Pinchbeck hosts Jeffrey Kripal, the Rice University scholar of religion who works on anomalous experience in the humanities, and Dean Radin, the laboratory parapsychologist whose new book is The Science of Magic. Both report that institutional resistance to psychic phenomena is weakening. Kripal credits psychedelic studies and the UFO question with reopening the subject in academic circles, and Pinchbeck adds the popular response to the Telepathy Tapes. Radin points to journals cautiously publishing psi papers and to invitations from universities, including a Harvard talk where he was advised not to press the word magic. He describes opening lectures with audience experience before presenting odds against chance, and argues that quantum brain function could close the explanatory gap without adopting analytic idealism. The closing frames science fiction as a recent idiom for much older religious ideas about becoming superhuman.
Guest: Jeffrey Kripal and Dean Radin
In brief
- Kripal argues that psychedelic studies and the UFO question are the two openings through which the paranormal has re-entered academic and humanities discussion.
- Radin says a paradigm shift is no longer pending but already underway, citing journals that now publish psi research and a broad range of university invitations.
- Radin was advised not to emphasize magic at his Harvard talk, and instead built the lecture around asking the audience about their own anomalous experiences before presenting laboratory results.
- Radin holds that the experiments indicate people are genuinely connected across space and time, and that a partly quantum account of brain function would reconcile this with physics.
- Radin suggests such an account makes it unnecessary to go as far as analytic idealism to explain nonlocal mind.
- Kripal argues that science fiction is a modern language for ancient experiences of deification and superhuman states, and describes himself as a chronic optimist rather than an apocalyptic thinker.
Full text
I'm I'm seeing a a major change in terms of uh what branches of science are willing to even talk about the topic of of psychic phenomena. And we see this partially by uh the journals that are are willing to publish articles on these topics hesitantly but nevertheless they're there. uh and more importantly the number at least for my own case the number of invitations I'm getting to talk to academia like across the board now everything from from Harvard on down and and as I I've been advised at least in the case of Harvard not to not to push the psychic story too much because it might make heads explode but so I gave a talk and there were four or 500 people in the audience and there was no panic there was there was no rushing for the doors. Uh afterwards a lot of people came up and were quite interested. It's very clear that the the seessaw has turned and so it's no longer that a paradigm shift is going to happen.
We are in the midst of it right now. Okay. Welcome to Liinal News. I'm very very excited today to be here with uh Dean Raiden and Jeffrey Krypal. Two of the leading uh kind of thinkers, philosophers, academics studying paranormal psychic phenomena. One from a more scientific perspective which is Dean and one from a more kind of humanities cultural perspective which is Jeffrey. And I understand you guys have never like collaborated, you know, kind of kind of on something together even though you sort of circled each other in the same kind of realm in a way. Is that true? Yeah, we we've we were orbiting each other.
Yeah. Nice. Uh, and I was just talking to Dean Jeffrey before you got here and he was saying that something that's really been striking for him recently is there seems to be a real like finally a real paradigm shift where kind of um, you know, sectors of society and the establishment and institutions that were um, very reluctant to look at psychic phenomena or the paranormal seriously now suddenly seem uh, more open. uh is that what you guys are both finding and how are you seeing that kind of uh express itself, Jeff? Yeah, I I am seeing I I personally see that uh certainly in academic circles and in humanity circles there's two issues that really raise this I think to the four.
One is psychedelic studies and the other is the UFO. And those are the two places where I think these things are most evident actually in my world. um they're they're just sort of popping up and there are problems with both of those but there are also promises I think. Yeah, everything has at least one problem. Well, then there was also I mean Jeffrey like the telepathy tapes whe whether you believe that that was good research or not, it showed this like you know volcanic uh yearning on the part of the the people to hear more about you know the the psychic. I mean, you know, as as I think we probably would all agree that, you know, people have psychic experiences often um and therefore they kind of know instinctively that there's something there and yet they're in a culture which completely kind of invalidates um their own experience in that sense.
So when something like the telepathy tapes appears or you know psychedelics for a certain although I would say in the psychedelic world they've been pretty circumspect about the psychic and the paranormal like like if you speak about that in relationship to the psychedelic experience you're not going to be kind of like you know in the mix of the United States. Maybe it's a little different in in England or in Europe or something. Um but yeah dem what what what are you seeing in that regard? Yeah, I'm I'm seeing a a major change in terms of uh what branches of science are willing to even talk about the topic of of psychic phenomena. And we see this partially by uh the journals that are are willing to publish articles on these topics hesitantly, but nevertheless they're there.
uh and more importantly the number at least for my own case the number of invitations I'm getting to talk to academia like across the board now everything from from Harvard on down and and as I I've been advised at least in the case of Harvard not to not to push the psychic story too much because it might make heads explode but so I gave a talk and there were four or 500 people in the audience and there was no panic there was there was no rushing for the doors. Uh afterwards a lot of people came up and were quite interested in these topics. It's partially I think that uh the nature or the level of empiricism that we have now that we can bring to bear only keeps getting better and at the same time the level of criticism keeps getting worse. So by seeing both of those like right in front of me all the time, it's very clear that there the seessaw has turned and so it's no longer that a paradigm shift is going to happen. We are in the midst of it right now.
What did you cover in your talk for Harvard Medical? You were looking at more the the experiments and the research protocols and all that stuff or Well, it I used it as an excuse to to uh plug my new book called The Science of Magic. Yeah. So, I was I was specifically told not to talk about magic because that would make heads explode. So, the the way that I I I did happen I showed one slide that did have the book on it, but that's as far as I would go. The way that I talk to most audiences today is to start with experience. Has anyone ever had an experience of fill in the blank?
And so, if I do that three or four times, I can get probably 80% of the audience to say, "Yeah, it happened. I don't know what to think of it." And they use that as an entree then to say, well, here's how we test this in the laboratory to get rid of all of the usual mundane explanations. And so you go through that exercise and you come out with odds against chance of a gazillion to one. And you go through a due diligence list to show that it's not this and it's not that. It's not all this conventional ideas. The thing that falls out of those experiments is that the experience, at least in principle, is what it seems.
people are connected somehow through space and time. So if it's a physicsoriented group then I have to also put in at the end of that talk why this is not incompatible with physics as we know it today and the only gap there's one gap missing which is does the brain operate at least partially in a quantum sense because if it does and I think the evidence is going to eventually happen then we have we've closed the gap from human experience all the way up to the the whole range of psychic experience. Interesting. So if the brain functions in some way on a quantum level that would explain how you can have interconnections outside of the of the physical brain. Yeah.
I mean part of our experience is is localized but part of it is not. And that would that that would be a way of sort of getting over that divide rather than positing something like analytic idealism um as a necessary aspect. We we wouldn't need to go that far. And the reason why I like I'm not I wouldn't propose that quantum mechanics explains. I would say I'm pointing you know look look at the direction I'm pointing where physics has gone because quantum mechanics is not finished. No no no physical theory is finished regardless of how how good it looks. So eventually it will evolve into something where it becomes more and more clear.
