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Subtle Energies and Uncharted Realms of the Mind Time-Reversed Human Experience: Experimental Evidence and Implications
To introduce his audience to this potentially confusing concept, Radin described a humorous yet powerful story of a synchronicity that happened in his life recently. At the beginning of the year 2000 Radin was looking for a new office for the Boundary Institute. By March he had found a nice office in Los Altos in the heart of Silicon Valley. Looking around at his neighboring offices, Radin noticed several doctors and psychologists. One new neighbor, however, perked his curiosity as he walked by the front door one day. On the door the sign read, "Psi Quest Research Labs, Inc." Radin thought to himself at the time that the "Psi" in the title must mean "Personnel Services Incorporated." However, after several weeks had passed, and Radin was walking by the office door, he decided to go inside and say hello. He saw a man at his desk who looked up in shock. He said immediately, "Dean Radin?" Stunned a bit himself, Dean said, "Yes, that’s me. I just wanted to introduce myself and ask what it is that you do here." As it turned out the man was doing exactly the same thing that Radin was: psi research. Although their meeting each other this way in and of itself was an extraordinary coincidence, it turns out that the man, named Jon, had been practicing a Tibetan Dream Yoga exercise, in which one maintains a lucid state of mind through waking and dreaming states of consciousness. When Radin walked in the door, Jon was just at the end of a 24 hour sequence, in which his intention was to find out if he was on the correct track in his business pursuits. As it turned out, Radin was one of the few people that Jon was looking for to be a part of his board of directors to raise money for his new business, but Jon didn’t know how to get in touch with him. This striking synchronicity raises a major question for Radin: what is freewill? Radin thought he was just walking into the office to say hello, when it seems that he had walked straight into a synchronicity that fit perfectly with Jon’s Dream Yoga practice. Still further, Jon next introduced Radin to his psi lab, which is a state-of-the-art facility that is just on the other side of the wall of Radin’s own office. Radin shared that he had been imagining the past few weeks just what his own ideal laboratory would look like, when it just happened to be on the other side of his office wall. Best of all, this coincidence looks like it will lead to a lasting and harmonious relationship between these two psi researchers who are now in close proximity. What is the easiest way to explain this synchronicity? Instead of thinking in terms of linear time, Radin suggests we think of the synchronicity itself as happening first. Radin and Jon had a high level of common interests and are "meant" to interact. The information-power of their connection then moves out across past, present, and future to pull them together. To draw an analogy, Radin suggests that powerful synchronicities are like large bodies of mass that attract smaller bodies of mass to them. The thermodynamic arrow of time is better understood as going from a small body of information-meaning to a large body of information-meaning. A strong synchronicity is a huge mass that influences and warps the very nature of space-time. A powerful meeting point is comparable to a singularity in space-time. It is like a "meaning black-hole," a dimple in space-time. One might imagine that Radin and Jon have two separate life-lines, or world lines, that are moving through space-time, but the power of their synchronistic meeting pulls on their separate lines until they collide. A dimple in space-time pulls the two lines together. Importantly, the meeting is not a pre-determined event, but rather it can be thought of geometrically. The geometry of space-time contains dimples and powerful information nexuses that pull linear life-lines to them. In this manner, a goal in the future can be set intentionally and we can allow ourselves to be drawn towards it. Radin pointed out that when we consider synchronicities between just two people, it throws a monkey wrench into our standard conception of time and physics. Furthermore, so much of Western science attempts to shield its experiments from human bias and unwanted contamination of evidence. Yet, no matter how hard we try, there is no way to control trans-temporal effects entering into an experiment from the past or future. In short, if we take what Radin is saying seriously, the very nature of the scientific method is called into question. Gold-standard beliefs, such as replicability and double-blind experiments are not so impervious after all. Radin’s Model To begin to theorize how some of these trans-temporal occurrences might be understood, Radin offers a multi-dimensional model of reality. Normal/Local Dimension:
Most science occurs here: force, energy, and linear causality Normal/Nonlocal Dimension:
Ecology of inter-relationships, web of life, part relates to the whole Non-Causal Dimension (beyond linear time and space)
Information dominates and attracts events from the past, present, future Radin also conceptualized and contrasted the local and non-local worlds:
