Supernormal Quotes

“Any number of controlled studies have demonstrated that when people are presented with facts that contradict their firmly held beliefs, they tend to ignore the facts; even more perversely, a sizable percentage of people will become more confirmed in their beliefs the more contravening facts you present.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. I can’t put it down.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in. —Willis Harman”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Many ancient teachings tell us that we have the capacity to gain extraordinary powers through grit or grace. Techniques used to achieve these supernormal abilities, known as siddhis in the yoga tradition (from the Sanskrit, meaning “perfection”2, 5), include meditation, ecstatic dancing, drumming, praying, chanting, sexual practices, fasting, or ingesting psychedelic plants and mushrooms. In modern times, techniques also include participation in extreme sports, floating in isolation tanks, use of transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation, listening to binaural-beat audio tones, and neurofeedback. Most of these techniques are ways of transcending the mundane. Those who yearn to escape from suffering or boredom may dive into a cornucopia of sedatives and narcotics. Others, drawn to the promise of a more meaningful reality, or a healthier mind and body, are attracted to yoga, meditation, or other mind-expanding or mind-body integrating techniques.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“By contrast, in the West the mere existence of psychic phenomena remains a contentious issue, despite persistent interest and popular belief. There are a number of reasons for this chronic tension. On the religious side, within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, only God (or those he appoints) is allowed to perform miracles. Ordinary folks who perform such feats are considered suspect (by theists) if they’re lucky and heretical if they’re not. And on the scientific side, there is a widely held (but incorrect, as we’ll see) assumption that these phenomena cannot exist because they violate one or more scientific principles.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“The above two quotes are indeed in the book Supernormal, but they are not by Dean Radin. The first is a quote from Rick Strassman regarding a person's experience on a DMT trip, and the second is by Einstein.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries.…”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“is known as a certainty that there exists an unimaginably powerful creator and sustainer of reality, and of you in particular. This creator is unborn, uncreated, undying, and unchanging.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“What might happen when this ancient-modern integration becomes a reality? On the beneficial side we can anticipate improved health care through a vastly better understanding of the mind-body relationship. We may see development of technologies that treat aspects of the mind-body system that are well understood in the wisdom traditions but are ignored by Western medicine (for the most part). This includes phenomena such as “subtle energies.” We may see a substantial reduction in interpersonal conflict through a broader recognition of the interconnectedness of all life. As the boundaries between subjective and objective realities are better understood, the communications and energy industries may be radically altered. On the other hand, we are likely to find that some aspects of the wisdom traditions are seriously distorted and in some cases are dangerously wrong. We may find growing societal resistance at the prospect of being “absorbed” into an increasingly powerful collective mind. And we may pass through a time when horrifically powerful weapons are created that reshape space-time and possibly even alter history. As science and society begin to appreciate that some of the siddhis are real, and that other aspects of yogic lore also provide legitimate road maps of reality, we can anticipate that some scientists and scholars, especially those who have bet their careers on past theories, will become increasingly marginalized and resentful. But the teeth grinding will eventually settle down as younger investigators, who were not so entrenched in passé prejudices, reach their prime.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Otto captured this sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object, in a famous Latin sound bite: the sacred is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, the mystical (mysterium) as both fucking scary (tremendum) and utterly fascinating (fascinans).80 (page 9) With the sacred viewed within this gripping, emotionally charged sense, it is hardly surprising that these topics are too disturbing to be studied either by religious scholarship or by science. The presence of real siddhis, real psychic effects lurking in the dark boundaries between mind and matter, are so frightening and disorienting that defense mechanisms immediately snap into place to protect our psyches from these disturbing thoughts. We become blind to personal psychic episodes and to the supportive scientific evidence, we conveniently forget mind-shattering synchronicities, and if the intensity of the mysterium tremendum becomes too hot, we angrily deny any interest in the topic while backing away and vigorously making the sign of the cross. Within science this sort of behavior is understandable; science doesn’t like what it can’t explain because it makes scientists feel stupid. But the same resistance is also