Transcription
**WHO WE ARE**
I was living and working in Hong Kong, and one day I found a lump on this side of my neck. When I went to the doctor and they did a biopsy, they discovered that it was lymphoma, which is a form of lymphatic cancer. I was very, very shocked and surprised.
So over a period of four years, I developed so much fear of this cancer. I was following everything; I was researching about it, and I lived my life just trying to get rid of this cancer that was in my body. But I kept getting worse and weaker and weaker. At that point, the doctors said that it’s too late even for anything; your body is already too far gone. You’re already dying. You only have three months to live.
I kept wishing that this was a bad dream. My body was not absorbing any nutrition. I weighed 85 pounds (38.5 kg). I looked like a skeleton. My lungs were filled with fluid. The tumors now in my body were all over my lymphatic system. They were the size of golf balls, and by February the first, 2006, I went into a coma.
The nurse gave me a big dose of morphine because I hadn’t been able to sleep or anything for many days because of the fluid in my lungs. I was in so much pain and so much discomfort. Then, on February the 2nd in the morning, I didn’t wake up. It was at that point that the doctors told my family that these were my final hours and that my organs were now shutting down and I was going through the dying process.
But what everybody around me didn’t know was that I had left my body, and I felt amazing! I could see, feel, and hear everything that was happening all around me. I felt light and free, and all the pain was gone and all the fear was gone. Something that I call unconditional love. You know, I’ve never felt anything like that in my physical life before.
I was aware of my body lying there in that hospital bed, but my body looked so small and helpless and lifeless compared to how I was feeling now. I wanted my family to know that I’m fine. In fact, I’m better than fine. I feel fantastic! But there was no way for me to communicate with them.
I was able to see and hear everything the doctors were doing, like they were taking fluid out of my lungs. It was very different from having physical eyes. It was more like I had 360-degree peripheral vision. I could be aware of things that would happen behind, on the sides, above, below, everywhere... and beyond the walls. I was seeing and hearing conversations take place beyond the hospital room.
My husband was talking to the doctor outside, about 40 feet (12 m) away from the room that I was in. I was able to see and hear everything. I could even see and be aware that my brother, who was living in a different country (he was living in India at the time), was rushing to get on a plane to come and reach me because he wanted to get to me before I died. I remember even feeling, “Gosh, I’d better not die until he gets here.”
Like many of us who grew up in the '60s and '70s, I knew science is the pathway to truth. As much as I wanted to believe a lot of what I’d heard in my Methodist Church growing up about an afterlife, about God, the power of prayer, my work in science (and especially as I pursued a career in neurosurgery) left me wondering how conscious awareness could survive the death of the brain and body.
So I taught for about 15 years at Harvard Medical School. That was all setting the stage for my near-death experience. It’s an important point to point out that we never ever understood WHY this happened. When I first got to the emergency room, the doctors were very alarmed because of how quickly I’d gone downhill.
Over 3.5 hours, I was deep in a coma, having grand mal seizures, and they found out the next day from microbiology that it was gram-negative bacterial meningitis caused by E. Coli. They, of course, put me on three powerful intravenous antibiotics and on a ventilator. I went through that week not really showing any signs of improvement.
By the end of a week, the doctors held a family meeting on day 7 of the coma. It was a Sunday morning when they said I had gone from a 10% chance of survival down to a 2% chance. Unfortunately, they thought of... if I was in that 2% survivor category, that would never translate into any meaningful recovery.
That’s why they suggested stopping the antibiotics and just letting nature take its course; let the infection run; let me go. I was way too deep in a coma to have had any experience, especially when you realize that the CT and MRI showed extensive damage. Yet the exact opposite is what I experienced!
How that journey unfolded began in that "earth-worm-eye view." I was rescued by a slowly spinning white light. Initially, that portal led up into what I call the gateway valley. It was far more real than this world. It makes this world look like a dream. That’s one thing that people have trouble understanding because they think this world is hardcore reality; well, that world is far more real than this one.
It was so refreshing, reassuring... I cannot put it into words. Soon after that, I had this sensation of a soft summer breeze blowing through. That was like my first awareness of the divine presence in that infinitely loving force that so many other near-death experiencers from all continents, all cultures, all belief systems, all millennia, the last 5000 years have talked about the same kind of realm.
That’s where our religions come from and all of that. To me, it felt very, very real. In fact, it felt more real than this physical reality. It was as if my awareness was expanding more and more, like going through different levels. After a while, I started to leave this physical level, and when we leave our physical body, we leave behind everything that’s associated with our body: our biology, our voice, our race, our religion. All of that gets left behind.
What crosses over is just pure essence, pure spirit, or pure love. We can call it whatever we want. I started to encounter the essence of a spirit of other people who were familiar to me, like my dad, who had died 10 years ago. I felt his presence around me, and even though he wasn’t in his physical body, I recognized him immediately.
It was literally like his energy and my energy just merged, and it was like, “Oh, dad, it’s you.” I just knew, and we were not even talking to each other. We didn’t need to explain who we were. We knew what each other was feeling right away without words.
My dad and I, when I was growing up, had a very turbulent relationship because I rebelled against my culture. I come from a culture where women are considered second-class citizens. My dad and I clashed a lot, and I even ran away from an arranged marriage. So when he passed away, I always thought that I had let him down, that I disappointed him as a daughter.
But now, here he was on the other side with me, and all I felt from him was pure unconditional love, and I felt he understood why I was the way I was. It was just the most incredible feeling. Then I felt that I was surrounded by other beings, and I didn’t recognize them all from this life, but I did feel that I was just unconditionally loved by them, and they were there to protect me and help me.
I started to understand that I’ve always been protected, but not just me - we all are. But we don’t realize it. We don’t know this. I was surprised by the incredible power of the love that I felt from thousands of beings around me, going off into the mist with their heads down, murmuring, mini praying.
I remember the angelic choirs above that were fueling all this beautiful dancing and merriment, serving as yet another portal to higher and higher levels. All the way out to what I call the “core,” infinite inky blackness but filled to overflowing with unconditional love of that divine source. I would cycle through those levels. I would tumble back down to that earthworm-eye view, but I could navigate back up by remembering the sound the music provided portals to traverse those.
