INTERVIEW WITH DEAN RADIN

by Cate Montana
Part I: April 2006
Part II: May 2006

INTERVIEW, PART I

WTB - For those fuzzy on quantum entanglement, could you give a brief overview of the relationship that you've written about in your new book Entangled Minds, between quantum entanglement and psi effects?

Radin - Entanglement was predicted by the mathematics of quantum theory. Quantum theory considers matter not only in particulate form, but also as waves of probability. The interesting thing about a wave is that it can combine and interfere with other waves. Based on this idea, two particles interacting could be understood in wavelike terms as the creation of a new, more complex wave. Not two waves, but one wave, and that one wave remains one system thereafter. So two particles that interact can no longer be considered separate. Einstein didn’t like this idea and called it “spooky action at a distance.” But the mathematics predict that if you have one particle that splits into two, or two particles that interact, once those particles separate they are no longer really separate. They both contain some aspect of each other.

For about 30 or 40 years this prediction about entanglement remained only a theoretical possibility. And then after development of a way to test whether the prediction was true or not in the 1960s, the first major replication of it was reported in the 1980s. The method was based on a theorem by Irish physicist John Bell. And so now we're in a position where we know, based not just on theory but also on empirical fact, that particles which appear to be separate can actually be connected through space and time in ways that appear to be spooky.

What's important then is that this is not just an interesting theoretical idea, but an observable fact about the fabric of reality. And understanding the nature of these entanglements is increasing fast. Between the time that I wrote my book and today, a half a dozen new discoveries about the nature of entanglement have been published. As I was writing the chapters on the physics of entanglement there were new discoveries reported about one a month. And this trend continues unabated.

What I require in the book is for entanglement, which is seen mainly at the elementary particle level now in physics labs, to scale up into bioentanglement, or entanglement in living systems. There have been all kinds of theoretical arguments proposed why bioentanglement shouldn't be possible. But the facts are beginning to contradict those arguments, as I predict in Entangled Minds. It’s my contention that bioentanglement must exist. And that people will continue to find more and more clever ways of demonstrating in fact that it does exist. Once bioentanglement is accepted, the next notion that will arise is, well, if it’s operating inside living systems, including us, then what would that feel like from the inside? That's what my book is about.

WTB - You talk about new examinations of bioentanglement. What is a current study that's been done that's kind of knocked your socks off?

Radin -- A study at the University of Milan in Italy where they grew neurons in a dish - human brain cells in a dish. Then from the same batch of cells, they grew them in another dish. The idea was that if those neurons, coming from the same source, are actually connected (even though they appear to be in separate dishes), then if I stimulate the neurons in one dish you should find a reaction in the other dish. So that's what they did. They grew the neurons on a dish that had electrical contacts underneath the neurons; so that if the neurons begin to fire you hav a way of measuring that they are active. The way that you stimulate them is with a laser. You use a laser because certain light frequencies will stimulate neurons, and because the laser light can easily be blocked from affecting the neurons in the non-stimulated dish.

They put the non-stimulated dish in a light-tight box away from the stimulated dish. They made sure that there was no way that the laser, even a single photon from that laser, could hit the non-stimulated dish. Then they stimulated the first batch of neurons, and they saw a big reaction in the non-stimulated batch. They've done many tests like this over the past couple of years, using more and more refined methods to make sure that it's not an artifact, and the papers that I've been reading about it look pretty good. Other people will eventually try to replicate this work, and if they’re successful then this will be a major breakthrough. A recent review of this same work by a researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School agreed with my assessment that the reported experiments look good, and that if real, they’re very important.

WTB -- I have to admit, I'm one of those people in your book that you talk about that, if they're not blown away by the significance of Bell's theorem and Bell's inequality and its implications for psi, it means they haven't understood it. Is there any way to simplify the explanation?

