532 - The Mind, Consciousness, and the Brain

Program Notes §

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake and Joseph Chilton Pearce

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0892819944Date this lecture was recorded: August 28, 1993

Today’s podcast features a conversation that was held on August 28, 1993 between Rupert Sheldrake, the originator of the Morphic Resonance theory, and Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of many books including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and other works investigating the brain, the mind, and consciousness. As their discussion proceeds they explore the concept that, as observers, WE actually are creating reality. Their conclusion to this often explored area of quantum physics is that, no, WE don’t create the physical world. Rather, we are largely the recipients of it and our job is to learn how to participate with it and go along with it.

 

The Crack in the Cosmic Egg:
New Constructs of Mind and Reality
by Joseph Chilton Pearce, Thom Hartmann
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World:
A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science
(2nd Edition with Update on Results)
by Rupert Sheldrake

Very Ape Podcasts
Episode Thirty-Nine: Acid Heads w/ Bill Radacinski
Episode Twenty-One: Cops for Pot w/ Howard ‘Cowboy’ Wooldridge

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

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Salon.

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is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And since last week, fellow salonners Jeff Cavs, Tiffany S., and Adam S. have all made donations to keep us keeping on, and

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their help is greatly appreciated. Without you and our other donors, well, these podcasts

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would have ended long ago. But thanks to you and to all of our fellow donors, we should have a long life of podcasts ahead of us.

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Now, in my small attempt to preserve

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some of the more interesting talks and conversations

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between people whose voices, I believe,

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will still hold the attention of those of us

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who have some strange attraction to thinking outside of the box,

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well, I’ve decided to play a scratchy old recording of a conversation

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between two people whose minds I’ve always admired.

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One of them, Rupert Sheldrake, well, we’ve heard from him many times here in the salon,

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mainly in the recordings of his trilogues with Ralph Abraham and Terrence McKenna.

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The other person, however, hasn’t been heard from here in the salon before.

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But one of his books, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg,

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remains one of the most significant books that I’ve ever read.

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To be honest, well, it’s been a long time since I last read it.

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But virtually every serious thought that I’ve had about metaphysics since then

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rests on the foundation that I received

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from that wonderful book by Joseph Chilton Pierce. It was a real game changer for me, and at the time

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I first read it, I was, well, I was still struggling to break free from the mind-controlled job that the

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Catholic Church had done on me as a small child. It has been a really important book in my life,

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and I hope that you’ll give it a read yourself,

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because simply by being here in the salon, you’ve already discovered that there is a crack in your own cosmic egg of consciousness.

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But enough from me, let’s now journey back in time to the evening of August 28th, way back in 1993, and join a few friends in the big house at Esalen

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to hear what these two interesting people have to say about one another’s work.

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Well, I think maybe there are people here who are not in your course,

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a lot of people who are not in mine, I’ve never saw them before.

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Do they know what you’re doing, and do they know what I’m doing?

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That’s my curiosity. Or do you know what I’m doing? I know what you’re doing, I’ve read the floor. Do they know what you’re doing and do they know what I’m doing? That’s my curiosity.

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Or do you know what I’m doing?

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I know what you’re doing.

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I’ve read your stuff.

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I know a bit about what you’re doing.

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I think the most interesting thing for us to discuss

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would be the question of the mind,

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consciousness, and the brain.

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And it should keep us going for an hour.

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All right.

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What I would be interested in hearing from you

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is the relationship between the, what

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we think of as the, I call them the fields of energy, which are intelligences, like Howard

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Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence.

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I’m sure you’re familiar with that, probably.

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And what the relation is between that and your so-called morphogenetic fields.

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Do you see the M fields, I think, brain-mind bulletin is calling them.

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Do you not see that as the only real, that’s the process of creation itself,

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that’s the genesis from our whole experience.

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It covers all aspects.

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Does it not?

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If it’s true, then

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it covers every aspect of everything. There’s

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nothing except that which generates

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from the morphic fields.

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I would think, you see,

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that all reality is organized by fields,

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that basically nature

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is habitual, and that

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our minds are field-based.

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These fields interact with the brain.

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So I would see the fields as the intermediate

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between consciousness and brain processes

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so that we have fields that would influence

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what happens in the brain.

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Fields of thought, fields of activity,

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fields of activity, fields of

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habitual response. And I would see morphic fields as basically habitual. The more often they happen,

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the easier they are to happen again. And at the same time, the creative process would involve

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the appearance of a new field, a new gestalt, a new way of organizing things.

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So I would see the fields as acting through the brain.

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The brain is capable of responding to many kinds of fields.

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And although the fields act through the brain and on the brain, they’re more than the brain.

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They’re shared collectively.

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What happens in one person’s mind can influence what happens in another person’s mind through morphic resonance.

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And that’s what you refer to as morphic resonance?

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Yes.

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Morphic resonance is the process by which a similar pattern of activity

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can affect a subsequent similar pattern of activity

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somewhere else.

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Well, we’ve been getting into just that

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in our little get-togethers.

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And the issue I used to try to get into your amorphic resonance in my recent book was the idiosyvane.

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recent book was The Idiot Savant. I remember coming across cases of the Idiot Savant some 25, 30 years ago, and I said, this is the most significant thing I’ve ever come across.

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It’s a great challenge. And I kept looking for examples of it, and found that simply

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no one was doing research into this area. Are you familiar with the Idia Savant?

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Yes.

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There was, in fact, a book on it a year or two ago.

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Yeah.

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Brought together across the…

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Daniel Treffert, Treffert’s work.

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And here I’d gather in all my years,

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I’d only found about six or eight examples of it.

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And here Treffert came out with a book with hundreds of examples.

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I know.

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Wonderful research.

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Wonderful, wonderful work. But we find here people with with hundreds of examples. I know, a bunch of research. Wonderful, wonderful work.

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But we find here people with an IQ of 25

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who can’t dress themselves, feed themselves,

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or take care of themselves at all,

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institutionalized from a very early age,

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and who are totally uneducable,

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and of course they’re literate, and so on and so forth.

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And yet they have one particular field of expertise which they can’t interact with.

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There’s no dynamic involved.

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They can’t even, so far as I know,

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the majority of them can’t self-stimulate the field.

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But if they’re asked a question from an external source

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concerning that field of knowledge,

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they can give answers which are totally impossible

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for us to account

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for in any way. The calendrical savants are a perfectly good example who can give you

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dates 40,000 years in the future, 40,000 years in the past, totally accurate, and computations

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which would take a computer enormous amounts of work to do

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and their answers are almost instantaneous and so on.

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In every case that I’m aware of

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when profiles have been done on these people,

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real research on them,

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we find that they come out of a very impoverished background

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in which they receive very little stimulus

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but the kinds of

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stimulus they had were those which would stimulate this particular kind of

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activity. For instance, the twin savants who were calendrical savants, very

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impoverished background, very lack of stimulus in their childhood, except that their mother had one of these

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little perpetual calendars, little brass gadgets, you know, where you turn the wheels and all

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the cog wheels turn and you can arrive at various dates.

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You can get dates for a couple of hundred or more years in advance or go back and so

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on.

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But the little children, that was their only play thing.

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That was their only toy.

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And they had

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no idea what the symbols meant, or

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in no way could they read

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the gadgetry.

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They just played with it, because if you turned this,

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all these other things would turn at the same time.

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They fascinated with it.

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And that alone

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was enough contact, enough

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of a stimulus,

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since it had no competition with much other stimuli,

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that it activated in them access to all calendrical information that you can think of.

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For instance, if they’re asked to go back before 1752, I think,

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the time in which we switched from Gregorian to Julian, Julian to Gregorian

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calendar, whichever way it was.

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They dropped out a number of days in European history there, and there were about 12 days

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involved.

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And when they go back before 1752, they adjust to the calendrical system and give an answer

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in keeping with the calendrical system at that period of time.

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And of course, if you ask them how they can make such an adjustment,

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they look at you blank because they can’t understand so abstract a question.

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If you ask them about a calendrical system,

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they can’t understand the word calendrical or system.

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But ask them for a date, and they can give you two with unerring accuracy.

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So the only way this can be accounted for

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would be that all human knowledge,

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all human experience,

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or undertaking of any nature,

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regardless of what,

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tends to aggregate as a field effect

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or create a field effect.

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So then from that point on,

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even from the first people notching a stick

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to keep track of time or run to the moon, stars, whatever,

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from that point on, all activity of that nature

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tends to aggregate as a particular field of activity.

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And these savants simply are locked into it

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by some fluke in very early childhood.

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And you do find that most of the swans have some experience like that in very early childhood,

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which opens them to the field effect.

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But they can’t enter into it dynamically.

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That is, they can’t sit around and think about various states.

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They have to be given the stimulus from an outside source.

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So it’s a very limited ability.

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Whereas we can learn about calendars and all that, but we haven’t direct access to it.

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It’s got to filter through the adjustment to all the other fields of intelligence operating

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in our brain systems.

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So we can employ these things and learn about them and dynamically

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interact with them, but we can’t give that

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pristine purity of

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answer, just like the mathematical

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savants. And I think they are

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the clearest example of this

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we have. Lightning calculators.

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They’re sometimes called lightning

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calculators.

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The two that the British employed during

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World War II literally as computers, as calculators. And they were the British employed during World War II

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was literally as computers as calculators.

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And they were insoluble.

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They never made an error.