endemic in comparative religion scholarship, which is supposed to be the discipline that studies the sacred. As Kripal says, scholars of religion “simply ignore … or brush their data aside as ‘primitive,’ ‘mistaken,’ and so on. Now the dismissing word in vogue is ‘anecdotal’ ” (pp. 17–18).80 One reason for this odd state of affairs is that real psi and real siddhis powerfully refute Descartes’s dualism, the very idea that led to the split between science, which deals with matter, and the humanities, which deal with mind. This distinction has carved up the world so successfully that when phenomena appear that harshly illuminate the artificial nature of the split, the resulting glare, says Kripal, “can only violate and offend our present order of knowledge and possibility” (page 24).80 From this analysis, Kripal arrives at his central argument: Psychic phenomena may be thought of as symbols that indicate “the irruption [a bursting in] of meaning in the physical world via the radical collapse of the subject-object structure itself. They are not simply physical events. They are also meaning events” (page 25).80 In other words, where objective and subjective meet, the fabric of reality itself blurs. This is a place that is not quite physical, and not quite mental, but a limbo that somehow contains and creates both.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Idealism is materialism upside down. It proposes that all that exists is pure consciousness. Everything in the physical world, all matter and energy, are emergent properties of consciousness. In its more radical form, it asserts that the entire physical world is a mind-generated illusion, somewhat like the virtual world in the movie The Matrix. Idealism runs into a miracle if it proposes that out of ephemeral nonphysical consciousness there emerges a hard, physical world. How does that happen? Once emerged, is it still connected to mind or does it go on its merry way? On the other hand, if it proposes that everything is an imaginary projection of consciousness, then the miracle is that everyone other than me is also a part of my imagination. Does that mean I still have to pay taxes? Panpsychism is the fourth main worldview. It acknowledges that mind and matter are quite real, but it also proposes that these elements of reality are inseparable and go all the way down to elementary particles and “below,” and also all the way up to the universe and beyond. The idea of a complementary relationship, where something is “both/and” rather than “either/or,” is a core concept within quantum theory. Light, for example, behaves both as a wave and as a particle, depending on how you look at it. The advantage of panpsychism is that no miracles are required to account for how matter can be sentient, or how mind can have physical consequences. It is both/and. But all is not completely rosy. The trouble with panpsychism is called the binding problem. This means that if all matter is already sentient, then every atom of your body, your cells, and your organs should also be sentient. Why then is your sense of self a unity and not a multitude? What binds it all together so that the “I” within you experiences just one self rather than trillions of tiny selves? Dealing with the New Story One of the more interesting takes on the developing new story of reality has been proposed by Rice University’s Jeffrey Kripal, who, as a scholar of comparative religion, has explored the core themes of his discipline—the sacred, the paranormal, the supernormal, the mystical, and the spiritual—in a direction that few academics have dared to tred.80 He views the intense popular interest in the paranormal as more than a mere fascination with fictional miracles, but rather as a sign of the original meaning of fascination—a bewitching accompanied simultaneously by awe and terror. He defines “psychic phenomena” as “the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one,” and the sacred as what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Dualism is the idea that mind and matter are completely different domains of reality. Mind is subjective, nonphysical, ethereal consciousness-related stuff, and matter is objective, hard physical stuff. This insight was promoted by French philosopher René Descartes. It exists in a slightly different form as Sankhya philosophy, which is regarded by many Indian scholars as the philosophical basis of yoga. In Sankhya there are two fundamental aspects of reality: prakrti and purusa. Prakrti is the evolving, changeable physical world familiar to science, whereas purusa is permanent, unchanging, pure consciousness-as-such. Unlike Descartes’s version of dualism, Sankhya maintains a tripartite model: matter, mind, and pure consciousness. Both matter and mind are considered prakrti, or part of the physical world. This is similar to the models developed by the modern neurosciences—the mind is a brain-mediated information processing machine. But the mind also enjoys awareness and consciousness. Thus in Sankhya philosophy the mind is the missing link between inanimate matter and conscious awareness. It is inseparably both at the same time. Yoga seeks to purify that link so the relationship between the physical world and consciousness becomes clearer. In the process of clarification, the undistracted mind begins to see the true relationships between matter and consciousness, and as a side effect of that insight, the siddhis arise. When the link is completely clear, enlightenment is said to occur. That’s the whole story of yoga in a nutshell. The problem with both dualistic or tripartite philosophies is this: How can radically different domains