Radin -- It challenges the mind, to really grasp it. There are a number of ways of describing how it works, including a moderately easy way that I’ve gone through in some detail in the book. As I was writing that chapter in the book, I suddenly got the impact of Bell’s Theorem in a new felt sense, and I actually felt dizzy for a moment. You can become woozy because of the sudden shock of understanding that things which appear to be separate at some level are not actually separate. For real, and not just in an abstract sense. It's a realization based on the logic of Bell’s Theorem combined with the laboratory studies demonstrating that entanglement is really real. The wooziness comes about because of the challenge to common sense. Most of the time I feel separate from other people and other things. So it's difficult to make the leap of faith – and in this case a leap of fact as well - that in another way I’m not as isolated as my senses insist on telling me.

The other reason why it's difficult to grasp the idea of entanglement is because we don't have the right words for such holistic concepts … language is based largely on common sense, and this is more like uncommon not-sense. So our modes of thinking, the way that we express and explain things, are ultimately based on the assumption of isolation and separateness. But here we're trying to talk about some other aspect of reality which is completely holistic. And because we don't have the right language for these ideas yet, sometimes it’s difficult to keep these things straight. Even physicists get confused about this occasionally…

WTB – Ah, I feel better, thank you.

Radin – Yeah. One way to think about entanglement is to imagine you have two photons, each of which has a spin; one might be spinning up, one might be spinning down. Entanglement means that the spins are correlated. Now, imagine that rather than photons you're dealing with something like little spinning toy tops. So you create an entangled pair of tops: one spinning left and one spinning right. Stick each one in a box and take the two boxes to opposite ends of the universe by a courier who doesn't know which direction the tops are spinning. And then when somebody opens a box at one end of the universe, and they see that it's spinning to the right - well, they know the matched pair top must be spinning to the left, because that’s how they were set up as an entangled pair.

So now you're thinking, what's so amazing about that? How could it be any other way? Why is this considered spooky? The answer is that because we're not dealing with ordinary objects. If the tops are behaving in a quantum way, then before we looked at them they literally wouldn’t have any properties. The tops would be in what's called an indeterminate state. Properties like spin – in fact many properties of a quantum particle - are not actually determined until they are measured. As a result, if you take a bunch of entangled objects, in which none of the objects have any determined properties yet, including spin….

WTB – So spin is in potentia?

Radin - It's something that in a sense we project onto the object.

WTB - Yeah, because what we call spin is not even really spin.

Radin – What we call that property is in an indeterminate, unknowable “gray state”…. then we look at it and suddenly we can measure all kinds of properties that we assign to it. So let’s say now we have two boxes, each with some kind of gray, vague spinning top-like object in it. These boxes are taken to either ends of the universe, and one is opened, and suddenly the object inside is found to have a whole host of properties. The other object will then have perfectly mirrored properties, instantaneously. So how did the one top in the box that was first observed “communicate” with the other top so it would show the opposite set of properties? That's the mysterious, spooky connection.

When we talk about instantaneous connection at a distance, this is the type connection we're talking about.

One of the ways of thinking about what's going on is with the idea of David Bohm’s implicate order … and a number of other proposals on how we might be able to account for this. But ultimately nobody really understands it yet at an ontological level.

WTB - I can't help but wonder, has anybody used the double slit experiment as a method of exploring PK (psychokinesis)?

Radin -- I'm doing that now, in the lab.

WTB - Really?

Radin - Yeah. I have an experiment using the equivalent of a double slit experiment, actually based on a Michelson interferometer, but with the same idea - to see what happens to the interference fringes when you have people meditating and imagining that their minds are within the interferometer. So I'm collecting data on that now.

WTB - So they're not actually trying to direct the photon or electron towards one or the other slit, but they're actually engaging the interferometer?

Radin - They are, in effect, trying to block one of the slits with their mind. If they do that, then the interference pattern will change. I don't expect the effect of mind will be the same as sticking your finger in front of one of the slits, but if there's any effect at all, then it should change the interference pattern.

