Mona Sobhani, a cognitive neuroscientist trained at the University of Southern California and author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, gives a talk in the Liminal Institute's Future of Consciousness course hosted by Pinchbeck. She describes conventional training in neuroimaging and psychopathy research, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt on law and neuroscience funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and the assumption she absorbed that the universe is random and meaning is manufactured by the brain. Against that she sets her Persian family's divination practice, her mother reading coffee grounds with an accuracy she began documenting during graduate school, and precognitive dreams she had forgotten. She recounts the existential crisis and run of misfortune that followed her doctorate. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, joins near the end.
Guest: Mona Sobhani
In brief
- Sobhani says her neuroscience training taught her that consciousness is produced by the brain and that coincidences are artifacts of a pattern-detecting, story-making organ.
- She kept written records of her mother's coffee-ground readings over six years of graduate school and concluded they were right more often than wrong, including predictions months in advance.
- Sobhani lived in sustained cognitive dissonance because mainstream science offered no framework that could accommodate what she was observing.
- She reports that her precognitive dreams were effectively erased from memory by her scientific training until she later recovered them.
- Dean Radin recounts bending the bowl of a spoon with force that would otherwise break a person's fingers, and says the episode convinced him such effects are real.
- Radin argues for caution in psi research on the grounds that researchers do not understand the forces involved, a stance Pinchbeck contrasts with the pace of AI development.
Full text
All right, Moto, those were some strong uh opening acts for you. Yeah, I was thinking I'm like I'm not even going to bother to try to outdo anyone. Just tell my story. Exactly. Exactly. Um yeah. So, uh Monus, Dr. Monusati, cognitive neuroscientist and author. Uh and um yeah, you had a I suppose a kind of a breakthrough from the materialist framework to a different understanding of the nature of reality. That's a little what you're going to chat with us about today. Yes, sir. Cool. I'm going to turn the the baton over to you. Um um so I mean I have slides, but I'm I'm not going to use them.
Probably just tell my story. um cuz they're kind of just filler anyway and I'm sort of still processing everything Dean said although he laid a good groundwork. Um okay so my story is I'm a cognitive neuroscientist very traditionally trained. I got my Ph D from University of Southern California. I did neuroiming. I was focused on psychopathic traits because I love psychopaths and true crime. I did a posttock at Vanderbilt with the Mac Arthur Foundation. it was law and neuroscience. It was looking at the intersection between our neuroscientific findings and how they might have implications in the legal system. Um, so very traditional and it was fun and interesting, but I definitely adopted the kind of undercurrent which is in mainstream science of believing the universe is random and meaningless.
uh you know any meaning that we find in our external environment is created by our brains. I was very anti-spiritual and anti-religious. Um I I just wasn't really interested in those topics and didn't find any use for them and none of my colleagues ever talked about that. So I I was kind of hostile and um very arrogant towards those types of things. And especially in our neuroscientific training, they teach us that uh consciousness comes from the brain as Dean mentioned that our brains are coincidence detectors. That the reason that you experience coincidences is because your brain is constantly looking for them in your environment. And then it um connects the coincidences together and creates a story.
So our brains are also storytellers. They are designed to create narratives and meaning out of these data points that come in. So I was a little more connected to the universe when I was in college. I was very interested in coincidences and um I was always observing things. I felt very connected. I wouldn't have called it spiritual at all. It was just the way that I lived. And I used to have precognitive dreams all the time, but I didn't know that they were weird or different. Um, I didn't know they had a name. I didn't know any of that. But when I finished my training, um, when I got finished my Ph D, all of that had been erased from my mind.
Like, I totally forgot I even had those dreams. Um, I convinced myself that I, you know, misremembered or I had um, my brain had created the coincidence and drew meaning from it. It's just exactly what they taught me. And this so this was all true except for one thing in my life which is that I'm Persian. So in our cultural heritage we do have a tradition of divination which my grandmother practiced and then my mom learned from my grandma. So my mom would practice it at home too. And it she used coffee grinds. Um people can use tarot cards or tea leaves as westerners like to make fun of it.
Um, but my mom used coffee grinds and she was really good and like she would do it at family parties and everybody would line up for these readings or like your mom is so good. You know, we everybody wanted a reading and I didn't even pay attention to it. I didn't even it didn't register in my mind as a thing until when I started graduate school. I would go home on the weekends and I would have coffee with my mom and then she would kind of absent-mindedly flip the cup over and read it for me. And you know, I would roll my eyes because I was an annoying daughter and I'd be like, "This is stupid." A tradition like I don't want to have anything to do with it.
