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Professor Dean Radin is one of the world’s leading authorities on psychic phenomena. He is the chief scientist at IONS, the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
“I don’t like the word ‘paranormal’ when referring to these experiences”, Dean says.
“Paranormal phenomena cover such a huge range of things that are strange, that it tends to collapse psychic experiences into things like search for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. But psychic phenomena, like synchronicities, are extremely common.”
Are psychic phenomena akin to spiritual experiences?
“I would say there is an overlap.”
The overlap, he explains, is when people say they have felt a strange, very intimate sense of connection with other people or with things elsewhere.
“The line between science and spirituality is arbitrary. There is a spectrum.”
A synchronicity can be described as ‘smart luck’, as opposed to ‘dumb luck’.
“In many ways the kind of research that I do attempts to evoke synchronicities in the laboratory. What some would call a coincidence we would call a synchronicity when we study for instance telepathy”, Dean says.
As we record this episode, Dean Radin is conducting an experiment aimed to test the quantum observer effect.
“To test it properly it takes an act of subjective awareness of what is going on. It is correlated to brain activity, but it is not physical. Maybe that’s what will break the chain and cause the measurement to actually occur.”
“If the results are replicated in lots of different laboratories, it directly informs an outstanding and long standing problem in the interpretation of quantum mechanics.”
The ‘Sigil’ experiment, as it is called, is due to be finished by the end of April.
The placebo effect is basically the same phenomenon – mind affecting matter.
“Can we see differences in the behavior of cells, be it plants or the human body, depending on what people are beaming mentally at them? The answer is yes.”
“For everything from photons, to chemical processes, to cells, to small animals, to human physiology and maybe all the way up to the global level, we do see that consciousness seems to be involved at every single stage.”
And yet there are so many skeptics, and so many psi researchers are being mocked.
“In mainstream science, these things are taboo. I know many academics have these experiences themselves, but you can’t talk about it, at the risk of your career”, Dean says.
“Materialism is an extremely powerful worldview. So powerful that it has given rise to the technologies we have today. But it leaves out something.”
However, in the last 30 years, the philosophy of idealism has begun to penetrate within the sciences, according to Dean Radin. Idealism posits that consciousness is fundamental and that matter arises from it.
“You see it in physics, in psychology, in neuroscience and in mathematics.”
There is a materialist ‘police’ that is active on Wikipedia and in public debate. But it is a vociferous minority, Dean thinks.
“They are only maintaining the taboo. But taboos don’t last forever. When you talk to academics privately after a couple of beers, everyone eventually reports they have experiences of this kind, and most are actually interested.”
So, if idealism is penetrating science and things seem to be changing, what will be the final nail in the coffin for the taboo?
Judging from the brief opening in consciousness studies that was seen in the 60s and 70s, Dean thinks the renewed research on psychedelics might be that nail. Another candidate is quantum biology. Scientists now suggest that the brain operates in quantum ways.
“That was a very fringy idea 30 years ago.”

Dean’s personal website
IONS website

Marjorie Woollacott was a scientist with a materialist worldview when she, in her 30s, had a spiritually transformative experience. Her heart opened. There was a feeling of total peace and equanimity. She felt at home.After the experience, Woollacott gradually reoriented her research and teaching in physiology and neuroscience towards the nonphysical human experience. Many of her 200 peer reviewed scientific articles are about the effects of meditation.“When we meditate, we begin to let go of our feeling of smallness and separateness to a feeling of interconnectedness with everything else in the world”, Marjorie says.Later, she began looking more fully into the nature of consciousness.In that context, she wants to highlight two scientists-philosophers in particular, Bernardo Kastrup and Federico Faggin (the inventor of the microprocessor).“They show us scientifically why seeing consciousness as fundamental is essential to our understanding of the universe.”Woollacott is co-editor of an anthology that is fresh on the shelves as we record this episode, The Playful Universe. It is about meaningful coincidences, something psychology giant Carl Jung called synchronicities.Cultural historian and archetypal cosmologist Richard Tarnas, who has written the introduction to the book, defines synchronicities like this: observed coincidences, in which two or more independent events, having no apparent causal connection, nevertheless seem to form a meaningful pattern in our lives.Synchronicities are often seemingly trivial. It could be something quotidian you haven’t thought about in 20 years, but when you do, that same thing suddenly appears all around you; in newspapers, signs, things you hear.Another contributor to the anthology, Jungian psychologist and mythologist Roderick Main, describes the evolution of our human understanding of the universe as having gone from enchantment to disenchantment (the scientific revolution) to reenchantment, which is happening now.“Life is still mysterious.” How can synchronicities happen? In Marjorie Woollacott’s view, we are points of consciousness within the universal consciousness, and we are all entangled and co-creating this universe.“Within that playful entanglement, we draw the situations to ourselves that are most important for the unfolding of our paths in this universe.”She also points out that our beliefs create our reality, which means that what we pay attention to in our lives is what we allow to unfold.So, how should we act on synchronicities?“Value them highly and explore them.”Marjorie Woollacott believes we have some kind of guidance from the nonphysical reality. She refers to research she has done on mediumship, where mediums say they are in contact with people from “the other side”.“I saw the incredibly strong evidence about these people communicating with us, telling us things we didn’t know that turned out to be true, and that could help us.”This is documented in peer reviewed papers,Many feel – and claim – that this world is unfair, and not only to themselves but to millions.“I believe it’s a fundamental misunderstanding”, Marjorie says.“But we all have these thoughts. We are both a soul with infinite awareness and a tiny point of awareness. And the tiny point, where our ego resides, is always making judgments about what’s pleasurable, what’s painful, what causes suffering, and what causes expansion. And from that point of view, yeah, things can be really difficult.”“But if we can take the view of the whole, which is our essence, there is probably something we can learn from that moment of pain that will move us forward in our expansion of knowing who we are.”Marjorie’s websiteThe Playful UniverseBio at AAPSBio at Galileo Commission