I’d been told every time I entered the core, “You are not here to stay. You will be going back. But we’ll teach you many things.” A lot happened on that side. I reached a point where I felt that I had a choice as to whether to come back into my body or to stay on the other side.
No part of me wanted to come back because my body was sick and dying. I was suffering here. My family was suffering, taking care of me. But it was like I entered a state of clarity where I then understood WHY I had been sick. I understood HOW it was that so many of the thoughts and the decisions and choices I had made in my life had led me to that point when I was lying there on that hospital bed.
I realized that I had lived this life of fear instead of a life of passion and joy and love. I had never allowed my soul, my spirit, to express itself and be all that it had come here to be, and that I was more powerful than I had ever known or believed.
In that state of clarity, I received the message that now that you know the truth of who you really are, go back. If you choose to go back into your body, your body will heal. At this point, I felt my dad was telling me, “You need to go back. It’s not your time yet.”
So it was at that point that I made the choice to come back. I started to understand that I had a bigger purpose to fulfill, something much bigger. I didn’t know what it was; I had no idea what it was. But I had the understanding that all I had to do was to be myself and live my life fearlessly... and my purpose would unfold before me.
It was at that point that I started to come out of the coma. My family and everybody around me were really shocked, but they were so happy that my eyes were opening up. It was like I had one foot on each side. I kept saying to them, “Dad is here; Dad is telling me that it’s not my time; I’m gonna be fine.” I would just say this over and over, and they were wondering what was going on.
The doctor basically told my family, “Don’t raise your hopes because she’s still critical. Sometimes it happens.” Then the doctor said, “These are the drugs just messing with her mind. She’s hallucinating.” But then I said to the doctor, “Aren’t you the doctor that took fluid out of my lungs at about 4 am this morning?”
That’s when he said, “But you were in a coma. You couldn’t know that!” So he got really shocked and started to wonder what was going on. I said to my husband, “Isn’t he the doctor that said I’m not even going to make it through the night?” My husband said, “You couldn’t possibly have heard that. He said that to me outside the room, down the hallway, near the nurses' station.”
What started to happen over the next few days was that the tumors just continued to shrink. The doctors just could not understand it. I had to start getting a little bit stronger and start getting out of bed, and within three and a half weeks, they could find no trace of the cancer anymore.
Within five weeks, they let me go home to live my life cancer-free. That was 14 and a half years ago. When I came back to this world, I did, when I woke up in that ICU bed on Day 7 of the coma, all I knew was where I had been. My brain was so wrecked, and I still had no memories of my life before.
So when I was first coming out of the coma and they first excavated me, I was still not even recognizing loved ones at the bedside... although that recognition in my language came back very rapidly, literally over hours. Memories were even more complete than they had been before the coma. That was something that was a real shock.
Everything turned around tremendously. I mean inexplicably, and that’s one of the points that’s made in that case report about my medical records. This is not like, “Oh, we see this one percent of the time,” or, “We just don’t see it!” The medical people’s opinions were very, very mixed. One thing that they all agreed on is that I’m lucky to be alive. They all agreed that I should have died.
Another one of my doctors said that all the things that I’d experienced, what I said was happening on the other side, seeing my dad and everything, he says that was my brain hallucinating, and he says that was the drugs messing with my mind. But the other part that the doctors and the medical people could not explain is how was I able to see my brother? How was I able to see my brother? How did I know he was on a plane flying to see me, and how did I hear the doctors?
My doctor, who was treating me, actually said, “You’re not the first person to tell me such a story,” and he said he has heard other patients who had experienced crossing over on the other side. What happened, though, is that I was interviewed once by a local newspaper, and then the newspaper journalist said to me, “Would your doctor be willing to verify everything that happened?”
I said, “Yes, he completely believed me.” But when the newspaper interviewed him, he didn’t say everything the way he said it to me. He was too embarrassed to speak it publicly. Many years later, another doctor said to me that “Yeah, if we say these things publicly, we can be ridiculed, and we can even lose our license.”
True, open-minded skepticism is an absolutely important ingredient in this quest. I would say I was my own worst skeptic. I’d spent 54 years in my life owning a very conventional scientific worldview, but essentially my coma journey to a neurosurgeon interested in explaining consciousness had a tremendous number of lessons to help me understand much of what we thought was completely wrong.
What I've found is that in the 11 years since I’ve worked with many scientists around the world who are interested in consciousness, all of the tremendous evidence that is available to all of us who study things like the afterlife, parapsychology, the reality of things like telepathy, remote viewing, out-of-body experiences. All of this phenomena of consciousness brings science and spirituality together and explains consciousness in a much more satisfactory fashion than the very bleak and paltry fiction of materialist explanation.
So obviously, you have to study these phenomena directly. My name is Dean Radin, I’m the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California. If you don’t know what IONS is, then you should not be watching this movie because it’s too late, basically. The Institute of Noetic Sciences is an institute devoted to studying the nature of consciousness.
It’s a part of a spectrum of experience... some of them are psychic, some are mystical, some are déjà vus, clairvoyance, precognition, the whole range of experiences that are actually very common. In terms not of belief, but in terms of what people actually experience, these kinds of things happen!
The next question is why don’t we find departments of psychic research in every university? The answer is that in the modern world, we follow a certain set of assumptions about the way that reality is. A philosopher would call it "materialism." This is the idea that everything that we know, including the mind, is made up of matter and energy.
From that perspective, the idea that aspects of your mind or awareness can transcend space and time is considered impossible. It’s not possible to have parts of your awareness extending away from your brain. Because the prevailing idea is that it's impossible, the only way of understanding the experiences is that they’re either made up or they are coincidence or some other mundane explanation.
One of the problems with materialist science is that they keep looking in a material world to try to prove things. If you're looking at the physical brain and you say, “Well, we assume this thing creates consciousness,” then you see all these things you can measure, like on a functional MRI, or on magnetoencephalography, or on a spectral electroencephalogram, or whatever your mode of examining the brain.