This is my my guess uh as to why we would have these experiences and why it is completely compatible with what we know about the physical world. So I would only push as far as dual aspect monism. Yeah. Explain dual aspect monism just for those who who might uh be a little unclear. It's the proposal that uh there there really is a physical world and there really is a mental world and they are connected through what Carl Young called the unis mundus. the the one the one thing the one world where things uh emerge from under the right conditions. So in dual aspect monism uh aspects of the one world emerge as a result of meaning.
So it it never quite says in that theory like where's the meaning coming from? Who's meaning? What meaning? But nevertheless, that's a way of thinking of there are epistemic splits out of this one world. And one we see as mind and one we see as matter, but because they came from the same source, they're intimately correlated with each other. And so if you think of that as a model and you apply it to Sai experiences and also Sai experiments, that is exactly what we see. We see correlations between mind and matter and all of these this whole realm. Cool. I'm excited to dig into your new book a little bit, but um uh Jeffrey, what about you?
How are you seeing kind of like this kind of like openings in this uh in the sort of materialist wall that's that's that's been, you know, facing us for so long? Well, I I love Dean's dual aspect modism. That's that's exactly where I go to. I think that's a working model for, you know, and where this works the best for me is synchronicity, by the way. you know, you have you have a mental event over here and it's corresponds almost perfectly with a physical event and there's no there's no clear causal connection between the two, but they they did emerge from this this unus this this bigger one world.
So I my own view is that we we can adopt these models and they're really important but it ultimately goes back to human experience as Dean said and I think most most people are in this zone. I I I think the strict materialists are a minority and I think the the fundamentalist believers are a minority and I think most people are in the middle and I think that's whom we're addressing and that's why you see things like the telepathy tapes and uh of such popularity because there's so many people there. There's just everybody knows that they've had telepathic experiences. They've had pre-cognitive dreams. they they know this from their experience, but we don't have a model of it.
We don't have a a scientific model of it that's reigning at least now. And I think that's what that's the paradigm shift that Dean's speaking about. Out of curiosity, since we're on the topic, what did both of you think of the telepathy tapes? Uh Dean, you want to start? I'd be curious because you have the more scientific framing. Well, I I was interviewed for one of the episodes, so I knew a little bit about it. Um, of course, from a scientific perspective, we're immediately suspicious about the queueing that goes on. So, when we do these in these kinds of tests in the lab, they were extremely strict about preventing any kind of queueing.
When you look at the videos of some of the tests they were doing, there's queuing all over the place. So, it's an uncontrolled experiment. So fortunately though the the the person who made Kite Dickens who made this se this series he's well aware that more stringent methods are needed. And so there's a scientific group now that that was assembled to help do the next round. And so these are tests where the you you can have the autistic person and their helper, however they're helping them, doesn't matter with queuing or whatever, but two groups of them separated because part of the claim of the autistic people is that they're in communication with each other.
Okay? So put them in separate rooms. They can be queued any way you want as long as only one side gets the target and then the other side has to give the result. So that kind of experiment is underway. And what I've heard from initial results is they're not quite as as high as nearly 100% hit rate, but they're way above what we generally see in the laboratory. So once we actually get to see the the documentary and the filming of those experiments, that will take this from an interesting anecdotal case at this point into something like, holy smoke, what is happening. What about you, Jeffrey?
What were your thoughts about it? Well, I've I've listened to all the well, the first season. I haven't seen the second season or heard the second season. Um, and I know Diane I know Diane well, Diane Hennessy Powell. And I am sure the scientific evidence for autism and telepathy is overwhelming. I have no doubt about that. Um towards the end of the first season, some of the younger people, they get into religious notions. And this is where a historian of religions comes in and says, "Okay, that's an interpretation of your telepathic contact." And maybe the telepathic context is itself loaded with interpretations. I don't I don't think they're being disgenuine or or uh lying or anything.
Um, but when we start to get into conversations like the existence of a single god or a heaven or what heaven's like, you know, my my red flags go up and you know, it's a it's a different place than deans go up obviously. Um, but I think that's the conversation we should be having and I think the telepathy tapes allows us to have that conversation. Um, I I I don't think I don't I think what the skeptical or the debunking community does is they shut down the conversation and they don't want us to have it. They don't want us it to proceed. And I say, "Let it let it go.
Let it proceed. This is a real phenomena. Let's talk about it." And I'm much happier with the messiness of human religious experience. I'm not a scientist. I I'm not interested in removing um um you know possibilities of influence or queuing because I think that's what religion does you know um but it also enables that enables these phenomena as well as as makes for a bad or or or a compromised scientific experiment it enables it how just in terms of having a cultural context well I for example take belief religious belief is you know It's it enables it it it allows certain things to appear but that doesn't mean that's what those things are you know if I can speak in in that dualistic of fashion.
Um if you believe for example take take levitation. Levitation's a really it's an extreme example. If you believe in levitation that it's a sign of sanctity, you're going to probably get more people actually levitating than if you live in a culture in which that's not possible. So there's something about the belief itself that enables the phenomena, but that doesn't mean that's what the phenomena is or is about. If if I can speak speak that paradoxically or that that complexely. Yeah. Is there something about like a cultural belief that allows for phenomena to happen? Would you relate that to something like uh you know kind of Sheldon's ideas around morphinogetic fields or something that a culture kind of like strengthens certain possibilities or or something like that?
I mean I wouldn't related to to Rupert's ideas but that for no particular reason. I'm just talking about the telepathy tapes. I think that's there is an enabling belief belief systems here that I think are really prone and interesting and and able to be commented on. But that doesn't mean the phenomena itself is not real. If I can if I can put it that way. How does that strike you Dean? Yeah, there's there's always a problem of interpretation but it's very clear in SI research that belief opens filters open psychological filters and you get better results and experiment if people believe that they can do it.
So and it also is probably related to experimenters. So if experimenters are doing an experiment and internally they're thinking this is it's very unlikely then that they're going to end up with a significant result. So but and this of course becomes a problem which is exactly why you have methods like double blind that are that are used to in order to to try to get rid of the belief issue. The problem is if sigh is true which I think it is then there is no control there are no double blinds. You can't separate anything. That that that's that's my messiness. That's what I'm trying to say.
Yeah. Yeah. Because I I I a problem I guess you run into with the scientific community is how like often there'll be an initial experiment which shows like a significant correlation of an effect and then when you try to repeat the experiment the correlation is not as strong or or is that kind of the kind of problem that you run into? Yeah. So there there is first of all there's a first timers effect. So the first time somebody does an experiment, they're all excited and they're naive about it and the results usually are whoppingly amazing and and then it progressively gets smaller and smaller, but it never goes to zero.