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In the early 1990s, Dr Robert Schoch was able to confirm John Anthony West’s theory that the Great Sphinx must be much older than the fourth Egyptian dynasty, judging from the visible water weathering (there was more, but this was the crucial ”smoking gun”). The huge sculpture must have been there during the wet African period, which ended long before the dynastic Egyptians.

”I am a classic academic in many respects. When I first went to Egypt in 1990, it was not to prove that civilization goes back further than we are told. I was convinced it would be my only trip to Egypt”, says Schoch.

But that trip was to be followed by many more. It changed his career and life.

Re-dating the Sphinx to a much earlier period than in textbook history gave Robert Schoch a global reputation. At first, he was fiercely attacked by archaeologists and Egyptologists. Today, the notion that the Sphinx may be 12,000 years old is a bit more widely accepted. The discovery of the megalithic site Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which the mainstream has dated to at least 10,000 BCE, was a game changer.

”It confirmed everything I had said about there being a civilization much earlier than what we are told”, says Robert Schoch.

To talk about a ”civilization before civilization” is still far from uncontroversial, however.

As late as in August of this year, there was a bit of a buzz around a study that was interpreted in a way that made Schoch’s / West’s dating of the Sphinx look impossible, but it turned out to be over- and misinterpretations.

Schoch is convinced that the Sphinx, Göbekli Tepe, probably the base elements of the Giza pyramids and many other megalithic structures worldwide were originally constructed by a civilization that was wiped out by cataclysmic events at the end of the last ice age, events that reshaped the face of the earth. The geological period in question is called the Younger Dryas and lasted from ca 10,900 BCE to ca 9,700 BCE.

Many other researchers also adhere to the Younger Dryas cataclysm theory, but when it comes to the cause of the cataclysm, Robert Schoch still walks a different path. According to Schoch, the available evidence does not primarily point to impacts by comets or asteroids, but to huge solar outbursts.

The sun is more unstable than we think. We know of several dramatic solar events during the last few millennia, like the Charlemagne event in 774-775 CE and the Carrington event in 1859. But these would appear like a walk in the park compared to what happened at the end of the last ice age.

The solar outbursts some 12,000-13,000 years ago melted the ice sheets and even melted stone. They caused huge wildfires, floods, catastrophic climate change and lethal radiation. A solar induced dark age ensued, which lasted six thousand years.

Survivors sought shelter underground for centuries or even millennia. Ancient city-wide tunnel and cave systems can be found in many locations around the world, for example in Cappadocia in Turkey.

There is also biological evidence, like the mass extinction of megafauna at precisely this point in time. This mysterious disappearance makes sense when accounting for large solar outbursts, including high levels of dangerous radiation.

And there is cultural evidence, in the form of strange petroglyphs and other depictions all over the world that look like plasma formations in the sky. 

”The truth is that we have incredible hubris. Natural events can devastate us”, says Schoch.

”All the astrophysical evidence is leading up to another really devastating solar event. We’d better learn from what happened.”

Robert Schoch’s website

ORACUL website

The book Forgotten Civilization (revised and expanded edition)