If you're sitting there thinking that whatever we see is gonna explain it all - you’re obviously misled. Sorry; it’s NOT there! I think it’s important to be clear that the brain and the mind, or the brain and internal experiences are clearly correlated with each other.
There’s a relationship between brain activity and our internal experience. But that relationship actually doesn’t say very much about what is the causal direction. The usual presumption is that brain processing is the causal reason why we have consciousness. But that’s an inference that is very difficult to justify because it could just as well be in the other direction.
In fact, this gives rise to ideas that it’s not that the brain is generating consciousness, but rather the brain is receiving consciousness... or is a filter of consciousness which is somehow "out there." This is the difference between looking at a radio and listening to it playing music and opening up the radio expecting to find little tiny people with instruments in it.
Well, that’s not how it happens! You open up the radio and you see something which ultimately is receiving information that’s coming from somewhere else. From the time I was a child, I was intrigued by the physical world and by "What is the mind?" So I went on to get my PhD in Neuroscience and then began doing research in rehabilitation neuroscience, working with children with cerebral palsy, people with stroke, people with Parkinson’s disease, and trying to find new therapies to help them move better and make their brains function better again.
I enjoyed that, but I should say that at a certain point in my career, I had an experience with meditation at a meditation retreat that shifted my whole understanding of awareness. I was in a bit of a quandary because I had a sense that there was more to consciousness than I’d originally thought.
Everybody in this world would say that the brain is very important in our body consciousness. We all know that. But at the same time, when you look at other research, for example on Near-Death Experiences, we find out that when someone has had cardiac arrest, their brain has completely stopped, and yet these people nevertheless retain their consciousness and they do something even more than that.
They actually see everything around them from a perspective outside of their body. The point is that if there is NO brain activity in the entire cortex, there couldn't even be a hallucination, and that’s what the materialist neuroscientists have to deal with. Of course, one of the things they will say is maybe the experience happened when there was still a little bit of brain activity, and they just THOUGHT it was happening in the middle of the coma.
But in fact, you can prove by what they’re seeing that they were definitely in the middle of a deep, deep coma with no brain activity, watching things happening then. They are seeing non-local events that would be impossible even to see with the normal brain! You’ve been studying the wrong thing. The brain doesn’t produce consciousness but is simply a transceiver or a filter.
A filter is a beautiful word for it. That’s not a new theory. That actually came more than 100 years ago from the likes of William James, who was a renowned Harvard psychologist. F.C.F. Schiller was another proponent of filter theory, as was Aldous Huxley, who wrote “Doors of Perception.” He came to realize that consciousness was far more profound than just something produced by a brain locally.
Right now, the brain filters everything out with the five senses, and therefore I see you and the things around me as almost a measly trickle – someone said - of what is actually available for me to see. The idea that William James brought forth was that when you have a mystical experience or Near-Death Experience, what happens is those filters in the brain are actually partially removed.
In normal waking physical consciousness, those filters are there for a good reason to help us function in this physical world. Clearly, what we perceive with our ordinary senses and in the everyday world is not the world; it’s a cartoon of the world. Picking up portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is very thin, it goes from DC (or zero Hz) up to basically infinity, picking up a thin slice.
This is true for every one of our senses. We are picking up little tiny pieces of an energetic world out there... and from that constructing the world that we see. Our sense of what is out there (our common sense view) is a construction. We KNOW that; it’s easy to demonstrate.
Of course, it begs the question: "What is the real world? What is it really like?" There it gets much more difficult to talk about. When we think, perhaps, that under certain degrees of meditative experience, under transformative experiences that can be spontaneous, what is often reported typically by mystics is that they now experience the world the way it ACTUALLY is.
One thing that happens with many people who have a Near-Death Experience is that when they come back, they now have the psychic abilities that they don’t even necessarily want... and sometimes these psychic abilities frighten them! What we study are experiences ultimately; people have strange experiences... so they would include things like precognitive dreams and presentiments of things about to unfold, telepathic experiences, mind-matter interaction effects.
Those kinds of things. The challenge from a scientific perspective is how do you then take those experiences and bring them into the laboratory so you can study them under controlled conditions where you can tell the difference between a coincidence and a real effect? For precognition, many different types of experiments all suggest that we DO have the capacity to know what’s about to unfold even under conditions where we can't infer it.
We also have many experiments showing that through clairvoyance, we can perceive (not always visually) but we can perceive something that is happening at a distance. That means that both through space and through time, we somehow can do that! We have the perception ability to do that.
Another whole class of studies is whether the nature of consciousness survives bodily death. Is consciousness part of the body or not? They clearly interact in some ways, but maybe it doesn’t need the body. These are survival-based studies where we look at things like mediumship and Near-Death Experiences and those kinds of phenomena, some of which can be brought into the laboratory, and we can verify whether or not, for example, a medium who claims to be talking to a dead person and getting information from that dead person, is the information correct under conditions where they can’t fake it or they can’t get information in other ways?
And there too, we can verify that actually does happen sometimes. We may be capable of MUCH more than we currently think. From a scientific perspective, these things shouldn’t happen! But they do happen! So clearly we've missed something important.
I want to find out what it is. What does it mean? I’m Rupert Sheldrake. I’m a biologist. I did research at Cambridge on the development of plants. I taught at Cambridge; I was a fellow at Clare College. I studied philosophy at Harvard. I did history and philosophy of science there.
The reason I did that is because when I was a student in Cambridge, I felt that biology had become very limited by this mechanistic theory of life, treating animals and plants as machines and treating people as machines. I wanted to see if it’s possible to have a philosophy of science, a way of doing science that was more broad and more inclusive.
Since then, I’ve been doing research in morphic resonance, memory in nature, and on unexplained abilities of animals and people. There’s a lot of evidence for these phenomena; I mean from years of research by physic researchers and parapsychologists. But from the materialist point of view, all my mental activity is in my head.
So if I think about you and you’re 100 km away and I want to telephone you, and you start thinking about me, and when I ring you, you say, “Oh, it’s funny; I was just thinking about you,” a very common kind of telepathy. Almost everyone has experienced this. I’ve shown by means of controlled, randomized experiments that this is not just chance coincidence.
