Lorne Brown:

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Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Today on The Conscious Fertility Podcast, I have Dr. Dean Radin, and I’m fortunate enough to have been introduced to Dean through the SSE Group and the PA group where they’ve had their conference. I’ve read your book as well, Real Magic. I’ve seen Dean speak on many occasions and he deserves this, what I think is somewhat of a lengthy introduction because he’s contributed so much from a scientific perspective in the conscious field. And so please enjoy this introduction.

Dr. Dean Radin, he’s the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an associated distinguished professor of integral and transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His original career is as a concert violinist shifted into science after earning a BSEE degree in electrical engineering, magna cum laude, with honors in physics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois.

For a decade, he worked on advanced R&D at AT&T Bell Laboratories and GTE Laboratories. And then for over three decades he’s been engaged in research on the frontiers of consciousness. And before during the research staff at IONS in 2001, he helped appointments at Princeton University, SRI International, and other academic and industrial facilities. You should know that he’s a co-author of hundreds of scientific, technical and popular articles, four dozen book chapters and four bestselling books, which include The Conscious Universe, which was a recipient of the Scientific and Medical Network’s 1997 Book Award. Also, Entangled Minds, Supernormal, recipient of the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book award and Real Magic. He has over a hundred academic articles that have a peer and peer review journals ranging from foundations of physics and physics essays to the Psychological Bulletin, Psychology of Consciousness, and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. He was featured in New York Times Magazine article and he’s been interviewed by dozens of television programs worldwide. And now we have him here on The Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Dean, one of the reasons I wanted to invite you to this conversation is we have had a lot of guests and there’s a lot of assumptions made that there’s this idea of consciousness or super consciousness is something beyond what we understand on a material level. There’s this assumption that we have to kind of just accept that. And then there’s things that you can do to become more awake and impact your mind, body, spirit. I thought because you are a researcher, a scientist, I’m looking for some validation that there’s something more to this world than meets the eye. And so I kind of wanted to start with the question based on the research that you’ve been involved in, is there more to this world than what we get from our senses?

Dean Radin:

Well, the whole history of science says yes, right? If we were to only rely on our ordinary senses without some form of instruments to amplify what we’re capable of seeing, then we would still be living in caves somewhere, or at least we would be like in medieval times. And so yeah, the reality is far more complex than we can perceive directly. We’ve learned a lot about the nature of the physical world through science. That’s what science is really good at. We have learned comparatively less about the subjective side of reality.

And so we’re all familiar with physicists who are obsessed with creating a theory of everything. And what that usually means is that it’s a theory of everything about matter and energy, but it doesn’t address the only thing that any of us will actually ever know firsthand, which is our own awareness. And so from a philosophical perspective, science is good at materialism. That’s what it’s all about. But there are other philosophies or other ways of thinking about the nature of reality. And so the flip side of materialism is idealism, which says that actually everything starts with consciousness. It starts with being aware. And from that perspective, everything else that we know, everything in science is an inference. We infer that there’s an external world. We infer that when we look through a telescope and see something, that it’s something out there. All of it is an inference.

Fortunately, a lot of it is good enough that it allows us to create technologies like the one that we’re using today. It works, it’s reliable, but that’s not all of reality. And it’s easy to forget that. So there’s an enormous amount of additional things out there that we certainly don’t know about yet, and an inkling about some of it through the kind of research on consciousness through our own personal experiences and so on.

Lorne Brown:

I want to understand more of this idea about consciousness. Some call it big C or super consciousness. So there’s this awareness. So we have an awareness. A lot of the experts say that when we find this present moment, and there’s many tools and processes for helping people get into this present moment where they’re fully aware, they can experience their emotions whether they’re unpleasant or not and they find this presence, they say that you can become whole brain. And my understanding is when you’re triggered and you’re stressed, you kind of go into that reptilian fight or flight brain. When you get into this present state, you access more of your brain. So you have access to more parts of creativity. And then some say you tap into this super consciousness. The question I have is, do you have a sense what this super consciousness is from the research you’ve been involved in, the research that you’ve reviewed and your personal experiences?

Dean Radin:

Well, in the modern world, we are constantly reminded that you are your brain. And so some of it is true. The brain processes information, and our experience then is partially due to that. But the research I’ve done and my colleagues have done for many years suggests that we are more than our brain.

And so when people report a mystical experience or an expansion of consciousness through meditation or whatever, I think what’s happening is that the portion of your awareness that is not specifically brain-centric is what you’re beginning to experience. One of the reasons why mystical experiences in particular, but also sometimes psychic experiences, are difficult to describe to somebody else is because in that expansive state, we don’t have a shared language yet. And so we don’t have words to describe what it feels like to essentially be one with the universe other than the used phrases like that.