Radin emphasized that conceptualizing and starting to think in terms of a new form of space-time is extremely difficult for us, because our very language structure is rooted in a linear and causal framing of reality. Coming from this new perspective, however, Radin has come to believe that PK (the seeming influence of mind over matter) and pre-cognition (the ability to foresee the future) are highly related and are probably the same thing. Rather than thinking that PK is the ability to manipulate matter, PK might be explained better as the ability to influence the world-line (the procession of something through space and time) of something before its present state. Radin added that maybe PK and pre-cognition are the wrong words altogether and that it is time think about them in an entirely new light. Our thinking is still so heavily influenced by cause-and-effect ways of conceptualizing that we need to open our minds to entirely different ways of understanding. Perhaps, most healing is not happening in present time at all. For example, if one takes the healing of a tumor, one might think a healer actually reduces the tumor by the power of the mind to alter matter. But maybe what is really happening is that a healer is going into the past and altering the development of the person’s health before the tumor ever arose. When we study the events of our lives backwards, all of the events seem to fall into place and make sense. The healing of the tumor was a normal occurrence from the standpoint of the future looking backwards. With respect to some of the data that has lead Radin to speculate about retro-causal influences on the present, Radin distinguished between true retro-causal influences and the more commonly accepted conditioned reflex of anticipation (our nervous system at work). In experiments, when subjects were presented with a random sequence of shocking and non-shocking pictures, their autonomic nervous system showed clear signs of anticipating the shocking pictures with heightened activity—even before the shocking picture was presented, whereas no similar anticipation was observed before the calm pictures were presented. Currently, Radin is doing a literature survey to collect further examples of experiments that supports the theory that the future impinges upon the present moment in a way that can be measured physically (nervous system, cortical system, etc.). Response In response to Radin’s presentation Elizabeth Targ pointed to the theory that maybe no one ever does any "real healing" in the present moment. Instead, it is all a matter of influencing choices made in the past or future. We meet and influence each other on our various world lines in time, and thereby effect a healing response that manifests in the present. Russell Targ furthered this line of inquiry by mentioning experiments whose outcomes could be explained by what Abraham Maslow called "good choosers." For example, imagine that you have 100 mice that are surgically injured. Some will get better faster than others, and there will be a distribution of healing rates. A psychic healer attempting to heal the mice might be influencing the way the mice are selected for the experiment in the past, as opposed to healing in the present. The mice that will get better faster end up falling into the "healed" group, while the others will go into the control group that do not receive healing. Pointing out a possible exception to Radin’s theory of retro-causal healing, Beverly Rubik asked how we are to account for direct bodily healing? Are energy healers somehow influencing the past of their clients when they are working with their chakras, chi, or biofields? In response, Radin honestly stated that the fact is that we know that subtle energy healing happens, as does homeopathy, acupuncture, psi, and PK, but we just don’t understand their mechanisms fully yet. They are all still a mystery, but we know for sure that we can no longer discount the meticulously gathered data that does not fit into explanations offered by the normal/local world of Newtonian physics. What Radin also emphasized was that when healers do their work, particularly distant healers, it is important for them to situate their healing intentions correctly within time. They must be aware of not only where but when. Henry Dreyer brought up a central question that retro-causal PK elicits: in a world where past, present, and future are mutually influencing each other, how do we account for free will to create our lives? Radin responded by offering that he believes that things happen probabilistically. Sometimes the probabilities are very strong and at other times, they are weak. Overall, the arrow of time is pretty strong. In conclusion, Radin offered a natural metaphor to visualize a new understanding of time. If time is a river, then for the most part it flows in one direction, but streams often have eddies, boulders, rocks, and sand bars that shape, trap, and redirect the flow of the river in many unique and remarkable ways. A small eddy can pull events akin to gravity in a slightly different direction than the onrushing flow of linear time.
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