But from the materialist point of view, that’s impossible. My thoughts cannot possibly influence you 100 km away. Phenomena like telepathy are impossible, and therefore all the evidence for it. The fact that most people say they've experienced it just proves these are stupid people who’ve not been educated enough.
If there is evidence for it from scientific experiments like my experiments or those of Dean Radin and many other scientists, then those experiments must be flawed; there must be some error in the experiments. This debate is not really a debate because it’s a denial campaign that's been going on for decades.
An enormous influence is the education system. Most people are interested in these phenomena because they’re actually happening, and they influence their lives. But then when they see a culture of denial in the scientific world, this makes people feel that science is dogmatic, narrow, and limited. And they’re right.
It’s really unfortunate the way science is practiced today... kind of like an old boys' club where the only one way to get things done is to do experiments that prove the accepted hypotheses about the universe. Yet when you hit all these jagged edges and say, “The model is wrong,” what our current community tries to have us do is say, “Well, no; stick to the plan.”
But you sooner or later get to a point, as Thomas S. Kuhn pointed out in his book about scientific revolutions back in the mid-twentieth century, where you have a breaking point... where there’s so much evidence that breaks the rules of the reigning paradigm that you have to basically throw the paradigm out.
At this time, there are approximately ten different meta-analyses of classes of experiments looking at various kinds of psychic phenomena published in mainstream journals. So why does it remain controversial? They will say that the reason why these studies LOOK like they are significant is because of questionable research practices. The dreaded QRPs.
The QRPs include things like selective reporting. So you’re only reporting the positive results, and you’re not publishing the negative results, which would create a big bias when you do the analysis. What they’re looking for generally is one of two things: they’re looking for an application that is undeniable, typically involving some way like making a lot of money.
“If you’re so smart, go to Las Vegas and make a lot of money.” So that’s one approach. The other one that changes people’s minds is a single, personal experience. The whole point of taboo is a social agreement about what you can talk about... and of what you shouldn’t talk about.
The irony is that despite a huge amount of scientific evidence showing that these experiments are what they seem to be... they're real. The taboo persists in the academic world, especially, not so much outside academia, but within mainstream academia, you’re simply not allowed to talk about this stuff.
When you step outside a worldview like this, you know what will happen in terms of what your colleagues will think about you. They would say, “Oh my goodness, this person has now gone weak-minded. They are not really a credible scientist anymore.” It’s very, very true that many young scientists who do not have tenure at universities yet, who have started to do research on meditation, have not received tenure from their colleagues because their colleagues decided that they were really not academically credible like they originally thought they were.
You have a high probability of losing your career. One of the complaints I get from my more mainstream colleagues is that “if psychic phenomena were really true, it would upset everything that we know enough to throw away all of our books and start over again,” to which I reply that is actually not the case.
What we know about physics is very likely to remain exactly the same. The physical world is very stable. What we know about biology and chemistry and all the rest is going to remain the same. We don’t throw away the science we’ve got. What the science we’ve got has done is established a whole range of facts about nature.
It’s extremely successful in building machines. It’s very unsuccessful in understanding consciousness, in understanding the interconnectedness of nature, and in understanding our role in the world and in nature. That’s why we have an ecological crisis - there's something gone horribly wrong by applying this kind of science, which is very limited without a bigger picture.
Science is one way of understanding the world. It gives a pretty good picture for a lot of things, but it doesn’t do well at understanding the nature of consciousness. In order to then understand psychic phenomena, we probably need to revise and re-look at some of the assumptions underlying the way that science has developed.
One of the ways of doing that is to question the assumption that everything starts with physics. Maybe there’s something more fundamental in the physical world. So what do we know that doesn’t seem to be physical and yet quite real? It's our internal experience. It doesn’t seem to have physical qualities to it, but we can’t deny we have experienced.
So maybe that’s more fundamental? If that's the case, you think of the scientific disciplines as a hierarchy with physics at the bottom and then chemistry, biology, psychology. Maybe there’s something that needs to go below physics? A number of thought leaders today across the board in science are beginning to say things like what’s more fundamental than matter and energy is information.
It’s somewhat more abstract than what we think of as physicality, but from information, you can create matter and energy. You can describe it and form a universe based on information. All of that is closely aligned with esoteric traditions, which say ultimately that consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world.
It all comes from consciousness somehow. Whenever it’s Kabbalah or neoplatonism or hermeticism or you name it, you’ll find it almost in every esoteric tradition, a way of thinking about how consciousness in its primordial state turns into reality. That’s idealism. That’s the notion that only the mental exists.
In fact, the universe is mental primarily, and the physical universe simply emerges based on the principles of that mental realm. Top-down causality. When you combine the consilience of neuroscience of consciousness, philosophy of mind, and quantum physics, which is THE most fundamental presentation of the mind-body question, they’re all converging to say “consciousness is the one thing that exists."
All of physical reality emerges out of that. It just becomes obvious that this IS a mental universe. Mind has tremendous power over matter, and we prove that all the time as humans with our own health! My basic education in the university is understanding the nature of cell biology, how cells work.
I was a stem cell research scientist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, where I was a professor at Stanford University later, where I was a research scientist expanding the knowledge of epigenetics. To understand the nature - what is the difference between genetics and epigenetics? When I say this character, this disease is under genetic control, that is the belief that genes turn on and off and make the disease.
This makes us a victim because as far as we know, we didn’t pick the genes, and here the genes turn on and off by themselves?!! Then you realize, "I’m just like a time bomb!" And one day the gene goes “BOMP” and I get cancer. I’m a victim. But the new science - epigenetics, which means control above the genes, turns out to be environment, but our PERCEPTION of the environment is what controls the genes.
I say if perception and environment control the genes, we as individuals can control our environment, and WE can control our perceptions. Consciousness, lifestyle, belief systems – these are the ultimate controls of the gene. So relevance is important. Because as you know, if you got a “cancer gene” and that's what you believe, then you think, "I'm gonna get cancer," and then you get cancer, and you say, "The genes did it."
Now we know: No, there is no cancer gene. There is not one gene that causes cancer. Genes are correlated with cancer. Meaning if your life is not in harmony and you have one of these genes, you can activate cancer. But the point is having the gene does not cause the cancer.
