Dean Radin Quotes

“A miracle does not happen in contradiction to nature, but in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature.”

“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.”

“Because the siddhis are so seductive, sages have repeatedly reminded us to calm down and not dwell on them, because ultimately these abilities are only a reflection of the holistic nature of the universe. In particular, they say nothing about one’s spiritual attainments.

Swami Rama explains: These powers have nothing to do with spirituality. Sometimes psychic powers develop; you start telling the fortunes of others, you start knowing things. These are all distractions. Do not allow them to obstruct your path.

Too many people, including swamis, have wasted time and energy on such distractions. Anyone who wants to develop siddhis can do so and can demonstrate certain supernatural feats; but enlightenment is an entirely different matter.”

“Beyond the fine points of how to properly interpret esoteric experiences, many mystical traditions also claim that there are methods one can use to develop a direct realization of these states.

According to psychiatrist and meditation researcher Roger Walsh: Comparison across traditions suggests that there are seven practices that are widely regarded as central and essential for effective transpersonal development.

These seven are an ethical lifestyle, redirecting motivation, transforming emotions, training attention, refining awareness, fostering wisdom, and practicing service to others.

Contemplative traditions posit that meditation is crucial to this developmental process because it facilitates several of these processes.

Modern physics has achieved its own version of the perennial philosophy through the development of quantum theory. While many workaday physicists shudder over popular misinterpretations of their precious mathematical models, the founders of quantum mechanics were keenly aware of the radical philosophical changes brought about by their new theory.

They wrote about it extensively, and most of them ended up sounding like full-blown mystics.”

“Clairaudience, through samyama on the area behind the ear.

This siddhi allows one to hear the 'conversations of the enlightened ones, the subtle mental conversations of others, the celestial music, and receive messages through the ether both awake or while asleep, as if they were spoken or whispered whether or not they exist through the medium of sound waves as such'.

In other words, this is a refined form of clairvoyance or clairaudience.”

“Everyday reality is just one provincial way of perceiving the world. There are others that are equally valid, and it’s in some of those worlds where the supernormal resides.”

“Facts don’t change minds as often as they confirm what the mind insists on believing. Therefore, the path from faith to facts is much more fragile than we like to think, and along the way are crouching adversaries — hidebound beliefs, stubborn biases, ad hominem attackers, skeptics who know in advance that X cannot be true, and the most elusive of adversaries, collective consciousness.

Mass opinion can stop an unwelcome fact in its tracks, which has happened for centuries when miracles, wonders, magic, and the paranormal have been too uncomfortable to confront.

Behind the cliché that you create your own reality there is a shadow: If you don’t create your own reality, it will be created for you.”

“For most people, psychic abilities manifest spontaneously and are rarely under conscious control. The experiences tend to be sporadic and fragmentary, and the most dramatic cases occur mainly during periods of extreme motivation.

By contrast, the siddhis are said to be highly reliable and under complete conscious control; as such they could be interpreted as exceedingly refined, well-cultivated forms of psychic phenomena.

The more advanced siddhis are said to include invisibility, levitation, invulnerability, and superstrength, abilities often associated with comic book superheroes. All these abilities are also described in one form or another in shamanism and in the mystical teachings of religions.”

“If the TM research was the only source of evidence suggesting that collective intentions can influence others at a distance, then that data would be interesting but concerns about their quasi-religious motivations would continue to simmer.

Fortunately, there are completely independent experiments, conducted in entirely secular contexts, showing similar effects. Before discussing those experiments, it is instructive to consider an individual case of the power of 'radiated nonviolence'.

Paul Ekman is a prominent American psychologist who pioneered the analysis of micromovements in facial expressions. In his 2008 book, Emotional Awareness, coauthored with the Dalai Lama, Ekman discussed how he was healed from a long-term problem with anger just by being in the presence of the Dalai Lama.

Ekman wrote: "I had a very strong physical sensation for which we do not have an English word — it comes closest to 'warmth', but there was no heat. It certainly felt very good, and like nothing I have felt before or after.

As a scientist, I cannot ignore what I experienced. I think the change that occurred within me started with that physical sensation. I think that what I experienced was — a non-scientific term — 'goodness'."

Every one of the other eight people I interviewed [who reported similar experiences] said they felt goodness; they felt it radiating and felt the same kind of warmth that I did. I have no idea what it is or how it happens, but it is not my imagination.

Though we do not have the tools to understand it, that does not mean it does not exist.