WTB - When did you start this?

Radin -- I got a grant to do this last year, and at the beginning of this year I got the whole thing working. So the experiment is underway now.

WTB - Are you going to be using just individuals, or are you going to attempt to measure group influences as well?

Radin – I’m starting with experienced meditators, and then if it looks promising I'm going to start working with groups of meditators. The thing with groups is that, unless the groups are tightly coherent, just because you're using additional people that doesn't mean you'll get more bang for your buck. With people, at least at the mental level, the effects tend to add up and interfere like waves. So if you get some waves that begin to overlap and cancel each other out, you can effectively end up with nothing.

So I'm looking for people who can not only meditate, but who are used to meditating together and can, in some way, act as a coherent whole. We have some methods of detecting that, but at this point it's more of an art than a science.

WTB - Sir Francis Bacon first proposed the possibility that tasks involving meaningful targets might be more effective than those less meaningful. And apparently psi research bears this out: meaning does sometimes amplify psi effects in the lab. Could you explain why more meaningful tasks apparently have greater psi result than just doing more mundane card tests and that sort of thing?

Radin - The answer is that psi phenomena are not simply physical phenomena. We talk about mind-matter interaction. Some people imagine that this interaction is a problem for physics, and yes it is a physics problem to some extent. … but it's not just a physics problem. And nor is it just a psychological problem. Mind-matter interaction involves both mind stuff and matter stuff, so it's the middle ground between psychology and physics.

The reason why motivation assists in producing larger effects in the lab - and probably in life - is because of the psychological component. When we are highly motivated to perceive information, to perceive something, to do something, to wish something… we have much more that we bring to bear, in terms of our attention and intention, towards that goal. I think the name of the game, at least from the mind side of this equation, is attention. The more attention that can be brought to bear for a longer period of time on a goal, the larger or more precise ore achievable the result. That's why motivation is important. Motivation is a natural way of focusing attention.

WTB – You wrote that “in controlled lab experiments we are forced to deal with measurement noise, and a pale reflection of how psi appears spontaneously in real life.” What do you mean by measurement noise?

Radin – Take someone who is a world expert in their domain, say in sports, an Olympic-level athlete, or a baseball Hall of Famer. The only reason they are interesting to watch is because they're not perfect. The best in the world baseball players will get a base hit rate of around 300, or one third of the time. Well, what's happening the other percent of the time? 70% of the time they're not even getting a base hit. That's the “not perfect” part – in other words human performance is highly variable. All that variation means that when you take measurements of any kind of human performance, whether physical or mental, you always end up with an enormous amount of variance. And on top of that, the ways that we measure human performance aren’t perfect either. So we have both performance variance and inaccuracies in our measurements. This is why human performance studies (and many other kinds of studies) have to rely on statistics. The noise level increases as you look at people with average ability, rather than world-class skills, and also as you move into more subtle domains.

So for example, say you're trying to measure the ability of someone to write a poem. You stick them on a big stage, and you have 1,000 highly skeptical, angry people in the audience, none of whom believe this person can make a poem on the spot, and they're all making a lot of noise and throwing paper at the person. Pretty soon they’re going to go away saying ‘See, we told you so. He couldn't come up with a decent poem. So we don’t believe in poems.’ Well, this is because of the inherent difficulty of the creative task combined with the context, which made it even more difficult. It’s an extreme example, but you get the idea.

WTB - Taking the sports analogy here, sometimes the example of a fastball pitcher in baseball is used to exemplify how mysterious the brain's functions really are, because studies show that a good fastball pitch comes at a batter too fast for the batter's brain to process and to actually coordinate a hit. In a lot of the experiments you talked about in the book, it seems the brain is capable of processing future events – which might explain how a fastball pitch can be hit. Could you go into that?