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They couldn’t read and write.

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If you put two plus two up in front,

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they could not interpret it and make a response to it.

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But they’re the ones that could give you the answer

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of two to the sixth fourth power.

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If you double the rice on the checkerboard.

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You know, you start off with one

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and the second one is two and so on.

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How many do you have down here?

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Well, it’s a number in the quadrillions

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greater than the number of atoms in the sun.

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And the guy took him 45 seconds

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just to read out the answer, that is,

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because it’s such a huge answer.

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But of course, if you ask him,

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how does he know,

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he looks you blank because he can’t understand such a question.

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And this covers all fields.

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Yes.

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Well, I agree.

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I mean, I think this is…

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It’s obvious they’re accessing something

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beyond their normal mental capacity.

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And something like morphic resonance could help explain it.

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What other theories are there?

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I don’t think anything else

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can.

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And the business

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of

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Gardner’s multiple intelligences.

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Again, you have

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always talked about as another aspect

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of this morphic resonance.

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So you would agree that that’s a good application of it?

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I think so, yes.

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I mean, I’ve been interested in the advocacy of Sathana thing myself

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because it’s clear that there’s some field of mental activity

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they’re tapping into, which is not.

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It’s coming through them.

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It’s hardly coming out of them in the normal sense of the word.

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And it’s obviously related to normal mental skills, but as you say, it’s happening in

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a very intensified form, because it’s not interfered with by other kinds of mental activity.

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And ordinary mathematicians, talented mathematicians, often have what’s called a mathematical landscape.

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You know about mathematical landscapes.

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Do you?

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And I suppose that they must be related to what goes on in the minds of lightning calculators.

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The mathematicians I have known in that sector

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get just a little bit one-sided, in fact.

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They can’t look at anything except to see it mathematically.

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A topologist, a friend of mine who did his doctorate in topology,

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and he really was operating in a different world. I couldn’t follow it at all, and yet he was seeing

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everything literally through that. He saw everything topologically.

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So if there’s this morphic resonance effect, which may be operating in the idiosyncratic,

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how do you see this relating to ordinary education?

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And do you apply this in the realm?

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Are you applying these principles?

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Well, I certainly think they could be applied in this respect.

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I mean, look at Maria Montessori.

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I love her term, constellates.

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And she was using this in regard to constellations of stars.

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And she was saying this child is born into the world with these constellations available to them.

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They’re there, they’re available.

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Constellations of intelligence, or abilities, and so on.

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And that all they need to be given

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is an environment that both nurtures,

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protects, and stimulates them,

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and makes it all right to unfold

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that which is automatically within them.

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And these consulates of what you would term

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morphic fields, in effect.

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And she was having children

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who were spontaneously reading and writing

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at four and five,

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and they said, what are you doing to teach them?

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She said, the funny thing is, no one is teaching them at all, you see.

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Instead, they gave them a totally protective environment

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in which this kind of exploration was perfectly all right to do,

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and they simply followed it because

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they’re, you know, we live in a deliberate world, a world of words and written words

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and so on. And she said, then people hear this and they say, well, how can we teach

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these four and five-year-olds? So we start trying to cram it in from the top down,

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you see, as an intellectual kind of pursuit,

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and jam up the whole system and nothing happens.

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And so her recognition of it as an innate capacity

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which just given the protective environment for it will naturally start and unfold

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is certainly different from most ideas

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about education. We have a Montessori

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teacher here, and I’m afraid to say

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too much, because

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I’d really like to have

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your feedback on that, but that’s essentially what

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she means by consulates, isn’t it?

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And the sensitivities, yes.

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And if we’re sensitive to that,

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and we’re kind of in tune with it,

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and give it, above all,

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it’s giving them permission to go ahead.

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That’s the protective, nurturing environment.

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And of course, she finds that anxiety

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or the stress of having to learn

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is, of course, what shuts the whole system down.

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I also have a friend in New Zealand, Stephen Taylor, I’ve told my group about him,

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a medical doctor who was a mathematician.

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And out of the works of Hegel, strangely enough,

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he claims that no one, maybe one in a generation, ever understands Hegel,

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and he thinks he did, after studying him all of his life.

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But out of the works of Hegel,

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he devised what he called circular mathematics.

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And no need to go into what circular mathematics is.

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It’s just not linear math.

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They don’t deal with numbers that unfolds one, two, three, etc.

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They deal with numbers as a circular hole.

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They deal with number as a circular hole. And anyone who’s ever learned mathematics from a logical standpoint, as we do, linear,

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is just driven up a wall by it.

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It’s the craziest thing in the world.

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And yet kids who use this system, who learn from the beginning how to do this and girls are as apt as boys can handle the four basic

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maths in incredible ways they can they can deal with and it’s all in the head

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they use no pencil and paper they’re never they are never even trained to use

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paper and pencil that they can give you astonishing mathematical answers

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lightning-fast by the way they operate

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and what they’re first of all trained to do is to open up and wait for the first

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intuitive glimpse of the general ballpark in which the game is being

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played and and where the answer lies and sometimes the answer itself so that the

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answer is arrived at very quickly by the kids.

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An answer to an extremely complex

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problem. And the answer is

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taken for granted. No one counts

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the answer as having much meaning.

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Because it really is

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coming out of the mathematical

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intuitive state of mathematics.

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So then their problem is

00:19:01 ► §

to take the answer in their initial problem

00:19:03 ► §

and build a logical bridge, a linear bridge back to take the answer in their initial problem and build a logical

00:19:05 ► §

bridge, a linear bridge back to it, which is the most elegant.

00:19:10 ► §

And to hear young 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old kids doing this is awesome.

00:19:15 ► §

But the whole thing is based on essentially the same thing that the savant is doing, except

00:19:21 ► §

then incorporating it into a tightly logical system.

00:19:25 ► §

But it’s also what regular mathematicians are doing, isn’t it? Because they have a kind

00:19:29 ► §

of mathematical intuition. The really creative ones often have these mathematical landscapes.

00:19:36 ► §

They see a solution, and then they have to figure out how to prove it. And a lot of them

00:19:41 ► §

have these very strong intuitions, and then they have to try and prove it, which is just what you’re saying.

00:19:47 ► §

They then have to find an element of bridge to get there.

00:19:51 ► §

And then they have to write it down in mathematical notation.

00:19:55 ► §

And then the rest of us who are not in that world see all these mathematical symbols

00:19:59 ► §

and they’re utterly opaque.

00:20:01 ► §

It’s like not ever hearing music and just seeing music written on the page.

00:20:05 ► §

What’s really going on in the minds of mathematicians

00:20:08 ► §

is something quite different.

00:20:10 ► §

And it sounds as if the Savants

00:20:11 ► §

and these people with circular maths,

00:20:14 ► §

and they’re all related to this central process,

00:20:17 ► §

which the most creative mathematicians have.

00:20:20 ► §

Do you know in Roger Penrose’s book,

00:20:22 ► §

The Emperor’s New Mind,

00:20:24 ► §

where he rejects the case for artificial intelligence,

00:20:28 ► §

saying that computers couldn’t do this kind of creative process because, first of all, they’re based on the wrong principles.

00:20:35 ► §

And secondly, if computers ever can mimic human intelligence, then they wouldn’t be digital, classical, physical things. They’d

00:20:46 ► §

be quantum computers, and quantum physics has quite different properties. But he talks

00:20:52 ► §

there about the difficulty as a mathematician of communicating a new idea. He said, you

00:20:57 ► §

have it, you have this intuition. And he said, and then, he said, you can stand at a blackboard

00:21:02 ► §

and sort of wave your hands around and make symbols.

00:21:05 ► §

And then some people just get it.

00:21:07 ► §

And he said it’s like an immediate transmission.

00:21:09 ► §

It’s a wonder to him, he said, that people can get it, that you can communicate these ideas.

00:21:14 ► §

And he thinks it’s more a matter of resonance, which is the way he puts it,

00:21:17 ► §

rather than through any kind of linear process of logic or communicative symbols.

00:21:22 ► §

These are helps.

00:21:24 ► §

But basically what’s doing

00:21:25 ► §

is springing up in someone else’s mind the forms, as it were, transmitted by a resonance

00:21:31 ► §

process. I myself think that may be the basis of a great deal of communication anyway. I

00:21:39 ► §

mean, even in the animal kingdom. And I think when birds are singing and they hear another bird singing,

00:21:47 ► §

the idea that all the information is being transferred by the actual

00:21:50 ► §

sounds may not be

00:21:51 ► §

what’s going on at all. The sounds may be

00:21:53 ► §

like a tuning system, and if you tune in

00:21:56 ► §

sufficiently, then the whole

00:21:58 ► §

resonant field may jump

00:21:59 ► §

across. You may tune in, literally,

00:22:02 ► §

in that case.

00:22:03 ► §

I think the very same thing is true in a lot of things that are going on right now.

00:22:08 ► §

We think all relationship is kind of vertical across time-space, and probably no relationship

00:22:15 ► §

is that way.

00:22:16 ► §

All relationships are kind of, I mean, horizontal.

00:22:19 ► §

All relationships are really vertical from the temporal spatial down into the field effect, and then back.

00:22:28 ► §

Rather like I used the example I did this morning.

00:22:32 ► §

I don’t know that I did very well because I saw people falling asleep right now.