Every mystics throughout the world and throughout history have used similar phrases when they’re asked to say, “Well, what was that like?” Well, it’s not like anything else. The best I can describe then is that you feel like you’re one with everything. Well, that doesn’t really help very much if you’re trying to get a sense of what this big C is about. So the distinction there is big C is a kind of universal consciousness. It’s simply there. It’s part of the fabric of reality. We are part of that as simply as being a sentient creature. And so in principle, we all have access to that since it’s part of us.

And here’s in a sense where the brain gets in the way. So you think about us as organisms that have evolved for millions of years on a planet. We have a physical form. A physical form has been shaped by evolution to survive. And so if you think about then the processing that goes on in your brain and body, most of what our everyday experience is like has shaped to pay attention to here and now. So our awareness is about here and now. That makes a lot of sense because if you’re walking along the forest and you’re thinking about what’s going on in Pluto a million years ago, which by the way I think we have access to, the tiger’s going to jump on you and eat you and then you won’t have any progeny.

So we’re focused on here and now because it helps us survive. And that gets in the way of an expanded forum of awareness. One of the ways of demonstrating that is by looking at what are the states that people are in when they have those experiences, whether they’re psychic or mystical. The answer is everything other than everyday awareness, dreaming, drumming, dancing, psychedelics, meditation and so on. All of them are ways of pulling away from having to pay attention to the here and now.

Lorne Brown:

And so I just want to establish this big C a bit more. The understanding then is that there is something outside of our physical body that we are connected with or are part of is what I’m hearing or understanding, but we don’t have great language to describe this. And this is what some people are tapping into when they have these mystical experiences or meditative states.

Dean Radin:

Mm-hmm. That’s right.

Lorne Brown:

And from a scientific perspective, that doesn’t sound like nonsense anymore.

Dean Radin:

Well, it depends on which scientists you’re talking to.

Lorne Brown:

Okay, well can you elaborate on that then?

Dean Radin:

Yeah. When you go through a standard academic curriculum, at least in the western world, you are being taught materialism, which is very rarely actually expressed as such. You’re being taught that everything’s made out of matter and energy, and that’s the end of the story. That’s why for at least 50 years within psychology, the idea that you had a conscious experience was denied because we don’t know how to create self-reflective awareness out of matter and energy. I mean, this is still a big problem. It’s called the hard problem in the neurosciences and in philosophy.

And so the easy way to handle that was, “Well, we’ll just declare it doesn’t exist.” In which case for 50 years within academic psychology, we were essentially zombies. We had the appearance of being sentient creatures that were independent and able to have free will into one, but it was an illusion. Well, fortunately that began to go away when people… It was like the Emperor’s New Clothes, that this was a ridiculous idea because consciousness is the only thing that we actually know for sure. So that has gone away. And now the problem has transitioned into figuring out how do we begin to understand why and how we have subjective experience in the first place.

And so after a couple of decades of people looking into that, both philosophers and scientists are slowly coming towards the idea of other models, other worldviews where consciousness becomes fundamental in some way. And so with Panpsychism says that everything that exists has some form of internal awareness. It’s simply part of the way things are. As I mentioned before, you have idealism which says everything starts with consciousness. You have dual aspect monoism and lots of other flavors of philosophy, which says that the physical world is a real thing, it’s not an illusion. It has certain properties and regularities. But consciousness also is a real thing, has its own properties and so on. And the two are somehow tightly associated with each other.

So the reason why I mentioned dual aspect monoism is because that is specifically a philosophy that says… And this is proposed by the way by people like Spinoza and Russell and William James and so on. It’s a well understood or well known idea, that reality is a little bit like the two sides of a single coin. You have heads and tails. They’re quite different from each other if you’re looking at the heads or you’re looking at the tails, but they’re tightly coupled. In fact, they’re inextricably coupled, they can’t separate the two and there’s two different characteristics then. Well, we experience one side of it, like inside of us, it’s the inside of physics. And then there’s an outside of physics, which is what science has specialized in.

So the consciousness part, the universal consciousness part is that side of the coin, which is simply awareness. So it may not be awareness with no other properties, it’s just somehow awareness arises and you then present it by fiat. It simply is what it is. So like Einstein’s saying that light can only move at a certain speed, consciousness simply is. We don’t know enough to be able to drill down further into that. If you go into the esoteric literature, which has been around much longer than the scientific ideas, well, this was the general idea. That basically consciousness is everything and somehow the physical world emerges out of it and gets properties out of it. But that’s as about as far as we can go at this point in saying exactly where did that come from. Well, from an esoteric perspective, it didn’t come from anywhere. It simply is. And that’s really not too satisfying, especially from a scientific perspective because in science it is just as important to have some sort of plausible explanation for something as it is to get good evidence that the thing, whatever it is exists.