Radin – There’s a line of research which considers the brain as an anticipatory system, which means that a lot of what our brain is engaged in is trying to figure out what's coming next. These anticipations also give us a kind of an illusion of continuity in our experience, and they help us to avoid the tiger that might be waiting for us around the next corner. Our brain is always unconsciously scanning for potential danger and for other possibilities. This anticipatory processing means that a large chunk of our cognitive processing is devoted to figuring out probabilities of future events. The probabilities are based on sensory information we’re receiving now, and also on inferences about what might happen based on past experience. That some of this information might also contain information from the future is usually not considered part of this equation.So we started doing experiments, that I talk about in the book, to see if the mind can perceive the future, and not just infer it. We set it up in such a way that there's no way you can outguess what the future is. It's a truly random future that appears as a stimulus; we wanted to see if the nervous system began to respond before a stimulus appeared. This gave us a way to see if the nature of anticipation might also include elements of the actual future. If it does, then it helps in understanding how anticipatory systems work. I mean, as an anticipatory system it would be much more efficient to actually reach into the future a little bit to know what’s about to happen, rather than try to predict the future based only on what you know right now. This line of research I’ve called presentiment, which is an unconscious form of precognition.

WTB - That’s very interesting. So in presentiment, is it possible that anticipation can be read across world lines, as in the many worlds theory? Or in other words, does psi reach across different world lines, or multiple realities, which could be perhaps one of the reasons why psi is not a 100% accurate process?

Radin – Possibly. It’s an interesting theoretical idea, but I'm not sure that we need it. Maybe there’s just one universe.

You can imagine where your world line is in that universe, and it's quite a solid line, quite well localized. It’s shows where you are right now, and where you were in the past. But the line beyond now, in the future, you can imagine as a type of branching structure, a probabilistic branching tree. The information we’d get from the future comes from all those branches. One way to think of this then is as though your world line were like a stream, or a river. Sometimes the whole river is moving lazily along the same path, following a strong current. Other times you get into places with lots of churn, where it becomes extremely complicated and chaotic and there are lots of different directions you might end up going.

What presentiment provides to you are the up-coming probabilities. So if you're in a large, slow-moving stream [an unchaotic state], the presentiments of the future will tend to be high probability events that might seem to you like fate or destiny. But if you're going through a period of chaos, like the rapids in a stream, you have thousands of possibilities that could arise in the next moment. In that case the noise in the presentiment goes way, way up, because of all those possibilities. So this doesn't require multiple universes to explain why presentiment is not completely predictable.

WTB – Right. Which is why we can be very good at presentiment in three second increments, but being a Jean Dixon and trying to predict the future is a whole other matter, because there are so many potentials and probabilities at work.

Radin – Yeah. And some of it is related to the branching structure I just mentioned. Just think in terms of one second from now, the world is very likely to be the way it is now. Ten seconds and it's going to be quite different. Three thousand seconds, and it's going to be extremely different. So the branching structure makes future predictions much, much more difficult.

INTERVIEW, PART II

WTB - So often when reading about psi experiments, the results seem small, but when meta-analysis is applied, the significance seems to soar. For example, the Sherwood and Rose studies of the dream psi experiments at Memoneides resulted in a 59.1% hit rate, and that is a 9.1% increase over the statistical norm of 50% and an odds against chance potential, as you write, rated at 22 billion to one. It kind of boggles the mind that a 9.1 variance- well, that's kind of significant, but when looked at in comparison to a 22 billion to one chance of happening, it puts it into a whole different light, could you explain this?

Radin – Well, it's all devolves back into a very basic concept in statistics: the more data that you have, the more confident you can be in your overall averages. It's that simple. So, the reason why historically, Mickey Mantle is considered an expert baseball player, is because his overall base hit rat was approximately 30%. So the reason why Mickey Mantle is considered one of the best, is because his career, over 18 years gave him about a 30% hit rate.