That's the point. So one of the reasons why I think the first timer effect happens is because uh your excitement overwhelms your reaction to it because you don't know yet what's going to happen. And then you see something amazing and you say, "We got it. We nailed the holy grail. Now we're going to show people this is really good. Internally at the same time you're thinking I hope it works. You know I don't know exactly what I did to make this work so good. So doubt begins to creep in even somebody who has an a priori belief and that will begin to squash it. So the reason why it doesn't go to zero is because the effect is real.
It's just that it's difficult to maintain the same state every single time you do something because we're human and we have memories. Uh and and so that's that's why we we see declines to say nothing of other I mean other reasons like you get bored after a while, right? Boredom is a killer. So there's something like a state of naive wonder that sort of enhances like synchronistic effects and so on. Um so you're both coming from very different disciplines and um uh I know Jeffrey, what was your last book or what's what's what's the most recent work that you did? It was a how to think of possibly.
Yeah. Uh, and I'm curious like, you know, do you have kind of different working uh, definitions for I would say like the terms like consciousness maybe and and and yeah, let's start with consciousness. I mean, Jeffrey, how do you how do you define it or how how do you think about it? Well, first of all, I love Dean's word and I' I've read the new book and I I've been following Dean for I what two decades now? I mean, it's been a long time. Um but I am not I am not a scientist. I am not um a parasychologist. I'm a historian and a um someone who works in the humanities.
So my my um criteria are different. And but that's not that doesn't mean they're better. It just means they're different. Um consciousness for me first of all the human is two as I often say. And by that I don't mean that there are two things in us. You know, there's some kind of spiritual world and there's some kind of physical world and and never the twain shall meet. I mean that we are not in control. We are not aware. We are not conscious of our full capacity. Um and this is obvious to me in religious phenomena that religious phenomena happen all the time. Um two people people don't choose them.
there there isn't some kind of conscious control often um sometimes there is um but often there's not and and so that's what I'm most interested in are these spontaneous experiences that at least the person experiences as spontaneous maybe they're not spontaneous in the end but but the the person certainly certainly um experiences them as such um I'm not sure if you sort of went into the whole question of how you define consciousness or whatever. Yeah. Well, it's complicated. I mean, there there there's this ego, there's Jeff or there, you know, there's Daniel or there's Dean, but there's also this cosmic awareness that kicks in under certain extraordinary circumstances, usually involving some kind of trauma, by the way, not always. Um, and so consciousness for me is really it's multi-layered.
It's it's it's many it's many different things. Uh, and I think what we get into, what we where we make a mistake is we think consciousness is one thing or we think there's one state of consciousness when there are actually multiple states of consciousness. How about you, Dean? Do you have like a working definition? Well, my working definition is uh consciousness. I think what we mean by that is awareness. Yeah. It's subjective experience. And again Jeff is right that there's a spectrum here that that there are various degrees to which somebody can be aware of something. Uh we know for example that uh the strongest effects that we see in cy research are from the unconscious things you are not consciously aware of but some aspect of you is aware of it because it's reflected in your body.
So what kind of awareness is that? My guess is that if you meditated every day for 30 years, your your span of what you can be aware of is simply wider. It's broader. So you can be aware of things that for a Joe six-pack on the street might be considered a fairly narrow band of awareness whereas a meditator maybe it's this big and maybe under psychedelics it's 10 times that big. So it's something about the nature of awareness and the me I like the metaphor of whatever that is it doesn't seem to be in space or time somehow transcends it. So we're living in a non-local ocean of whatever that awareness thing is that's everywhere and I call that big sea consciousness whereas what I talk about the eye is little sea consciousness.
So I'm a piece of that ocean and under the right conditions I can be the ocean like the drop of water knowing that it's in the ocean. So those are nice metaphors because beyond the metaphor I have I don't know what it is. Those are lots of classical religious metaphors you know the ocean and the drop and the little mind and the big mind. I mean these are all um very familiar. This is what I mean by the humanist too that it it's vast and it's it's specific. It's local and it's non-local to to use Dean's language. Yeah. Everything in between. There's a whole intermediate realm in here too that I think is really really problematic and and but it really fascinating for us too.
And it's it's what we don't deal with very well. When you say that Go ahead. The reason why I I value Jeff's work so much is because uh al although I'm I'm I'm I don't know about the humanities very much other than a few things I read mainly from Jeff I think uh but I'm also human so I I have those experiences the same kinds of experiences that other people have but my prediliction is to immediately go to the question of well what was that because often times the experience is one that that this is this is not normal this That's not my everyday experience. Well, what what is it? And if if you're a psychologist, an academic psychologist, you immediately think of 400 things that it could be, all of which are completely mundane, subliminal this, and you know, a lot queuing and priming and whatever.
So, you want to be able to push through all of that and say, well, is it any of that? And if it turns out that the answer is no, it's something else. It's something much bigger than that. Well, then that's where I get excited. Uh yeah, I want to talk a little bit about magic. Um I'm kind of curious the same way kind of like how you guys think about magic differently or how you define it. Uh and then also Dean, I'm curious why you got so excited about it. The last few books you've been been focused on it. Yeah. So I I the last book and this current book are both about magic essentially because it is well understood within the SAI research community that we're dealing with magic.
And so years ago there was a there was a discussion that that in the title of an article are we shaman or are we scientists and that was basically about the sociology of what we do not about the nature of the phenomena because everybody doing this kind of work immediately knows this is somewhere between shamanism and esoteric magic and blah blah blah. It it it's in that domain but we're just applying scientific tests to it. So similarly to when BF Skinner and his contemporaries said in order for psychology to be seen as a serious scient science we can't talk about subjectivity because you can't measure that directly. So we're not going to talk about it and eventually people forgot that there actually is a subjectivity. So that that sort of infected the academic psychology for 50 years.
Well, I've I've known since day one that we're we're basically talking about somewhere between religious experiences and shamanistic experiences and all that. That's the raw meat of it, but we don't talk about it. And so, just like we we don't talk about fight club, I've got I'm tired of that. Like, we why don't we just say what it is that we're doing? And so does it is what we're doing overlapping with the nature of especially western esoteric traditions? The answer is sure it is. It's obvious. So I'm just stating the obvious basically. And how does it a little more precise? Well, I'm still kind of curious how you just define magic as a as a term.
Is it about operations from the psychic world to the physical world or or what? Yeah. What what defines magic for you? Well, complete parallel with what is studied in cyberarch. So the three categories of magic are enchantment which is which is about manifesting things. We would call it psychokinesis intention affecting the world, divination which is perception through space and time and the which is about spirits and more on the religious side of ways of that people think about things like survival after death. That's what we study. That's the only difference then is that from a magical perspective, it is seen as a practice of of psychic abilities.