Many scientists actually value theory more than evidence, which I think is completely backwards, but that nevertheless is what happens. You present an observation of something, which is, especially if it’s challenging the status quo, the very next question will be, “Well, how do you explain that?” And the answer is, well, we don’t know yet. There are lots of things we don’t have a good explanation for, but are also quite real.

In fact, if you were to take this exercise I like to use every so often is we create a fraction and the fraction is, on the top, things we think we understand. And on the bottom of the fraction is everything that is understandable at some point like the rest of reality. So is that fraction closer to one or zero? Some people will say it’s closer to one. We actually know quite a bit and we’re sort of close to understanding it all. And I would say no, we’re actually very close to zero. That the science is a new enterprise in clever apes who think that they’ve understood how things are working. So no, we are so close to zero, we might as well know nothing at this point. The only reason we have the illusion of understanding something is because we can use things like Zoom and say, “Wow, somebody figured out how to do something because otherwise this wouldn’t work.” And that’s true, but it’s still from a larger perspective, it’s very, very primitive.

Lorne Brown:

It reminds me of that saying, “There’s what we know we know, what we know we don’t know, and then what we don’t know, we don’t know. And it sounds like that fraction is what we don’t know what we don’t know.

Dean Radin:

Yes. Yeah, that was Donald Rumsfeld made that famous and he was correct in that sense. There’s much more left to learn, yeah.

Lorne Brown:

So to kind of make it practical for our listeners, I’m going to ask some questions around manifestation. And again, they want to manifest a baby. So people are looking to how can they grow their families? And even those that are trying to grow their families or people that are listening we’ve learned that aren’t trying to grow their families, but some are looking for relationships, abundance in money, a healing of some sort. I was wondering about manifestation processes and the science behind this. These are kind of some of the core tenants I see when you think about manifestation. Know what you want.

I call it setting your GPS, set the destination at where you’re going so you know where to get to. You don’t need to know how to get there. Imagine as if you already have it. So bring in all the senses, the emotional charges like putting out a beacon into the universe, into the ether. And it’s to believe as if you already have it. So in the cells, you actually start to really feel that it allows you to become not attached to former outcome, because you start to believe it, you practice it so well. Is there any truth to this? Any signs to this? Do you have anything to add to this?

Dean Radin:

Well, you described the process very well. So that is the process of affirmations. The question underneath it all is, does it do anything other than make you feel better about it? And so I think that the answer is yes. The way that this is studied then in a scientific sense is to ask a simpler question of, does focused awareness and intention change something in the physical world that is measurable? And so if you look at the physical targets that have been used in these kinds of studies, it ranges from everything from photons and electrons all the way up to human health and human behavior and even beyond. So a very broad range. I mean, probably two dozen different kinds of targets from the very small to the very large.

What you get from all of that is that it appears that attention and intention push probabilities around. And so the kinds of physical targets that can be manipulated to some degree are probabilistic. Most systems are, like all living systems have an enormous amount of probabilistic processes going on and a lot of inanimate systems do as well. So I’ll give one example of such a study at an elementary level. And by the way, for many, many years it was thought that this was impossible because there’s no connection between mind and matter, no direct connection. And that’s still a puzzle. We don’t know exactly how that works. But we can say from a straightforward neuroscience perspective that when you hold certain thoughts and tensions, attention, that you can see that reflected in brain processing.

So there’s two sides of the argument here. One is that somehow you, whatever that is, that consciousness part, you think certain thoughts, you focus your attention and your brain reflects that. So you’re driving the bus, the other side says no, you have the illusion that you’re doing that and it’s really just the brain is doing it all by itself. To begin to learn then, “Well, which one of those two types of descriptions may be better?” we need to use a physical system that is not inside you, a direct mind-matter interaction with the target is somewhere else.

So one of the targets that have been used most in these kinds of experiments is called a random number generator. This is a hardware electronic circuit usually where the randomness that it’s producing is traced back into quantum indeterminacy. So the one example of that is if you’re measuring the time it takes for a radioactive particle to be emitted by radioactive ore for example, the time will be random. According to quantum mechanics, it’s not only that we don’t know what the answer is, but that it is literally indeterminate, fundamentally random. There is no cause. It’s happening acausally. Well we’re not used to acausal events in the everyday world, but that’s a prevailing idea of what happened. It just happens. We don’t know why.