interact at all? This is why philosopher Christian De Quincey calls dualism a miracle. At least within Sankhya the mind is regarded as consisting of both matter and consciousness, but that too doesn’t cleanly solve the interaction problem. The next major idea about mind and matter is materialism, which asserts that everything that exists, including mind and consciousness, consists of matter and energy. This is the dominant philosophy of science today, and it asserts that there is nothing special about consciousness because it is simply due to activity in the brain. The problem with materialism is that no one has any (good) idea how the mindless physical brain can give rise to subjective experience. This impasse has led some philosophers to sidestep the problem by simply denying that subjective experience exists. Within that rather odd view, we’re all just zombies.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“This is leading to the expectation that there are deeper theories than quantum mechanics, and that when those are developed entirely new forms of postquantum spookiness will be found at all scales. As I described in a previous book, Entangled Minds, the direction that physics is headed is becoming increasingly compatible with the kind of physical reality that is required to support psi phenomena. That is, common sense tells us that the everyday world is fixed in space and time. Our watches remind us of this, and we have to physically lug our bodies around to get from one place to the next. But within physics it is well established that beneath the appearances of common sense, space and time are relationships and not absolutes. We may be on the threshold of even more refined theories that redefine relationships as side effects arising out of a spaceless, timeless, informational reality. If we didn’t know better, we could imagine that this is what the yogis have been trying to tell us about the holistic nature of reality that they’ve experienced in samadhi. They just didn’t have the technical language to describe it. As physicist Vedral says, Space and time are two of the most fundamental classical concepts, but according to quantum mechanics they are secondary. The entanglements are primary. They interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time. If there were a dividing line between the quantum and the classical worlds, we could use the space and time of the classical world to provide a framework for describing quantum processes. But without such a dividing line—and, indeed, without a truly classical world—we lose this framework. We must explain space and time as somehow emerging from fundamentally spaceless and timeless physics.358 (page 43) A half century ago, psi researchers were already proposing models based on quantum concepts.1, 2, 295, 360, 361 It appears that the rest of the scientific world is beginning to catch up.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“So far, we’ve learned that there are rational, evidence-based reasons to accept that some of the siddhis—the ones that have been repeatedly tested under controlled conditions—are real. We’ve seen evidence suggesting that advanced meditation may be associated with improved psi performance. And, except for rare individuals and some advanced meditators, among the general population we’ve seen that these abilities tend to be weak, sporadic, and uncontrollable. From a scientific perspective, the mere existence of these phenomena, regardless of how weak or unreliable they may be, is astounding. It tells us that the modern understanding of the human mind, which is based on the neurosciences and its approach to studying brain function, has completely overlooked a fundamental aspect of our capacities and potentials. It says that both science and religious scholarship have prematurely discarded stories about the siddhis as mere superstitions. Undoubtedly many of those legendary tales are pure fantasy. But we now know that some of them described dazzling gems that have been obscured by the distortions of history. Identifying and polishing those gems with modern techniques opens the real possibility of discovering whole new realms of knowledge. Over time, as mainstream interest in studying the capacities of advanced meditators increases, we are likely to understand psi and the siddhis in new ways. As that happens, more integrated models of reality will arise, and eventually technologies may be developed. How long do we have to wait before this knowledge is pragmatically useful? Not too long.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“In the introduction, we derived one general prediction for beginning and intermediate practitioners of meditation from both the Hindu and Buddhist approaches (meditation yields generally positive psychological effects), but we did not deal with predictions that refer to advanced or final stages in the meditation practice. Here is such a prediction. Both Hindu and Buddhist approaches hold that practitioners of meditation might develop a kind of supercognition, special abilities (siddhis) that exceed our normal abilities. Buddhist theory predicts that six kinds of siddhis might arise.… Notably, the least spectacular one, destruction of the defiling impulses, is seen as the most significant. The others are psychokinesis, clairaudience, telepathic knowledge, retrocognitive knowledge …, and clairvoyance. The Yoga Sutras report more of these siddhis as a result of extended yoga practice. In both the Hindu and Buddhist approaches, siddhis are not regarded as very important, and the Buddha, as well as famous yogis, has warned of the dangers inherent in the siddhis.