But I started taking notes because my friends started coming over. Every Sunday they'd be like, "Are you going to be at your mom's? I want to come over. I want a reading." So, so then I started to take notes thinking, "Well, I'm a scientist in training. I'll just take notes and see." And then this went on for I was in grad school for six years. So by the end of grad school, it's weird like as everything else was being erased from my mind with my training. Um I got convinced though that the coffee readings like my mom was more accurate than she was wrong. And she would predict things that even I wouldn't know were coming, things that neither of us could possibly think to predict.
Um and I started to, you know, pay attention to them and count on these readings kind of. they were um important, but I could not explain it with science. And so I just lived in total cognitive dissonance. Um and I don't know that I talked about it that much with many people, obviously my my friends that would come over, but I just kind of lived with these two things, not bothering to reconcile them because I couldn't because there was no foundation in mainstream science for it at all. um especially since my mom would see things sometimes months in advance and that was really hard to reconcile.
So I just went on living this way for a while and then I after graduate school though I started to have a sort of existential crisis you know I started working and I would wake up and think oh my gosh this is what we do forever we just wake up and go to work and there's no meaning you know in life because that's what they had taught me in school and I started to have this just crisis um and at the same time this was going on in my mind my um external world. I had a a a lot of things happen at once. Um bad things like just lost a job and then a friend moved away, a really good friend and then um got in a car accident. Um, and then my mom saw this um, event that she started being weird around. Like she would read my coffee every week that I would go home and there started being something.
And then one day she awkwardly said, "I feel like I have to tell you, I have to warn you. I feel like uh, you're going to get really bad news." And she was upset about it. I was upset about it. I was like, "Well, what is And she's like, "Well, I don't want to say what it is cuz I'm not really sure what I'm looking at." She's like, "I just know it's not going to be great and it's not in your house, like in your family, so that's good." So, every week for six weeks, I would go home to visit my parents and every week she would be like, "Yep, yep, it's still there. So, just be prepared." And um and then finally I got the news that one of our professors that I had worked uh on one of my experiments for my dissertation with he was killed by one of his students in the program um brutally.
Um and it was really awful because he was like the nicest professor in our program. And I called my mom and I was like I think I know what the event was. And she was like yeah it was a death but I had never seen anything like it before. And I she's like I didn't even know what to say cuz it was not like an old person dying or something I've seen. So this really shook me because it was not like about work or anything. It was life or death. And I I thought how could the information of someone's death be in the ethers and accessible by somebody else?
And I started to wonder about destiny and fate, you know, like is is it possible that these things exist? Um, but you know, my scientific mind was like, "No, there's no way." But I mean, I had this frame breaking event that was confusing me. Um, and so I was really upset about it, but I also had just started a new a new job, so I didn't have a lot of time to think. So I just went through that the grief of that and then got busy. Um, and was it I was distracted by the new job, which was good for a while because so many things had gone wrong and I didn't know how to process any of that.
So, I I was just distracted. And then I got in a relationship and my mom um again with the coffee uh saw that she said it was going to be a good outcome, but then we ended up breaking up. And so I was like, "How is this a good outcome? This is not what I wanted. This is not good." And so I and that was like the final um you know like stool of the I think of like the legs of a stool. That was the last one to be knocked out. When that relationship ended I felt despair and like lost hope and for the first time in my life really ever and went into a really dark place of like I just don't understand why we're here and we have to do this.
So I was there for a while and for a few months and then I thought when I could get some energy up to think in a different way I thought well what's interesting is the you know the coffees like how did that work? Why um why did she say it was going to be a good outcome? Why did it work in not work in my opinion in that case and then why did it work for the death? And I just got interested in that and started digging into it. And I did not think like I was not at all familiar with Dean's work. I thought this stuff had not been studied that there's no way it had been studied or if it had it was terrible research because that's what they that's the narrative in the mainstream.
So I didn't bother looking for research initially. I just thought, you know, I'll interview some of these intuitives because I live in Los Angeles. my girlfriends had gone to intuitives. So I thought well I'll just interview them um about their experiences. I'll interview my mom and then I'll interview my scientist colleagues to kind of understand are any of them religious or spiritual or have they ever had you know experience something that they couldn't explain with science like I had. And I found that all the scientists, all my friends, they all had an experience. Like everyone had either an experience themselves or someone in their family was intuitive or they had a friend or so everybody had a a story and also they were very open-minded.
Although I have to say we had these conversations in private obvious so they weren't public but they were very open-minded. Um and it was confirmation that we're well trained. They're like, if there's, you know, one instance of something, then you can't discard it. Like, you have to look at it. Then the model's wrong. So, we could all agree on that. Um, and then finally I think I started reaching out to Oh, I heard like I wasn't listening to anything spiritual or or paranormal or anything like that, but on a podcast I listened to that Chelsea Handler, the comedian, she was hosting it, she had a psychic medium come on, um, Laurelyn Jackson, and then they mentioned the book, Many Lives, Many Masters.
And so I and I they said it was a psychiatrist case study, which so I thought it was a normal book, so I ordered it. and it arrived and it was not a normal book. It was about past life regression. Um but I when I read it, it struck a chord. Um because the psychiatrist was Yale educated and Columbia educated. was like an atheist and he was describing this, you know, unique situation with his patient um where she seemed to have past lives and carried over the trauma and that through this altered state, she could release this trauma and her like well-being and her symptoms improved.
And as a neuroscientist, I was just interested in that purely for the therapeutic aspect because I've always been interested in how few mental health um treatment modalities we have to offer. And so I thought, "This is weird. This is so weird. How could hypnotic regression from a past life or from a fantasy or whatever cure someone?" Um, and then also he would talk about spirits and um, psychic phenomena in the book. These were all things that that he encountered in treating this patient. And that was a lot of the stuff I had encountered with my mom, with the intuitives. Um, the intuitives I'd gone to, they they all kind of subscribe to the same belief system that we reincarnate, that they at least the ones I saw that they we reincarnate, that we come here for soul lessons, um, that we have soul groups.
And so, this is I mean, you cannot imagine how foreign and wild this stuff was to me. Like, I was so it was actually like painful to my ego to hear them say these things. Um, and but I I listened, you know, I recorded the sessions, I took notes and what they said went over my head until I read many lives, many masters and I started realizing that, you know, they were coinciding and I thought, "Oh, this is weird. There's probably more. There's probably more out there that I'm unfamiliar with." So, I took all the references from his book. I read all his books. I read all the past life progression literature.
And that's when I just started doing a lot of research. I read all of Dean's books. And then I started reading the actual papers because I thought um you know I didn't believe it if you're we're trained not to believe um unless you read the paper yourself and you know uh uh scrutinize the research methods. But once I did that and it was legitimate, you know, it was all sound research. Some of it was methods we used I used in my experiments. Like it was very it was sometimes better statistics than I even bothered to use in some of my studies. Um then I started to I get nervous about or confused and I you know my my mind just started being like oh my god is it possible that this is real is it possible that there's this much research is it possible that we ignore all of this and why do none of my colleagues talk about this or know about this or you know it was very um lifealtering and so at first I I was like okay this is cool this is cool this research is cool suggests reality is different.
Um, I'm going to I'm going to, you know, try to incorporate this, but um, I got I got into like reading University of Virginia's literature also about reincarnation. I mean, some of this stuff is just super weird, you know, and as a mainstream scientist, you it you really like continuously just hit a wall. Like your head is hitting a wall. like I don't understand how this could be like I and I kept trying to find a mechanism but this was this was the problem is they never tell you when you're getting trained as a scientist that you're being trained in a phil phys physicalist scientific materialist worldview and they never tell you that there are other worldviews uh and I never took philosophy so I didn't know so I thought that it was just known that we live in a physical universe So when I encountered that all of this material, I was like where is the physical explanation for it? Uh and that's what I tried to find initially and it wasn't until I hit the literature probably like Dean's books um where they started talking about consciousness and the alternative world views that I it was like my the box I was in was blown open and I thought oh wow okay if we just take the restraints around physicalism off then a lot of this is possible and it's not that big of a deal.
It's actually reasonable and it explains a lot of things that currently, you know, I was like, like I said, my I felt like I was walking into a wall every time I would read something because it was it was incomprehensible to me based on my training. Um and so then I started getting angry which um at my training be like why didn't they give us philosophy course? How come no one told me that the assumption is I'm being trained in physicalism and there's these other views and there's all this evidence but the truth is they don't know either. So this once I hit that I the philosophy section I I started to understand it better um and it was easier for me to talk about this stuff with my colleagues although not many of them were well verssed in philosophy either um and it it so that was the intellectual journey okay like that was my intellectual journey but after that happened then I'm I'm a human I had to update and then the second part was the emotional journey. So once my I never realized how much my how much of my identity was built around being a scientist and how much my self-worth was built around that and so once that started being threatened with this stuff like at one point I was sitting on the floor surrounded by all these books and I was judging myself.
I was like, I can't believe I'm the type of person now who's reading this kind of stuff. And like I just remember that moment so clearly because I did catch it. I did catch it, you know? I was like, whoa, that's a mean thing to say to yourself. Um, and I would have probably walked away like it it was a crossroads, right? It was a crossroads. I was like, I know that if I turn my back and go back to who I was, I'll be more comfortable, but and maybe I I think I'll be happier. But I had been far enough down the road to know that I wasn't going to be I wasn't happy.
I mean, that was how what led me to this whole thing to begin with. And also, reading this material set my soul on fire or whatever in a way that nothing had in years. like I was so excited to read this stuff um that I finally had, you know, like I went from basically wishing I didn't exist every day to being excited to wake up to read this all of this new information that was very exciting and that really resonated with my life experiences because then I started I started having precognitive dreams again, you know, as soon as I remembered I used to have them, they started coming back immediately. Um and ne and now I had a scientist's training to you know write down every night in a dream journal and see like what was you know meaningful and not. Um and so it was I started to come up against my ego and it was really hard.
So I had to make a choice and um but I feel like I made that choice a million times a day because I would wake up and immediately I'd be like oh you were you've been fooled. You fell for it. you fell for all the the fraudulent evidence. And then I would have to like review all the evidence again in my head over and this went on for a very long time for maybe months and until one day I was just so tired. I'm like how many times am I going to have to do this? Like I either believe the evidence or I don't. What is the like problem here?
And that's when I, you know, I had to like turn the awareness on myself and be like there there's an emotional issue here. It's not rational. um if it was rational, I would have read the evidence once and made a choice. It's not rational. It must be emotional. Um and then that's when I had to start doing some healing work, right? So I started digging into all the healing modalities, past life regression, psychedelics, literally everything. So and then once that that started to alleviate a lot of this because a lot of that angst, I think it was like angst, it was like ego versus soul or whatever.
I I don't even I don't like to put words around it, but um these two parts of myself were fighting and then you know the angst started to kind of ease up but that was just the beginning. So I talk about you know I had a first dark night of the soul which was my existential crisis and everything that brought me to this worldview flip. The world view flip helped me enormously. Like for some reason, just the idea that there might be meaning or that we're all interconnected or that maybe all these life lessons um or all these things that are happening to me are lessons instead of, you know, viewing viewing it like tragedy. um that simple psychological perspective shift significantly improved my life to begin with like and that happened within a few weeks.
So that was already great. But then as my identity started to shift and I started, you know, to encounter all the internal resistance around everything. Um and also well what happens is start hitting these wounds from from childhood, right? Because you're suddenly like, oh, I'm not going to belong in the group anymore. I'm not you hit belonging wounds or like you're not good enough or you don't feel safe, right? like how many of my scientist colleagues did that I feel safe talking about these new topics with. Um so all these things started to come up and I think that I have compassion for the scientists who maybe start down this road and turn back because to continue is really really hard and you have to start healing all of those things and it's not easy and as you change you know you're like the node of a network as you change everything in your life changes.
So like your self-concept changes, your relationships change, so everything starts to change and it's like chaos. And that's the second dark night of the soul, and that's where I've been for the past few years. So it's it's not easy. And I feel like people don't talk about that a lot. And I've noticed that, you know, now I have a lot of friends who are scientists, scholars, physicians who've flipped and we're we've all like scrambled through these flips on our own without resources like just trying to figure out how to do this gracefully. Um, and like find community and others like ourselves and we're finally we're, you know, we're coming together to tell our story.
So, one part of that that's really important, this is something I'm doing. It's one is to get more scientists to talk about it because I found my friends my colleagues they all had experiences. So uh one of my collaborators we started going to the society for neuroscience annual conference which we have like one big conference uh every year. It's I I heard it's actually the largest conference in science now. I don't know if that's true but it's definitely the largest conference in neuroscience with like 30,000 attendees every year. Um, so starting in 2022, we went and we organized a neuroscience and spirituality social and I thought no one would come.
I didn't even want to do it. I was so scared. Um, but my friend Allison convinced me. She's like, "No, it'll be great. It'll be really casual." And she made a bunch of flyers that said, you know, "Have you ever experienced something you couldn't explain with science? Um, you know, come join us. were a group of curious scientists who want to ask the hard questions about reality. So, she put up these flyers all around the conference um venue and then I had booked like a room for only 15 people. There were like 15 muffins like not a lot of coffee and then 50 scientists or more I don't even know people were coming and going.
It was a three-hour event but we ran out of space. We had to keep asking hotel for more chairs. There were so many people as grad students, postocs and faculty who came and they were asking some of them were asking about pre-cognitive dreams, some about God, some about psychedelics, some about psychic phenomena. Um, it was so wild. It I mean it was I didn't expect it. Allison said she knew that would happen, but she's more intuitive than I am. So, we did that the first year and everybody wanted to stay in touch. So, they requested of us references and resources. So, we made a website, we made a Google group.
Um, we I made a bibliography, but we're we're still working on adding that to the to the website. Um, and then the following year we did Oh, yeah. This is I would share this. Let me share my screen for a second. Oops. I have to make Sorry. I have to make zoom wider so it There we go. That's the one. Yeah. So we So then last year we did um another event at the uh conference but this time we did a panel to explore alternative models of consciousness. So we had Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Castro, Julia Mossbridge, Jonathan Schooler, and uh Kristoff Coke came to he was supposed to um he didn't want to give a talk twice because he was doing one at the SFN thing, but but he came um to just talk about what if consciousness doesn't come with their brain or what are other models um other philosophies.
So it was a really great event. We had more people than the first time. Um it I think we had like 300 people total cycle through over the three hours and we I think we did an informal poll of the group and there were about we asked has anyone had an experience they couldn't explain with science and there were about 20 to 25% of people raised their hands. Um and so we're doing it again this year. It's I think in two weeks. Uh this year it's in Chicago and so we're g same exact thing, not a panel this time. We're going to do the social because I felt like that was a much more friendly uh community where people could share their stories.
Although I did notice the first year that we did this, people reached out to me afterward to talk to me privately to tell me their stories because I don't think they wanted to do it in public. But it was heartbreaking because these people had been holding on to these stories a lot of times for most of their lives. Uh you know very significant turning points in their lives. Uh and they had never told anyone and they were like so excited to tell me and that's why Alison and I decided to continue because we thought this is a shame like no one should have to do this alone. No one should have to feel shame about it.
But there is a lot of shame and stigma and taboo in the scientific community about this despite the fact that most of them have probably had an experience or know somebody who has or will at some point in their life. So that's uh that's where we are. I don't need to share. Oh yeah. I and I write about these things in my um substack which is called cosmos coffee and consciousness. Mostly this year I've been writing about the Dark Knight. Um because as I mentioned I'm uh sort of still working through that and then I wrote a book about my experience and I'm going to stop sharing there and I'll take any questions.
That was wonderful. Thank you so much. Um yeah really amazing to hear your your your personal journey on all of this. Um and that was a great group you had. I mean, you had like um obviously a lot of overlap. Uh Bernardo and so on. They were probably virtual or in person. Most of them are virtual. Julia was there and Kristoff was there. Um so how is this now influencing kind of your professional like focus like or is it not? Is that still kind of separate you know? Well, I left I was working at the University of Southern California as a research scientist, but I wasn't doing neuroscience.
I was doing digital health. Um, but I left there after I wrote the book because well, I didn't um want to do that job anymore. And I started my own consulting company. Most of it is trai is normal neuroscience. I do some writing for ions. So, I work with Dean like with them just writing blogs and scientific writing. Um but yeah, I guess the majority of it is normal mainstream neuroscience. Yeah. And um so it seems like you're seeing more scientists um being amenable or open to this conversation. Yeah. As Dean mentioned, I was actually happy to hear it's because of psychedelic research. I think um they've really opened up or slowly they're opening.
One other reason is because we've noticed graduate students coming in want to study these things. Um especially psychedelics. So it's like they come in, they've tried psychedelics, they've had these experiences. So they come in and they kind of dance around like am I going to be able to study this or and then you know the older scientists have to be like uh we're going to need to and talk about how we uh phrase this or you know we talk about your research plan because you can't go too wild um or you won't get funding. I mean there are very people who study the intersection of psychedelics and psychic phenomena.
I think David Luke is the only one uh that I know of. No, there's Yeah. No, I don't know of anybody. Yeah. But that would be interesting. That should be funded. Yeah. Um, what is uh what what area interests you most in all of this? What would you love to be able to research and and where do you where do you see the the most uh Yeah. cutting edge interesting progress could be made? I'm really interested in um how as you do healing work, how your intuition and psychic abilities open up because uh I've noticed that I don't know if some ground level like as Dean was saying genetic capability like is it cap or I you know who knows because none of this has been studied but I think I think that that's really interesting cuz I think that the more like I kind of see it as you're this entity and as you go through life it's almost like you pick up debris and then you have to like get rid of the debris which and after that it's like you have a stronger connection.
Um but I would like I mean that's my sense of it. So I would like I'm curious to know if that you know I'm interested in studying that to see if you could if it's true if you quantify it. Did you say debris? What what do you mean by that by Yeah. Well, I mean like trauma and disconnection from yourself basically like inauthenticity um so it's a combination of psychology, neuroscience and um and spirituality I guess. I mean it seems like trauma is often something that releases or makes available psychic abilities like for like channels and mediums and all that stuff. And then anecdotally, I don't even know if it's true what they say about like the um you know programs that were done with like the kid kids.
I don't even know if that actually happened but to sort of induce trauma to create like psychic uh capacities in a way. That's true. I have heard that. Um I don't know too much about that. I don't know if that's been like officially studied. That's not I don't think so. No. Like yeah unfortunately not not much of this has been studied. So there's a lot of questions, right? You can't study something when you just negate it. Like when you when you completely act like it doesn't exist. I mean, how are you going to study it? Yeah. Well, that's why we're doing the events because I feel like each even though it's it's one conference, it's one field.
I mean, hopefully we can encourage other people to do it themselves. The problem is they're expensive to throw. So, um, but every time you do that, it's like if someone tags along or sees someone else share their story, then they'll be more likely to do it themselves. And it's, you know, hopefully it'll be like a domino effect, but yeah, there's no other way. You just kind of have to it it's it's it's also not like you're trying to change their minds, you know? Like the thing is that a people who end up there like have probably had the experience. You're just trying to, you know, make it okay for them or give themsel permission to talk about it or accept it because that's at least that's how it was for me.
It's like I was trying so hard to find somebody to give me permission and that's what I was looking for was all the other scientists who had already flipped. Um, and Jeff Kriel helped me a lot with that with not only with his book, The Flip, but like personally. So, yeah, I think that people are just looking for community and and permission because you really in science do not feel like you have permission. Also, because it's this hierarchical system like you're constantly made to feel like you're not good enough. Like you might you might be a professor, but you're not tener. You might be in grad school.
You're not a Ph D yet. You might be a Ph D, you're not a posttock. Like there's Yeah. all this stuff. So, you always feel like I don't have a right to say anything. Yeah. I want to turn it over to see if other people have questions. So, I had one last little question. In the beginning, you were like, "Oh, I really like psychopaths." And I I could I couldn't help but ask um what what do you like about psychopaths? Why would why were they so interesting to you? And is there some relationship between that and kind of being interested in these other dimensional things, realms?
I don't know the connection yet. I like them because they're such extreme forms of human of humanity like of human nature like what it's like what makes humans special. Empathy is one of those things. Um and psychopaths seem to really lack that. So it's interesting. Well, let's see if anybody has a question. I guess that was Guy's question. Sorry, Guy. Um anybody uh Guy, you have a question? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I thought of another one. Um, so yeah, my question is, um, as you've had this dark night of the soul experience, um, twice essentially, um, why do you think it happens? What's the kind of evolutionary benefit, if any, to having that um, kind of deeply traumatic or unpleasant experience, if you if you think there is one?
Yeah, it's probably to know who you really are. Um because I feel like you well that's what happens is you you get confused about you know you think you're one thing and then this stuff happens to you and then suddenly you're like wait if that's not who I am then who am I? Uh, and you have to constantly ask yourself like these, you know, these questions of like like I like the story I said in the beginning. I'm like I'm the kind of person who reads these books and you kind of have to dig into that to be like what kind of person is that and why aren't you that or why are you that or so I think yeah the point of that is to just is to know who you find out who you really are. But do do you think a lot of it was because you made it public and you came out saying, "I'm a neuroscientist who now believes in this stuff." Um, so then you're you're kind of like putting yourself on on display to, you know, and people could ridicule ridicule you.
No, I haven't found that. It's not that. It's more personal. Everything's very personal. like mo most of the um angst or tension is in my personal life. With with people who haven't made the flip yet? Yeah. Yeah. And um what's your have you developed a uh kind of a protocol with such people? Do you like give them a Jeffrey Corpal book for their Christmas? Slip a Dean Raiden book under their pillow and Yes. Oh my gosh. I'm always recommending Dean's books because they're so good with the science and they're funny. Um and and Karle, but Karle is a special kind of um book to not for everyone.