Fifty percent of the women that have the same BRCA1 gene never get cancer. The point is very important. We have to help people take them from the belief that I’m a victim and give them the science that “No... your consciousness is creating this life experience in here. Your consciousness is controlling your genes."
My evolution took me from the genes to the role of the mind. The mind is the absolute control of our biology. When we give our power to other people, THEIR beliefs control our biology. If I buy their story and it’s not a good story, then I’ve just altered my life. This is why we need to take the power back.
People say, “Oh, that positive thinking doesn’t really work.” But that’s not true. The best example of positive thinking in a scientific study is called 'placebo.' You have a disease, and the doctor says, “Here’s a new pill, it’s a brand new science - it’s going to cure you,” and you believe it, and you take the pill, and you get well.
Then you find out the pill was a sugar pill. So then you're left with, "So what made me well?” It’s not the sugar pill! It was the positive belief in that sugar pill and how it’s going to help your life. Sometimes mechanistic doctors try to dismiss all alternative healing by saying, "It’s nothing but the placebo effect."
But the fact is that the placebo effect works. In fact, regular medicine depends on placebo effects as well. It doesn’t really matter what we call it. The fact is it’s happening. It shows that belief and expectation are actually influencing the healing process.
But people don't recognize... negative thinking is equally powerful, but it works in the opposite direction. The American Psychological Association has recognized that “90% of doctor visits are due to stress.” It turns out that stress is the major cause of problems in health. That stress is a consciousness issue, so if you can control stress, then you can control your health, and that’s what the new science is all about.
The mind-body connection is now recognized as a thing. The next stage is things like affirmations. Affirmation (in terms of the literature of affirmations) rivals the number of books sold for religious texts. It’s extremely popular. It’s been around a long time in many different versions.
Some people will say, “If you want a gold-plated Mercedes, you just think about it really hard... and there it is!" Now you have a gold-plated Mercedes that’s yours somehow. Of course, nothing works that simply, but because of the association between the idea of “you create your own reality” and suddenly manifesting mounds of gold out of nothing, people are of course very reluctant to say, “I believe in that” because it sounds crazy!!!
In fact, as stated, it IS crazy. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that affirmations don’t work, that they don’t manipulate the world in some way. I personally believe, based on the experimental work I have done, that we DO create our own reality on many layers.
Even among my colleagues, what I have just said is probably considered controversial because I’m more liberal-minded than some of my more conservative colleagues. Based on the experiments that I’ve done and the way that I interpret it, I think that we actually do, to a small extent, manipulate the world in a literal way and not simply on a psychological way.
If you look back at various spiritual traditions, even from way back in India, intention was considered very, very important. In fact, the term in Sanskrit is "Sankalpa." It means that when you have a strong intention, you can literally move ahead much, much more quickly than you can if you don’t have an intention... with whatever you want to do.
People might say, "Well, that doesn't always happen to me," but what we often notice with an intention is that there’s a surface level of our intellect that says, for example, “I want to lose weight,” but underneath there’s a stronger, what I would call ‘my alligator’ brain or my unconscious desire, to eat wonderful rich foods... and they often compete with each other.
You think your intention is to lose weight, but you may have a stronger intention for something else, or your intention may be distracted. Then we might look at our distractions or the things that might keep that intention from happening... like maybe a fear of actually being successful in the world that some people may have.
We have to understand that during development, the brain is the equivalent of a computer. The beginning part is it's got an operating system. Now the brain is going to work, but it doesn’t have any programs. Nature creates the first seven years of a child’s life to download programs.
A child below seven has a vibration of a brain that’s less than conscious. It's called 'Theta.' You can’t give an infant a book and say, “Study the rules of how to be a member of a family” or “Study the rules of how to be a member of a community.” Thousands of rules. So how does a child get a chance to learn it? It’s not even able to read.
The answer is: it doesn’t have to. Because the brain is in 'Theta,' which is hypnosis. It watches the community, and whatever it sees is downloaded, just like a video recorder. Watch my mother, watch my father. See how they did it? I record that. Now I have a program.
For the first seven years, we download behavior... but from other people. The problem is this – most of their programmed behavior is not very positive. We’re actually downloading programs that are not helping us. This goes into the “subconsciousness.” The subconsciousness is like a hard drive in a computer; it's got programs, okay?
The conscious mind is the creator, like the one that types on the keyboard, but you still have to work through the program. Here is the interesting conclusion: 95% of our life is coming from the program. Your life is a printout of your program! The conscious mind is wishes and desires. That's what you want from your life: health, happiness, good relationships, good jobs.
The conscious mind is creative, but when the conscious mind is thinking 95% of the day, the automatic behavior is coming from the program. Very often, we don’t realize the concepts that we are holding inside of us about either “I can’t do that,” or “This is impossible,” things like that.
I think it’s an interesting word – we use often like psychologists use as well that we "project" onto the world what our story, which is our own filter, our own lens, is telling us about it. We have in our head very positive thoughts, but our life doesn’t match the thoughts. If life isn’t working well, if we say, “We’re a victim,” that means I’m powerless. “Oh, it happened to me; I’m just a victim.”
I go: There are no victims; we are CREATING what we are doing. All you have to do is look at your life, and the first thing it says, you say the things that I like that come into my life, they come into my life because I have a program to let them come in. More importantly, the things that you want, that you struggle over, you have to work hard for it, you have to sweat to make it happen...
Why are you working so hard? The answer is inevitably whatever you want and you can’t get it is because the program you have doesn’t support it. Of course, the most important is: Can I change the program? You have to remember this is a habit mind. Habits do not want to change. If a habit changes, then it’s not a habit anymore.
Thank God you learned how to walk before you were two. It doesn’t change, and you’re still walking; you could be a hundred. Okay. But that creates an issue then. What if my program is one I don’t want, and I want to change them? Well, it learns in a different way from the conscious mind.
This is what people read in a self-help book, and if you give them a test, they can get a 100. I understood everything in the book. I say, “Did your life change?” “No, but I understand everything in the book.” That’s because the conscious mind downloaded that information, but the conscious mind only works 5% of the time means: “I don’t care what you read in the book.” Your subconscious is still controlling it.