WTB – Right. Whereas if you have just looked at his batting average in one game…

Radin - If you look at one game, maybe he struck out. So, it's only in the long-term average, where you can get a sense of high confidence about whether somebody is any good. The same goes for somebody like Michael Jordan. You look at his overall statistics, year after year, clearly he's superior to other basketball players, who on any given game might have actually done better than him. So the same is true in experiment where you're dealing with noise and measurement error in an experiment. If you do one experiment and get a really interesting result, than you might be excited. But, someone could validly say, well, maybe it was a fluke. And you have no retort for that, there's no way to respond to the possibility that maybe you were just lucky that day. So you have to run many, many experiments, and then you start building up an overall average for that. And as you build that up, your confidence in what the actual size effect is, begins to get better and better.

So the reason why a 9% effect, as in the dream telepathy study, is monstrously significant is because you have a very high confidence that that 9% is real. It's not just a chance effect. That's where the meta-analysis people [can streamline things] where the goal is to create essentially a very, very large scale experiment that would simply cost too much and require too much time before any one group to do.

WTB - which is why the global consciousness Project at Princeton with the random number generators around the world is so effective? Because it's taking this huge sampling around the world of events that create coherence? Maybe that's not such a good example.

No it's not. It's not simply about lots of data. In the Global Consciousness Project, while there's a huge amount of data that is being produced every day, you only have 200 events. It's like an experiment with 200 events or 200 trials. Which is a substantial experiment. But it's not billions of trials. There is a different design than the usual experiment that the data is pulling all the time. But we only look at certain elements of it which we predefine as important to look at.

WTB - statistically it seems that in random number generators with women apparently have have greater significant results effecting an RNG than men, but apparently, usually in the opposite direction then is desired. For example, if they are asked to mentally direct the random number generator to produce a greater number of ones than zeros, women tend to produce a greater number of zeros. Why do you think this is?

Radin - Where did you hear that?

WTB - I think I read that in Lynne Taggart's The Field.

Radin - I would guess that it's referring to studies done at the PEAR lab. In modern times they've done the most studies with random number generators, and also including differences between men and women. It's difficult to generalize their results to everybody else's. So what we can say is that, at least within their lab, they have found this interesting gender effect. But there have been very few applications of gender effect - not just applications, but very few studies from other people have even tried to look at gender effect. I wouldn't have high confidence. Here is a good example of not having high confidence that that effect is due to gender. Because there aren't enough independent replications. As to whether there are gender effects at all, I expect there are probably very strong gender effects. Partially cultural expectations about women's intuition and all that. But these are all generalities. There hasn't been an enormous amount of gender research done in parapsychology, partially because there hasn't been very many parapsychologists. Is only so much that we can do.

WTB - I think the atmosphere is significantly shifting now? Are enough scientists producing enough quality experiments to begin to shift mainstream scientist's myopic view of psi effects?

Radin - In a word no. I would say in more than one word, that for those who are genuine skeptics – they’re open minded but they doubt – and for those who do their homework - of course. To do homework, I have to be motivated in the first place. They have to be somewhat interested in. And doing your homework in this realm is not too easy, because there aren't that many books out there, and specialty journals are not that easy to get a hold of. But if you were motivated - and there is an unfortunate thing that has occurred because of the Web. Most people know never go to the library. If you can't find something on the Web, it doesn't exist. And that creates a significant problem in this field, because, while there are now sources on the Web, there's one extremely good source that is an online bibliography but it's a subscription bibliography, it's not free.

A lot of people have become lazy and if you can't, with your laptop, go to a free source and get an authoritative article, then it doesn't exist. It's not too easy now, especially given that there is a lot of noise on the Web about controversial topics.

I hear from journalists all the time that they are confused as to what to believe. To which I become a little exasperated, because I ask them how they’re doing their research, and they're using Google. Google is quite good, it will give you a nice pointers here in here. But there's no way in the world you're going to solve a controversial topic by sitting on a laptop using Google.