Yeah. To bring about certain results or whatever to bring about certain results. However, even within the magical traditions, a lot of it is based on empiricism. Like we're not going to keep doing this spell. It this doesn't do anything. Yeah. Well, so that's that's empiricism. We're going to test it and test it and eventually somebody writes a grimmoire that has spells that supposedly work for somebody and so that's that's what we're going to use. Uh but otherwise the the nature of the phenomena are the same. The it is uh spun differently according to language and culture and history but it's the same thing. Has thinking about it in those ways led you to kind of like want to change the focus of your experimental or research work in any way?
Well, I did. Yes. So, one of the experiments for years now, I've been doing experiments looking at the idea that consciousness collapses the wave function using various kinds of optical systems. So in this last experiment I did uh I ended up recruiting people who were meditators or magicians meaning that they they claimed and and I tested through questionnaires and videos and so on that they either had experience in meditation or they experienced doing magical acts and the reason is that most meditation you can think of as practice of inward focus of attention whereas magic is an outward focus of attention. And so I wanted to see well does it make any difference in an experiment where you're trying to influence something outside of yourself.
And as it turned out uh the magicians did significantly u not only significantly better but significant in the test of collapsing the wave function whereas the meditators did not. So, it's like one pointer and I haven't replicated this yet, so I don't know if it's going to hold up, but the idea of it makes a lot of sense to me that if you're trying to influence the thing out there, which is what science does, we'll use people who practice that as opposed to meditators who are really good at following instructions, but may not have practice and actually doing an outward focus of attention and intention. I see. And what about uh you Jeffrey? What about what what does magic mean for you?
And how do you see it kind of like you know what what's in speaking about it? How does it operate in the world and so on? First of all, there's no more universal and common experience than magic than the history of religions. There's none. The history of religions is the history of magic. And we generally in the west anyway in the monotheistic west we call things we don't like magic and we call things we do like religion or or now science. Um, but I take magic back to Dean's dual aspect modism. So there's a there's a mental aspect over here that's influencing a physical aspect, but it's influencing it in this unus.
And then it appears up here and it looks magical. It looks like there's no causal connection, but in fact there is because the it it it they both emerge from this this deeper reality. So I I personally think magic is like key uh key to both the history of religions but also the future history of science. And and I I think it will bear out. Today it's used as a a bad word. By the way, if you're accused of magical thinking, you're, you know, somebody's making fun of you or somebody's trying to take you down. Um but I just think that's ignorant. That's just ignorant. I I would add on to that that I took out a section of my book where I was showing that the notion of magic is found throughout science.
That word is found throughout science and it's a it's not as a bad word but as a placeholder for something amazing is happening in this context. You see it from astronomy into biology and everywhere else. It even in quantum mechanics now there's a property called magic. So th this uh the notion is that uh we we kind of all agree that there are some magical things that happen and as Jeff was saying it's like somehow there's a relationship and as John Wheeler pointed out we live in a participatory universe. I mean that's as mainstream physics as you can get. What he's talking about is that there is a relationship between mental and and material in some way and maybe we don't understand it very well.
So the word which everyone kind of gets a sense of what that means is a placeholder for someday we're going to understand this amazing relationship and that's why you see it everywhere in in science. Let let me talk about scientists um and math mathematics. I not sure I've ever met a mathematician who wasn't a platonist. By which I mean why why do the numbers we make up in our head why do they end up corresponding to physical reality? That is weird. That is fundamentally weird that we can come up with a set of equations and get a person to the moon and back. Okay. Most mathematicians I know become plaintists or are functioning plaintists in the sense that they think that numbers are discovered that they're discovering some aspect of reality.
They're not inventing them. They're not making something up. They're discovering something. There there's some esoteric space in which numbers or mathematics exists. And that is a fundamentally magical notion. This is where I'm trying to go with it. that there's some there's some deep deep correlation between mental reality the mathematics and material reality the the the physics as it were and that reality is in the math. Yeah. Uh this more of a speculative question but as I was um thinking about um you know the work you guys have been doing on magic I was also I' I've been following this esoteric You Tuber recently Gigi Young who does a lot of stuff around Rudolph Steiner's ideas who you know I'm completely fascinated with.
But she's recently been doing a few things about how, you know, certain contemporary events, you know, for instance, like maybe Charlie Kirk's assassination could almost be looked at as kind of a cult or magical operations to kind of create some type of uh effect, you know, and and then I guess the thought would be, you know, are there people who are maybe behind the scenes or in the ruling elites who kind of have a have a handle or an understanding of psychic phenomena, the realm of the psyche, you know, magical operations, um even if the institutions and the establishment has been saying that this doesn't exist. Um just curious if you have any thoughts or perspective on that. Well, can I speak Dean to that? Yeah, of course. So, I get asked that question a lot.
But I mean what about the bad uses of these notions essentially the the conspiratorial notions and there is actually a large parasychological literature on what they call the fear of sigh which I actually like a lot I think it's really really powerful and basically the fear of sigh comes down to the idea that if the mind can affect material reality then of course the mind can affect material reality in a negative or scary way as well as a positive or redemptive way. Um, and I think that's essentially true. Uh, and I know that the most of the history of magic around the world is a history of negative magic. You're you're killing something or you're you're winning a war or you're seducing someone. It's not it's not good.
Mhm. Um, and so I I think we one of the mistakes we make is that we associate all religious experience with goodness and and with ethics and or with our ethics. And I just think that's a mistake. I think human beings are uh complicated and if you posit something like sigh, which I do, it can be used negatively as well as positively as well as neutrally. And I I just don't see any problem with that. Is there a con is there a conspiracy or a secret committee somewhere? Probably not. I I don't I'm not a I'm not a supporter of secret committees. Uh because I don't think anybody understands what's going on.
I really think we're messed up. Uh and we're stumbling through this. And these are these are what Charles Ford called wild talents. These are real phenomena, but they're not yet controllable or weaponizable and that's probably a good thing. Uh Dean, what about you? Would you would you add to that or how would you assess that? Well, so when when I was at Harvard, it was part of the Sadguru center there uh at the medical school. And so later I had a chat uh with Sadguru about this. Um, and I was trying to get at the the notion of why in virtually every spiritual tradition it is recognized that you will begin to bump into these kinds of phenomena the more that you practice whatever that practice is.
And in each of the traditions then you're told don't pay much attention to that stuff because your goal is spiritual enlightenment and kind of push through it. So we'll name like the cities and the yoga uh traditions and say this you're you'll experience some of these things but look at it as kind of a guidepost rather than something to collapse into and I I was asking sad guru this because I mean after all my profession is collapsing directly into the sigh phenomena and trying to figure out what is going on here and even you can look at that from a point of view of not simply from the the scientific perspective but it is a validation then that there actually is a spiritual path and poti and others were not making it up. So you think that would be an attractor. Wouldn't that be good? Sadguru did not agree with that and and the reason why is because very similar to what Jeff was saying that when you begin to recognize what these abilities are about they provide a certain power there and power is seductive.
