Subtle Energies and the Uncharted Realms of Mind
An Esalen Invitational Conference
June 6 - 11, 1999

Philosophy and Theory

One possible framework, espoused by Russell Targ, resembles Advaita Vedanta. Advaita means "not-two" and it consists of a mystical recognition that, in fact, what seem to be separate and distinct loci of consciousness -- human individuals -- are in fact all part of the same fabric of consciousness. They are undivided. The apparent transmission of information from mind to mind, even from opposite sides of the planet, is an illusory construct because on the most fundamental level those two bubbles of consciousness are not separate. We can thus access remote information, even in the future, because it is all part of our larger Self. Russell feels that consciousness can expand beyond the boundaries of what is apparent to our discursive intellect. In this perennialist view, expanded states lead to a recognition of the formless field of awareness called God, Sunyata, Allah, or Love by various traditions. And this formless field of awareness is who we are.

Advaitins thus work with the question "Who am I?" which gradually becomes the question, "Who wants to know?" leading to the ultimate realization that we already are that Consciousness, Awareness, or Truth which we seek. A stilling of the surface waves of the mind allows a recognition of the Ocean beneath. In the moment of enlightenment, there is a heart-bursting recognition that all of the people one is looking at are not different than oneself. The enlightened one is then overwhelmed with love. The boddhisattva vows that the meaning of life is to become one with God through that ultimate loving experience, and then help others to have this experience, which reduces suffering.

These metaphysical postulates relate to how we frame the question of intentionality. We tend to think in terms of an outflow of intention, and the inflow of information. We preserve the fundamental dualism. However, we have the opportunity, in a place of stillness, to surrender the fundamental dualism, thereby expanding awareness to enter mystical states. We can then see there is nothing flowing in or out but it is all part of the same fabric of consciousness. Russell's concerns have thus shifted from purely scientific to spiritual domains, although when dealing with psi phenomena, such a distinction may no longer serve us.

Russell feels that only four-valued logic can begin to approximate this deeper knowing and its relationship to surface understandings. Nagarjuna, his favorite philosopher, exemplified this form of exposition, a form impenetrable to most people who think in two-valued terms. Nagarjuna would state, in reference to Buddha's teachings, "This is neither a teaching nor not a teaching." In the Aristotelian world, the law of the excluded middle (yes or no) almost always gives the wrong answer, except when one is counting. Four-valued logic includes four options: true, not true, true AND not true, and Nagarjuna's favorite neither true NOR not true. Modern physicists must deal with this kind of logic, albeit reluctantly, when looking at the paradoxical relationships emerging in quantum physics such as wave/particle duality. Four-valued logic, Russell thus feels, is the minimum adequate understanding to unscramble the data we come up against.

Wayne Jonas next led the group in a reflection upon the question of why we do research at all, with some interesting conclusions. His basic hypotheses:

1. Any "thing," meaning any phenomenon we can identify, can theoretically be measured. By choosing to notice a phenomenon, by focusing on it as a "thing," observing it, and measuring it, we have already had a formative influence on the boundaries of the reality we can see. Thus observation, the choice to see something, fundamentally shapes our reality. In this way, we are creating as much as discovering when we do research.
2. The measurement device is largely irrelevant if we are attempting to measure causative links, since the cause is the link between observer, measured phenomenon, and measurement device. Thus, we see conscious interactions with photons, random computer clicks, the pattern of cars passing us on a street, large wooden balls, futures stocks, blood coagulation, diagnoses, and weather patterns. All these "things" are equivalent from the perspective of the causative nature of observation.
3. Thus, the most important issue to consider in research when we are selecting the phenomenon to observe, the instrument with which to measure, and the methodology to use is what we plan to do with the information once "found" (or "created"). That is the purpose or intention we have for the information we create. While there are primarily six main "goals" or uses for research information, the overarching goal is to better communicate and connect us with each other and the world in a more intimate and personal way.
4. This intimate connection and communication is primary and is what we call relevance. Relevance (or perhaps virtue) is the "goal" when making choices about what and how to investigate.
5. For relevant discoveries, play is essential. Only if we are playing with the research are we going to discover what is going on. If we think that we are discovering things in the sense of traditional science, we are mistaken. Humor is a higher order of intelligence than logic, and it allows us to get outside the box of our logical assumptions and attachments.
6. We can design our experiments in a logical fashion but we likely won't understand their relevance unless we arrange them in such a way that they can provide surprising, playful and even humorous (paradoxical) results. This allows higher orders of intelligence than us the opportunity to communicate and so contribute to the creation of relevant information and order.