Now we want to change the subconscious, but that has a special learning process. There are three ways to change beliefs: 1) Self-hypnosis earphones at night, 2) Create new habits and practice them. Just practicing, repeating them. 3) Energy psychology has a way of changing programs very quickly.
This is what we all need now because the planet is in a very tough situation right now. We all have to change our beliefs because our beliefs are creating a problem. Unfortunately, we do not come into the world with a user’s manual. It would be very convenient if we did have a user’s manual... with an index.
We could look up things like: why I’m here?, do I have a purpose?, all of these kinds of questions. But we don’t have that. The closest that we have to it are traditional religions because they will be very happy to tell you exactly why you are here, what you should do, and all the rest of it.
For somebody who doesn’t follow traditional religions, it still doesn’t take away this internal sense that we have that we want to know. Is there meaning to anything? If people experience tragedies in their life of any sort, they immediately come face-to-face with this notion of do I live in a completely purposeless universe, or is there some meaning to any of this?
It’s a question that everyone faces at one time or another. Ultimately, if you really learn, it’s what you learn from the inside. My dad was an artist. He taught me to observe. We lived in the deep country, and I was used to being alone. It was natural to look at the weather; look at the sky.
Dad was very good. Yes, he was always noticing which way the wind was blowing. He noticed what was happening to the leaves, how they were growing. We had compulsory chapel; we had to go to chapel twice a day and say our prayers in the morning and evening beside our bed.
I very soon began to find safety in what I might call 'prayer.' I went to a school of meditation in London, and I stayed with them actually for 20 years; I used to go down. I was given a mantra: You’ve given a sound. It seems like a meaningless sound. You just repeat this sound. This is how meditation works.
You never try to get rid of thoughts. You can’t do that. But you’ve put in an alternative... like this meaningless mantra. You just repeat that sound even if you just say it half a dozen times. For those few seconds, your attention is not on your thoughts; it’s on this mantra.
The more you give attention to something, the bigger it gets, doesn’t it? It magnifies. The more you think about your problem, the bigger it gets. But if you think about something else, what happens? It gets less. Because the attention is really the life force, and it gives things life.
If you turn your attention to something else, your thinking is diminished. This is how meditation works. I’ve had a long life; I’ve been far, and I’ve been many things. I’ve traveled widely and done all sorts of things. But this meditation I practiced mornings, evenings, and I’ve hardly missed all these years.
I still do it now. I really consider this to be my work. Thinking, the little voice in the head... I love the way Michael Singer puts it in his book: ”The Untethered Soul.” He calls that running stream of thoughts in the head, the monkey mind that we all have, this chatterbox of thoughts, inner dialogue... He calls that the annoying roommate.
So many people identify with that. They think they are their thoughts, their memories of what they’ve been through in their life, and they identify completely with that. That can be a terrible trap. That little voice in the head that’s not who we are. That’s not the deep and profound kind of higher consciousness we are.
But we CAN come to identify very richly with that by going within. For example, many scientists, philosophers, artists, musicians, etc. have found ways to get into that kind of universal mind by QUIETING the voice in the head and actually opening themselves to full-blown creativity.
Getting in that hypnagogic space is a RICH source of creativity, understanding, insight, and guidance. As sentient beings, we all have the power to meditate, to go within consciousness to explore and find out much more about who we are and what our relationship with the universe is.
Let’s assume that there is a parallel between our understanding of the physical world and our understanding of consciousness itself. The conscious world, the conscious mind... are very tightly coupled. Classical physics, in a sense, is like a refinement of common sense. It is the world as we see it. It’s real. Our awareness is real as well.
But just below that, we start seeing “Oh, the world is a little bit more complicated.” Quantum physics, nuclear physics; you also find in meditation, the world there is a little more complicated, too, because now you’re more in contact with your subconscious. You go down, down, down, down until you're at the bottom.
We don’t know what the bottom is, but let’s assume it’s way down there somewhere, both in the physical sense AND in the mental sense. In the magical traditions, this is the way that the magic is described as working. If you go down into a state that a magician will call 'gnosis' or a yogi will call 'samadhi,' which is a deep level of awareness, where you are still able to operate.
That is then, not simply parallel to the real world, but it converges with it. It IS the physical world at these deep levels. If I am at this very deep level of reality where mental and physical are not that separate from each other, and if I put a little intentional spin that I want something... that could manifest into the physical world as the something that I wanted.
What I have just described is basically the idea within the yogic tradition where the 'siddhis,' the special powers that arise as a result of meditation. A very tiny thought or intention in the deep mental state could manifest as a monstrous effect in the physical world.
The caution that happens within the magic tradition is to avoid black magic. Black magic is overriding somebody else’s free will. This is why in parables, in stories, you constantly read about the equivalent of Darth Vader. There is someone with a little bit of talent; they start using it, originally doing only white magic, but they get seduced by the power and they become Darth Vader.
It’s how we decide to use that power which is starting to spin out the ethical considerations of it. Each and every one of us is more than just a physical body. I’ve discovered there is so much more to our reality than we have ever been led to believe, but we have not been taught to tap into it.
Intuition is really your connection to your higher self or your soul or your spirit or your source or whatever we want to call it. The mind is what decides how much of the spirit or soul is allowed to come through. To me, this is what it means to have an open mind versus a closed mind.
People who have a more closed mind struggle more because they allow LESS of their intuition or their spirit to come through and express itself through their physical body. The mind literally acts like a filter. You have the choice as to how much you want to open that mind up.
When you allow your intuition, your intuition will always guide you to what is best for you. What does it make me feel? Does it make me feel expanded or small? That is one thing that they don’t teach you at schools or at college. Nobody asks you how does it make you feel... including what career you choose.
One of the consequences of a materialistic understanding of the brain-mind relationship is that it leads to the idea that your sense of awareness, your consciousness, is a side effect of the brain processing. That leads to the notion of a nihilistic universe, a universe that doesn’t have any meaning or purpose.