So that becomes very useful to take those timings and turn them into bits, into zeros and ones. So that’s what a commercial hardware random number generator does. It produces series of random bits that are completely unpredictable. They’re not a computer-generated algorithm, they’re actual based on some random event. Truly random event. So you use that in an experiment where you set it up so the random generator is pushing out bits and you make some kind of display as a result, maybe an ongoing graph on a screen. And your job is to, when you’re told to, look at the graph and mentally make it go up. So people will say then, “Well how do I do that?” Well, don’t worry how you do that. It just mentally will that the line goes up, which would mean there are more ones and zeros.

And now you do a different task. And so you wait a while and say, “Okay, when you’re ready, you press the button and now make the line go down to have more zeros.” So that kind of experiment has been going on for over 50 years. Hundreds of such experiments, most of which are published. And overall the evidence is quite clear, I would say, that something funny happens, meaning that what you’re getting is not expected according to statistics. What you would expect in these kinds of experiments is a very well understood distribution of results that’s just baked into the way that we do statistics. You can show that when people are given assignments to mentally change what’s going on, that the distributions you get are no longer according to expectation. They’re following, usually, not always, following what the assignment was. “Push it this way. Push it that way.” And it happens.

So the very next question is, “Well then why does it happen?” And again, we have to plead ignorance, but there’s a couple of possibilities as to what’s happening here. The main one is that in quantum mechanics, there’re two strange things about quantum mechanics that makes it different than classical mechanics. One is that quantum mechanics predicts and has been shown and just got the Nobel Prize to show that there’s quantum mechanics involves non-locality. It means that things can appear to be separate in space and in time, but remain connected. So it’s called entanglement that got the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Lorne Brown:

I just want to hear you say that maybe another way non locality. So this to me again goes beyond this idea of this material world that we are separate and this is what you can see physically. You’re suggesting then when you say non-locality, that there is a correlation or collective amongst us humans and the matter in the world? Can you say that again another way just so I can kind of really by get my teeth into this?

Dean Radin:

Non-locality has a technical meaning in physics, but ultimately what it means is that everything is connected through space and through time. So this does not match our everyday like I need to move my body from here to there in order to get something done over there, but from a deep physical structure, we’re not talking about consciousness anymore, we’re talking about the physical world is deeply interconnected through space and through time. And we know that because her technology is being developed now based on it. It’s not just a theoretical possibility, it is a physical reality that you can test. In fact, one of my experiments used a tabletop system to generate entangled photons. So these are particles of light that you create them out of a single source, they go in their merry way, you can twiddle with one of them and the other one will react. It’s not that a signal is being sent between them, it is more that we live in a holistic reality that is fully interconnected all the time through time, through space. That’s simply the way it is.

It’s a little bit like saying, “Well, consciousness is what it is. It’s there.” Entanglement is a real thing. The leading edge now in physics is suggesting that even what we used to think of as space and time as fundamentals, you’d say space simply is there and time is simply there. Now they’re saying, “Well, actually there’s something even more fundamental than space and time.” Einstein showed us that space and time are actually related to each other. That’s why we use the word space time, but it goes beyond that.

And now the Leading Edge is saying that the reason why we have space and time is because of entanglement. In this holistic reality that we live in somehow where everything is connected, that is what gives rise to our perception of differences in space and time. So that’s one strange thing about quantum mechanics that somehow we’re all it, this is no longer like a nice idea, but it’s physically true that things are connected through space and time. That can make your brain hurt when you really start thinking about it because as I said, it’s not like this is our everyday reality, but nevertheless that is how it is.

So the second strange thing is that somehow when you think about quanta, which are generally thought of as microscopic particles like electrons and photons but actually extends up to the world at large, that when you observe a system, it changes its behavior. So at the elementary scale of reality, something about the nature of measurement/observation causes that thing to change. Well, this is part of a very long ongoing discussion in quantum mechanics because it was recognized early on that this makes it extremely different than classical physics. Because in classical physics, if you observe a system, it doesn’t change that at all. Well, now we know when you observe a system, it does change. So that’s the door that opens just a crack for how our consciousness, which is among other things a way of observing reality. When you focus your awareness on something, it changes. Now the way that it changes is it can be a very broad range unless it’s a very simple system.

So one of the reasons we use a random number generator is because ultimately all we’re dealing with are zeros and ones. So if you strongly intend that you get more ones, something happens to this system and it changes the probabilities just enough so that you end up with more ones than zeros. So that’s an explanation which is predicated on a plausibility argument based on our understanding of the physical world. It says nothing. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about why that happens, right? Because that’s the next question, “Well, why would that happen?” Well, the answer is we don’t know why that would happen. And when you play the why game, you will always come down to a point where the answer is, “Well, we don’t know why that is.” We have to simply accept that is the way that it is, or we can demonstrate it, but we don’t know all of the why’s. It’s like turtles all the way down.