Wayne thinks that research is as much a process of creation as of discovery. The most important questions relate to what we do with research rather than how we go about it. As co-creators, we must commit to a purpose, to the kind of world we want to see. Do we want to prove the anomalous? Get funding? Avoid silliness or attain credibility? Make something accessible or available for public use (and thereby democratize transformation)? He suggests that we need to answer the questions of what use the research will be before we can produce anything meaningful.

The current data, as Wayne interprets it, shows that we cannot discover the final nature of causality since causality is in itself illusory. A poem encapsulates his thoughts on the matter.

Fools Don't Cough

We cough in the dust clouds of mystery
For truth whirls outside and remains unexplained.
A winter cricket jumps as the meaning of life arrives,
Metal bends when you look away,
Science cures and magic is the proven cause.
A woman sitting next to me has given up hope
She sees none of this and she sees me as a fool.
Fools commit social suicide,
They fix their gaze on paradox,
Moth to fire, lemming to cliff,
Henry to Agincourt, me to mystery.
Fate's pain is too great,
Logic's veil is too tempting.
Run inside from truth to clarity.
Don't be a fool, coughing in the dust.

He thinks that one way to model a research experiment is with a triangular pyramid. The base of the pyramid is the standard triad of observer, event, and measurement device. However, at the apex, connecting to all three in some mysterious way, and thereby giving three-dimensional depth, is an intelligence greater than us, an intelligence which has its own purpose for the experiment. He posits that such a higher intelligence (or set of intelligences) has three main purposes: to connect us with others, to alleviate suffering in the world, and to help us see more clearly. In fact, he believes that almost all of our activities can be boiled down to these three principles. If our research does not serve one of these purposes, we are likely to get results that are humorous, a gesture of the higher intelligence involved in the process, a cosmic monkey wrench playfully thrown into the apparatus.

Much of our research shows that the depth dimension of the pyramid is necessary to understand psi events, that we must go beyond Flatland models and interpretations. And the element we tend to neglect about this depth dimension is that it may be interacting as an active agent, providing the relevance or the meaning in an experiment. To illustrate, he and Kathy Dalton played an interesting trick on the group, substituting a seemingly desiccated banana on the shelf where George Leonard had placed a banana that he attempted to desiccate the previous day. Several participants were very surprised by this turn of events before Kathy and Wayne revealed the substitution. The point, though, was that a deeper intelligence can be playing just such a trick on us, acting as a causative influence beyond our more limited horizon. Fundamentally, he believes, this deeper intelligence has a preference for those activities that bring us into a more loving, helpful relationship with others. And experimental results -- especially in these experiments at the "edge of the edge" -- are indicators or signposts leading us forward. In other words, researchers need to look for the personal message in the results, not just the objective truth about them.

As an amusing illustration, he noted that he has witnessed dozens of spoon-bendings, but always indirectly, always when no one is looking for a moment. The timing is often extraordinary, as if a higher intelligence is playing with the situation. For example, he attended one party where a woman had a spoon from her silver set in her breast pocket; the rest of the people were getting little bends but nothing particularly interesting. However, she pulled the spoon out of her breast pocket and gasped: it was twisted on its axis. Did she bend the spoon? As another example, experimenter effects are notoriously quirky and playful. Sometimes the p-value will be significant, but in the opposite direction of the last run, as happened with Marilyn Schlitz and Richard Wiseman.

Nonetheless, Wayne emphasized that doing science should not be seen as a silly waste of time. It is another avenue or mechanism to get at a deeper wisdom, to live life more in accord with deeper principles, to commune with Spirit. Holding research more playfully and appreciating some of its trickster-like qualities and its personal messages might allow us to work more in alignment with what is best for us as individuals and for the society as a whole. Marilyn reminded the group that Florence Nightingale said, "God is revealed through statistics."

During the final session on theory, conference participants added a number of points. First, several people commented that without a cohesive theory, many effects are dismissed with the caveat that there is some unexplained source of error in the experimental protocol. For example, Wayne Jonas related the story of a quite extensive study of homeopathy he did which provoked an editorial letter that said, basically, "Since we know this is a placebo versus placebo condition, there must be some other unexplained source of error to account for the effect." Until a cohesive theory can account for psi research data, these kinds of circular arguments will continue to proliferate.