If you use the way up to find articles, and then go find the articles. Then you start snowballing out to actual data out there. That's available. Most people I know who are doubters, but open-minded come around to - first of all - surprise that is as much good evidence as areas. The second is interest. They don't automatically collapse and say they're a 100% believer, because no scientist, including myself, would ever say that. But certainly level of interest is significantly peaked from “I assumed it was all entertainment and nonsense,” into “there’s something interesting going on.”

So to push the mainstream is extremely difficult. There's a lot of the inertia. And at the level of editors and science writers, I think the principal problem is one of ignorance. Where everyone assumes that it's nonsense. And when that is the overriding assumption, there's no reason to go check the facts. Just recently in the New York Times science section, the deputy science editor, David Overbye, wrote an editorial about What the BLEEP!? And though he seems somewhat sympathetic to the idea, but in a kind of smug way, it's understandable why people want to revert back to the 60s and make physics. Be the way they wish it to be, rather than the way it really is and, as we all know, the parapsychologists were kicked out of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 30 years ago - it's all nonsense. Well, this is an example of what I call junk skepticism. Junk skepticism means that when you're blinded by what everybody knows to be true, I don't take the 10 seconds it would take to verify whether your belief is true or not.

The Parapsychological Association has been a member of the AAAS since 1969, and continues to this day. And I know because I'm the president of the Parapsychological Association. I know it was challenged 30 years ago, but the council voted to keep it. So this is an example of the difficulty of penetrating the mainstream mind, because, the mainstream mind is actually kept by perhaps a couple hundred people whose opinions matter -they're the science writers the editors and so on. They literally don't know what they're talking about, which is demonstrated in this particular case. (See last month's From the filmmakers)

I immediately wrote to the New York Times saying you'd better check this. And they did print a retraction, but of course, nobody ever reads retractions. And unfortunately, it tends to perpetuate a myth. Because people will read the original one and to this day, I write in my bio, in response to letters I get and so on, talking about the Parapsychological Association as a AAAS affiliate, and people challenge me on it. In fact, if you go to Wickipedia, the article which is my bio, which I didn't even post, has a red flag on it.

And the red flag means that it is considered to have a non-neutral point of view. So I have to wonder why in the world would my bio have a non-neutral point of view? And the reason is because it says in their debts I've been president of the Parapsychological Association, which is a AAAS affiliate, and people don't believe it.

I timed, I actually timed how long it would take to verify that the PA is in fact, a member of the AAAS, and it took 10 seconds searching on Google. So this is obviously frustrating, because myths that are repeated often enough take on an aura of truth, when that's simply not the way it is.

WTB - And yet the majority of educated individuals, not the intelligentsia, necessarily, believe in some sort of psi effects.

Radin - They do. Even in the intelligentsia, when you talk to them in private. In private, there's a big big difference between public and private stance. The public stance for people in a position of holding the public wisdom have to respond in a certain way. I have met very, very few vocal skeptics, who in private would not admit some interest. But they also then, will immediately as soon as they go back in front of the public, will say what they think they are expected to say.

You see again and again in mainstream meetings that if anybody in that audience raises a question about something psychic date immediately become an outcast. But privately afterwards, people will come up. And after a Barrett's who will start talking about their interesting stories. And so it becomes quite a frustrating bridge to straddle, because, the other side of the bridge are people who might be called over enthusiasts, who believe everything is psychic - they see signs and omens everywhere, which is not true either. So I always try to maintain, and most of my colleagues in the PA, try to maintain this middle ground, where you are doubtful. And you remain doubtful at all times. On the other hand, you don't want to be so doubtful that you can't pay attention to actual interesting data. And you can begin to gain confidence about something. But we don't then collapse into black and white world. We remain in interesting shades of color, where you have confidence in some things and less confidence in others.

WTB - Towards the end of your book you point out that perhaps the level of human consciousness over time - has moved from basically the unconscious towards the conscious through stages of awareness that could be classified as superstitious, then mechanistic, currently more involved in black and white logic; do you think understanding and embracing the existence of psi, and actually being able to demonstrate psychic abilities is a potential demonstration of advanced consciousness for humanity?

