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Dean Radin – 2

meditation, or who are naturally adept, may be able to sustain being a drop. They may be able to settle into that ocean and still have a sense of their “dropness”, even though they’re also now part of the ocean.


David: So you’re of the opinion that it’s possible that not the same thing happens to everyone after they die. Perhaps some people merge back into everything, and some people are able to maintain some element of their individuality.

Dean: If there’s anything that psychology teaches it’s that people are different. So I imagine that there may as many ways of experiencing after-death as there are people to experience it.  And no one explanation is the “correct” one.

David: What potential do you see for research into the psychic powers of animals?

Dean: I don’t think I talked about that at all in my book, and there is a pretty long history of it. A good percentage of J. B. Rhine’s research was spent on psychic tracking in animals, such as looking into the stories about dogs or homing pigeons who found their way home over great distances. Now we understand that some of their navigational abilities are due to magnetic senses, and probably to exceptional sensitivity of their other senses. So there may be some normal explanations for what appears to be animal psi, in some cases. But Rupert Sheldrake’s recent experiments with dogs and parrots also shows that even in cases when you exclude the ordinary explanations that some animals still show telepathic ability.

We don’t see psychic phenomena happening in say, ants, but maybe it’s because we haven’t been looking for it. Maybe ants don’t need it, or they can’t use the information because they don’t have a kind of cognitive processing capability able to recognize when it’s there or not.  Or maybe they do use it in the sense that this what sustains the “hive mind”.  We don’t really understand enough about human consciousness to make any strong statements about any other forms of life. But I would expect that all animals, certainly any animal that would be recognized as sentient, does have a form of psychic awareness. I imagine that plants too can exhibit some form of psi, when psi is viewed as a reflection of the fabric of reality rather than as a skill or talent. Cleve Backster’s work with “primary perception” in plants seemed to show something like this.

David: What are some of the shared characteristics that you see among natural psychics?

Dean: It depends on how far into psychopathology you want to go. Some people who are psychotic might be very good psychics, but they can’t control it. Most of the folks that I’ve worked with are naturally highly psychic, but they are able to deal with it.  And their sense of the world–I guess in a word– is more *meaningful* than for the rest of us who are more locked into our heads.

David: What are your thoughts on how psychic phenomena has been portrayed in science fiction films?

Dean: Films like Scanners, Fire Starter, Phenomenon, and Powder push psychic abilities far beyond the bounds of real life, mainly for dramatic purposes. None of those films are very realistic, but the ones that may be closer to reality are the ones that have to do with time paradoxes. One which I liked was Millennium, with Kris Kirstoferson who played a crash investigator for the FAA. There’s a crash, and he gets pulled into this time paradox thing where he notices there’s something wrong with the people who ended up dead on the airplanes. He’s puzzling about this when it turns out they have a link to future events, and then the plot becomes trickyand complicated.

The movie is nicely done, because it actually points out some of the problems with casual paradoxes, and how things might be able to happen before they occur, and other mind-minding stuff — some of which we think might actually be real. I say this because we’re doing experiments now–which are actually part of a long line of study–in which we seem to be changing the past, or at least that’s one way of interpreting the results.  You might be able to change something which


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