Lorne Brown:

This idea of observing or intending can impact this material world is what I’m hearing. And it’s beyond space and time. I get excited and then I get a little disappointed. I get excited like, “Wow, we have the ability to impact this world” because some people are not happy with the world, of the way it looks, the safety, feeling of separateness, the fear. So it’s like, “Okay, there’s an opportunity. Without having to go out and push on matter, we can go inside and have an impact.” That’s exciting, the potential. The sadness is if this world is a reflection of it, a reality, then we’re all really angry and sad and afraid and coming from lack, aren’t we?

Dean Radin:

Yes.

Lorne Brown:

All of us if this is what we’ve created.

Dean Radin:

Yes. So it’s absolutely true that we all get annoyed when something horrible happens and politicians say, “Well, we’ll give you our thoughts and prayers.” And what we want though is will somebody do something. Do something. Well, what we’re saying here is that thoughts and prayers are doing something. It’s just that in the laboratory as we know that the way that you see these effects is very similar to your description of why affirmations work. You need very tightly focused awareness. You need to sustain that. You need to have a very clear idea about what it is that you want. And unfortunately, the way that we’re constructed is that we start mind wandering almost immediately. So you can do studies where you ask somebody to look at this thing on a computer screen and we’re measuring your EEG and we’re going to see how long you can focus on that.

For most people, you can do it for a few seconds and then you start dreaming about cheeseburgers. The mind wandering seems to be built into the way that a mind and brain work. And that means that when you have an experiment or even in an affirmation sense, that the likelihood that you’re going to be able to both focus and sustain the focus for more than a couple of seconds at a time, very rare. So where you see people are able to do that for longer periods of time are generally long-term meditators. And people who end up being long-term meditators depending on the type of meditation that they do, if it’s a concentrated type of meditation, which is one, it’s not like mindfulness, everyone knows about mindfulness today, that’s more of an open focus. You’re not trying to focus in that sense, [inaudible 00:30:46] trying to be, which is fine, I mean it has all kinds of great health benefits.

But for concentrated meditations which are closer to some of the practices in Tibet and other places like that, you can sustain focused awareness for very long periods of time, but you need talent to do that, natural talent. You need enormous amounts of practice, like that is your business. Eight hours a day you do that or more. So it is not a normal thing for people to be able to do these kind of focus for a long periods of time. So for the average human to do affirmations or any kind of mind-matter interaction effectively, it means you have to do it again and again and again and again each time knowing that it’s a small effect, but they accumulate with practice. So that’s how I would say how we do it.

Lorne Brown:

And so that’s in the idea of manifestation, is getting focused on what you want, writing it down, practice feeling it, imagine you have it and that is your, I’m calling this a ripple effect, but these are small moments of intention and attention and it has an accumulative effect. You can gain some momentum unless you’re going to go move to Tibet and do this for eight hours a day and get trained by somebody.

Dean Radin:

Yeah. We don’t have the luxury most of us of being able to do that. So one of the methods I talk about in my book Real Magic for affirmations, they’re all classic magical methods. I mean they’re been around forever as part of a magical tradition, which is writing magic. So as you said, you write it down. So one of the ways that you can think about what you’re doing is that the sheet of paper is the universe. It’s like that is the universe. And when you’re writing onto the universe, you’re impressing an impulse into the universe where you want a certain thing to unfold. So it’s not simply just scribbling something down in you. In your mind as you’re doing this, you’re using that sheet of paper as the surface of the universe and you’re changing it as a result of what you’re writing. So you have to be careful what you’re writing.

I mean it is often said sometimes be careful what you think of or be careful what you desire because you might actually end up getting it. You have to be extremely clear about what it is that you think you want and also be aware that there are always unintended consequences regardless of how clear we are in terms of what we want. The other thing is that it may happen quickly, it may take months or years before that thing can unfold. It depends to a large extent on what else needs to happen in the world in order for that thing to happen.

So one of the examples I use often is I’m going to affirm that I get a gold plated Mercedes. That’s simply what I want as an example of a thing, which is unlikely to happen. But nevertheless, why not? I want a gold plated Mercedes and I don’t want to have to pay for it. I just want somehow magically I get it. So I use this in the examples where people are asking about manifestation. One of my listeners at that point sent me a gold plated Mercedes, except that it was two inches long. It was a tiny little car that was… Like the wheels would turn and the doors would open.