Astonished at his response to the presence of the Dalai Lama, Ekman continued to investigate this phenomenon, which he mentioned in a 2009 interview with psychologist David Van Nuys.

When asked about his as-yet unpublished study, he replied: The only thing that we carried to completion was a study of a single Buddhist monk, who’s been a monk for 32 years.

And what we were able to do is to identify the differences between different forms of meditation and its impact on his mental state, and we were also able to show the calming effect that his presence had in discussion with people who are normally or typically very aggressive.”

“In samyama one may focus on the processes of time, change, and transformation. The siddhi that arises is the simultaneous perception of the past, present, and the future.

The idea that the present contains the past is common knowledge; we call this memory. The idea that the present is also influenced by the future may seem odd, but this quasi-teleological concept is accommodated within today’s physics.

For example, in quantum theory the idea that the present is constrained by both the past and the future is respectable, but of greater importance, there is now experimental evidence supporting it, published in 2012 in the journal Nature Physics.

The originators of this concept are not mystics. They include physicist Yakir Aharonov, who was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2010 and is regarded as one of the world’s leading quantum theorists.

The future influencing the present might sound strange, but practically everything seems strange the moment we step outside of the everyday world and probe either the inner depths or the outer limits of reality.

Likewise, the siddhis seem contrary to common sense only because they arise from depths of awareness that lie far beyond the common senses.”

“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.”

“Influencing others. This siddhi suggests that a highly realized yogi who is adept with the previously described siddhis can not only know about others, but also influence them.

This is related to the concept of shaktipat, the ability to transmit spiritual energy to others through one’s gaze or presence. In laboratory jargon, this phenomenon is known as 'distant mental interactions with living systems'.

It may be interpreted as a sort of field effect due to the rarified mental state that the yogi embodies, which acts like a radiating beacon that influences everyone in the vicinity. This siddhi is also related to a sutra described in the second book of the Yoga Sutras, Sadhana Pada.

The translation of Sutra II.35 reads: In the presence of one firmly established in nonviolence, all hostilities cease.”

“It 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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

“Keith Stanovich’s psychology textbook lists paranormal phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, reincarnation, biorhythms, astral projection, pyramid power, plant communication, and psychic surgery.

All these items are perfectly amenable to scientific inquiry, but so far only a few have been systematically investigated. Education may benefit by teaching students to avoid knee-jerk negative reactions to topics just because they seem peculiar and instead to evaluate what the evidence actually says.

If there’s no body of systematic scientific evidence to rely upon (e.g., for the viability of 'pyramid power'), then we can’t say much about that topic yet. But when there is evidence (as with several classes of psychic phenomena), then students should learn how to evaluate it.

Professors often give lip service to the importance of teaching critical thinking skills, but in practice most of that lip is arrogant and dismissive.

Another reason that the paranormal gets a bad rap is that professors are unaware of the evidence because their professors, and their professors before them, kept repeating that there wasn’t anything worth paying attention to.

When something is repeated often enough, the lie takes on a life of its own. Political propagandists and advertising agencies have long capitalized on this fact.”

“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'), 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.”

“Most metaphysical, occult, and esoteric schools believe in another, deeper, hidden reality beyond the mundane world. The mystics, saints, and geniuses who blazed trails in those transcendental realms have given us many marvelous stories, and their insights are the foundations of most of our religions.

Of course, similar tales are told by the delusional and the insane, and this muddies how those experiences should be interpreted. The line between genius and madness is notoriously thin.

When scholars of religion began to compare these 'other reality' experiences across cultures — from overwhelming feelings of cosmic oneness to a sense of intense meaning underlying mundane physical appearances — they noticed some intriguing similarities.

What the mystics described appeared to be a repeatable human experience, suggesting that beneath variations in appearance something very real was going on.”

“Most people’s minds are awash in a buzz of thoughts, worries, and desires. From that splintered mental state, which is reinforced by the necessities of daily life, samadhi sounds like a vacation to a Valiumscented fantasy island.

Work, commuting, and chronic television violence are very effective at smothering the equanimity and silence necessary to develop and sustain samadhi. That’s why when one seriously practices yoga at a traditional ashram (retreat center), there are no mundane distractions. No television, radio, iPod, cell phone, Internet, sugar, caffeine, spicy foods, clocks, and in some cases, no talking.

The ecstasy associated with the experience of samadhi might sound superficially similar to the momentary high achieved by smoking crack or shooting heroin. But while narcotics can blast the mind into a euphoric stupor, it doesn’t take long before that route becomes horrifically grim, to say nothing of fleeting and a considerable drain on society.