And so once once you have your hands on a power, will you always use it for good? Probably not. Because we're weak. We're we're we're anxious monkeys essentially. And we So we're not evolved enough to the point where you can take on huge amounts of potential power and actually only use it for good. So that may be one of the underlying reasons why there's a kind of fear and not only in the general public but even among the researchers there's a fear of what's going on here because we we kind of sort of understand little bits of it but we don't really understand what's going on if I can add to that.
So I think the history of religions or the scholarship on these anomalous phenomena only advances if we ignore what the religions say. I I don't like what Sakuru said. I don't I I think we should ignore it. And that doesn't mean we affirm the negative or but we have to have a conversation about it. We have to point it out. We have to become aware of it. I think you know I gave a talk you know it was actually at Dean's invitation and one of the sections was why why we are so scary. Well the reason we are so scary is because we talk about these very things.
you know, and we we want to we want to understand them. And so I I think a part of saying there's kind of like an innate intrinsic fear of the psychic in these realms because people do sense that there's a lot of power there and they intuitively know they're not ready for that kind of power. It's also the it's the contemplative thing is ignore them. Do not pay attention to them because they will they will take you off of this contemplative path. But that resonates perfectly with ignore them that the skeptics or the debunkers are saying too. And I want to reject both of those and say no, pay attention to them because they're actually speaking about the reality of these phenomena and this can advance our our understanding of reality.
So it it's a it's a it's a fairly serious thing. even though I'm I'm making fun of it or I'm laughing about it, it's it's it's an it's a very conscious rejection or ignoral of the advice. Yeah. And so my argument was, isn't it better to know than not to know? And and Right. I mean, Yeah. Yeah. My point is my point is somebody's trying to talk to us. Listen. Listen. And guess who's talking to us? We are. Yeah, like why would we I mean it's like a psychological problem if you're not paying attention. So I think the it is true though that the the history of technology is generally not that great for us.
And so in this case I said well like what to Sadguru I said well what if we develop a way of of producing extremely good telepathy like wouldn't that be good because then there's no secrets and you know lots of things would change probably for the better. And he said, "Well, if I can read your mind, the way he put it, I can also inject thoughts into your mind." And talk about the level of control there. I mean, it's like one of the major fears that people have when they they're saying, "I'm I'm having thoughts. I don't know where they're coming from." Well, so the usual way of thinking of it is, well, the person is schizophrenic, maybe. Or maybe schizophrenic is when somebody actually is targeting them.
So, wouldn't it be better to actually understand what's going on there? Uh well it's it's a yeah we need to talk about these things. My my further point I so I get asked this a lot. My further point is if we don't talk about them they're still going to happen. The the 90% of the audience is still going to have these experiences and they are going to shut down. They are going to there's going to be layer and layer of secrecy that is going to kick in and it's going to be all kinds of social pressure and my all of my psychoanalytic and intellectual instincts say that's a bad thing.
You you you want to speak you want to speak what your psyche is saying. You don't want to shove it down. Yeah. You need people and yourself to be able to hear it though, right? Because in and this I think is pretty well culture bound, right? Like it's really strong in the US and in Europe. It is way less of that in India. So when I I went to India for a month and gave lectures all over the place and like there's it's like no big deal. Like why are you even talking about this stuff? Of course these things exist. Yeah. Uh in US though it has been a major struggle since the very beginning and probably in most of Europe as well.
So that there's there's an assumption that this somehow does a nasty violation of our physical worldview and so it cannot exist. It is impossible and so take it away that and so Jeff is right. There's a gigantic suppression that goes on which from a psychoanalytic perspective is saying you probably ought to pay attention to that. Well, let's let's let's drill into that a little bit more in terms of like so let's let's imagine like a near future where these things are, you know, mainly, you know, kind of accepted by society like societies, precognition, telepathy, even occasionally more extreme things like, you know, materialization of objects or who knows what. Um what what what would that mean kind of like for society and for social ethics and so on?
Like have you have you thought about you know what would be the consequences of you know this you know this becoming a really a big paradigm shift in a way you know would it be a destabilizing thing for society or would society find a way to sort of you know recalibrate because yeah we look at like Amazonian indigenous cultures where they use shamanism for power you know you know they were you know across the forest they were sending poison darts at their enemies in the astral plane and so on. So, how do you see this, you know, shaking out in like a modern post-industrial technological world? Can I I'll speak to that first. Yeah. First of all, I don't think it's a fair question, Daniel.
I my own profound commitment to this is because of human beings who are shut down and silenced because they had experiences that don't fit into their the worldview any worldview and I get really upset by that. But imagining what the world will be like if these experiences can be spoken. I don't know. I don't I don't have a you know take the UFO world. There are different perspectives on on whether disclosure will benefit the religions or or vastly disempower them. You know I tend I tend more to the negative side by the way. I think we I think once we realize that this is us and that there's a vast consciousness in us that is not localized or egoic, I think it will have devastating effects on particular kinds of fundamentalisms.
uh it won't it won't it won't negatively influence the kind of verticality of of religion but it will vastly challenge and destroy the the horizontal exclu ex exclusionary nature of some forms of religious orientation. Um so I do think there are major social societal impacts that we're talking about but I don't know how that will play out. Uh and and um I I'll just stop there. Mhm. Yeah. My sense is that it will destroy civilization as we know it. So and and for very simple reasons that uh let's say we had a president who lies constantly. But telepathy never that'll never happen. No, of course not.
But but but to say telepathy had evolved to the point where people are able to to like look at that person and say what is wrong with that person? Like everything he's saying is lying. because they know the justice system would change, business would change, politics, everything that we know of would change because it all depends on secrecy. So that that world could not look the way the world looks today. So if there's a transition period, the status quo would push against the development of like the widespread acceptance of these things like with enormous power and they they would prevent it. And so you can look historically backwards and say, well maybe that's one of the reasons why this thing has been pushed out on the fringe for so long because there is a recognition whether conscious or unconscious.
We don't want this kind of thing to to be unleashed because it would destroy everything that we know. Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's kind of um kind of the idea like Francis Gates the historian of sort of Renaissance magic wrote a book about the Rosacrusian enlightenment and people written about Pico dela Mirandola. There were these different attempts to bring back more of like a nishatory path within the western Christian thing. Um and they were basically you know branded as heretics and tossed out. Then the witches obviously were also um but they were they were also there. They they're important. This is my point is that they they're they're suppressed or they're pushed down, but they're also they're there 500 years ago.
They'll be there 500 years from now. It's it's still going to it's not going to go away because people wanted to go away. Yeah. the sense there's a transformative potentiality here that could have all sorts of impacts on on society if it was unleashed and along with people's innate fear of their own power maybe that they don't want to deal with because they've got too much shadow. Uh there's also this concern that this would be too disruptive for societ. Maybe that's also why in the 60s all this stuff got like pushed down when it started to emerge. Let me speak magically to to to this. First of all, I think this will I'm an optimist.