And it wasn’t actually gold, it was painted gold, but it was a little car. She sent that along with the message saying, “Well be careful what you think about or what you desire because you can get it.” But did you say that you wanted an actual working Mercedes that you can get into and drive around? No, I just said I wanted to go play to Mercedes. So that’s an example where I wasn’t clear enough. And even in that, I mean I just use that as kind of an example, not something that I really, really wanted it, but I got it anyway except it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

By contrast, I’ll tell you an actual affirmation that there was something that I really wanted. I did not know how I was going to get it, and I got it in about a week. So this had to do with some of the work we were doing. This was now maybe 15 years ago, we were doing experiments involving long-term meditators to test one of the claims that you hear from long-term meditators of two kinds of experiences that they have. One is spaciousness. They feel that something about the nature of space expands, like mystics talk about that just expands to infinity and they can feel it. But the one that was more interesting is timelessness. That they feel that the moment of now, our awareness of now which is from a neuroscience perspective roughly 500 milliseconds, like half a second of nowness, it expanded out to infinity. That’s their internal sense, their space and time just expands.

So the question is, is this an illusion or is it ontologically testable? So the way we would test this, the way we did test this, was we had them wear a multi-channel EEG and we had them wear glasses with little LEDs in front of your eyes. So they close their eyes. And every so often, completely randomly, there would be a little flash of light. Well, it’s well understood what happens in your brain when that occurs. You get a response in the occipital lobe. We also had them wear earbuds and every so often they hear a little beep. So they did this both while meditating and also not meditating with random light flashes and beeps to see how the brain would respond and also whether the brain responded before, because the whole idea of being timelessness is that if your moment of awareness is much longer than usual, including extending into the future because that’s their experience too, well maybe if your future has a light flash that you will and your brain will then begin to respond before. This is a method called presentiment, which is an experimental design.

So we did that experiment. And we got long-term meditators and we got controls to do the same experiment. We ended up with a gigantic amount of EEG data of which I was preparing to analyze myself. I know how to do that, but I thought it would be much better if we had a real expert to do this. Somebody who this is their bread and butter, they do this all the time, they know what to do with multi-channel EEGs and so on. So I thought, first of all, I went looking for an EEG analysis package that I would be able to figure out how to use and that was free because money is difficult to come buy in these kinds of research.

So I found one, it’s the most popular EEG computational neuroscience package out there. And so I got that. And so I started learning about it and I realized, “This is going to take a while to figure out how to do this, so maybe I should look for a graduate student somewhere who’s using it.” I had no idea what I was going to do, but at the time we weren’t that far from Berkeley and I figured, “Well, we could ask and see if somebody knows how to do this and would want to help.”

My assistant at the time was saying, “Well, you want something, but you’re not being very clear both about how to go about it or exactly what it is that you want.” So internally I said, “Well you’re right. I’m confused about this.” So I simply made up a very clear internal want, which was I want an expert to arrive that knows how to use this software and is interested in the idea and would do it, would do the analysis.

One week later, the person who wrote that software package called EEG Lab, he wrote me an email saying, “Oh, are you doing anything interesting that might need EEG analysis.” Yeah. And so I told him about it and for the past almost 15 years now, he’s actually been a member of the science staff at IONS because he was so intrigued by doing that analysis and wanted to work in this realm anyway, he’s been part of our staff. So this is an example of getting really clear on the affirmation and took one week for the exact right person to show up. So it wasn’t completely out of the blue because I had met him at a conference a couple of years prior to that. He’s a professor in France and he had an appointment at UC, San Diego. But I didn’t know he was that interested in this and nor did I know that he was going to contact me because I hadn’t heard from him in years.

Lorne Brown:

That’s where it’s neat when these synchronicities line up and I subscribe to the idea that that’s part of the manifestation process.

Dean Radin:

Yeah. So everything we do in the laboratory is a synchronicity, right? We get a strange coincidence of things, but it’s meaningful. But a synchronicity usually says it’s spontaneous. And in the laboratory we want it to happen while we’re watching. So it suggests that you can create a synchronicity. So that’s starting to get really close to magic. That’s why my last book is called Real Magic because it’s as though you can manipulate the world to a certain degree and create these synchronicities.

Lorne Brown:

Our bodies have a capacity to heal. In my practice with Chinese medicine, a big focus is creating an environment in the body so it can do its healing. It’s a little different than from the western conventional where we’re trying to cure or fix the body. The Chinese medicine, we still have the same goal of a healing, but our role is what kind of environment can we create to support the bodies’ innate capacity to heal.