00:22:36 ► §

But I used the example of the work that was published in 1983 from the Paris Optic Institute, the University of Paris.

00:22:48 ► §

It was Roger and the rest of them who did the proof of Bell’s theorem.

00:22:52 ► §

Aspect.

00:22:53 ► §

Yeah, aspect and Roger and the rest.

00:22:56 ► §

That here are the particles that can’t be communicating through time-space like this

00:23:04 ► §

because the distance is too great.

00:23:06 ► §

And so the only way to explain it is if the relationship between the two is contained

00:23:11 ► §

through the field set given rise to the paired particles.

00:23:14 ► §

And this was a perfect example of geomorphic resonance.

00:23:18 ► §

And I was puzzled why you didn’t use it, or at least I haven’t found you using it,

00:23:22 ► §

and why other people don’t use it to defend what you’re talking about.

00:23:25 ► §

I certainly would. I think it’s a perfect example of it.

00:23:29 ► §

Well, I think non-locality in quantum physics,

00:23:32 ► §

where widely separated systems have this apparently instantaneous connection,

00:23:37 ► §

could easily be another aspect of the same phenomenon.

00:23:40 ► §

I mean, I would rather see them as different aspects of the same phenomenon

00:23:44 ► §

rather than try and build morphic resonance on quantum theory.

00:23:47 ► §

Well, I don’t agree with that at all.

00:23:49 ► §

I think quantum theory comes out of morphic resonance.

00:23:51 ► §

Yes, I’d see it the other way around.

00:23:53 ► §

Sure, I would too.

00:23:54 ► §

Well, I had a very interesting correspondence with Bell himself,

00:24:00 ► §

you know, Bell’s theory.

00:24:02 ► §

And Bell read my first book, The New Science of Life.

00:24:08 ► §

He also read The Presence of the Past.

00:24:10 ► §

And was really fascinated by

00:24:12 ► §

Morphic Resonance because

00:24:13 ► §

he, like some other people working on

00:24:16 ► §

quantum monochromaticity,

00:24:18 ► §

were interested in the idea

00:24:20 ► §

that it might have

00:24:21 ► §

really big implications for the world.

00:24:24 ► §

And it really might make a

00:24:25 ► §

difference to the world as we live in it.

00:24:27 ► §

Whereas at present, this utterly weird thing is sort of marginalized by physicists, or

00:24:32 ► §

by most physicists.

00:24:33 ► §

They say, here’s this weird thing going on in the quantum domain, but as far as we know,

00:24:38 ► §

it doesn’t have any…

00:24:39 ► §

Has no application.

00:24:40 ► §

…aspects to the rest of the world.

00:24:42 ► §

No.

00:24:42 ► §

And meanwhile, they go on thinking about the physics of the brain in terms of classical physics

00:24:47 ► §

and electrochemical mechanisms and so on.

00:24:52 ► §

And people like Penrose are the ones who say,

00:24:55 ► §

well, look, if the brain’s going on a sort of

00:24:57 ► §

quantum processes and non-locality,

00:25:00 ► §

I’m probably involved.

00:25:01 ► §

The idea that quantum physics just somehow

00:25:03 ► §

doesn’t exist in the brain is preposterous,

00:25:06 ► §

and yet modern neurophysiology is largely based on ignoring it.

00:25:10 ► §

So there are a lot of people like Penrose and Bell himself

00:25:14 ► §

who are groping towards finding ways where non-locality,

00:25:18 ► §

as revealed in quantum theory,

00:25:20 ► §

may be a very general and important part of nature.

00:25:24 ► §

So Bell thought morphic resonance could well be related, but he couldn’t see exactly how,

00:25:29 ► §

and neither can I.

00:25:31 ► §

And so it’s a kind of tantalizing possibility that it’s not yet been possible to produce

00:25:38 ► §

the formal bridge, as it were, between the two phenomena.

00:25:41 ► §

between the two phenomena.

00:25:46 ► §

I tried to talk about this to,

00:25:48 ► §

if I’m not saying this,

00:25:50 ► §

Bob John at Princeton.

00:25:51 ► §

You know Bob John’s work.

00:25:52 ► §

This is a book he published,

00:25:54 ► §

Margins of Reality.

00:25:58 ► §

And we shared the same platform at a conference at the University of California,

00:26:00 ► §

Berkeley once,

00:26:01 ► §

when he was right in the middle of all that.

00:26:03 ► §

Now Bob John was head of the Dean’s School of Engineering at Princeton,

00:26:10 ► §

and is now heading up some of the biggest programs that the government has,

00:26:14 ► §

NASA and the whole raft of things.

00:26:15 ► §

He’s a very competent physicist.

00:26:17 ► §

And he had this 10-year research program going,

00:26:21 ► §

which he called the Anomalies Project.

00:26:23 ► §

research program going, which is called the Anomalous Project.

00:26:30 ► §

And they were taking kind of problems that classical physics won’t touch and the ordinary academic mind won’t touch,

00:26:33 ► §

and were seeing what validity there was toward it.

00:26:36 ► §

And it really turned him upside down.

00:26:37 ► §

It stopped his world pretty thoroughly.

00:26:40 ► §

They were able to take electronic machinery of all sorts,

00:26:44 ► §

interferometers, throwing bands of light on a screen,

00:26:49 ► §

and they were bringing people in off the streets,

00:26:52 ► §

demonstrating it to them,

00:26:54 ► §

and the people would sit there and change the bands of light on the screen

00:26:57 ► §

without touching the machinery at all.

00:27:00 ► §

And when the bands of light would change on the screen,

00:27:02 ► §

the machinery would change.

00:27:04 ► §

And they were doing all sorts of double-blind studies.

00:27:06 ► §

You know all those things they were doing with magnetometers inside sealed Faraday cages.

00:27:14 ► §

And the individuals, and they were linked, double-blind linked to other magnetometers.

00:27:23 ► §

These gauged the lines,

00:27:25 ► §

magnetic lines,

00:27:26 ► §

which were present.

00:27:28 ► §

And people were literally able

00:27:30 ► §

to change the magnetic lines

00:27:33 ► §

within the Faraday cage,

00:27:35 ► §

and the double-blind controls on it

00:27:38 ► §

would change correspondingly.

00:27:41 ► §

And all this, of course,

00:27:42 ► §

is totally impossible

00:27:44 ► §

on any classical physics. And all this, of course, is totally impossible on any classical physics.

00:27:48 ► §

But my favorite

00:27:49 ► §

that they were doing

00:27:50 ► §

was remote viewing.

00:27:52 ► §

And just very briefly,

00:27:54 ► §

they would have an individual

00:27:56 ► §

sitting in a room

00:27:58 ► §

concentrating on the image

00:28:01 ► §

that would appear,

00:28:02 ► §

and they’d have someone else

00:28:03 ► §

that sounds very occultic, and it was,

00:28:06 ► §

but they’d have another individual going out

00:28:08 ► §

and looking at a certain target,

00:28:10 ► §

and the target would be chosen

00:28:12 ► §

only briefly by computer selection and so on.

00:28:15 ► §

They’d look at a certain target,

00:28:16 ► §

and this individual was picking it up

00:28:18 ► §

with a very high degree of success.

00:28:22 ► §

Then they began to find that most of the so-called failures were simply failures of interpretation.

00:28:30 ► §

For instance, they had someone looking at the front facade of the New York Public Library.

00:28:36 ► §

The individual in the room picked up not the facade of the front side of the library, but

00:28:43 ► §

the back side.

00:28:43 ► §

not the facade of the front side of the library,

00:28:44 ► §

but the back side.

00:28:47 ► §

Then, in other cases,

00:28:50 ► §

the individual will be looking at the front side of a famous building.

00:28:54 ► §

The individual will pick up an inside room of that building and describe it quite accurately.

00:28:56 ► §

One time, the individual was looking at some kind of a famous statue

00:29:00 ► §

in a park or something,

00:29:01 ► §

and the receiver picks up not the the monument

00:29:07 ► §

that the individual is looking at but a person sitting next to it on a park bench reading a book

00:29:12 ► §

and tell you the book they’re reading see now there are all sorts of problems this this both

00:29:18 ► §

verifies this but it introduces a whole new wrinkle and that is they have set up a closed system of inquiry,

00:29:27 ► §

a closed system of trying to set up a cause and an effect.

00:29:32 ► §

And the closed system itself breeds the whole process.

00:29:36 ► §

What they’re not aware of is, in my estimation, you could probably dispense with the so-called

00:29:42 ► §

viewer who is sending altogether.

00:29:46 ► §

By the time you have set up the entire

00:29:48 ► §

experiment, the experiment

00:29:50 ► §

itself is then a self-verifying process.

00:29:54 ► §

Targ

00:29:54 ► §

and Russell Targ

00:29:56 ► §

and who’s the other one in that?

00:29:59 ► §

Foodhouse.

00:30:00 ► §

You remember the long distance

00:30:02 ► §

and this was under government

00:30:03 ► §

money. They were doing this too. And they remember the long distance, and this was under government money, they were doing this too,

00:30:07 ► §

and they were doing long distance remote viewing from Russia to here, and they had this gal in

00:30:13 ► §

Russia who was predicting four hours ahead of time, that the computer, the targets of the

00:30:19 ► §

computer was going to select four hours later in San Francisco. And this immediately shoots down every theory that we have,

00:30:27 ► §

like Charles Tartt’s theory of psi energy, P-S-I energy.