In a sense, that is the way that modern civilization works. The best that you can do in a nihilistic universe is to die with the most toys. That’s the way it's sometimes put. Among other things, the notion that your life really doesn't have any meaning to it and that you’re completely isolated from other people, which is another consequence of materialism, leads to things like greed.
All of the human vices are then amplified because you have to look out for yourself; you are not connected with other people; it doesn’t matter if somebody's starving on the other side of the world. That’s the view of reality that we end up with. We’ve become better and better at creating distractions, which is an escape, and there's nothing wrong with escape.
I mean, sometimes the world is such that you want to escape it. It’s not clear that it is telling us something that we really want to know, which is what is actually going on here. It’s alarming, it’s tragic, and it should fire up anybody who heeds what I say to take this work seriously. Dead seriously.
Raising of consciousness truly is a salvation. It saves us from this pit of darkness or ignorance which is called 'the world.' Infinite love, infinite fulfillment is what you might call our real home. This is where we come from. Somehow we left it, we lost paradise, and we've fallen into this world.
The human condition, lost in thought, is really a state of darkness or ignorance. The wisdom of man is foolishness to God. Human knowledge is ignorance. Wisdom or faith is at a higher level when we begin to function from here... rather than from here.
If you long sufficiently for the truth or whatever it is... love or peace or fulfillment and true knowledge, you will gradually find like a sort of accomplice within yourself that you've been led to in this direction. Freedom, you could say, takes you by the hand and leads you along the way.
It usually takes getting used to if you're not used to it. Fear is one of the things we have to overcome. Much depends on how determined you are, how much you want to be free. One of the problems with society and the way that we live right now is that we are conditioned to operate from a place of fear.
For example, the news media fills us with fear; even our financial system is driven by fear of not having enough money. But in actuality, the fear itself is what causes the problem. It cuts us off from our connection to our spirit or our higher self or our source; it cuts us off from our intuition.
My work has been for myself to always maintain that connection and to not buy into the messages that this paradigm is constantly feeding us. Don’t buy into those messages. When people say to me, "Oh, what you’re saying is wonderful, but it’s not practical for this life. We have to be in survival mode," my answer is: ”For me, I used to be in survival mode, and it gave me cancer. So I refuse to go into that mode anymore.”
I had been depressed about the state of the world, about land and plant misuse. But the real depression lasted for several years and occurred when I was 47 after a great love experience which really turned me upside down. I suppose you could say it altered the course of my life.
I wandered for several years, not really knowing where to go, what to do. I know a lot about depression and despair. This world is full of good advice, isn’t it? I often think one of the most practical things is simply to go out for a walk, open the window, see there are other people out there. Some are even worse than you are, in a worse state.
Then one thing leads to another. Well, as they say, 'time heals.' Sometimes you just have to stick it out like the weather. Sometimes it’s as good a way to make your bid. Mercifully, things come to pass for the good and the bad. For most of us, sometime in life, the clouds do pass.
People ask me: "Is it just about positive thinking?” No, it’s none of that. It’s about being yourself. When you’re being yourself, sometimes you have a bad day. Don’t suppress it. It really is about embracing every aspect of you, even the parts of you that are struggling, even the parts of you that don’t feel good.
It will pass. But the next step is to be optimistic about the future. To me, being optimistic is very different from being positive. Optimistic means I may not feel this way now, but it doesn’t mean it's always gonna be that way. Tomorrow is going to be different.
You are a facet of the Divine or God or Source. If all you do is allow spirit and know and trust that my spirit came here for a purpose and a reason and you allow it to express itself through you, what is truly yours comes to you. That is such an important concept, and I realized when I came back from my coma journey that the vast majority of the problems in our world are not because I don’t love my neighbor enough, not because I don’t love my enemy enough, but I don't love MYSELF enough.
The wonderful story about this new science is that programming is what creates our life, and parents are programmers. If parents knew that the words that they say to a child are shaping the future of that child, then parents would start to say different things to their children. Instead of criticizing them, saying, "That’s not good enough," and "You don’t deserve this," and "Who do you think you are?"... trying to get them to do better.
Remember, a child under seven is not thinking. It’s just recording. What is it here? Not good enough, not worthy, not lovable, not deserving. It’s more effective for parents to say, "You are the most wonderful child," "You are smart," "You can do anything," "You’re very powerful," "You’re a creator."
Why? Because if those are the programs, then the child's life is 95% from those programs. All of those programs give power to a child. We have to recognize, "I want to be a conscious parent." If both parents are doing this, at some point they will rewrite the negative programs and then become truly conscious parents, creating the next generation with power.
This is a lesson that is very crucial for this world to learn today, especially in the face of ongoing violence, warfare, conflict, and refugees. Humanity, at our current level of progression, is in a very kind of barbaric phase of our growth. It is time to wake up and realize we have responsibility.
In fact, I would say that this materialist science, by giving this lead of thinking, we are all separate, and then Darwinian evolution, which was misinterpreted in the 20th century as survival of the fittest in competition. Only the strongest survive. That’s not the way evolution really works!!!
In fact, modern biologists point to the amount of collaboration and cooperation in the biological world. That's how biological success happens. We see it’s exactly the opposite with what humans are doing in WRECKING our planet even as we speak. This kind of greedy selfishness and the polarization of wealth with the rich... I just saw today that the 400 wealthiest families in the US have more wealth than the bottom 60% of the population. That’s wrong. Completely wrong.
We see that all around the world. Becoming rich comes with a number of perks. The appeal of getting more money means your life becomes a lot more comfortable. Yet, I know plenty of very wealthy people who are very, very unhappy. They learned, among other things, that while you can get some creature comforts and your life will be easier in many ways, it does not address the question of who and what we really are.
It also does not address the question of, "You're going to die, and what do you think about that?" My wife, my family, my home, my job, my work, my position, my money. What can we take beyond the grave? It’s really a good question: what can I take with me beyond the grave? Everything else we leave behind.
I can tell you when you reach my age, it's only too obvious. Clouds come and go; seasons come and go; everything in this world comes to pass. That’s the nature of this world. But the stillness... eternally doesn’t change, does it? It’s here, it’s in France, it’s in Australia. The same stillness. Unchanging - always NOW.