And so coming to this consciousness work or conscious healing that some of the experts have talked about, have you seen or are you aware of that you can share in the research that you’ve been involved in and with your colleagues, are you seeing anything outside of the materialistic expectation of healing? If for examples, these spontaneous healings or healings that just don’t make sense, which we’re very aware of in conventional medicine. I mean, I have babies that we’ve seen born in the women that we have worked with where they’re not supposed to get pregnant, right? I know many people have these stories. I’m kind of a fan of studying the outliers. In the west it seems like sometimes they’re called outliers so we ignore them because they mess up our data. And I’m kind of like, “Even if there’s one, can we study that person because maybe we can replicate it, make it two, make it four, make it eight?”

So I’m curious what you guys are seeing, I’m calling it conscious healing, quantum healing, but healing that just really doesn’t make sense but something that’s happened inside the individual and because of that, they get a biological upgrade or this healing that just wasn’t expected.

Dean Radin:

Yeah. Spontaneous remission. Institute of Noetic Sciences where I work some years ago created a bibliography of over 2,000 spontaneous remissions that were reported in the medical literature of things that are not supposed to happen, but did. Similar to what you’re saying here, that the tumors disappear overnight and horrible diseases disappear quickly. Well, the value of that is showing that it can happen. The downside is we don’t know how it happens. And it’s true that a lot of people would like to know how to make a spontaneous healing occur, but because of its very nature being spontaneous, there’s no way to study it. It’s like somebody saying, “Well, how did you do that affirmation? How did it work?” We can make up ideas about pushing probabilities around and something like that, but otherwise we don’t know.

What we do know is both in studies of so-called energy medicine practices like Reiki and [inaudible 00:42:59] and therapeutic touch and so on, we know that those work. We know they work both locally and they also work at a distance. People will say to them, “Well, how does it work?” Well, we don’t know how it works, but we can go into the laboratory and we do an analog of distant healing. It’s based on this phrase of the feeling of being stared at. So many people have had this kind of experience where you’re sitting somewhere minding your own business and you just get a sense that somebody’s staring at you. You turn around and sure enough, they’ve been staring at you. So in the laboratory you can do this experiment, but under very strictly controlled conditions where you’re not going to get peripheral hearing or vision or something. They’re really isolated and they’re looking at you over a one-way video. And so you don’t know when they’re looking at you.

And so we wire you up to look at your changes in heart rate and skin conductants and that sort of thing. And you can show that somebody paying close attention to you from a distance changes the person who’s being stared at, their physiology changes. So we did this once with a couple of long-term bonded couples, one of whom was being treated for cancer and the other one was trained in a method of how to connect with compassion to the partner at a distance. And we used this paradigm of feeling of being stared at. So they were strictly isolated, but one was sending their healing thoughts towards the other person.

We also had people who were not in that kind of high motivation state as controls. They’re also doing the experiment. What we saw is that most of the time you’d use people who didn’t have very high motivation other than curiosity. And you could see it even in that kind of a couple. But in the couple with very high motivation, even though the cancer patients were under chemo and sedatives and all kinds of things, they reacted much more strongly. They had a big effect, a big fast effect that suggests that from both the receiving party and the sending party, if the motivation is very high, then the loving thoughts that are being “sent” from one to the other or being “received” from the other have a physiological impact.

So does it matter what you and your partner are thinking about? Yeah, it matters a lot. And now expand that out to the community and to the world at large. So if you have a lot of people around the world who are suffering, whether you know it or not, their suffering becomes your suffering partially because of this connection between everyone, but also some kind of mental connection. Not even thinking specifically about you, but just sort of like a field effect. That’s I think one of the reasons why it’s been so difficult to sustain a level of calm peace around the world, because as long as there are inequities, as long as there’re bombs falling, it’s very, very difficult to maintain an internal sense of what we can think of then as contentment at minimum that everyone would feel.

To get back into more pragmatically for people who are dealing with a health issue or fertility, you and your partner need to be in the same wavelength and need to think about each other in a way like offering supportive help, love, contentment to each other because it does have a physiological impact even at a distance.

Lorne Brown:

And I will add to this in my practice, first, find that love and compassion for self. It’s hard to be genuine and have compassion and love for somebody else if you can’t find it for yourself. So it is an inner journey. Has that been something that resonates? I don’t want to use that word too loosely for you, because I know it means something to you, but is that aligned with what you would believe in as well? That there is that inner work? First, you can’t… Because I can think of some people that are not in a good relationship and they’re trying to pretend they love their partner, but they’re really trying to manipulate the outcome of what they want. And they’re thinking it, trying to think it, but maybe the feelings aren’t matching they’re thinking.