Radin - Yes. But in the same sense that any advancement of knowledge, does that as well. So the history of humanity is the struggle away from superstition. What is superstition? It's simply ignorance about the way the world works. So every time we take a step away from ignorance is an evolution of the mind.

Which is good. I mean it’s the evolution of humanity, of our way of understanding what our role is in the universe. Psi is just a tiny piece of it. I mean. Probably it's a big piece, because it presents something new about the nature of the mind, and that's important. But that's not the end of it.

One of the things I'm doing now when I give a talk on the topic is, at the very beginning. I try to expand the scope of what I mean by psi. Because most people have in mind, that we are talking about telepathy. But some people are thinking big deal, is already been studied for a hundred years. And why is anybody even interested anymore? And then other people are saying well, this is all nonsense. I don't even need to listen to it. But to expand the concept of what we're dealing with here makes it a little bit more meaningful to everyone. Psi is part of a spectrum. It's a spectrum of the nature of mind that we’re just beginning to grasp. Imagine a graph. And on the left side of the graph, we're dealing with things that are commonly repeated and mundane. On the right side of the graph. We're talking about things that are rare and profound, and profoundly important for everyone as individuals. And as society. And this is part of the smooth spectrum. So on the left side we are talking about things like the feeling of being stared at; we are talking about pre-cognitive dreams; maybe even déjà vu - very common, very mundane, controversial from a scientific perspective, but so common in human experience that that is what we call psychic.

Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, are prophecy; slightly longer-term things which turned out to be true and are meaningful. So in the middle of the spectrum, we have things that are less common. But more meaningful. Like all sections of the Bible prophecy. At the far end of the spectrum, we start having to really interest of, which includes creative insight, both in music and intentions and in science. Einstein was asked where do you get your ideas? And his answer was intuition. It comes from the mind. It didn't come from little logical steps based upon inference and deduction, it came from imagination and intuition. Lots of inventors have magically gotten an entire invention downloaded into their head. They don't know where it comes from. But if they're a good inventor, they will be able to turn it into a real thing. So that's part of the spectrum.

Further out, you have religious epiphany that start great world religions. And further still. You have mystical union, which is the underlying power, the real insight that you can use to drive these beliefs. So what's the difference then between mystical insight and telepathy? My response is, fundamentally, that there is no difference. But they both point to the nature of the fabric of reality. A certain type of fabric of reality is necessary for both of those things to work. So the only reason why one would be considered Monday and in the other profound, is because virtually everybody can at some point experience something like telepathy - knowing who's calling on the other end of the telephone. But in principle, that is kind of a glimpse of the same sort of mystical insight that spun out the world religions. That's why people, when they have such an experience, they have a moment of awe. The same awe, not quite as strong or as long, as the awe that created the great religions.

So that's the larger context in which, you know, we get lost in thinking of these strange, statistical anomalies that show up in our experiment - that's the tip of the iceberg. Those experiments were done, not because, as some skeptics have said, that we're just interested in looking for statistical anomalies.

That's an extremely myopic view of these experiments. And were looking at what is the actual nature of consciousness? And what do the answers to that question tell us about the world that we live in? What is the nature of that meeting? And that's why, when I see an interesting psi experiment, that's telling me an enormous amount about the Buddha and Christ were talking about. The average person is not thinking of this in a spectrum sense. They don't get the connection, but that's what it really is.

WTB - And the more we expand what we believe and what we accept, the more we expand the horizons of what's possible.

Radin - Right, because the spectrum that I mentioned, is, in a sense, the visible and historical part of it. But spectrums go both directions forever. So, we don't have really any idea what's beyond mystical insight at this point, mainly because language breaks down as soon as you get further out. As all mystics will tell you, their experience is ineffable. Well, we immediately…. it's like saying what's on the other side of the universe? We want to know what that is. But we haven't developed the language yet to be able to describe it.