It is absolutely crucial to be present. If you ask someone, “When were you happy?” Almost everybody will give you an answer... often years and years ago. Often when they were children. Suddenly, without knowing why, they were just happy. If you ask them to describe it, they'll usually give an answer which describes being present.
Just seeing the sunshine or just by the seaside, just seeing the waves, or just stroking a dog, the touch of the dog, just suddenly feeling the dog or looking into the dog’s eyes. These are moments of insight. Amazingly, people remember them all their lives because those are the real moments where you've exactly touched what's real in life.
It doesn’t mean that all the problems suddenly go away. Life is always offering stresses and struggles. But no matter what... in the end, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK. If it’s not ok right now, that means it’s not the end yet. Even death is not final. Even death is something that is not to be feared.
At the end of the day, it’s the actions we take in THIS world that are part of our growth or lack of growth in those spiritual realms. Because if all people knew is “Oh, that’s a beautiful afterlife... you know, this is such a crummy little existence for me, I’m just going over there.” WRONG MOVE because you never dodge the issues that you face in this life through suicide or through leaving this world.
It’s very important to realize there is no way out but THROUGH. The more we bring that love into this world, the more we actually grow as souls. That’s why this whole universe EXISTS. It’s for sentient beings to make these discoveries, to learn and teach together in GROWING towards their understanding of their connection with the universe.
Interestingly, as a scientist, I never believed in spirituality because I was programmed with a belief in genes controlling life. But as my world changed and I started to see how the environment was controlling the cells, I started to recognize something: that no two people are exactly the same.
The identity is a set of protein receptors, antennas, just like television antennas on the surface of the cell. I say: Why is it important? Because these are called SELF receptors, receivers of self! Then where is the signal of self coming from that activates these antennas? The answer is: NOT inside the cell. OUTSIDE the cell.
That’s when I said, “Oh my goodness, my identity is picked up by these antennas.” But the antennas are receiving a broadcast from the environment. This is the television, and I am the broadcast. Because if I am the broadcast, the broadcast is always here. It’s the televisions that come and go.
We have to recognize the idea of death is not what we have believed to be, an end. Death just means: Ok, the television is broken, but you’re still the broadcast. You're still here in a different form. You can manifest the physical part again; that’s called reincarnation. But you are always here as a spirit.
Once we own that we are spiritual entities, then we become empowered because the fear of death will disappear. Field – invisible moving forces that influence the physical world. I thought, "Okay, cool. Wait!" There is another word with the same definition – spirit – invisible moving forces that influence the physical world!
Whether you say the word 'field' or whether you say the word 'spirit,' they are functionally the same thing. This is the uniting of ancient spirituality and modern science coming across to become one and the same. I love that quote from Nicola Tesla: “When science first begins to investigate non-physical phenomena, they will discover more in the first decade than they have in all the existence of the scientific revolution.”
I think that we’re getting very close to entering that decade even now. This world is on the verge of a tremendous revolution in thinking that is long overdue. I think that we desperately need a kind of sense of spiritual reconnection in the Western world.
There's been an extreme process of secularization, an abandonment of traditional religion in favor of a secular, scientific worldview. But that turns out to be very thin and unsustaining and gives such a narrow view of human nature and consciousness. It also leads to consequences that are so destructive to the environment and to our relationship to the environment.
Previously, before Descartes in the Middle Ages in Europe, the worldview was that nature is alive, the Earth is alive, animals and plants are truly alive - they are beings with souls... the whole universe is alive, the stars are intelligent. What we need is reconnection with that sense of spirit and greater connection with the whole earth, the whole cosmos... and the realm of consciousness beyond the human level.
That’s where I think spiritual practices are so important because this is something which for most people is only meaningful through direct experience. Meditation, connecting with nature, relating to plants, pilgrimage, taking part in festivals and holy days, rituals, singing and chanting, fasting, even sports, which for so many people is the most common way that in the modern realm people achieve altered states of consciousness.
The big question obviously is who am I? The one thing that seems constant within me is my awareness of everything happening around me. That consciousness, that beautiful miracle, is within everyone and everything. It’s a powerful concept that the highest creativity within the universe dwells within US!
If we can actually experience that, it's like our heart just opens up in this incredible feeling of bliss and joy... and wonder. When you do that, what mystics often talk about is that the world out there is completely perfect. The world out there, everything is working exactly the way it's supposed to.
This is nice if you’re in an ashram and everything is pretty and quiet. It’s not so nice if you're in the middle of a war zone somewhere because in the thinking that the world is exactly the way it's supposed to be? And in the midst of chaos? That doesn’t sound right.
Nevertheless, this is one of the more common things that mystics talk about... their view of the world is that everything is interconnected; it’s related to consciousness in some way, and it’s perfect. In my journey, I saw very clearly not just the afterlife, but I saw oneness with that Divine, becoming one with.
That was never a concept that I would have entertained based on my religious beliefs. That’s a lesson that, unfortunately, our religious systems have in some cases lost sight of. A universal spirit that is part of us that we have purpose and meaning in our lives.
We are all united at a very deep level, and that you should do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. If you think of those disco balls, you know these balls with all those mirrors all around the ball. They project a light onto the wall.
When you look at the walls in a room that has the mirror balls, it’s gonna all there speckles of this light on the walls. Imagine that each of those speckles on the wall was one human being, one physical person. If you imagine that each of these speckles of light believes that there are separate beings from the other speckles of light, we start competing with them and fighting with them.
The whole is fighting with itself. One day when we die, we realize, “Oh my gosh, we are actually all from the same source; we were all actually one." The other way of saying it is we are here because we are the universe that is looking back on itself.
From a mainstream scientific perspective, the universe is here for some reason. We are the universe, the portion of the universe that is aware! That is what we are... is the universe being self-aware! It is said that we have a soul which, of course, is that divine spark, that part of light that lights every man.
Then there is hope for us. There's more to life than meets the eye. We can’t capture it within our thinking mind, so it's said that real knowledge is not something we learn by description. It comes from revelation. “My ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” [Isaiah 55, Bible]
You’re deeply loved and cherished forever. You will be taken care of.