So I yeah I well I tried to feel them out and you know it's kind of you tiptoe, you say things, you see how they respond and then see if there's like a door open. But I I will say I found most people want to talk about this stuff. most people are more open than you think that they are. Um, and I also have the understanding now that if somebody is being aggressive or whatever, um, that it's not about me that it's about them because I would experience that myself. Like it was all about me. It was all about you're threatening my self-concept or you're threatening my idea of myself of being smart or whatever it is.
So I get that and so I don't take it personally. So just and you just have to have compassion for wherever they are in their journey because I had about a million different stages of this. Yeah. And you know for me it was a long time ago and I still very much remember and um you kind of like Yeah. You you know you defin have just at a certain point you just realize some people are going to come along with you and others are just it's not for them. Like my mother like I I laugh because her apartment number is 3D uh like three 3D realm like I think she's just the 3D realm is where she's gonna be you know like um she can't she's not not in this life for her to move into this other way of understanding.
Um yeah I like that Carlos Cast talked about the assemblage point uh which I think is a very useful idea that somehow people assemble their whole model of reality from a certain point. He had it as Don Juan had it like as a physical point on the on the back of the shoulder. He would like slap uh Castanada in you know the sort of novelizations whatever those were and when he slapped him then he could move the assemblage point up and cast something suddenly see these different realities. I think there's something true to that that everybody has like an assembly point. Some people their assembly point can become more flexible.
Other people it's really it's really rigid, you know. And I think once you accept that that's just the way it is, it's actually kind of uh it's like okay like the person is fine in this life. They're just uh you know and um yeah, I mean psychedelics actually helped with this too like making it very um experiential because even I remember I when I first did psychedelics Yes. I did five mem and after that actually that was a catalyst for a lot of things really moving towards um disconnection between me and other people but it's it it's such a like I'll just describe quickly the five minute DMT I don't know what your experience was very much like almost like a nirvana kind of like white light experience no of course not but the people I was with had that they had the like love and then mine was like I went crazy and then I um became paradox like I became paradox and then um well so the I did it twice so the first time I became all of space and time and um my ego dissolved and I was just pure awareness that was beautiful but the sec but the second time I thought I actually died so I had a near-death experience and that was very traumatic and then that had to be worked through but then looking back on. I was like I was in the middle of a transformation.
Of course, they had mentioned that they're like um it's it I think it's the most likely psychedelic to for people to have near-death experiences on. So, and it's like I was going through a death and rebirth. So, it just it made sense. But yeah, but it's so extreme that when you come back from it, it's it's really ontologically shocking and you're like, I don't know how I'm ever going to like talk to people again. Yeah, totally. And it's really unpredictable because sometimes you have that experience where you're like uh oh, you know, and then you have to kind of use every day like I think every day we have like a certain amount of available like psychic energy or psychic processing power and you'd find like I would find that like 20% of it was going into you know how do I contextualize that experience?
Like what does that mean for my life? Like now my ego really doesn't seem like it means anything you know how do I deal with that? Yeah, it was really really challenging but beautiful. I really I'm grateful I did it but it was challenging. Teen I had a question for you actually. What do you know about China and Russia in terms of psychic um research and psychic experiments? I think I heard from somebody that that there is a there are scientists in China who are very interested in this area um but I haven't had any official confirmation of that. So I I've heard that as well.
uh China, India, Southeast Asia, uh the uh even those who are trained in western scientific methods, the cultural acceptance is so strong that it actually think you put on your your national security hat. Uh I think people in the west should pay a lot more attention to it because if there's there probably is a lot of government funding that goes into these areas that is not available in the west uh which means that there likely to be faster understanding of what's going on and it and it you know as I said before that if if we learn a lot more about this we will learn more about the nature of inter of our interconnections which is a kind of a power. Knowledge is power and power in the world today can be used for good or bad. And so we we think about what other countries would would like to do. Uh it behooves us to pay attention to it at minimum.
It's very similar to the as I said before with about UAPs. The reason why people are interested in UAPs is because of the threat. That's the only reason they ever the government ever gets interested in this stuff. So, is it a threat if our science falls behind in this domain? The answer is probably yes. And I'm I'm about as pacifist and anti-military person as you will ever meet. And yet I I do understand then that it's we we can't ignore the fact that people in other countries have a very different view of these kinds of things. And they will call it different names. I mean, chi is essentially sigh.
Soqi in a in a Chinese context is extremely different in terms of its acceptance than it is in the west. And so that I think should concern us. Actually Mona I was curious because you talked about not having an idea of what would be like the mechanism and I was wondering if you'd also looked at the work of Amit Gaswami uh he wrote a book called physics of the soul uh where he he sort of you know he he'd written a manual on quantum mechanics. He's a quantum physicist who I think was involved with ions also. Teen must know him. But that book I found really fascinating because he basically argues that if you understand the me the mechanisms of quantum physics, it gives us potentially a um yeah a sort of a theory we can we can make about how it could be a kind of like reincarnating aspect of ourselves.
uh and also the subtle bodies might exist as these sort of non-local quantum phenomena that are consciousness-based but don't have any less reality or validity uh because they're consciousness based. Yeah, I've read so many um so many different theories and at first it was really exciting, but to be honest I actually don't care anymore um what what it is. like I'm really glad that other people do and are digging into it. But um after like an initial like uh just taking a wide swath of it in, I thought, okay, this is confusing enough. At least I know there's a possibility of models, but like I don't really actually care which one it is.
And it seems like we're nowhere near figuring it out, so whatever. Um all right, cool. Maybe we'll wind down for today unless anybody has a last uh question. Um Dean, what do you think about the uh exploring psychedelics and psychic phenomena? Do you think that psych because we talk about psychedelics as non-specific psychic amplifiers? Do you think that could be a powerful avenue? And is anybody doing it that you know of? Uh I once had a conversation uh with the folks at John's Hopkins who who were doing psychedelic research 1015 years ago and they wanted to do experiments because they kept noticing in the patients that they were working with that they were reporting spontaneous telepathy and all kinds of things.
Uh and so we we talked about how that might be done and usually using unconscious physiological methods because once you're in that kind of intoxicated state, you're not interested in doing experiments. So you can't do anything that involves conscious report, but you might be able to do something with an unconscious stimulus. So we talked about it. We've talked about this frequently at ions because uh we're we're interested in that as well. But as long as it's still difficult to to do this and legally we we put the whole institute at risk if we if we do it. So we haven't we haven't been able to do anything publicly.
Privately is a different matter but then we can't report it. So we're kind of stuck at this point that we would love to do experiments with different kinds of psychedelics and we think we have protocols that would actually work but again if you know part of this scientific aspiration is to do something and then report it publicly to let people know about the results and if we can't do that well it it reduces the the interest and again to say nothing of the possible legal ramifications. Well, I mean that that leads to a f follow-up question, you know. I in a purely speculative, you know, fictional way, if there had been private explorations of these of these things, what might they have found um you know, by doing that? Well, in a hypothetical way, what they find is that uh especially telepathic rapport, if especially done in groups, telepathic rapport goes through the roof and in ways that are not always all that great.
I mean, this is one of the if you are suddenly merging with everybody in the group, you know everything about them or at least you know something about the darker side that they wish you didn't know. Um, so yeah, I mean it it's it's both uh interesting and probably useful and slightly dangerous to to uh to go into realms where you are that open. This is one of the reasons why I take a pretty cautious approach in our laboratory work where we we're learning bits and pieces and we're not stressing people out too much because we don't know the dangers yet. And so one of one of the ways that I I like to talk about this is that for many many years I was skeptical about the whole thing about spoon bending because that sounds ridiculous. That's not possible.
And then one day I did this where I bent the bowl of a spoon in half just touching it. You can't do that with ordinary force. It would break your fingers to do that. And and yet I did it myself. So I couldn't deny that this was possible. And so some of the other stories I've heard of people taking something like a rebar and going whoop with a rebar and they're not particularly strong. And that's also impossible. And what that tells me is that that first of all, it's frightening that we can do that because I have no idea how it can be done. And second, it means that there's probably a lot more that we can do that starts pushing into the realm of magical lore, which may is it increases the likelihood that those things are real, but it also increases in in my case at least the fear that we really don't know anything about what's going on here.
It's like we're we're playing with atomic weapons and we might accidentally press the wrong button. And so that that's why I'm taking tiny baby steps where at least along each direct each way that I take a baby step I have some sense of what's going on and where instead of pushing it really hard and it's and I'd admit it really has to do with fear of not knowing the kind of power that we're dealing with. Well, it sounds like you're being a lot more cautious than today's AI researchers. So, we'll see how that goes. Yeah. Uh well guys, it's 4:01. Uh thank you everybody for for coming.
Uh thank you so much for Dean and Mona for those amazing presentations and Jamie although he he left us. And um uh yeah, look forward to seeing uh you on Wednesday. Thank you so much.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.