By contrast, the mind trained to sustain samadhi is focused, calm, and crystal clear, and the accompanying happiness doesn’t fade or cost anything (other than maintaining a lifestyle that is probably much simpler than most Westerners are willing to adopt).

The modern sophisticate has been taught to associate claims about 'bliss' and 'ecstasy' as starry-eyed New Age pabulum, or as a sign of taking one too many psychedelic drugs. But this is indeed the serious aspiration of yoga practice.

It may not be simple to achieve this goal today, but nor was it all that easy even when Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. Still, the sages insist it is achievable, and both history and contemporary examples confirm that it is possible.

These people smile and laugh too much. They burst with radiant health and generosity. We are suspicious of them. They’ve been transformed out of the ordinary, and it shows.”

“Not being able to study the cream of the crop means the effects we see will probably be weak and sporadic. That means having to collect an enormous amount of data to gain confidence in the results.

Fortunately there is also an advantage to studying ordinary people. If Joe Sixpack, our randomly picked 'man off the street', can show weak but positive results in the lab, then it indicates that the siddhis are part of a spectrum of abilities that are broadly distributed across the population.

It is much easier to accept the reality of a claimed skill if it turns out to be a basic human potential rather than an extreme idiosyncrasy that only a handful of people in the world possess.

I suspect that there are those among us who have high-functioning siddhis gained not through extensive meditation practice but through raw talent. Like Olympic athletes or Carnegie Hall musicians, these people are rare.

Based on my experience in testing a wide range of participants in laboratory psi tests, I’d estimate that perhaps one in ten or a hundred thousand have exceptional skills comparable to the traditional siddhis.”

“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.

While free will as a persistent brain-generated illusion is a popular idea in the neurosciences today, 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.”

“Presentiment in Meditators

What does a clock do when it’s hungry? It goes back four seconds.”

“Quantum concepts can be difficult to grasp because they strongly violate common sense.”

“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.”

“The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

“The monks used two types of meditation. Deity Yoga involves generating and holding a three-dimensional color image of a deity surrounded by his or her divine entourage. The other type of meditation is called Open Presence, in which attention is broadly distributed without focusing on any experiences, images, or thoughts that may arise.

The claim tested about Deity Yoga was the assertion that highly complex images could be mentally maintained for minutes to hours. Kozhevnikov also tested nonmeditators and meditators who did not engage in their practice prior to the test.

The results showed that all the groups performed at the same level before meditation, but after meditation, the Deity Yoga practitioners, according to Kozhevnikov, demonstrated a dramatic increase in performance on imagery tasks compared with the other groups.

Therefore, Deity Yoga specifically trains one’s capacity to access heightened visuospatial memory resources via meditation, rather than generally improving long-lasting imagery abilities”

“The mystery of the double-slit experiment 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 on — '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 Niels 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.”

“The newly developing worldview suggests, for example, that it is no longer tenable to imagine that the universe is a mindless clockwork mechanism.

Something else seems to be going on, something involving the mind and consciousness in important ways.”

“The prudence is intentional – it prevents existing knowledge from coagulating into unshakable dogma, which is the forte of religious faith.

Also, just because a statistical test ends up with huge odds against chance doesn’t necessarily mean that the effect we were measuring is what we imagined it to be.

To gain that sort of confidence it takes many independent scientists repeatedly examining the same effect in different ways, and for the results to be consistent on average.”

“Then there is levitation, of which there are between two hundred and three hundred historical cases in the descriptions of the saints, including Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663).

Saint Joseph was observed to levitate by thousands of witnesses, usually in broad daylight, over a period of thirty-five years. Reports can be found in witnesses’ private diaries and in depositions provided under oath, including 150 eyewitness reports from popes, kings, and princesses.

Purely secular cases of levitation also exist, including most famously that of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886). Like Saint Joseph, Home was observed to levitate in daylight by dozens of prominent witnesses. Not a single case of fraud was ever discovered.

Other charisms include bilocation, in which the mystic is observed to appear in two distant places at the same time; fragrances, or the 'odor of sanctity', issuing from the mystic’s body or clothes; inedia, or complete abstinence from food or drink for long periods of time, without harm.

Infused knowledge, or the supernormal ability to gain wisdom without studying; incorruption, the absence of the normal decay of the body after death; discernment of spirits, which in the Catholic context means interacting and knowing the difference between angels and demons; and luminous irradiance, a glowing light surrounding the heads, faces, and sometimes the whole bodies of mystics.”

“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.

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.”