Dick Shoup is working on a theory that says there is no absolute direction of time. Instead, there are relationships between bodies of information. First, Newton realized there is no absolute up and down, just gravitational relationships between two bodies of mass. Second, Einstein realized that there is no absolute space or time, only relationships between bodies of mass and energy. Third, and still unfinished, might be that there is no absolute direction of time, only relationships between bodies of information.

Dean Radin commented that we have a) two-dimensional flatland b) three-dimensional world of common sense, c) four-dimensional world of relativistic time-space, and d) ten-dimensional (or more) world of superstring theory. Somewhere between c and d is the realm of psi; all we really need are five dimensions. Everything else can spin out from five dimensions down to where we are. Though the physics works out, the mysterious part is tying human experience back into it. Russell Targ has been developing a theory of eight dimensions, in which each of our standard four dimensions has an added "complex" component.

Brian Josephson has developed a theory that over eons of time, living organisms have evolved to take advantage of the fact that we live in a nonlocal world. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect shows that we live in a universe that allows nonlocal connections between things apparently separate from one another. Since this is true on a physical level, it should be true on others as well. Evolutionarily speaking, there is a huge survival advantage to being able to sense one another in this nonlocal way. Josephson also thinks the laws of information and meaning are different than the laws of physics, though they are complementary.

George Leonard countered that there is also a survival value in not having psi happen most of the time. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by stimuli. Marshall McLuhan, for example, had a brain tumor near the end of his life and was hearing other people's thoughts. It drove him crazy in some ways. Dean Radin concurred that we have evolved in a direction of being consciously unaware of psi, unless something is very pressing. With traditional psychiatric disorders, malfunctioning gating systems allow a flood of stimuli, contributing to schizophrenia, phobias, etc. Steve Dinan brought up the idea of an evolutionary optimum of psi, mostly operating at an unconscious level with an occasional burst into conscious awareness, perhaps tied to need. We might have evolved to strike a good balance. Frank Barron's research with highly creative writers is relevant. The best writers scored very high on both the ego-strength and the schizophrenia scales of the MMPI, a highly unusual result since the two scales typically vary inversely. This score would correspond to a strong sense of self and the capacity for permeable psychic boundaries as well.

If we assume that biological systems have taken advantage of nonlocality, then we should be able to find psi effects in various organisms, especially higher-level ones. Some animal behaviors appear to demonstrate this. Schooling behavior in fish, for example, happens faster than could be explained by electromagnetic communication. A lot of studies have been done with animals and apparent psi, such as pets who wait at the door for their owners, even when the owners return at unusual times. Trees distant from a fire have been shown to drop pine cones, sensing the impending fire somehow. The migration of monarch butterflies, which takes place over several lifetimes, is baffling to scientists. Wayne Jonas cited a study with a light mounted on a robot that wheeled around a room at random. When chicks were introduced in one corner, they were somehow able to move the light closer to them for a greater percentage of the time. Several people commented that the experimenter might have led to that particular effect, though.

William S. Condon of Boston University School of Medicine did experiments in the 1970s with entrainment by taking high-speed film of people in conversation. He discovered that we make micro-movements that are perfectly synched with conversation patterns and micro-movements of the conversation partner, faster than is explainable by standard routes of communication.

Beverly noted that, in her experience, Japanese culture is much more coherent than Western culture. While there, she has noticed some interesting effects, such as how everyone at a stoplight will start rolling almost simultaneously, or how a group will stop their laughter abruptly, at almost the same moment. Perhaps this coherence reflects a subconscious psychic connectivity. Steve Dinan added that the outer formality in Japanese culture might actually be psi-conducive; by establishing firmer boundaries on the outside, this might allow a loosening of inner boundaries. Marilyn added that Achuar and Huaoranis in Ecuador do collective dreaming and collective ayahuasca journeys in which they partake in some sort of collective mind. For important decisions, each person reports the results of a dream or journey to an elder, who assembles these pieces into a coherent whole. Different cultures may thus have different base rates for psi because of social coherence factors.