I think this will win out eventually because this is what reality is. I think it really matters what reality is and I think this is real and this will show itself as real eventually. Now, are there visions in our entertainment industry and on television and film of a positive future? The answer is no. You know, and as Dean often jokes, the psychic in the movies always gets killed or gets, you know, that we don't have positive views of of superhuman abilities or or the future. But we can we can we can do this. And if we have a negative view of the future, guess what the future is likely to be?
It's likely to be negative. If we have a positive view of the future, it's likely to be positive. And and I think the superhuman abilities is is part of this this this future that we can just imagine it a new. We can we can really do this thing differently, but we we've really got to try. We've really got to do it. Yeah. So I have two thoughts on that. One is that there's this TV program now called Pluribus which is addressing this very issue which is about some mysterious way everyone in the world becomes a hive mind and they're all just completely happy and overjoyed except for the protagonist who somehow is not absorbed into it and so she's freaking out.
And so it's a very interesting narrative way to to study this issue because at least in that case if everyone in the world with the exception of something like 11 people are absorbed into the hive mind like everything is suddenly perfectly fine. Well what's wrong with that? But then we look at the the images that are portrayed. It's the invasion of the body snatchers. It's the Borg on Star Trek almost always seen as the most horrific thing that could happen is that you somehow you you end up being part of the hive mind and that's an ego thing. The ego is pushing against that because it wants to protect itself.
But nevertheless, we want to achieve world peace really quickly. That would do it. You're pro- hivemind. I think hivemind would be great. That's very like Telar Desardon, right? the newest sphere similar to what Jeff is saying eventually one consciousness on this larger scale there's a positive view like the opposite what's that there's a positive ecstatic view of the future it got crushed yeah so so what's wrong with that the only thing wrong with that is uh we have internal we we'd have an internal sense that uh it's important to be separate except that the phenomena we're talking about says well that's an illusion we're actually not separate So there may already be a hive mind at an unconscious level.
And among other things, the global consciousness project that we've been running for a long time now was showing that that's probably the case. But the there is a hive mind. It's just below the level of awareness for most people. Oh, I'm very bad at doing this, but um I want you you to tell people just a little bit about the global conscious project in case they don't know. Uh but I also just wanted to remember that I'm this is, you know, lial news. It's my it's my You Tube channel. If you if you're watching this, you're enjoying what we're talking about, please like and subscribe and share and all of that great stuff.
It really helps. But yeah, go ahead. Give us a little bit of just I mean I know it by well. I'm sure Jeffrey does too, but just for you know, whoever's watching. Okay, so the GCP as we call it was taking uh the mind matter interaction experiments with true random number generators that used to be in the lab and putting it worldwide. And so this is not a worldwide experiment in the sense that we're asking people to mentally try to influence generators around the world, but simply looking at moments of very high attention, usually driven by media events to see whether or not that is correlated then with a is the mental coherence of large scale attention reflected as a coherence effect in randomness.
In other words, is there a global scale mind matter interaction? So the all of the evidence at this point says it looks very much like something like that is going on to seven sigma for those who don't know what that means. It means odds against chance of around 3 trillion to one. So something is happening. Do we we don't understand exactly how to interpret it all yet but it looks like there is something like a hive mind that you can see when hundreds of millions of people are all attending to the same thing at the same time. Whether it's the Super Bowl or whether it's some kind of tragedy, media now has the capability of pulling together huge numbers of people and we see reflections in the physical world.
So people want to know more go to gcp2. net. So it's still running. You have the random number generators and how many we're in the second generation now with with new kinds of generators and many many more. We have over a thousand um and as I as I remember the biggest uh differentials from normal patterns of randomness were found like with 911 and OJ Simpsons chase and so on and if I remember th those the patterns began to deviate like a few hours before the plane hit the building and so on. So there was a sense of like there being kind of an incoate um sense that something was coming.
Yeah. the the precognitive element is less clear. Okay. I did do a study. I mean it happens occasionally but like for major earthquakes we one of our colleagues looked at major earthquakes to see if there was a precursor to that not very clear. Okay. So it definitely when something happens and media draws people's attention you can see it. Uh but on for using tweets or Twitter tweets I don't know what they're called now the the individual things. I like tweets better. But anyway, I I used a a series of around 10 years of tweets and there's a sentiment measurement that goes along with them. Is there are they happy tweets or sad tweets essentially and objectively measured according to each word.
Does that act as a precognition about something that is very negative that's going to happen two weeks in the future? That's the analysis I did and the answer is yes. M and they looked across 10 different languages and you you can see this as something like a a grand premonition sense in the language that people are using dayto-day just in their tweets like you you know we don't consciously know what's going to happen two weeks from now but it turns out that the sentiment keeps getting lower and lower and lower as you as you approach that day. Um yeah I guess following sort of on that a little bit what about the impacts of emerging technologies on kind of like the study of consciousness the study of psychic phenomena. So there's obviously you know neural links brain interfaces there's the god helmet which u you know kind of stimulates a feeling of like awe and and um connection to something bigger.
There's obviously artificial intelligence and the whole question of you know could that become sentient or conscious kind of uh yeah what how are you seeing this impacting the the sort of disciplines and the kind of like um explorations that you guys are are on right now. Well for one thing I know that there's enormous interest in Silicon Valley on this. So everyone there I think is required to take LSD or something and and so that the they're open to these experiences to the point where they want to to create technologies to use it in some way. Uh I think that at this point is somewhat naive because we don't really have a good handle on what what the phenomena are. But nevertheless will technology of any type help improve the science?
Absolutely it will. So I'm I'm able to use uh AI chatbots now to it's as though I have a Ph D student here who's really good in statistics and one over here is really good in coding. And I mean I'm I'm now a collective. I've created a little hive mind of Ph D level people who help me do my science which is much much better than it used to be because I had to rely only on myself and what I knew. So it's so science definitely will improve and that will improve the nature of the evidence. So where that ends up I don't know but it might accelerate the broader acceptance of the phenomena simply because the science itself is going to get a lot better.
And Jeffrey what about you? Where are you seeing the interest in the sort of new technology revolutions and and how they're impacting explorations of consciousness the psyche psychic phenomena and so on? Well, the conversation around AI is everywhere. Yeah. Particularly in higher education. Um, and I think the the two um conclusions at least in my world are one it it's a it's a great tool. Um, we need to use it. And the other is there's always this I would say it a called a thread. There's always this underlying assumption that's materialist in orientation that consciousness is somehow a function of little bits of matter organized into into more complicated bits and suddenly it becomes conscious or sensient or alive.
And so I do think the AI conversation um tends towards a kind of materialism um although it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. We it we can also um reveal what's really unique and special about consciousness and about about reflexivity and subjectivity that that isn't reproducible by by any computer or any set of computers. I was also interested you you spoke a little about UFOs and disclosure um and I know you did a piece you did with some work with Whitley Streber I believe. Yeah. Uh, what's your current Well, both of you, let's start with Jeffrey. What's your current perspective on on the sort of UFO realm?