… Nonetheless, a theory about the effects of meditation would not be complete without consideration of these altered states of consciousness. There is some evidence that such states can occur spontaneously …, but the effects found in meta-analyses are usually quite small.… To the best of our knowledge, nobody has yet examined whether the respective effects are more pronounced for experienced practitioners of meditation, as both the Hindu and Buddhist approaches would predict”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Dalai Lama Even given positive results of experiments, it is exceedingly difficult for the Western-acculturated mind to accept that supernormal abilities really do exist. The Dalai Lama is often asked about this issue, and he wrote about it in his autobiography: Many westerners want to know whether the books on Tibet by people like Lobsang Rampa and some others, in which they speak about occult practices, are true. They also ask me whether Shambala (a legendary country referred to by certain scriptures and supposed to lie hidden among the northern wastes of Tibet) really exists.… In reply to the first two questions, I usually say that most of these books are works of imagination and that Shambala exists, yes, but not in a conventional sense. At the same time, it would be wrong to deny that some Tantric practices do genuinely give rise to mysterious phenomena.6 This statement is cautiously worded, and appropriate for a spiritual leader who was also a political leader for many years. The upshot of his answer is that yes, advanced meditative practices do give rise to some strange effects, and for the most part these practices have been ignored by science. The Dalai Lama has been personally interested in promoting science-spirit dialogues, but at the beginning these talks were not easy to arrange, even for him. Within meditative traditions advanced methods are considered a secret doctrine, and as we’ve seen repeated in the Yoga Sutras, demonstrating one’s abilities for secular reasons is strongly taboo. Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama believed it was important to get science to investigate these phenomena: I hope one day to organise some sort of scientific enquiry into the phenomenon of oracles, which remain an important part of the Tibetan way of life. Before I speak about them in detail, however, I must stress that the purpose of oracles is not, as might be supposed, simply to foretell the future. This is only part of what they do. In addition, they can be called upon as protectors and in some cases they are used as healers.… Through mental training, we have developed techniques to do things which science cannot yet adequately explain. This, then, is the basis of the supposed “magic and mystery” of Tibetan Buddhism.6”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Similar to the yogic tradition, in Tibetan Buddhism it is understood that the siddhis arise only after one is able to sustain the deep absorption of samadhi. However, it is also recognized that not everyone who meditates will be able to achieve samadhi, nor will the siddhis that do arise necessarily be stable. As Roney-Dougal explained: Tibetans separate two types of “clairvoyance.” They consider that the one Western parapsychologists research is a low-level ability that is unreliable and subject to fraud. Many people are considered to have this ability and Tibetans consider that it is an inherent ability resulting from past life karma, which could, however, benefit from training by meditation. The clairvoyance you attain after reaching Samadhi is a high level ability which is reliable. In interviews with various monks, it was stressed over and over again that only a few people attain Samadhi and clairvoyant abilities, and even then the clairvoyance is no more than 80% reliable. Omniscience arises only with full enlightenment. Not everyone who practices meditation will attain Samadhi, so not everyone who practices meditation will become psychic.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Robert Hogan spends just a few minutes meditating, he had no formal training in clairvoyance, and he hardly ever practices. And yet he is able to accurately perceive a target thousands of miles away. Perhaps he is naturally gifted with the siddhi of clairvoyance, which Patanjali mentions is one way that the siddhis can manifest.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“I asked Hogan to describe his process in performing this task. He replied: In 1998, I read Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness by Dale Graff333 [retired Defense Intelligence Agency director of the US government’s classified psi research program] in which he described how to remote view. I sat in front of a monitor with the code for a target in my mind and closed my eyes. I made my mind “an empty rice bowl.” I repeated the code to myself and waited. The impressions came and I sketched them. I nailed the target the first time. What I do hasn’t changed much [since then], but I have some nuances that are different. I go to a quiet place and sit. I close my eyes and warm down for a minute or two by relaxing. [Former army “psychic spy”] Joe McMoneagle takes 45 minutes to warm down. I’d be asleep by then. I can go only a minute or two. With my eyes closed, I blank my mind and repeat the target code or location. It could be a code like [the letters] AMEF or a location like “on the table in Wayne’s office.” I just need something to focus my attention on that thing out of the innumerable other things in the universe. I have a place I “look” in my mind, and I know my eyes actually focus on it. It isn’t like