Dean Radin is the English-speaking world’s leading popularizer of the science of psi and its implications, and the author of many books and scientific papers. He is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and cofounder and chairman of the neuroengineering company, Cognigenics. He earned a BS and MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 2022 he was awarded an Honorary DSc from the Swami Vivekananda University in Bangalore, India. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International.

Welcome to Truth Jihad Audiovisual. I’m Kevin Barrett getting visual here for the first time with Dean Radin. I’ve had him on a few times on audio. And here we are doing actual video and talking about his great new book, The Science of Magic. And the subtitle is How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality. It basically starts with the science of psi, leads us up to magic, and the notion that we’re actually all sort of co-creating the universe through paranormal means. It used to be known as magic. Anyway, it’s a good book, and it’s good to have you back, Dean Radin, welcome.

Thank you. It’s good to be here.

It’s another fascinating book. I’ve been interested in these topics since high school when I discovered the Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Psi, which shockingly basically said that, yeah, this has been proven. Unless there’s something very strange going on, clearly Psi has been proven scientifically. This was back in the mid-1970s. And so I looked into it. Wow, that’s interesting. That’s not what I’ve heard from everybody else. And I looked into it and it was true. So I’ve been sort of following that ever since and also have been aware of the fact that we’re sort of influencing reality psychically all the time. And that’s that’s where your book gets to in this kind of second half or third third. So, yeah, let’s talk about that and the wild and crazy implications. Where should we start? You tell the story of how you got into this field in the book. So maybe you can give us the short version.

Well, the short version is that like a lot of kids, usually, who start reading science fiction and fairy tales, you can’t help but start wondering if any of that stuff is true. And then you get a little bit older and you start learning about science and you hear pretty uniformly that none of it is true. And so it depends on whether or not you remain with childlike enthusiasm and imagination, or if it gets squashed when you’re a little bit older. So for a lot of people, it gets squashed pretty quick. For some, they never break out of the squashiness and their imagination begins to fail. But for others, many scientists, actually, you’re driven by curiosity, as I am. In which case you simply want to know what’s real, what’s true. And so when you start looking at the scientific evidence, which has been around since the late 1950s, it’s very difficult to reach a conclusion that the phenomena that we’re talking about, psychic phenomena, does not exist or is impossible, because it’s quite clear that it has been happening all the time in human experience, and you could even see it in laboratory tests. So anybody who pays attention to that, as you just said, you are then presented with what amounts to a kind of a paradox, a contrast between we are being told, and yet the evidence is clearly not saying that. This is real.

So other questions arise like, well, why are we not being told this? What is something being hidden from us? And so I generally don’t go in that direction. I simply say that science tends to be very skeptical and conservative in terms of what it accepts as being true, which is fine. But once it accounts certain kinds of anomalies, which history again and again shows that’s where the future of science always is, there’s two ways you can respond to it. One is to go with the status quo, so it doesn’t disrupt the possibility of your future employment, and just agree with what everyone else does and says; or follow the anomalies, which entails some risk, but also offers a lot of rewards. So I decided the risk was worth it. So here I am years later, and finding it as interesting and as thrilling as I thought when I was a teenager.

Yeah, I agree. Your book is really kind of exciting to read. For somebody like me who’s known about this for a long time, it really is inspiring. It’s actually kind of thrilling to know that we’re somewhere near the edge of a radical change in worldview. Because this can’t be ignored forever. And there are signs, even though it hasn’t exploded into public consciousness the way I expected it would. When I first looked into this in the 1970s and early 1980s, I kind of thought, “well, by the turn of the millennium, this will be pretty widely accepted.” And it seems like it kind of stalled. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy was a very mainstream publication. And they were unequivocal that “this stuff is real. It’s been proven seven ways from Sunday. Get used to it.” But somehow the consensus view in the academy has managed to keep sticking heads in the sand. How have they kept a lid on this?

Yeah, in many ways, that’s really the interesting question, because the answer is that it’s partially culture-bound. So within, as a broad umbrella term, Western academia, it is thought that because these effects are impossible, then the only evidence can be interpreted as flaws or fraud. If you look at Wikipedia, that’s sort of the way that is presented. Well, that partially becomes a theoretical problem. If you can’t immediately think of an explanation, you say, well, it doesn’t exist. But as sociologists of science have pointed out again and again, that is always how anomalies are presented. That there must be something wrong because we can’t possibly change the dogma, which is what we are accepting as being true. And eventually, if something is real, it will penetrate.

So why has it not penetrated yet into the mainstream? Well, one possibility is, without going too far into conspiracy theory, is exactly the same reason why UFOs have only recently, like within the past five years or so or six years, have come out of the closet as far as the U.S. government has presented. And other governments have been way ahead of this. So... There are those who perceive that UFOs, psychic phenomena, and a whole bunch of other things are simply declared as demonic. We don’t understand it. We don’t like it. It’s uniformly presented as demonic or as horrific in our entertainment. And so we simply come away with an idea that we don’t want this to be real. And so there’s a huge push from a religious perspective: Don’t pay attention to this. Don’t look at it. It’s bad.

There’s the other push from science, where the science spokespeople, many of them, are saying that this stuff can’t possibly be real, and then give a bunch of reasons. So you have pressure from both of those directions, which is pretty strong. You may also have pressure from government. The government doesn’t want people to know that this is actually real too, partially because with things like remote viewing or clairvoyance in general, the possibility arises that not only are we in a surveillance state, but the kind of surveillance that literally can look at anywhere in space or time by people who are adept at doing that. And so maybe there are people in government that don’t want to know that that’s possible.

It’s even worse than Snowden said.

You can understand that there’s multiple pressures that combine to push the idea of these kinds of phenomena to the fringe. So that’s a big part of it. But again, it’s culture bound. So you go to India, you go to Asia and so on. These things are so well accepted that people say, well, why are you even bothering to study it? Like, what are you studying? That’s the kind of attitude I’ve encountered in India for sure, but in other countries as well. So this is a culture bound problem.

Absolutely. I moved to Morocco two and a half years ago, and I can tell you that it is a culture where people basically accept the worldview that you’re presenting. Nobody, only maybe a very minuscule percentage of people here who’ve been overly indoctrinated in Western education, might agree with the Western consensus. But the vast majority, not at all. And that’s one of many things I like about Morocco.

So you mentioned science and religion both kind of working in the same direction to keep this suppressed. I wonder…it seems to me that years ago it was more the religion side that was doing it. And now we have the tools of science proving that it’s real. And I think one of the reasons that many people in the scientific establishment don’t want to admit it’s real is that it challenges scientism as a dogmatic substitute for religion. And indeed, it opens the door again to a more religious worldview. I thi...