I mean, are you more in the kind of um Well, it actually it actually relates to the AI question. Okay. Yeah, tell me. Well, the the narrative or the I would call it a mythology, and I I don't mean that in a negative sense. The narrative that that's public now is what we call the threat narrative. It's it's the nuts and bolts. It's some kind of machine or technology in the sky and it's invading our nation state, our airspace, it's an aviation threat, you know, etc., etc. But there's this whole other realm of the UFO world that's about experiences, that it's about abductions, it's about encountering entities, and that just gets lpped off.
Um, and so what I want to say is don't lop it off. Don't do that. you know, but there were a lot of people like I mean I read David Jacobs's book, The Threat. He was a hypnotherapist and and a lot that's the me that's the messiness part that I'm not suggesting that we suddenly believe all of these experiences or that we just take this all in. But we that's part of the phenomenon. The paranormal is a part of the phenomenon whether that's recognized in the narrative or not. And so what fascinates me about the UFO topic is precisely this combination of the material or the technological and the paranormal or the mental.
It's that combination again that that draws me to this topic and and the fact that I don't actually think anybody understands what's going on. I think we're just still working in a kind of dualistic or materialist framework. And so we can't understand what is essentially a dual aspect monism, which is essentially this this mental or paranormal aspect interacting with this technological or or nuts and bolts aspect. Um, and and where that's going again, I don't know, Daniel, but but that's what that's the hook. That's the hook, as I call it, or the the the gateway drug of the UFO. It pulls it pulls people in. Yeah.
And so it was disappointing a little bit in the this uh documentary, The Age of Disclosure, which came out a little while ago. Uh it doesn't talk about the psychic element of it at all, even though everyone in that field knows perfectly well that that's that is at least half of what's going on. And so yeah, yeah, maybe all of it. Yeah. Well, but the problem is it's not all of it. It's but it's a like what the experiencer community says a lot is people will say in the nuts andbolts sphere narrative well we don't know what they want and the experiencers like yeah we do they told us I mean we have tons of tons of these communications why don't you listen to us and that's all I'm saying is let's listen it's like the the conversation we had earlier about the sidis or the the paranormal stuff let's listen you know Let's not not keep dismissing or cutting these people out of the conversation.
Well, so it's interesting then that it was it was said in that that documentary that one of the reasons why this has been suppressed for so long is the religious fundamentalists who are in charge of the purse strings who say these are demons and so you cannot engage with them. Well, well, okay, that shuts it down pretty quick, you know. And the same thing then with any any kind of psychic thing, you know, don't pay attention to it because it might be bad. Yeah, it might be, but we won't know unless we actually engage. Well, I told I I I said earlier religious fundamentalism is the same thing as materialism.
It's two sides of the same the same push back. And you know, in terms of demons, you just call a demon what doesn't fit into your system. That that's that's what a demon is. And my joke is I have never met a demon who didn't look like a suffering human being. And I never have. That's not a joke actually. That's Yeah, I know. It's true. It's like come on, it's us again, but it's it's suffering. It's it's us in suffering or in trauma or and so I I honestly I don't I think the demon language is really bad. I think it's just pure projection. Yeah, another question for you guys.
So, one of you, you know, you know each other's work, you both really appreciate each other's work. One of you has been in science and one in the humanities. I'm kind of curious like Dean, if you were to switch places with Jeffrey and Jeffrey, you would to switch places with Dean, like what would you like Jeffrey, what do you feel would be amazing for somebody like Dean to research in this area that maybe hasn't been touched yet from a scientific perspective? And Dean, what do you think it would be really crucial to investigate? maybe hasn't really been dealt with very much from a humanities or, you know, that kind of academic orientation, you know.
Well, I I have an easy answer to that. I would study magic. Okay. And and so so I don't I don't know anything about religion. I was not raised that like the history of magic like a grip on I would I would study like the whole shebang and and in particular parts that I don't really understand very well which is the religious side because it's it's all intertwined you know as Jeff keeps saying the he would use the word messy I would use the word variance huge amount of variance in there and it makes things more difficult to study but if if I uh had a second life I I would probably begin there in what would be what would be your initial question?
My question yeah about well the the question would be then well why have these kinds of practices persisted forever if they weren't true or at least if there wasn't some truth to it because you know I mean magical thinking yeah that we were trying to save ourselves from uncertainty essentially and and that's that's viable but still I'm not sure that something would persist throughout history if there wasn't some reason why people were thinking Okay. Well, if you do this, this, and this, well, then you get that outcome. The the flip side to that is people in sports are always saying that they're superstitious. So, does it matter if you wear special color socks? For that person, it does.
May not work for anybody else, but if they believe it's going to help, well, then yeah, that helps from a psychological perspective at minimum. Maybe beyond that. Yeah. Interesting. What about you, Jeffrey? What would you love to know from a scientific perspective that you don't really have access to? I would probably be a mathematician. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, I would. I because I think that's behind a lot of the science and I I I think it's ultimately Pltonism, you know, in terms of thinking of of some kind of structure of m of of of reality as as mathematical. So, I think it's an access. It's it's it's a a heady abstract access to reality.
Well, certainly that was what they thought in the ancient world, right? There was a great interest in in I think it's what they still think. I think if you just talk to people, they that's what they still think. Yeah. The poster boy for that is Romanian. Yeah. Right. You the the Indian mathematician who had goddesses talking to him. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. So I mean there is like the pure case where I don't need to know anything. I just need to talk to the goddess and I will get this entire book of theorems which people are still working on today because they're turning out to be true.
Yeah. Um cool. Well, you know talking for an hour I don't want to keep you forever but it's so nice to to hang out with you guys a little bit. Um what would you kind of like um you know let's say somebody is listening to this and hasn't really invested so much. they're still skeptical or they're kind of like confused or they don't really know uh you know maybe they've had a little bit of intuition of psychic phenomena like what would you what would you kind of advise for them? How would you advise them to explore it or cultivate an interest in it or anything like that?
What I advise is uh to read my books because the reason I wrote those books is so I don't have to spend hours talking to somebody about their experiences. That is exactly why I wrote it. You're interested in this? Read this book. Yeah. And then we can talk. But if you don't read the book first, there's nothing to talk about. And and which book would they would they read first? Which which one would The science of magic. Okay. So I would say the same. I mean, look, look, I spend every morning maybe three or four hours writing, you know, and it's to communicate with people. And if people don't read those communications, then I I've got nothing, you know, there's no conversation there.
The the other piece of advice I would use, it's hard to get people to read books these days, man. Well, but that's a problem. That's I know it's a problem. There are audio books, though. Yeah, that's true. Well, Jeff, are your books available as audio books? Well, two just two of them. Just the flip and and the supernatural, but not not the other ones. No, it's hard. It's hard as you know to do audio. Or maybe it's not hard for you. No, I like I I've been asked, "Well, why don't I read the book?" So, you got to be kidding. Nobody wants to listen to my voice for eight or 10 hours.
