say it is impossible because it violates the laws of science. In the second stage, skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible, however, not interesting; claims are weak. In the third stage, the mainstream realizes the idea is not only important, but effects are much more pervasive than previously imagined. The fourth stage is achieved when the same critics try to take credit for the idea. “Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was once considered a dangerous heresy.”

Radin said at the time that Stage 3 was on the horizon. His research has been repeated by others with similar findings. Psychic phenomena — namely, the perception of objects or events beyond the range of ordinary senses; and mentally causing action at a distance — are opening the doors of perception for like-minded folks.

“Mind willing, many interesting things appear to be possible,” Radin said.

In his book, Entangled Minds, Radin explores the connectedness of all things in this universe — the universal we, the collective conscience — as did other quantum theorists. Quantum, in and of itself, is the black sheep (or hole?) of the scientific community. Probably because most can’t bend their minds around it.

“If you do get schwindlig [dizzy] sometimes when you think about these things, then you have not really understood it [quantum theory],” Danish Physicist Neils Bohr once said. German-born Theoretical Physicist Albert Einstein referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.”

Indeed, the relationship between the connection of cores of separate things, connected curiously throughout space and time, have wowed great minds for a millennia. But most believers agree with Austrian Physicist Erwin Schroedinger’s word “entanglement” to explain the peculiar phenomenon.

For centuries scientists saw time and existence as a clockwork mechanistic model, Radin explained. “Now we see reality is woven from strange ‘holistic’ threads, not located precisely in space and time.”

In his book, SUPERNORMAL, Radin examined what are now believed to be outdated assumptions about the myths of Gods and Super Heroes. Embracing this truth could be the evolutionary trigger that pulls the switch and releases our full potentials, according to the book’s intro page.

“Focusing on Patanjali’s mysterious Yoga Sutras — a 2,000 year old meditation practice believed to release our extraordinary powers — Radin offers powerful evidence in confirming that sometimes fact is more wonderful than the wildest fiction.”

2010-03-05 SVYASA lecture hall

We Are The Salvation We Seek

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” ~ Albert Einstein

Parapsychology and the Noetic Sciences have received an overload of skepticism and criticism, much like the subject of human-caused global climate change does these days. There seems to be a deliberate push to keep us locked in the abyss of ignorance, and there is an alarming, but willing acceptance of the status quo. It’s been so highly profitable for so long, but it’s not an endless well that the powers-that-be exploit. Fortunately, some of us are awake, and we’re not buying what they’re selling anymore. We don’t believe the “same old same old” is going to save us from our own demise. Skepticism is easy to claim when <em>no one</em> currently on this planet has all the definitive answers. You can’t box the divine.

In a May 15, 2006, interview, Essential Shifts, Radin spoke of the state of the collective. His words echo even louder now, and people need to listen up.

“The current global situation, if you see this from the point of view the way the media portrays it, is one of a time of great fear and hysteria. I suspect that a large proportion of the fear and hysteria is driven by the way that the media works. It works in such a way as to make people feel pumped up — to be driven by adrenaline — and in that state, there’s a lot of mindless reaction, and not a whole bunch of mindful thinking about what’s actually going on. …”

Thanks to Radin’s persistence on the subject, more of us consider the possibilities of a great essential shift. There’s a lot of buzz in the New Science, New Age, and Cosmonaut communities.

“Some of the fear and hysteria are associated with a worldview model, which may be called a classical model — a materialistic mechanistic model of science — in which we can use all the natural resources we wish, and we can push people around any way we wish, because it doesn’t make any difference. We live as isolated creatures, and you can shove all your garbage over to the side, and it’s isolated from you. You’re safe from it.

“That view is changing. It’s changing into a more interdependent and ecological and holistic model, in which case, there is no place to put garbage. And things are not anywhere near as isolated or separated as we previously thought, in which case, we simply have to clean up our act — a lot more that we’ve ever had to before.”

Like it or not, we really are all in it together. The Butterfly Effect is in full flutter. What one does affects the whole. Radin likens it to “living in a liquid.”

“When you start pushing a bit of ink in one area, it begins to spread out, and affects the entire medium itself.”

But, like Radin, many of the wisdom traditions, New Age thinkers, and egalitarians — Gregg Braden, Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay, Doreen Virtue, and others — say the we have the power to make our futures good or bad. It sounds so ridiculously simple, but we all do have the power to make it happen.

“… So, if a magical circumstance occurred where everyone decided for one day to only think about peaceful things, even people who weren’t participating in that exercise feel more peaceful. So, it raises the possibility that you can change the whole environment by … effecting it, perhaps, with positive thoughts, just in the same way that we tend to infect it with negative thoughts.

“So, in this magical other world, this next level, if the media got together and simply decided that for one day the media was only going to be really happy event, which is, by the way, the majority of what happens all the time anyway — that’s the way it actually is.”

Though it will take a lot of undoing, and a lot of work, to bring this new way into our everyday reality, Radin suggests to simply SLOW DOWN when possible. Mindfulness is key. Step away from the overwhelm of our technological harbingers of doom.

“If everybody was even like a smidgeon more mindful about the choices they make, and what they do, that spreads out, and affects everybody. And then hopefully, everyone makes a slightly better decision.”

As Earth’s inhabitants become warier and wearier, people will seek new ways to replenish. In his 2007 paper, Intention & Reality: The Ghost in the Machine Returns, he said his work with the mind will continue. And hopefully he won’t be the lone Major Tom digging for answers. The journey is quixotic most days, even for the truest believer, but the gains should be worth pursuing for every living thing on this planet. Besides, considering the possibilities sounds like a blast!

“ … One this is certain: Gaining a deep understanding of consciousness will play an increasingly important role in 21st century science. If the evolution of knowledge in this century exceeds that of the last, which seems likely, then we can look forward to a future that’s likely to redefine our concepts of reality far more than any of the strangest concepts we’ve encountered so far.”

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