Relation to evolution

George Leonard stressed that the higher potentials of the mind and body we are discussing are often denigrated in the mystical literature as barriers to spiritual development. Moksha (enlightenment) before siddhi (spiritual powers) is a common teaching. However, he and Michael Murphy are particularly interested in how these abilities might be forerunners or foreshadowings of an emerging human nature. In other words, human evolution may be continuing and both psi abilities and healing effects afford glimpses into our future. Most spiritual traditions arose in times before the universe was seen as evolving, so the stress was always on stepping off the karmic cycle or waking up to an enlightened reality; they did not generally concern themselves with the human relationship to an evolutionary process. He believes that linking psi and subtle energies to evolution is pivotal to making such topics acceptable in mainstream circles and to bridging science and spirituality. As Tillich said, roughly, "The great task of our society this century is to join the circle and the line." Marilyn offered the counter argument that we might be evolving away from a reliance on psi; it is much easier to pick up a telephone than communicate with telepathy. Ancient people may have had more need for psi than we do today and thus it could be dwindling. Fred Luskin stressed that power and compassion must develop together for siddhis to actually serve.

George feels that much of the neurosis, crime, disease, and war in the world is a result of our failure to use our full potential. Seventy percent of the neocortex is uncommitted to any function we know right now; we are full of possibility. The challenge is to use these latent abilities for the common good. George believes that we are at a unique historical moment where we can be active co-creating agents of evolution, both individual and social. Dean Radin commented that all previous technological advances have had unintended, and often horrible, consequences. Perhaps by using psi we can more consciously avoid or mitigate such unintended consequences and steer cultural evolution in the best direction.

Marilyn Schlitz and Russell Targ then brought up Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose's work on microtubules in the brain, a possible route into quantum biology. Microtubules might provide the structural basis for maintaining quantum coherence in a biological system, a plausible mechanism for nonlocal transfer of information. Beverly explained that microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton of the cell. The theory derives from the fact that molecules are not fully random. Liquid water should thus, they surmise, have coherent domains. Hameroff and Penrose calculated that the coherent domain of water should be about the diameter of a microtubule. This might, they think, form a basis for consciousness. Beverly pointed out that these coherent domains of water, if they exist, could indicate the entire earth is capable of unusual information exchange. However, she feels that coherent domains are coming into existence and disappearing in a constant flux, which is quite different than the stability of microtubules. She thinks the microtubule theory is a bit overrated. Dean Radin made the comment that rhodopsin, in the eye, is a strange molecule because it maintains coherence for much longer than other organic molecules. The hairs in the inner ear are sensitive to single quantum hits.

Russell noted that there are two main problems we are faced with. First, how does psi information get to our awareness? This connects psi processes to microtubules, EEG activity or whatever. Second, how does the information or image get from one brain to another? This is the question that interests him more. With regular vision, for example, we have a fairly good idea of the processes that lead to the recognition of, say, a flower in the brain. With psi, we simply have no theory for the transfer of images. Roger Nelson likes David Bohm's theory: at the point of any source of information, a universal field occurs. Somewhere else in the universe there might be a need for that information, and that need can then actualize the information from the universal field at the new location (Bohm and Hiley, 1993). Distant healing for example, might involve an ideal or healthy pattern that a distant healer can present to the universal field. This can then be manifested and absorbed by the "needful" patient. Kathy Dalton pointed out that the need/relevance issue helps explain why parent-child pairings do so well in the ganzfeld.

This need-driven version of psi relates to Douglas Dean and Sheila Ostrander's finding that high-level business executives, especially those with successful track records, scored at a very high level on psi tests. The capacity to sense the shifting terrain of the business world and the most profitable directions to move a company is undoubtedly enhanced by psi. Executives are well-advised to cultivate it. Bernard Grad concurred that healing effects in the lab were only evident when there was a need for it. We should not, then, become fixated just on physical theories but allow for the importance of psychological and sociological theories as well. Fred Luskin, drawing from his background in the psychotherapeutic world, questioned why we are so fixated on just one theory. Psychology allows for dozens of theories, many of which have internal cohesiveness and some degree of efficacy. Perhaps we should not think about the need for a single theory; it might be more individualized or particularized. Russell, though, thinks there is a difference between psychological reality and consensus reality and is more comfortable with a single theory. Several people believe that a cohesive theory cannot be built until we have a lot more progress in a variety of domains. We might need physics from fifty years in the future and biology from fifty years in the future and so on. We just can't do it yet, or, at best, we can only come up with approximations.