So, I use some of my advanced money to pay a professional reader and his, you know, his is the perfect kind of voice for it. And that's that's how I do it. The um the other piece of advice I would have, Daniel, is just listen to your loved ones. listen to yourself. Um, and and by that I mean people have these experiences and they really don't fit in to what we think about the world. So, you know, I think our views of the world are what's problematic, not our experiences. And so I think that's the ultimate the ultimate test of of of of a skeptical response is just to listen to people and and and and to listen to to oneself.
I mean I I think these experiences are really common actually. Yeah. We've done surveys showing that among the general population, if you give a list of 25 different kinds of experiences that people have had, 94% of the general population say that they have had at least one on an average above seven of the 25. So then we tested hypothesis that uh scientists are human too. And so we asked academics at elite universities around the world what did they think about these 25 experiences not what they believed about them but what their experiences were 93% had at least one and on average eight of the experiences including academics saying that they have experienced levitation a small percentage yeah small percentage but nevertheless some of them who are academics in places like the Ivy Leagues said that they've experienced levitation and that doesn't mean that they'll put them into their science or into their their lecture.
This is this was what I've learned lecturing at universities. By the way, I've given well over a hundred in all kinds of universities and I can tell you for an absolute with absolute certainty that intellectuals are people too. Yeah. um and they have these experiences but they won't talk about them you know from the lecture or from or much less in a grant proposal but that doesn't mean they don't happen they just won't do it because they're trying to get the grant or you know get the lecture or whatever and I think that's a problem I I I really do I think that's just that's the issue but that's I mean we saw that with psychedelics right because when I wrote my first book on psychedelics you know it dead silence in the culture. You couldn't even bring it up.
It was instant ridicule and then you know there was a flood of articles on you know Iawaska and then people started making TV shows and suddenly it's like there's certain careers now where if you don't have on your resume that you've done like Iaska in Peru you're not going to get a job you know not no one wants you to be their life coach if you haven't like spent a month you know in the jungle you know drinking I was so um so you know we could see a flip I guess that would be the flip uh along those lines at some point you know but then on the other hand You know, I have to be honest, I'm not convinced that the whole psychedelic uh flip has actually been socially beneficial for various reasons. Yeah. For some individuals, it's been beneficial, but um did you guys ever read William Thompson? Well, I know the name. He was a cultural critic in 70s, 80s, really brilliant.
Uh he wrote the time falling bodies come to light and uh coming into being text on the evolution of consciousness. And in one of those books he has a whole theory come and coming into being around how kind of different things that have been happening over the last you know 40 50 years now have been actually eroding the boundaries between the physical and the psychic plane which allow more kind of like ambiguous or malevolent kind of entities to cross that plane. And he talked about how uh you know electronic media you know the internet and psychedelic use were two types of things that many many people were doing which might be having this boundary of sort of eroding you know this effect of eroding this boundary between the psychic and the physical. This is the point where Ouija boards are always mentioned too by the way. What do you mean?
Well letting this letting the demons in. This is demon talk again, you know, just this that porous boundary and this is things you shouldn't do. You shouldn't take psychedelics. You shouldn't use Ouija boards and you shouldn't maybe I wasn't saying should or shouldn't I mean and you know I mean I' I've advocated for people to take psychedelics but have you know but but I do wonder if maybe there there has been a negative effect. This is the fear again. Maybe this is Dean's comment about maybe this is why maybe this is Yeah. Well, it's just it's disruptive for the stability of civilization. Yeah. But so maybe that's necessary in order to evolve into a different civilization, a better one, right?
I mean we we can stay stuck in this form for a long time and we don't see at this point any advancement in terms of using technology that we have very carefully vetted in some way to to more likely end up helping us rather than killing us. That's part of the discussion in AI. When we have a super intelligent AI, we've lost control completely. And I also I I'm co-founded a genetic engineering company and we're we've created a a compound that would help treat dementia which otherwise is really difficult to treat. So, okay, as best as we can tell, this would not have a negative side effect.
I mean, we're we're paying close attention to the ethics of genetic modification and the use of treatments and so on. And at least we haven't gone to clinical trials yet so we don't know yet what what'll happen in humans but can we use technology to do things that are good and then spend a lot of time thinking trying to project ahead is it really going to be good we think it's good every all of the signs saying it looks pretty good but you can immediately then think of what I think of is the wrath of Khan. So for for Star Trek fans you'll know what that means. So, if you don't know what it means, go look up the wrath of God and you'll learn what that means. I know it was just mentioned a few days ago, but it is is it sort of like the road to hell is pay good intentions, that kind of idea kind of kind of.
Yeah. So, this was developing enhanced humans. Yeah. In the future in Star Trek land. By the way, they're already doing that right now. I mean that Musk and Teal are, you know, doing place like Honduras and so we're talking about way beyond that and we're on the cusp of being able to do it as well. And so I suspect that there are people already in the world who are taking enhancement methods, genetic enhancement methods, so they're no longer human. They're they're superhuman or something. Interesting. Um yeah, I mean, we're definitely moving into, you know, uh sci-fi territory on uh on many levels. Yeah. Um and I would add we've always been here.
I would say the religions are sci-fi, by the way. different language, different times. Yeah, it's just it's just different imagining. Well, it's not just imagining. It's experiencing superhuman states and deification and all of these goals of making the human something that's beyond the human. This is as ancient as the hills. Yeah, this is this is sci-fi is our new kind of uh framework or literature for this, but it's been around for thousands and thousands of years. Um, cool. Anything else that you want to address along these lines or uh any any thoughts that I've missed? This is a never- ending conversation, so you're just gonna have to cut it at some point.
Yeah, we can do that. Okay. Well, we'll hopefully we'll come again uh together and do it again. I' I'd love to chat with you guys more. It's great. It's great seeing you again, Dean. Yeah, I saw I saw Daniel about a couple months ago, maybe now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I haven't seen Dean for for for a couple years. Yep. It's always good to see happy. You look happy. Oh, it's it's all it's smoking mirrors, you know. Zoom. It's not me. Well, and Jeffrey, you seem very aphable considering you can even think dystopian most apocalyptic sci-fi futures. No, I'm actually not apocalyptic. Nor nor do nor am I into dystopias.
I I am an No, I know. I get that. I get that. Yeah, but it's hard to not pay attention to the fact of where where we are all collectively seem to be headed. So, yeah, but I'm a chronic optimist, too. Otherwise, why bother? Yeah, why do this? I mean, it's a very fascinating time to be alive right now. It's it's a, you know, we're definitely moving into unknown unknowns, you know. It's it's rough. It's rough. As you know, as I say, it's messy. Let's put our heads down and let's do it. All right, great everybody. I look forward to chatting with you all again and thanks for spending some of the time.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.