00:30:32 ► §

It just won’t work.

00:30:34 ► §

There ain’t no such animal in that respect,

00:30:37 ► §

nor is there any sending of a signal.

00:30:40 ► §

All that is shot down.

00:30:42 ► §

If it can happen ahead of time,

00:30:42 ► §

all that is shot down if it can happen ahead of time

00:30:44 ► §

or if the individual can pick up

00:30:46 ► §

an aspect of the

00:30:48 ► §

of the phenomena

00:30:50 ► §

that’s the target

00:30:52 ► §

of the operation

00:30:54 ► §

and yet not what the individual

00:30:56 ► §

who’s supposedly sending is looking at

00:30:58 ► §

then you introduce

00:31:00 ► §

an element of it that can

00:31:02 ► §

only be explained by your amorphic resonance

00:31:04 ► §

so what’s being sent isortic resin. So what’s

00:31:05 ► §

being said is a totality,

00:31:08 ► §

or what’s being said is a totality

00:31:09 ► §

from which this individual is liable

00:31:11 ► §

to pick up any aspect

00:31:13 ► §

of it at all. But he,

00:31:15 ► §

because of the nature of setting up the

00:31:17 ► §

experiment, you close the

00:31:19 ► §

possibilities to that

00:31:21 ► §

experiment. The individual

00:31:23 ► §

sitting over here doesn’t pick up something

00:31:26 ► §

unrelated to the experiment, but always related to it. Well, I certainly think this way that we,

00:31:34 ► §

through our intentions and the way we set up experiments, you can have these seemingly

00:31:38 ► §

paranormal effects is very interesting. And one of the things I’m working on at the moment is

00:31:43 ► §

taking a look at regular science.

00:31:46 ► §

Because you see, scientists for years,

00:31:47 ► §

skeptics, have taken the view that

00:31:49 ► §

parapsychological experiments are subject to all these biases,

00:31:53 ► §

experimental effects, expectancy biases, and so forth.

00:31:59 ► §

But what they assume is that regular science

00:32:01 ► §

is dealing with regular objective facts.

00:32:06 ► §

Now,

00:32:06 ► §

if you look into the

00:32:07 ► §

psychological and medical literature,

00:32:10 ► §

it’s most psychologists

00:32:11 ► §

and animal behavior people

00:32:13 ► §

and medical people are well aware of this, and they do

00:32:16 ► §

double-blind experiments because

00:32:17 ► §

they accept that you can have

00:32:20 ► §

this effect on…

00:32:21 ► §

Your expectations can influence what happens.

00:32:24 ► §

It’s been proven so

00:32:25 ► §

many times that it’s part of first-year undergraduate textbook stuff in psychology and medicine,

00:32:31 ► §

experimental expectancy effects. And you know Rosenthal’s famous studies on rats. You give

00:32:38 ► §

people one lot of rats labeled Harvard, no, Berkeley bright strain and Berkeley dull strain

00:32:43 ► §

and tell them to run them in mazes

00:32:46 ► §

and they run them in mazes and the bright rats

00:32:48 ► §

do much better than the dull rats

00:32:49 ► §

but actually they were just selected from a common

00:32:52 ► §

laboratory pool and just labeled differently

00:32:54 ► §

and

00:32:55 ► §

it’s not just that people

00:32:57 ► §

bias their observations but the rats

00:33:00 ► §

actually do do better

00:33:01 ► §

so the expectation is communicated

00:33:04 ► §

somehow and in medicine placebo effects actually do do better. So the expectation is communicated somehow.

00:33:07 ► §

And in medicine, placebo effects,

00:33:11 ► §

not only do people get better with placebos,

00:33:13 ► §

but also placebos, blank pills,

00:33:16 ► §

can bring about the toxic side effects of the kind involved in the drug under time.

00:33:19 ► §

So this is so well documented,

00:33:22 ► §

there’s no dispute about it in psychology and medicine.

00:33:25 ► §

It’s supposed to be mediated by so-called subtle cues.

00:33:28 ► §

But my question is just how subtle?

00:33:31 ► §

And I’ve been in correspondence with Rosenthal and said,

00:33:35 ► §

has anyone ever tried looking for the experimental effects in biochemistry, genetics, cell biology, physics, chemistry?

00:33:42 ► §

And his reply is no, because it’s impossible that subtle cues

00:33:46 ► §

could be mediated to non-inanimate systems

00:33:49 ► §

or to things other than people, higher animals, and so on.

00:33:54 ► §

You couldn’t have a mechanism for this

00:33:56 ► §

because they assume it’s just some subtle psychological mechanism.

00:34:01 ► §

So I also wrote to Rosenthal and said,

00:34:03 ► §

had he considered the possibility it might be parapsychological

00:34:06 ► §

the mediation of these

00:34:07 ► §

experimental effects.

00:34:10 ► §

And he wrote back saying that he had considered

00:34:12 ► §

this possibility. He discussed it in

00:34:14 ► §

a publication saying that this would be quite

00:34:16 ► §

easy to test but he’d never done the

00:34:18 ► §

experiment. So what I’m

00:34:20 ► §

proposing in

00:34:21 ► §

writing a new book on cheap experiments

00:34:24 ► §

that could change our view of

00:34:26 ► §

the world. It’s called Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, a do-it-yourself guide

00:34:31 ► §

to revolutionary science. And most of the experiments could shatter existing paradigms,

00:34:42 ► §

lead to a totally new view of reality, and most of them cost less than $10.

00:34:46 ► §

So the point being that science is at the moment

00:34:49 ► §

very restrained because of the professional institution,

00:34:52 ► §

peer reviews,

00:34:53 ► §

a kind of almost Stalinist orthodoxy

00:34:57 ► §

which you can’t stray beyond.

00:34:59 ► §

But the fact is,

00:35:00 ► §

if you can do experiments that are cheap enough,

00:35:02 ► §

you can do what you like.

00:35:03 ► §

And science in the past was mostly innovative. the innovation was mainly done by amateurs so if you can get cheap experiments

00:35:10 ► §

anyone can do them there’s no longer any restriction this experiment i’m proposing

00:35:15 ► §

would be very cheap it simply involves applying rosenthal’s protocol to regular science because

00:35:21 ► §

if you look at biochemistry journals, cell biology

00:35:25 ► §

journals, embryology journals etc, no one ever does double-blind experiments. You

00:35:30 ► §

know exactly what you’re doing and which solutions being poured in there. So my

00:35:34 ► §

proposal is that you do very simple standard protocol from Rosenthal. You

00:35:39 ► §

have an experiment in biochemistry where you give people something activated

00:35:43 ► §

enzyme, inhibited enzyme, and ask them

00:35:46 ► §

to compare their activity

00:35:47 ► §

using standard biochemical assays.

00:35:50 ► §

And of course it’s the same thing, just

00:35:51 ► §

labelled differently.

00:35:53 ► §

Do you get

00:35:54 ► §

experimental effects here?

00:35:56 ► §

Then you give people something radioactive,

00:35:58 ► §

very radioactive sample, and

00:36:00 ► §

quenched radioactive sample. You count them

00:36:02 ► §

on the Geiger counter. Do they show

00:36:04 ► §

different activities?

00:36:06 ► §

You do experiments with drosophila fruit flies.

00:36:10 ► §

One population, activate a gene and suppress a gene,

00:36:15 ► §

do you get different ratios in the segregating populations

00:36:18 ► §

when you breed them out?

00:36:20 ► §

I think you might easily.

00:36:22 ► §

I think that regular science is probably the theatre

00:36:24 ► §

of an enormous number of experimental effects

00:36:28 ► §

of a parapsychologically mediated kind.

00:36:31 ► §

And I think paradigms are partly to do with collective expectation.

00:36:35 ► §

And as you learn to be a scientist,

00:36:37 ► §

you have to learn to be able to do the experiments.

00:36:39 ► §

All science classes have practicals in them.

00:36:42 ► §

And if you don’t get the right results,

00:36:44 ► §

in other words, the expected

00:36:46 ► §

results, you flunk your practical

00:36:48 ► §

exam. You don’t get to be a

00:36:50 ► §

scientist. So there’s a very strong

00:36:52 ► §

selection procedure in

00:36:53 ► §

the technical field

00:36:54 ► §

for people who can actually bring about

00:36:57 ► §

the right results.

00:37:00 ► §

And having spent years at Harvard

00:37:02 ► §

and in Cambridge demonstrating

00:37:03 ► §

freshman and second year practical classes,

00:37:07 ► §

it’s amazing, with simple, straightforward experiments that are meant to give straightforward,

00:37:12 ► §

it’s amazing the scatter of results you get.

00:37:14 ► §

And you just have to tell people, you know, you’ve got the wrong result, you must have done something wrong,

00:37:19 ► §

and this is what it’s meant to be.

00:37:20 ► §

And so they get constant feedback.

00:37:23 ► §

And by the end of the second or the third year as undergraduates

00:37:26 ► §

the ones who are majoring in science begin to get it right

00:37:29 ► §

and start getting the right kinds of results

00:37:32 ► §

this takes years

00:37:34 ► §

by the time you’ve got a PhD in science

00:37:36 ► §

and you’ve got your union card to practice as a professional

00:37:40 ► §

you’ve had something like 2 or 3 years at high school

00:37:43 ► §

3 years or 4 years as an undergraduate 3 years as a graduate student you’ve had 7, two or three years at high school, then three years or four years as an undergraduate, three years

00:37:46 ► §

as a graduate student, you’ve had seven, eight,

00:37:48 ► §

nine, ten years of

00:37:50 ► §

being put through a system of

00:37:52 ► §

doing the right experiments and getting the right

00:37:54 ► §

results, so I think the possibility

00:37:56 ► §

of a very large amount of so-called

00:37:58 ► §

objective reality is produced in this way

00:38:00 ► §

is quite striking

00:38:02 ► §

and I think Bob John has

00:38:04 ► §

come up against the fringes

00:38:05 ► §

of this, and most scientists treat that as a totally fringe phenomenon, and then try

00:38:10 ► §

and attack his credentials, his methods, his statistics, and so on. And it’s very much

00:38:15 ► §

a question of, I think, people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones, except they don’t

00:38:21 ► §

realise they’re in a glasshouse. Anyway, this experiment that looks at experimental effects in regular science

00:38:27 ► §

is quite simple, quite cheap to do,

00:38:29 ► §

and I think it could be very revealing.

00:38:32 ► §

I think so.

00:38:33 ► §

Great.

00:38:36 ► §

I mean, it may turn out that there are no effects of this kind.

00:38:40 ► §

I’d be very surprised.

00:38:41 ► §

But then the skeptics ought to be pleased

00:38:43 ► §

because for the first time they’ll have actual evidence

00:38:46 ► §

that regular science is not just reflecting the experimenter’s expectations.

00:38:53 ► §

Everything we know about areas where this has been examined,

00:38:57 ► §

psychology, medicine, animal behavior, suggests that these are quite big effects.

00:39:02 ► §

So this raises the question of how much of reality do we construct,

00:39:07 ► §

not just by the way we interpret it,

00:39:10 ► §

by the way our expectations bring about what we expect.

00:39:14 ► §

And in the interpersonal realm, we know that for sure,

00:39:17 ► §

that if we approach somebody and we’re convinced

00:39:20 ► §

that they’re a really horrible person and totally hostile,

00:39:24 ► §

the way we react will probably bring out those responses in them.

00:39:28 ► §

Self-fulfilling prophecy is the stuff of everyday life.

00:39:32 ► §

It’s also the stuff of science in many spheres of science.

00:39:37 ► §

And so I think it may play a very major role in science as a whole.

00:39:43 ► §

And this brings us to another point,

00:39:46 ► §

which I rather wanted to ask you about.

00:39:49 ► §

If we influence and construct reality

00:39:53 ► §

and tune into fields and so on,

00:39:55 ► §

how would you see this applying to the realm of prayer?

00:40:03 ► §

Or if you just put it in a secular form

00:40:06 ► §

positive thinking

00:40:07 ► §

where people take the idea

00:40:10 ► §

that you create your reality

00:40:12 ► §

it’s not just the way you see it

00:40:14 ► §

but somehow our minds are influencing

00:40:16 ► §

what comes to pass

00:40:17 ► §

well

00:40:19 ► §

the term

00:40:22 ► §

I know Fritjof Kopper used that term

00:40:24 ► §

and I don’t believe him.

00:40:27 ► §

He says, oh, we are involved, we’re creating this reality,

00:40:33 ► §

and it’s up to us to create something different.

00:40:37 ► §

Well, I think that’s as much an error as the hardcore classical scientific idea.

00:40:43 ► §

I do not believe…

00:40:45 ► §

I know from all I’ve read

00:40:47 ► §

and from all my own experience,

00:40:49 ► §

I know that this is a cerebral universe.

00:40:53 ► §

I think the people writing in the journals now,

00:40:55 ► §

I’ve forgotten the group I quoted

00:40:57 ► §

ahead of my second or third chapter

00:40:59 ► §

in my recent book,

00:41:01 ► §

a group of neurologists

00:41:02 ► §

who state categorically

00:41:04 ► §

any perception you have, locating an object in space,

00:41:09 ► §

or a sound in space, or any tactile experience, whatever it is,

00:41:13 ► §

your experience of any physical reality is the result of a peak of activity

00:41:19 ► §

in a population of neurons.

00:41:22 ► §

Okay.

00:41:23 ► §

And this is known.

00:41:24 ► §

I don’t see any way in the world around that.

00:41:26 ► §

I look at Edelman’s,

00:41:27 ► §

you know Gerald Edelman’s work.

00:41:28 ► §

They’re brilliant stuff.

00:41:30 ► §

But you’re dealing with populations of neurons

00:41:33 ► §

and their activities,

00:41:35 ► §

and the end result is your perception,

00:41:36 ► §

our perception.

00:41:38 ► §

And the extent of which we can enter into this

00:41:41 ► §

and participate with it dynamically,

00:41:42 ► §

we can pull out scientific stuff and so on.

00:41:45 ► §

We can participate in it.

00:41:48 ► §

But this organization of the perception of the physical reality

00:41:53 ► §

with its emotional, subtle overtones

00:41:57 ► §

and its final intellectual intelligence realm and mental realm,

00:42:02 ► §

that process occupies, according to everything I can find out

00:42:08 ► §

and most authorities on it, about 95% of all the energy of the brain-mind system.

00:42:13 ► §

Everything going on here. 95% of it is completely beneath our awareness. We have no real access to

00:42:20 ► §

it at all. We’re the recipients of it. I mean an ego structure. The individual ego structure

00:42:25 ► §

represents about 5% of the total energy of the whole system. It’s the end product

00:42:31 ► §

that off which the whole thing is balanced. And we as a 5% ego then assume, because we’re a result

00:42:40 ► §

of all this, that we make the assumption that we’re creating all this.

00:42:45 ► §

Well, it’s all created within our head, the result of billions of years of

00:42:50 ► §

evolutionary process, but the idea that we then are creating a reality is simply

00:42:59 ► §

not true. The reality is being created by a fantastic creative process infinitely beyond our concept.

00:43:07 ► §

We’re the recipients of it,

00:43:09 ► §

and our job is to learn to participate with it

00:43:11 ► §

and go along with it.

00:43:14 ► §

But to ever assume that we’re doing it

00:43:17 ► §

is a profound error.

00:43:20 ► §

And so you think we are, you see.

00:43:22 ► §

I think that there’s a whole set of habits that are at work, most of which I think are unconscious, which are operating through our brains, these patterns of activity.

00:43:46 ► §

what’s there. But I’m not sure how much the perception, how much the brain activity comes first. You get brain activity associated with perceptions, but the perception and the brain

00:43:52 ► §

activity, you see, take the classic Hindu example. You look in the gathering darkness,

00:43:58 ► §

you come across a piece of old rope and you think it’s a snake. I mean, this kind of,

00:44:03 ► §

everyone’s had this sort of experience. Now, if you think it’s a snake. I mean, everyone’s had this sort of experience.

00:44:05 ► §

Now, if you think it’s a snake, you start back.

00:44:08 ► §

Adrenaline’s pumping through your body.

00:44:09 ► §

All the physiological responses you could measure

00:44:11 ► §

would be characteristic of perceiving a snake.

00:44:15 ► §

Yet, if you saw it as a bit of a rope,

00:44:16 ► §

you had different physiological responses.

00:44:19 ► §

So, I would say that the mental perception

00:44:22 ► §

and the physiological and the chemical changes all go together.

00:44:26 ► §

And it wouldn’t be that you have first a brain mechanism doing something

00:44:30 ► §

and then a perception overlaid on top of it.

00:44:33 ► §

That’s the whole thing, part of it.

00:44:35 ► §

A field, there are two different fields of activity which involve a subjective side,

00:44:40 ► §

an emotional side, a hormonal side and a neural side all together.

00:44:45 ► §

Okay, that’s true.

00:44:47 ► §

I have to go along with that.

00:44:49 ► §

I’m just saying we first of all have to realize that we’re largely recipients of a fantastic

00:44:54 ► §

creative process.

00:44:55 ► §

We have to accept that before we’re going to talk about coming into control over it

00:45:01 ► §

or predicting and controlling the whole process in any way.

00:45:06 ► §

And of course, you have your problem of delusion.

00:45:08 ► §

I think of the delusion that the snake is, the rope is the snake.

00:45:14 ► §

I remember our mutual friend Bohm, David Bohm, talking about we have illusion, we have delusion,

00:45:29 ► §

and we have the dreadful situation that happens when we all get together and have mutual, what do you call it, collusion,

00:45:37 ► §

which verifies our delusions about our initial illusions, you see.

00:45:42 ► §

And then we begin to live those out. I realize all that.

00:45:46 ► §

But I think when you start talking about prayer,

00:45:53 ► §

I think we’re talking about

00:45:55 ► §

beginning to resonate, if you like,

00:45:59 ► §

with sort of the intelligence behind the intelligence

00:46:03 ► §

and the creative process.

00:46:13 ► §

And the way I look at it, these frontal lobes, I’ve been fascinated with the frontal lobes recently. I didn’t know until about two years ago that

00:46:18 ► §

they were the last added by evolutionary history, and that they are the last

00:46:23 ► §

developing in the developmental scheme.

00:46:27 ► §

The brain is still laying down the tracks for this whole portion of the system throughout

00:46:34 ► §

childhood and adolescence, and not until late adolescence, somewhere around 20 or 21, is

00:46:40 ► §

the structure even complete.

00:46:43 ► §

And all the literature for the past 50 years

00:46:46 ► §

has said everything is complete by age 15,

00:46:49 ► §

myelinated, locked into place for good.

00:46:52 ► §

And here’s the major portion of the brain,

00:46:53 ► §

which they’ve always referred to as the silent areas of the brain,

00:46:56 ► §

because they can’t find anything happening there.

00:46:58 ► §

It’s indeed wasted.

00:47:01 ► §

Aren’t even available to any kind of developmental age 15,

00:47:06 ► §

after all the other structural parts of the brain

00:47:09 ► §

are fully functional and myonated and operating.

00:47:12 ► §

And these are the parts of the brain that give us, in effect,

00:47:15 ► §

our moral perception according to our models,

00:47:19 ► §

always according to our models, which is what you’re talking about,

00:47:22 ► §

the whole enculturation process,

00:47:24 ► §

which determines the kind of reality we experience.

00:47:27 ► §

We have no control over that at all.

00:47:28 ► §

I have no control over my mama and papa

00:47:30 ► §

and what they thought and how they formed my mind.

00:47:33 ► §

But my role reflects it.

00:47:36 ► §

But there again, we have no choice

00:47:39 ► §

in a totally open-ended system as we have,

00:47:42 ► §

except to close it in some form.

00:47:44 ► §

Were it not closed, we would have no reality of instability.

00:47:47 ► §

We’d be in chaos.

00:47:49 ► §

And that closure is what we call enculturation.

00:47:52 ► §

Enculturation locks us into a fixed system, which is always, it seems to me, negative.

00:47:58 ► §

I think Gazzaniga, I believe, who said we have no development at all

00:48:03 ► §

without our environmental stimulus,

00:48:08 ► §

and the environmental stimulus, which means family, school, society, and so on,

00:48:13 ► §

is always negative and always inhibits us and constricts us.

00:48:17 ► §

But nevertheless, we have this other aspect of the brain now,

00:48:21 ► §

which we have to start to look at, which is the frontal lobes,

00:48:27 ► §

which aren’t even completed until somewhere four to five years after all the rest of the system is complete and should be functional and furnishing us, in effect,

00:48:34 ► §

both our sense of ego individuality and our environment, which is your question.

00:48:46 ► §

which is your question, what the possibilities of prayer and all are,

00:48:52 ► §

are probably some of the methods for activating meditation, contemplation,

00:48:55 ► §

what all the great mystics have always claimed,

00:49:00 ► §

there are ways of starting to activate this latest evolutionary process,

00:49:04 ► §

which in the majority of people probably are never activated at all.

00:49:05 ► §

I see. Well, why do you think it’s located in the frontal lobes, or indeed anywhere in particular?

00:49:13 ► §

Well, I still think it’s the cerebral universe, that is, whatever is happening must be interpreted by some kind of neural process,

00:49:23 ► §

or combination of processes within

00:49:25 ► §

the brain system. Certainly goes beyond the neurons. And the topology of the brain,

00:49:32 ► §

I think Edelman is right. There’s a very strong topological aspect. I was saying this morning,

00:49:39 ► §

Luria used to think that you could not locate anything within one specific area of the brain

00:49:43 ► §

because the whole thing was operating in such an integral unit.

00:49:47 ► §

But now they’re finding a very high degree of location of particular effects within the brain.

00:49:55 ► §

And as you know, certain damage to certain areas of the brain

00:49:58 ► §

simply eliminate big chunks of our reality out there. You can lose whole chunks of your vocabulary by

00:50:08 ► §

removing a couple of areas, tiny areas of the brain. And the same thing with the visual fields

00:50:14 ► §

and so forth. So you do have this topological aspect. And the development of the child’s

00:50:20 ► §

intelligence from the beginning follows the same hierarchy of evolutionary development the brain to begin with so this is again topological and here you

00:50:29 ► §

get to a certain point which for the majority of people the curtain closes no

00:50:34 ► §

more development takes place and yet here these silent areas of the

00:50:38 ► §

neocortex which are not developed they’re not utilized and we’re not given

00:50:44 ► §

models for it we’re not given models for it we’re

00:50:45 ► §

not given a nurturing environment which encourages the development of it and so

00:50:50 ► §

they remain simply in their dormant state leaving us in effect locked into

00:50:56 ► §

identification with very low and rather primitive animal structures of the brain

00:51:01 ► §

I think McLean was quite right when he refers to the two animal structures of

00:51:04 ► §

the brain and we remain in effect in that position.

00:51:08 ► §

We can use a lot of the intellect of the neocortex, the other parts of it,

00:51:12 ► §

other than the frontal lobe, to manipulate and do tricks with that

00:51:20 ► §

which is given by the two primary brain systems. Our whole scientific world and

00:51:23 ► §

all the rest of that comes out of that.

00:51:26 ► §

But that does nothing whatsoever

00:51:28 ► §

to lift us out of our identification

00:51:32 ► §

with a purely physical system

00:51:34 ► §

with its purely physical limitations.

00:51:37 ► §

And I think that’s what the frontal lobe is about.

00:51:40 ► §

And that’s where you get into

00:51:41 ► §

what we interpret as the spiritual realm.

00:51:44 ► §

But it still would be perfectly biological.

00:51:47 ► §

It would be as biological as anything else

00:51:49 ► §

because it requires its corresponding brain structure

00:51:53 ► §

for its interpretation into our life

00:51:55 ► §

and for our participation with it to employ it.

00:52:00 ► §

So what happens to people with lesions of the frontal lobes?

00:52:04 ► §

Well, what happens to people when they do a frontal lobotomy, for God’s sake?

00:52:09 ► §

Well, that’s a good question.

00:52:12 ► §

Has this been done? Are there studies on this?

00:52:16 ► §

I don’t know. I haven’t heard of any. No.

00:52:19 ► §

Do you think that people who are considered mystics or extremely spiritual or have psychic powers,

00:52:28 ► §

or even individuals in history like Christ who would have helped,

00:52:32 ► §

that this is something that maybe was just very highly developed?

00:52:37 ► §

There are two or three things in that that I would have to respond to.

00:52:40 ► §

First of all, I would never equate psychic with spiritual, not myself.

00:52:46 ► §

To me, they’re totally different phenomena.

00:52:51 ► §

The other thing is this is a recent evolutionary achievement.

00:52:56 ► §

And this business is the frontal lobes.

00:52:58 ► §

And the business of achieving a state of awareness

00:53:01 ► §

which is freed from all the lower evolutionary processes. And again,

00:53:06 ► §

if you look into the structure of the brain and the triune structure of it, what MacLean

00:53:11 ► §

calls the reptilian and the old mammalian or limbic and then the neocortex, and the

00:53:17 ► §

way it unfolds in children, and the one-for-one correspondence between MacLean’s work and

00:53:22 ► §

the developmental psychologist’s work, then you’ll see that evolution has literally been moving toward

00:53:27 ► §

a form of awareness which can be freed from

00:53:31 ► §

all the forms of awareness necessary to get to that state.

00:53:35 ► §

And that’s what we’re all expecting,

00:53:38 ► §

and that, in fact, the expectation for that new form of awareness begins to arise very sharply

00:53:47 ► §

in us around 14 or 15. That’s when that feeling that something tremendous is

00:53:51 ► §

supposed to happen begins to manifest in us. And our society tells us all these

00:53:55 ► §

things, if we just had them this would be taken care of. And it isn’t. So I think in

00:54:02 ► §

evolutionary history great people have broken through into this realm.

00:54:07 ► §

It’s just like a few scattered examples.

00:54:11 ► §

And then they try to act like the target cell in the brain when it organizes.

00:54:16 ► §

They try to act as target cells to attract other people to the same phenomena.

00:54:23 ► §

But to my other thing, not enough of this has taken part

00:54:26 ► §

to establish that there’s a strong enough morphic field that it can be

00:54:32 ► §

interacted with by the populace at large. So it remains a rather isolated and esoteric

00:54:39 ► §

kind of procedure. And then we build up all sorts of religions around it and that really kills it off you see we talked a little bit this morning about the heart having the ability to communicate and

00:54:50 ► §

manifest and have that interaction between the mind brain and the heart wouldn’t the heart also

00:54:58 ► §

have a morphogenic field that the heart could have a way of communicating that would be different than the brain-mind.

00:55:06 ► §

I wasn’t there when you were talking about

00:55:08 ► §

your interpretation of the heart.

00:55:11 ► §

It wasn’t my interpretation of the heart.

00:55:15 ► §

I started off only with some

00:55:19 ► §

hardcore research that’s been done on it.

00:55:23 ► §

We had a cardiologist there for a while who

00:55:26 ► §

fed into this very nicely, but it’s the fact that the heart plays a profound role in the

00:55:31 ► §

operation of the brain system.

00:55:34 ► §

The ANF, a hormone produced in the atrium area of the heart, controls virtually every

00:55:39 ► §

aspect of the whole emotional cognitive system that runs the whole hormonal process of the body.

00:55:46 ► §

And that is the pituitary

00:55:48 ► §

and all these hormonal processes

00:55:50 ► §

take their signals from the heart.

00:55:52 ► §

The heart controls all this.

00:55:53 ► §

Now, this is known.

00:55:54 ► §

They’re no longer arguing about this.

00:55:57 ► §

In fact, actions in the heart

00:55:59 ► §

precede all actions in the body and in the brain.