WTB – You quote Giles Brassard as saying “classical and quantum information can be harnessed together to accomplish feats that neither could achieve alone." How can applying the concept of psi and quantum entanglement apply to other disciplines? What do you see for the future?

Radin – Among other things it suggests that when the notion of a collective mind as a guiding force becomes more real; if you imagine that psi is connective mental link between all people -which as I said, it is not exactly right, because the image that comes to mind is something like a mental Internet. And that's still is separate objects connected by lines of something. We're not dealing that, really. We're dealing with a holistic environment, where there are no separate objects. But because of the limitations of language useful to think of this in terms of something like a mental equivalent of the Internet. I mean that something like that. You have rich mental network, which can take on the life of its own.

Think the analogy between separate neurons in your brain, the billion neurons in the trillions of connections in between them, that creates the level of complexity in the person which is necessary in order for us to gain individual awareness. Well, amplify that by a couple billion additional minds around the world, and you have the possibility the living Earth; A mind the size of the earth. Would we be aware? Would I be aware of what has come to be referred to as Gaia's mind? And I think the answer is, most of the time we would not be aware of it: In the same way that a neuron is not aware that it's in a thinking brain.

But nevertheless, it's there. Occasionally, you might get a glimpse of it. The way we might get a glimpse of it is a lot of minds thinking about roughly the same thing at the same time. In a sense, what we're looking at in the global consciousness Project. So you can make a leap of faith and say, well let's just assume that there is something like a Gaia mind. Well, the Gaia mind is going to have, presumably, thoughts and desires and goals and all the rest of it. Which means that all of our collective actions are being pulled, in an evolutionary sense, by something bigger than us. So depending upon your definition of it all, people use terms like God, to her for some larger teleological force, which pulls us. I'm agnostic, when it comes to such content. But I can imagine, easily, but there are larger intelligent forces at work, which to pull us in various directions collectively, but we're not normally aware.

So the next step is, well, why stop at the earth? There must be other intelligent creatures out there on other planets. Maybe there's the universal Internet, or a galactic Internet. Make it as large as you wish. They are fully interconnected with it as well. So where does this larger and larger collective mind stop? The answer is, I don't know. It begins to raise the possibility of many levels of increasingly larger hierarchical mind, which is connected in larger and larger spaces. Which then, I hesitate to use the words intelligent design, because people go berserk when they hear that in the scientific realm. But it suggests there may be something like that.

Yes, in many ways we live in a mechanistic universe, and we understand things in those terms. But the evidence is very strong that there is more than that. As soon as you make that leap into something more, there are all kinds of new possibilities.

WTB - Sir Roger Penrose in England has theorized that at the Planck scale, the Planck scale actually is information.

Radin – Yes, and John Wheeler as well. His way of putting it was, “It from it.” So what he means is, “its” meaning things, objects, matter from it, meaning information; that at bottom all there is, is information. We have a tough time thinking about what in the world kind of bottom is that? How can something exist purely on abstract information terms? It's so far from common sense that it's really difficult to think about it. Nevertheless, the case can be made that physics can be built up, from the ground up from information. And then we perceive it in a certain way. But when we're down at the fundamental scale, perhaps at the Planck scale perhaps below the Planck scale, were made at out of bits of information. It sounds very matrix-like.

WTB - And what you are studying is how we access that information.

Radin - it's not so much how we access it. I think it's more that if in fact, we consist of that holistic information, we are that information. And our experience is reflecting it. You know, we're getting glimpses of the forms of interconnectivity that exist at that level. It's not so much the information, at that level, but more of the result of being in a holistic medium.

That's really what all of psi experiences are telling us. And common sense is one way of perceiving localized information. But since were built up out of this medium, which is an interconnected medium, we can directly experience that. That's what we are.

END PART II

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