And so being pragmatic, doing the conscious work and finding that compassionate love for self, that’s the first step. And even that will make a major shift in the women I see more, or the women who come in than the men. We do see both, but 90% are the women. And when they start to do the conscious work, inner child work, they find a way to heal their hearts and minds and do these practices. They say that they can see the relationship changing. And I don’t know if it’s just because they’ve changed, they perceive their partner differently. So it’s a different experience. Or if the material world has changed, their partner has changed. Regardless, they’re enjoying the relationship because that’s their perception. But that’s just them doing the work. They’re not even having their partner do the work yet.

So I want to share that because some people, the women tend to be… This is a generalization, but they tend to be the ones driving the fertility journey. And I can see, I can feel that so many of them hearing that would get so stressed out thinking, “Oh my god, another thing for me to do.” And I just want to remind them that if you do your inner work and find the compassionate love for yourself, that could be enough.

Dean Radin:

It’s certainly a start. It’s a step in the right direction. And it is on one hand simple. It’s a matter of paying attention. And the other hand, it’s not so simple because our conscious awareness of what’s going on in us is by definition the surface of a very large structure. It’s like an iceberg, right? We’re aware of that piece above the ocean, but there’s an enormously larger piece underneath. And so how do you gain control of something which by definition you don’t know, right? That’s why we call it the unconscious. What we do know from research on psychic ability is that probably all of it comes bubbling up from the unconscious. That means if unconsciously you are afraid of these phenomena or you don’t want the phenomena, you will block it very effectively. Whereas if you’re open to it, you have the possibility of making it more porous, that you can allow things to bubble up.

This has been tested again and again in these kinds of phenomena, that simply by asking somebody what they believe, “Do you believe it’s possible that this can happen?” Some people will say yes, and some people will say no, it’s impossible. Well, if you separate people based on just that response and you have them do the same experiment, the people who are open will show positive results and the people who are closed will either get no results or they’ll get negative results. They’ll do the opposite of what you want.

So we’re talking about the deeper levels of awareness that are usually not immediately accessible to most people, and it takes either 30 years of therapy or five minutes in a mystical state or something to blast through that and then get some insight as to what is going on at an unconscious level. And if that happens, the likelihood of an affirmation or any even spontaneous remissions I think is much, much more likely.

Lorne Brown:

And I’ll share with our listeners, there are processes to help you access, start to access this unconscious and how to work with it, take up a relationship with it, even imprint new programs. I would encourage you to check out Dr. Dean Radin’s collection of books because you’ll get some ideas there. Some of the experts we’ve had on our podcast, Jill Bolte Taylor talks about it. Helene Wabe has stuff on there. Shamini Jain. There’s lots of conscious experts, authors, that are sharing processes to help you find this awareness and start to work with it. So we’re not suggesting that it’s helpless and you have to wait 30 years. There are some tools and techniques. As Dr. Dean Radin had said, it’s a start. Some people have profound experiences very quickly out of the gate. And so I think it’s worth to look into that.

We’ll put in the show notes how to kind of connect with Dr. Dean Radin, like the material he has out there including his books. Dean, do you have anything that you want to share where it’s best to just learn what you’re up to or what you’re doing? Is there a website or an IG account that you want to let people know about and we’ll also include in the show notes?

Dean Radin:

Well, so my personal website is deanradin.com. I have a contact tab on there. And then I work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is noetic.org. Same place at Helene Wabe works. She’s my boss. I’m also chairman of a biotech company that he co-founded that’s using genetic engineering for psychiatric conditions, mainly anxiety and depression. So that’s cognigenics.io, which you may want to put up there as well. So that has very little to do with everything we’ve been talking about, but it’s a whole other line of research interest that I have.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah. I think some people may be interested in that as well. So we’ll include that in the show notes. And I set out with an attention today when inviting Dr. Dean Radin to our conversation was I wanted to see if there’s some scientific validity to this conscious work, working on the subconscious and getting to this idea, can you tap into something greater than itself, meaning beyond this material level? I’m going to give myself a check. I like what I heard today.

I also wanted to let our listeners know that there is some things that you can do, processes that can help you on your journey, on a healing journey. I think we got some resources that we’re listening to show notes and we started talking that we’re seeing this happen and it’s being validated from a scientific perspective. So check mark on that as well.

Dean, thank you very much for your time today. Very much appreciated. Thanks to our listeners for tuning it into Conscious Fertility. As you know my agenda is, to heal the world, we first heal our hearts and minds. And we go from conscious fertility to conscious conception, to conscious pregnancy, to conscious parenting. And so this next generation can be an improvement on us. And so I’m wishing you all the best of luck on your journey.

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram @lorbebrownofficial. That’s Instagram @lornebrownofficial. Or you can visit my websites lornebrown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious. And for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.