an infinity setting on a camera. I think it’s with a focus of about three feet. The next part is difficult to describe. I allow images to come. If someone says it’s an object on a table, I allow an “impression” of a table to come into that space. I’m not really remote viewing the table. It’s just a platform. Then my mind relaxes into allowing target impressions through. I may say, “Let me see the object on Wayne’s table.” As I relax into it, I get a feeling that is a little like a very small feeling of that time when you’re starting to drift into sleep. I could guess it’s going from Alpha [brainwave rhythm] into Theta, but I don’t know. I don’t hold it for long, though. I come back from it and have to go back in. I have to open my eyes and sketch what I get, but I’m not a good artist and by the time I get a part of a sketch started, I’ve lost some of the target. I write the impressions in words and sketch what I can. Then I have to close my eyes again, warm down briefly, and repeat the process. I have to stay with details and avoid naming something. I’m much better at objects than pictures. I’ve learned that everything I get is meaningful, but some can’t be associated with an object. It’s still attached to some real thing. I have had no training, and probably haven’t done more than a hundred sessions since I first learned I could do it in 1998.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“The word clairvoyance, from the French, literally means “clear seeing,” but the perceptions can resemble sound, called clairaudience, or perception of smell, touch, or taste, called clair sentience. The term “extrasensory perception” (ESP) is synonymous with clairvoyance, as are modern euphemisms such as remote viewing, remote perception, and anomalous cognition. Clairvoyance differs from telepathy in that the information obtained is not “sent” by anyone. It appears to differ from precognition in that the information obtained through clairvoyance is about events at a distance in space, rather than events at a distance in time. And because of the relativity of space and time, if precognition exists then it is likely that clairvoyance also exists.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“EXPERIMENT 4. In our fourth experiment, we tested a “nonlocal” aspect of the consciousness collapse interpretation. This is a bit tricky to grasp at first, because it invokes the timeless nature of the quantum world. I’ll go through this slowly. The idea that the quantum wave function collapses due to observation implies that the collapse occurs only when observation occurs, and not when the data are generated.295 That is, unlike events in the everyday world, where actions occur in particular locations and unfold in ordinary clock time, events in the quantum domain do not occur in time as we normally experience it. This is what is meant by the spooky “nonlocal” nature of quantum mechanics—events are connected across the usual limitations of space and time. When an elementary quantum object is not being observed, it remains in what’s called an “indeterminate state.” In that unobserved condition, the object has no definite properties yet—no size, shape, location, polarization, spin, or any other property that we ascribe to ordinary real objects. The consciousness collapse idea further proposes that when, and only when, an object is consciously observed does it take on real properties. To repeat—because this concept may make your brain hurt the first time you encounter it—if you take measurements of a quantum system using an inanimate recording device, like a camera, then that system will remain in an indeterminate state until it is observed. This ridiculous-sounding idea has been tested in conventional physics labs and it has definitely been shown to exist. That type of study is called the delayed-choice experiment.154, 324 We tested this idea in the present context by using a time-reversed version of our double-slit experiment, somewhat like the studies that Daryl Bem conducted, as discussed earlier in the chapter on precognition. This test also provided a more rigorous way for us to test the effect of participants being located within a few meters of the optical system, because all the data in this study were generated and recorded with the apparatus located by itself inside the shielded chamber, and with no one else present in the laboratory.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur. The Michelson interferometer experiment suggested that an observed optical system does behave differently than an unobserved system, and in a way that’s suggestive of the quantum observer effect. In other words, we—like others before us—had once again found evidence for a direct mind-matter interaction. This was interesting, but it wasn’t enough. What we wanted to know was whether mind-matter interaction effects were consistent with the notion that consciousness “collapses” the quantum wave function. If it turned out that this was the case, then the most successful physical theory in history might contain the seeds of psychokinesis within it.