00:56:02 ► §

And the ANF, by the way,

00:56:04 ► §

controls every major organ of the heart,

00:56:06 ► §

of the body as well.

00:56:09 ► §

No, it’s atria and neurotic.

00:56:11 ► §

Where is that doctor?

00:56:12 ► §

He’ll give you…

00:56:13 ► §

He’s not in either one of these workshops.

00:56:15 ► §

ANF.

00:56:16 ► §

It’s the atria neurotic factor.

00:56:21 ► §

The atria neurotic factor.

00:56:23 ► §

I think I’ve got it right.

00:56:25 ► §

Yes, say it again. That’s right. Ang atria neurotic factor. I think I’ve got it right. Yes, say it again.

00:56:26 ► §

That’s right.

00:56:28 ► §

No, it’s atria neurotic factor.

00:56:34 ► §

Yeah, it’s a peptide, one of the hormones,

00:56:37 ► §

but it operates from the heart

00:56:39 ► §

and profoundly controls the operations of the brain structure itself.

00:56:42 ► §

At the same time,

00:56:44 ► §

the heart is being informed of the general reality situation that we’re in by the

00:56:49 ► §

brain structure. There are all sorts of direct unmediated neural connections

00:56:54 ► §

between the heart and the brain in which the heart is controlling brain function.

00:57:00 ► §

So you have this dynamic between the heart and the brain. The

00:57:05 ► §

heart also takes on characteristics of the individual personality being

00:57:11 ► §

developed within the brain, and the heart begins to reflect those because of the

00:57:14 ► §

dynamic exchange between the two. And so when you have cardiac, one of the

00:57:18 ► §

interesting phenomena they found in cardiac transplant is that the donor, I mean the recipient of the transplant,

00:57:27 ► §

is it takes on characteristics, personality characteristics of the donor. And we might

00:57:33 ► §

expect that with the brain transplant, but it comes as a surprise from the heart transplant.

00:57:37 ► §

And yet it’s one of the common effects of a heart transplant. So I was getting into that simply as the basic

00:57:46 ► §

heart-mind interaction

00:57:48 ► §

in which some form of intelligence

00:57:51 ► §

in the heart

00:57:52 ► §

is directing the intelligence

00:57:53 ► §

of the brain system

00:57:55 ► §

the way it functions.

00:57:56 ► §

But it doesn’t do this

00:57:58 ► §

through language

00:57:59 ► §

or sending up sweet misses of love

00:58:02 ► §

or anything like that,

00:58:03 ► §

but simply changing brain function.

00:58:05 ► §

But also my point in this and bringing it up with my group was,

00:58:09 ► §

if we look at the way intelligence unfolds from birth on,

00:58:15 ► §

in fact it starts, of course, in utero,

00:58:17 ► §

and goes through these specific changes,

00:58:20 ► §

you will find that the intelligence of the heart is designed by nature

00:58:23 ► §

to undergo constant and continual evolutionary development as well.

00:58:29 ► §

But that depends on the development of the brain system itself,

00:58:32 ► §

and again depends on nurturing environments and appropriate models for that stimulus that will bring that about.

00:58:52 ► §

So most of us operate at a very low level, just a hormonal, chemical, molecular dynamic between the heart and the brain,

00:58:58 ► §

whereas much higher forms of intelligence and interaction can exist.

00:59:03 ► §

And the adolescent who begins to feel this great anguish of a heart and this great longing and this great feeling of expectancy that something tremendous is supposed to

00:59:08 ► §

happen begins to feel that precisely when the great frontal lobes are nearing

00:59:13 ► §

maturation and what will activate the frontal lobes into their a totally

00:59:20 ► §

different form of experience than we ordinarily have, is an open heart, if you like, or an enlightened heart,

00:59:28 ► §

which all these are la-di-da terms, and I don’t like them.

00:59:32 ► §

But this is what the whole meditative process is about,

00:59:35 ► §

and it’s what the whole contemplative process of the West is about.

00:59:39 ► §

They all speak of the heart,

00:59:42 ► §

and learning to take your cues from the heart and all,

00:59:44 ► §

but they don’t realize that the heart and learning to take your cues from the heart and all,

00:59:51 ► §

but they don’t realize that the heart is, in effect, if there is an intelligence of the heart,

00:59:56 ► §

it’s totally helpless without an instrument for expression, and that happens to be the brain system.

01:00:02 ► §

And so the frontal lobes would be, were they developed, be simply the instrumentation for moving us into a modality

01:00:06 ► §

that is beyond the basic survival mechanisms

01:00:11 ► §

of the lower brain structure.

01:00:13 ► §

If you read Paul McLean,

01:00:15 ► §

now years ago,

01:00:16 ► §

and he’s a great brain research person

01:00:18 ► §

who was head of the Department of Brain Evolution and Behavior

01:00:21 ► §

for, what, 30, 40 years,

01:00:24 ► §

and they did synthesis of all the brain research

01:00:27 ► §

going on all over the world,

01:00:28 ► §

as well as doing their own research.

01:00:29 ► §

But he, years ago, was looking at the frontal lobes,

01:00:32 ► §

and he said, what could they be for?

01:00:34 ► §

And he had the courage to go out on a limb

01:00:37 ► §

and talk about meaning,

01:00:39 ► §

which in the scientific world is just, as you know,

01:00:42 ► §

it’s just not done.

01:00:43 ► §

It’s politically incorrect.

01:00:46 ► §

But he said, what are they about he made the proposal two things that the frontal lobes would be probably

01:00:53 ► §

whatever intelligence they held within them would be appropriate for development at adolescence

01:00:58 ► §

beginning somewhere around 15 that has since been borne out, I can guarantee you. And the other thing that they seem to have to do with all the higher virtues, as our religions have always talked about, love, empathy,

01:01:15 ► §

sympathy, compassion, care, nurturing, and so on. And then he draws a strong correlation between

01:01:23 ► §

the cingulate diuretic area of the limbic system and the frontal lobes.

01:01:27 ► §

So all that’s been mapped out, and it fits in now with everything that’s coming out in research about the frontal lobes.

01:01:34 ► §

So they would represent a totally different form of life pattern,

01:01:42 ► §

or a different way of looking, a different way of perceiving,

01:01:44 ► §

which we call the unified state or the state of unity,

01:01:48 ► §

where we’re not split one off from another,

01:01:50 ► §

but which we feel this totality of experience.

01:01:55 ► §

Well, of course, in many traditions, the heart’s always the center, isn’t it?

01:02:00 ► §

I mean, the Christian, the prayer of the heart tradition,

01:02:03 ► §

the Tibetan idea in

01:02:05 ► §

heart chakras and so on. And I’ve always understood these to involve not just the physical heart

01:02:12 ► §

of course, but also the fields to which the heart is attuned.

01:02:14 ► §

Now there you have it. That’s the whole thing.

01:02:17 ► §

Yes. I mean these physiological interactions you’re talking about between the heart and

01:02:22 ► §

the brain would be part of the picture, but there’s also the larger picture which comes from the old pre-blim pre-blim understood that

01:02:31 ► §

he talked about the parallel processes in the brain here’s a we’ve got all these cells and all

01:02:35 ► §

these things we can gauge with their instruments he said well what about the parallel processes

01:02:39 ► §

that don’t lend themselves directly to that kind of instrumentation and then he’s talking about

01:02:44 ► §

your fields exactly and that’s what he’s talking about your fields.

01:02:45 ► §

Exactly.

01:02:46 ► §

And that’s what I’m talking about,

01:02:49 ► §

the higher levels of intelligence in the brain.

01:02:50 ► §

We’ve got these hormonal actions.

01:02:51 ► §

Fine.

01:02:54 ► §

The scientific people will accept that.

01:02:56 ► §

But when you start talking about the parallel processes that are not of the direct kind of quantum mechanical,

01:03:03 ► §

physical interactions and so on.

01:03:05 ► §

They back off, and of course the whole purpose is to get to the other realms

01:03:09 ► §

that the heart is operating out.

01:03:10 ► §

The Easterners speak of the old thumper here as slightly to the left side,

01:03:16 ► §

but the true heart over here right beyond the thumper,

01:03:22 ► §

over here in the very center, the true heart you see the heart of

01:03:26 ► §

all things which is in effect the subtle aspect of the physical heart and there

01:03:32 ► §

you’re is what you’re talking about so I think that’s the whole key and that’s

01:03:37 ► §

what all of us are after and that’s the answer for everything to my way of

01:03:41 ► §

thinking all that all their problems are caused by blocking these higher biological

01:03:48 ► §

processes.

01:03:49 ► §

It’s all still biology.

01:03:51 ► §

You can’t separate them, to my way of thinking.

01:03:53 ► §

And we block those, and we lock our kids literally into an identification with the lower animal

01:03:59 ► §

structures, because they’re then predictable and controllable, and they’re good economic

01:04:04 ► §

commodities.

01:04:06 ► §

And what we are after is to break out of those lower evolutionary processes into the highs,

01:04:12 ► §

and that is done through the heart, I think.

01:04:23 ► §

Well, it relates quite well to the extended

01:04:26 ► §

line the only problem is that

01:04:27 ► §

we’re supposed to be ending at minus one minute

01:04:30 ► §

again

01:04:30 ► §

so it’s a whole other topic

01:04:33 ► §

maybe I should just say very briefly

01:04:36 ► §

this is one of the things I’m working on

01:04:38 ► §

the frontal lobes

01:04:39 ► §

oh the frontal lobes

01:04:41 ► §

I haven’t thought in particular about

01:04:44 ► §

the frontal lobes and I haven’t thought in particular about the frontal lobes.

01:04:46 ► §

And what I’ve been interested in lately is the idea that the brain is only part of our mental fields work through and influence the brain.

01:04:58 ► §

But our minds are far more extensive than our brains.

01:05:02 ► §

our minds are far more extensive than our brains.

01:05:09 ► §

So that in ordinary perception, when I look around this room,

01:05:13 ► §

that my mental activity, everything I see is an image in my mind,

01:05:15 ► §

but it’s not, I don’t think, inside my brain.

01:05:18 ► §

I think the images are right where they seem to be.

01:05:22 ► §

In other words, all around us, we’re projecting out a whole mental world.

01:05:26 ► §

And this is an empirically testable proposition.

01:05:33 ► §

And some empirical tests that are going on now concern the very well-known phenomenon of the sense of being stared at.

01:05:37 ► §

If you affect what you’re looking at,

01:05:40 ► §

if there’s something going out as well as coming in,

01:05:43 ► §

then say you stare at someone from behind.

01:05:46 ► §

If there’s a mental influence reaching out to whatever you’re looking at,

01:05:49 ► §

as well as light rays coming in,

01:05:51 ► §

you might be able to affect the person you’re staring at.

01:05:54 ► §

They might know they’re being stared at.

01:05:56 ► §

And this actually is, of course, a very well-known phenomenon.

01:05:59 ► §

And empirically, it’s possible to show that this really happens.

01:06:03 ► §

It’s not only that 90% of the population think it happens

01:06:06 ► §

because they’ve experienced it,

01:06:08 ► §

but you can actually, I think, prove it.

01:06:10 ► §

This is one of the chief experiments,

01:06:12 ► §

these staring experiments,

01:06:13 ► §

which are done for virtually nothing.

01:06:17 ► §

The simple protocol I’ve developed

01:06:20 ► §

involves people working in pairs,

01:06:22 ► §

and you toss a coin for the randomization

01:06:25 ► §

procedure, you either stare or don’t stare, according to the most randomized trends, apart

01:06:30 ► §

from pencil and paper to write the results down, all you need is a coin to toss, which

01:06:35 ► §

can be one cent, and that’s recyclable, so this is virtually free.

01:06:42 ► §

But the consequences are absolutely profound, you see, because I think these fields

01:06:48 ► §

of course influence our brain’s work through them, but we’re surrounded by these extended

01:06:52 ► §

mental fields, and the perceptual fields flow into our perceptual world all around us. And

01:06:58 ► §

I suppose anything that involves the heart would involve fields of activity stretching

01:07:03 ► §

out from our hearts, as well as being located just inside the physical heart.

01:07:08 ► §

So a lot of common usage of language to do with people who are big-hearted

01:07:12 ► §

or take on rather more literal meanings than you would usually assume.

01:07:21 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:07:23 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:07:28 ► §

As I was listening to this talk with you just now, well, it dawned on me that it was only a few days ago, out on the forums,

01:07:36 ► §

when Zeitwell and I were talking about the fact that psychedelics sometimes bring out the woo-woo factor in people,

01:07:43 ► §

and that I’ve always tried to keep the woo-woo to a minimum here in the salon.

01:07:47 ► §

Well, what made me smile to myself just now is that the conversation we just listened to

01:07:53 ► §

was beginning to enter into woo-woo land, just a little bit.

01:07:57 ► §

But hey, these two guys weren’t approaching their ideas from a psychedelic perspective necessarily,

01:08:02 ► §

but were just two public intellectuals riffing

01:08:05 ► §

on some of their favorite ideas. But for what it’s worth, I really don’t think that what we

01:08:12 ► §

just listened to could be called woo-woo. For me, it’s more like wow-wow. Of course, I love thinking

01:08:19 ► §

about these things, and my guess is that you do too. Otherwise, you wouldn’t still be listening to this podcast

01:08:25 ► §

right now. Anyhow, in the interest of not letting my own interpretation of these ideas get in the

01:08:32 ► §

way of your own thinking, I’m going to leave you to your own devices and get out of here for today

01:08:38 ► §

after leaving you with just two more thoughts. The first one is to let you know about a podcast

01:08:44 ► §

series that I think should

01:08:45 ► §

not be missed. I learned about it just yesterday when my good friend Wild Bill Ratazinski called

01:08:51 ► §

to let me know that he’d just been interviewed for the Very Ape podcast. Bill, as you know,

01:08:57 ► §

is one of my longtime friends, and if you want to hear more about our times together in Palenque,

01:09:02 ► §

Mexico, well, you can go back to my podcast number

01:09:05 ► §

307, in which Matt Palomary interviewed Bill, and they talked about some of those wild days that we

01:09:11 ► §

all had together. And if you go to the program notes for that podcast, you’ll see an interesting

01:09:17 ► §

photo of Bill and me, and it’s nothing like what you would expect. Well, since our Palenque days, Bill and I have had many more adventures together.

01:09:27 ► §

Well, actually more than I’d like to count.

01:09:30 ► §

And I should add that Bill is also one of the all-time top five supporters of these podcasts.

01:09:36 ► §

And for that, too, I will remain eternally grateful.

01:09:39 ► §

Anyway, the Very Ape Podcasters, I kind of like that, the Very Ape Podcasters,

01:09:46 ► §

interviewed Bill, and they just now posted it on their SoundCloud page.

01:09:50 ► §

It’s their episode 39, and it’s titled Acid Heads with Bill Radizinski.

01:09:56 ► §

And as soon as I post this podcast today, I’m going to listen to it myself

01:10:00 ► §

to hear some more of Bill’s latest thoughts.

01:10:03 ► §

Now, when he called me to tell me about

01:10:05 ► §

the Very Ape podcast, he went out of his way to encourage me to listen to their podcast number 21,

01:10:11 ► §

which is titled Cops for Pot with Howard Cowboy Woolridge. Now, if you’ve been with us here in

01:10:18 ► §

the salon for a while, you already know that a few years ago, Bill retired as a law enforcement

01:10:23 ► §

officer in the city of New York.

01:10:26 ► §

And so whenever it comes to questions that I might have about law enforcement, Bill is my go-to guy.

01:10:32 ► §

So when he told me that the very ape interview with Howard Woolridge was not to be missed,

01:10:37 ► §

well, I took his advice, and this morning while I was at the gym, I listened to it, and, well, I was really impressed.

01:10:44 ► §

Woolridge is one of the co-founders of LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition,

01:10:49 ► §

and is now working for you and me as a lobbyist in Washington.

01:10:53 ► §

I could actually go on and on about the new information that I learned in this interview,

01:10:58 ► §

but I’m going to leave you to that for yourself.

01:11:01 ► §

However, if you are involved in any kind of group that discusses the war on drugs,

01:11:05 ► §

this is one podcast that you most definitely will want to play for your group.

01:11:11 ► §

And I’ll put links to both of those podcasts in today’s program notes.

01:11:16 ► §

Now, as you know, I also publish a flipboard magazine, which is titled Psychedelic Salon.

01:11:22 ► §

And if you don’t use the flipboard app on your phone or tablet,

01:11:26 ► §

you can still read it online.

01:11:28 ► §

So just go to our psychedelicsalon.com site

01:11:31 ► §

and click on the link titled Saloners.

01:11:34 ► §

And there you’ll find several links to things that I think may interest you.

01:11:37 ► §

And one of them is the Salon’s magazine.

01:11:40 ► §

Now, the only reason that I’m mentioning it to you right now

01:11:43 ► §

is so that you can read a story titled,

01:11:46 ► §

A Neuroscientist Explains Why Donald Trump Needs LSD.

01:11:51 ► §

And that has as its premise that the president’s biggest enemy is his ego.

01:11:56 ► §

And it then goes on to speculate about what could happen if he could temporarily dismantle this monster ego.

01:12:03 ► §

if he could temporarily dismantle this monster ego.

01:12:07 ► §

Well, the biggest problem with that plan, as I see it,

01:12:10 ► §

is that there probably isn’t a psychonaut anywhere that’s brave enough to drop acid with Trump.

01:12:13 ► §

But that also got me to thinking that,

01:12:16 ► §

well, it could be kind of a funny thing if it went well.

01:12:18 ► §

Which, of course, led my twisted sense of humor

01:12:21 ► §

to remember that wonderful little video on YouTube

01:12:23 ► §

of the experiment in the UK where some of their elite Marines were given LSD just to see

01:12:30 ► §

how it affected their performance. And if you haven’t already seen it then well

01:12:35 ► §

you may want to treat yourself to a good laugh so go check it out. I guess that

01:12:40 ► §

the only reason I’m even taking the time to mention it here is that, well, at times like these, we need to get in all of the laughs that we can.

01:12:49 ► §

And so, as you watch that video of the Marines on acid, try to picture Trump in the middle of them giving his orders.

01:12:56 ► §

As I said, we have to grasp at straws these days, but I think that you will find that a little humor each day is just what the doctor ordered.

01:13:04 ► §

but I think that you will find that a little humor each day is just what the doctor ordered.

01:13:10 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:13:38 ► §

Be well, my friends. Thank you.