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“From one test session to the next, the interference patterns tended to differ because of slight variations in ambient temperature and vibration. So for the sake of simplicity I based the formal statistical analysis not on a change in the precise shape of the interference pattern, but rather on a decrease in the average illumination level over the entire camera image during the concentration or “mental blocking” condition as compared to the relaxed or “mental passing” condition. To test the design and analytical procedures for possible problems, I also included control runs to allow the system to record interference patterns automatically without anyone being present in the laboratory or paying attention to the interferometer. Data from those control sessions were analyzed in the same way as in the experimental sessions. Results I was fortunate to recruit five meditators, four of whom had many decades of daily meditative practice. Those five contributed nine test sessions. Five other individuals with no meditation experience, or less than two years of practice, contributed nine additional sessions. I referred to the latter group as nonmeditators. I predicted an overall negative score for each experimental session (illustrated by the idealized negative curve shown in Figure 15). The combined results were in fact significantly negative, with odds against chance of 500 to 1. The identical analysis across all the control sessions resulted in odds against chance of close to 1 to 1, indicating that the experimental results were not due to procedural or analytical biases. Figure 16 shows the cumulative score (in terms of standard normal deviates, or z-scores) for the nine sessions contributed by experienced meditators and nine other sessions involving nonmeditators. The experienced meditators resulted in a combined odds against chance of 107,000 to 1, and the nonmeditators obtained results close to chance expectation. This supported my conjecture that meditators would be better at this task than nonmeditators. Figure 16. Experienced meditators (more than two years of daily practice) obtained combined odds against chance of 107,000 to 1. Nonmeditators obtained results close to chance.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“It took quantum theory … to reconcile how both ideas could be true: photons and other subatomic particles—electrons, protons, and so forth—exhibit two complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, “wavicles.” To explain the idea … physicists often used a thought experiment, in which Young’s double-slit demonstration is repeated with a beam of electrons instead of light. Obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, the stream of particles would split in two, and the smaller streams would interfere with each other, leaving the same kind of light- and dark-striped pattern as was cast by light. Particles would act like waves.311 In 1961, this idea was actually tested with electrons, and it worked as expected. Elementary particles, chunks of stuff like little billiard balls, behave like waves, provided that you aren’t looking. This can be demonstrated easily even if you shoot a single photon one at a time through a double-slit apparatus.312 However—and this is the frosting on the quantum measurement problem—those very same chunks of stuff behave like particles when you do look at them. Technically, the process of looking is called gaining “which-path” information, in which you learn which path a photon took as it traveled through the double-slit apparatus. To repeat: If you know that it goes through the left slit or the right slit, typically determined using a detector placed behind each slit, then the photon will behave like a particle. But if you don’t know, then it will behave like a wave. Assumptions The experiment we conducted took advantage of this intriguing effect. It was based on two assumptions: (A) If information is gained—by any means—about a photon’s path as it travels through two slits, then the quantum wavelike interference pattern, produced by photons traveling through the slits, will “collapse” in proportion to the certainty of the knowledge obtained. (B) If some aspect of consciousness is a primordial, self-aware feature of the fabric of reality, and that property is modulated by us through capacities we enjoy as attention and intention, then focusing human attention on a double-slit system may extract information about the photon’s path, and in turn that will affect the interference pattern.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Still others propose that the only unambiguous way to avoid the role of the observer in physics is to deny the belief that we have free will.310 While free will as a persistent brain-generated illusion is a popular idea in the neurosciences today,171 that idea remains at odds with the only direct form of contact we will ever have with reality—subjective experience—which paradoxically allows for the experience of deciding to believe that free will does not exist.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“[The double-slit experiment] has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. —Richard Feynman296 The mystery Feynman was referring to in the preceding quote is the curious fact that a quantum object behaves like a particle when it is observed, but it behaves like a wave when it’s not observed. This can be easily demonstrated in a double-slit interferometer, which is a simple device in which one sends particles of light (or electrons, or any elementary particle) through two tiny slits and then records the pattern of light that emerges onto a screen, or a camera. One might expect that if particles of light (called photons) behaved like separate hunks of stuff, like tiny marbles, then the pattern of light emerging from two slits would always be two bright bands of light. And indeed, if you track each photon as it passes through the slits, then that is what you will see on the screen. However, if you do not trace the photons’ paths, then you will see an alternating sequence of light and dark bands, called an “interference pattern.” This then is the mystery of the dual nature of light—whether you see a wavelike or particle pattern on the screen depends on how you’re looking at it. It’s as though all matter—photons, electrons, molecules, and so on297—“knows” that it is being watched. This exquisitely sensitive bashfulness, known in physics jargon as wave-particle complementarity, lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. It is also known as the quantum measurement problem, or QMP. It’s a problem because it violates the commonsense assumption that we live in an objective reality that is completely independent of observers. The founders of quantum theory, including Neils Bohr, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein, knew that introducing the notion of the observer into quantum theory was a radical change in how physics had been practiced, and they all wrote about the consequences of this change. A few physicists, like Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, and Eugene Wigner, believed that consciousness was not merely important but was fundamentally responsible for the formation of reality. Jordan wrote, “Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it.… We compel [the electron] to assume a definite position.… We ourselves produce the results of measurement”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“Most scientists would probably agree that demonstrating the existence of a genuine mind-matter interaction effect, regardless of the magnitude of the effect, would be of profound importance. And thus careful consideration of this topic is amply warranted. But different personal beliefs and predilections invariably lead to different assessments of the same evidence. Scientists who worry about accidentally accepting something as true that is actually false (called a Type I error) insist on absolute proof-positive before taking the evidence seriously. Others who are more concerned about accidentally rejecting something as false that is actually true (called a Type II error) prefer to take a more affirmative stance. The Type I personality is reflected in Bösch’s comment that “this unique experimental approach will gain scientific recognition only when we know with certainty what an unbiased funnel plot … looks like” (p. 517).196 We find a similar statement in Schub’s comment that “perfect methodological quality is a logical necessity in parapsychology, since a paranormal effect can only be demonstrated if all possible non-paranormal causes are ruled out”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“So far, we’ve discussed evidence indicating that one person’s intention can influence the physiology of a distant person, and that the intentions of trained meditators have a somewhat larger effect than nonmeditators. Through the TM-Sidhi program we found that meditators’ intentions may affect the behavior of the local population as measured through reduced indices of violence. A third class of studies, called the “attention focusing facilitation” design, takes a variation of the TM-Sidhi claim into a controlled laboratory context to see if one person’s focused attention can remotely help a distant person to focus his or her attention. In a “distant facilitation of attention” experiment, the distant person—let’s call her Holly—is asked to focus her attention on a candle flame. As soon as Holly notices that her mind is wandering from the candle, she is asked to press a button and return her attention to the candle. The frequency of her button presses is used to measure Holly’s level of focused attention and is the measurement of interest. A second participant, let’s call him Vernon, is located in a distant, isolated room. Holly and Vernon are strictly isolated to exclude any normal means of communication. Vernon’s role is to act as the “attention facilitator.” He has a computer monitor in front of him displaying an experimental condition, either “control” or “help.” During help periods, Vernon focuses his attention on a candle flame in front of him while simultaneously holding the intention to enhance Holly’s ability to focus on her candle. During control periods, Vernon withdraws his attention from the candle and Holly and thinks about other matters.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

“As a short aside, it is useful to know that there are a variety of technical definitions for the term “nonlocal” within physics, but the basic concept is straightforward. Everyday common sense tells us that physical objects interact by bashing into each other. By contrast, fields, like gravity, do not seem to follow this simplistic idea, but fields too eventually came to be interpreted as forces carried by particles traveling at the speed of light. Within classical physics the idea of fields and forces seemed to describe just about everything. Everything, that is, except some peculiarities about the nature of light. To gain a deeper understanding of light, quantum mechanics was developed, and out of that our understanding of basic physical concepts like force and causality went through a radical transformation. To trace this history in detail would require a major diversion from the discussion at hand, so let’s just say that a nonlocal effect is an interaction that does not involve force, nor does it involve the transfer of signals, and it happens instantaneously regardless of the distance between the objects. Instantaneously does not mean faster than the speed of light; rather, it means without any time passing at all. Later in this book we will return to quantum concepts, which can be difficult to grasp because they strongly violate common sense.”
― Dean Radin, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities