4 - Psychic skills & miracles - Technology used for telepathy and remote viewing

The theme of tonight's talk is Psychic Skills and Miracles, and I want to be clear what types of psychic skills I'm going to be talking about. The first of these is Telepathy. When I say Telepathy, I'm referring to the transfer of information between two brains along lines that physics would either have a hard time describing or wouldn't want to touch at all. The classic example of the kind of the stories that everyone has heard most often about this kind of psychic transmission, telepathic transmission; is when a mother , lets say in the state of Maine, suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night knowing that her daughter in California is having some kind of trouble. And wakes up, places that frantic call asking "what's wrong?" And then finds her daughter is on the other end of the phone saying my boyfriend just went berserk, or "I was in a car accident" and so forth. Somehow, across three thousand miles of sheer physical distance, there can be this transfer of information. Its most common between intimates, people who are closely connected, mothers and daughters, boyfriends-girlfriends married couples, siblings and so forth. The next type that we would be talking about is remote viewing, which I'd like to kind of characterize as 'real time' clairvoyance. Remote viewing - I'll try to define these things, even though I think everybody already knows what it is, It's when someone in one location can focus or put their attention on another location and gets real information about what's going on there. There are some types of psychic connections, some type of psychic skills, that I won't be talking about or that my comments here tonight won't apply to. Things like 'precognition'. And I think there is some validity to precognition (and I'll be mentioning one of the studies was validated later on) that involves information from the future to the present. And this is tricky because it opens up what what is in theoretical Physics referred to as a can of smelly worms. Because getting information from the future to the present breaks down their fundamental assumptions; challenges their fundamental assumptions about the nature of time. And they want us to do as little of that as we can possibly manage. So, we're not going to be talking about tarot card readings, palmistry, tea leaf readings, crystal gazing, or channeling. All these are in a different class of experience. And one of the things that distinguishes telepathy and remote viewing from other kinds of psychic work is that all you need to do it is a human brain. No tarot cards, no crystal balls, no tea. This isn't what we're covering. And the reason we're not covering it is that the reason that this talk is possible at all has to do with a certain new class of evidence that's come from a laboratory in Canada where a new technology was used to elicit telepathic and remote viewing in experimental subjects. And here, is a picture of the first prototype. This device is known as the 'Octopus' because it has eight, it has eight magnetic coils, or eight pair of coils that arranged around the head. From the top you can see them a little bit better These are film canisters, and each film canister has two magnetic coils (which are actually adapted solenoids). And There a couple of signals that have been used in this class of technology. One of them is actually called a Chirp signal and I'll be getting you a look at that later on. And the other one that is actually derived from activity deep in the brain from a structure called the Amygdala. And this technology has been used to pioneer a new way of studying psychic perception. What the individual pairs of coills are doing is outputting magnetic fields. And those magnetic fields rise and fall in very short periods of time like 1 - 3 milliseconds so that the magnetic fields they're producing actually acquire a distinct shape. It was developed by Dr. Michael Persinger, here on the left, and Stan Koren on the right. And they are both senior researchers at Lauren's Kean University Behavioral Neurosciences Program. That's located in Sudbury, Ontario. Dr. Persinger, on the left, is also my mentor and has we've had a mentor-protege relationship for about O.. I would say thirteen years at this point. And the first set of experiments that he did with this technology were done with a very well known remote viewer named Ingo Swann. And the research paper said that he had formerly been employed by an unspecified US government agency. And there's a lot of speculation is to what this might have been. Apparently, it is the CIA. But sitting behind the podium, I would like to say that I'm not completely sure. You never know who's going to watch the video, right? So, two experiments were done with Ingo Swann - actually, a great deal ofwork was done, but two of the experiments really gave us some important information. In one of them he sat in a room - an acoustic chamber, a darkened room; actually he had light but the room door was still closed and he was in complete silence. and he was.. his task, his job, as the experimental subject was to remote view a set of photographs. And he had no idea what the pictures are going to be or going to be of, but he would tell them when he was ready and then someone in the next room would take out one of the pictures from manila envelope and leave it on the table. The original research paper actually gave the length and width of the table as well as the length and the width of the manila envelopes they were, they were contained in - very precise information. He had told me exactly where to put the pictures on the table. They gave me firm amount of latitude. They weren't looking to prove that he wasn't a remote viewer. This was not a skeptical experiment. They were attempting to prove to validate that he was a remote viewer and setting up the experiment to prove him wrong but , allowing him to set up the environment to give himself the best chance, the best shot at doing his thing well. And, in the other experiment, he was told to remote view certain researchers. He saw them in advance, he knew who he was trying to track and they went out into areas around the campus of the University and into the town nearby - Sudbury Ontario. And he would remote view them. Now, while he was doing either of these jobs, he was drawing; Ingo Swann is also a noted artist and actually has a reputation as an artist, quite separate from his reputation as remote viewer. And then 44 students who played no other role in the experiment whatsoever, were asked to compare the pictures that he had been remote viewing and the drawings Ingo Swann had made while remote viewing the pictures. And then to make, to match them up as well as they could - to say in percent kind of guesswork, but the failings of guesswork disappear when you have a large numbers of people doing guesswork. Their read on whether this picture match that sketch may be inaccurate, but the percent of cognizance, the percent of agreement that they assigned to each one yields a solid numbers which could be analyzed. So there, that's how we go from very imprecise and difficult to pin down procedures like Remote Viewing to actual quantitative measurements, and this is one of the breakthroughs in this field. It's not just an amazing new technology being developed, it's not just a researcher finally stepped forward - someone with real credentials and academic publications and putting the reputation on the line, it was also that a breakthrough in statistical methodology allowed precise measurements of imprecise phenomena and that something quite important. Dr. Persinger is many things to many people, certainly he has many things to me, but where he really shines as a .. as a scientist is in his absolutely breathtaking mastery of statistics. So, the results of these experiments were that the accuracy of the drawings he made while his remote viewing turned out to be much higher when he was being exposed to one of the two signals, and I'll show you that just in a moment. He actually, in addition to confirming and validating his remote viewing and you .. stimulating and enhancing his remote viewing by this means which gave a real, much clear idea what's happening in a brain when psychic skills are being exercised. They also tried to set him up to block his remote viewing skills, and then found that they were able to do it. I don't have a picture of it and I wish I did, but what they did was they constructed a frame and put more of these magnetic coils around the edge of the frame, and then they ran a signal through all of these coils at once and when they ran the signal he wasn't able to remote view through the screen. So now there exists a technology that will actually screen remote viewing. And the signal that he ran, that was run through these was very interesting - is exactly the same as the signals that were run in the experiment, except where that the experiments were being.. the experiments were producing the signals under DOS, when it was run through Windows, there was this extra component added to the output. And that extra component which had a kind of fractal pattern the chaos model in mathematics is the only one that can describe the additional input that was put in and when that was put there, he could no longer remote view. And so they didn't just let him remote view and enhance it, they also found a way to turn it off! And that really lends a degree of certainty to all the experiments that wouldn't be gotten in any other way. It's not enough to make something happen to describe it scientifically, it helps a great deal if you can stop it from happening. So that was the first of these experiments that involved just the one subject but there were other experiments done with this technology that involved other people - non-psychics and this is important. The other subjects in this research that I'll be mentioning none of them were trained psychics, none of them brought any additional skills - cognitive or emotional skills into their participation in the laboratory. We're dealing with ordinary people with ordinary minds and looking to see how they're psychic abilities might be turned on and or enhanced. And in one of these experiments pairs of intimate subjects brothers-sisters, mothers and daughters, twins, and married couples participated. And one of them, who did not receive the Octopus stimulation, the circumcerebral magnetic stimulation sat in a room and were shown pictures taken in a local area. So one might be a field, another might be a famous monument. So, the other one sitting in the darkened chamber, again it's acoustically silent but they had a microphone and we were told the kind of free associate sharing any thoughts, any feelings, any images that might come up for them while they were receiving the stimulation. And what they found is that the one who is looking at the picture and had been asked what memories they might have had with the other person while they were in that location or nearby while the other one free associated with no control what so ever. Then the moments when this subject who wasn't getting the stimulation and was looking at the pictures was compared to the moments in which the persons receiving the stimulation had. Again by 44 students each of which gave an approximate kind of guesswork rating for how well they match, they found that the matches came up 2.85 times more than they would have by chance alone. The accuracy of their telepathic skills went up almost three times. Now that may not be enough to get you a world-class psychic like Ingo Swann, but is enough to demonstrate that it's possible under certain conditions for human brains to share and transfer information between one another and that's an important result, an important result. In addition, they found that like Ingo Swann, when they were being stimulated with a chirp signal going around their head, their accuracy improved. And the interesting thing about this is that this is not a biologically derived signal, this one doesn't come from the brain, this one comes from a fairly normal kind of signal that a, that of laboratory equipment called a Function Generator, sometimes called a tone generator can produce. So a box it could produce your perfect musicians aid - 440 Hz can often produce this kind of signals. Well there is no biological basis for the success of this signal. In another experiment, and here we see the the coils lighting up to show how the fields rotate. This was another experiment involved only siblings brothers and sisters, sisters and sisters, brothers and brothers. One of them sat in the room with the Octopus on their head getting the stimulation around their head, the other one sat in another room and they're brain was monitored with EEG- Electroencephalography. . And what they found was that when the person who is in the darkened chamber was asked to pretend that they were touching their brother or sister in the other room, the brother or sister in the other room, they had their EEG respond. Pretend to touching your brother and your brother's EE brain wave showed it, pretend to touching your sister your sister's brain wave showed it - again transmission of information between two brains. This time it didn't take any group of 44 undergrads to rate the pictures for extra credit in their psychology class. This time the EEG showed it, the times matched a perfectly and there is very little room for skeptics or research critics to find anything wrong with this experiment. And as far as I'm aware, no one has published anything criticizing any of these experiments. And considering how outlandish the results are from the point of view of traditional consensual science, that's really saying something. Sometimes the scientific community really wows us by what they say, in this case I'm really wowed by what they didn't say. In addition to that, there were several of these cases where the occipital lobe of the brain, including the sibling touching experiment, responded more than other areas of the brain. And that's kind of an unusual, an unexpected results because the information processing areas of the brain as far as we know are not in the occipital lobes in the back of the head - the occipital lobe are actually primarily a visual processing area. So like any good research it leaves us with a few unanswered questions that will allow further research. Now, the next result wasn't published. I received it as an e-mail from Dr. Persinger who talked about how one person, in this case they had two Octopus setups, both of them were receiving the brain stimulation and what they did was one of them sat in the room and looked at a flashing light. The other one sat in another room again with octopus stimulation and EEG. And what they found was that when the light was flashing for the one subject, the EEG of the other subject responded. And the reason this is important is because whereas all the previous research in this field worked with human brains - transmission from one brain to another, examining the brain ..a person while the remote viewing actual people this was doing it with with a flashing light, something that has no personality, no personal vibrations or aura or anything like that for psychic to lock onto. This was direct transmission from one brain to another. And when he closed the email to me about this, which I found terribly exciting, he said that when the experiment was over, we then drank a toast with diet coke and realize that we were at the brink of a shift in paradigm. Now the device that I've been discussing so far is the Octopus - the circumcerebral neuro stimulation device, developed by Persinger and Koren. This is the Shiva device and the Shiva device is my own invention based on Dr. Persinger's technology and developed with his full cooperation and support. I probably had easily half-a-dozen conversations with him over the phone in which he explained and re-explained the parameters for the signals - the way they rotate, as they rotate around the head they don't just move from coil to coil - they move from one coil to another at let's say a speed of 10, then the speed of 12 14..16.. 18..20.. with the length of time over each area increasing as it goes along. So the signals are change of.. magnetic fields are changing there are getting weaker and stronger with each passing millisecond and the rate at which it moves from one coil to the next continually changes. I have a question. Yes, I'm very happy to do that. Magnetic fields are a fields phenomena and I'll go over this part quickly because it gets a little boring. But energy in the vocabulary of science is whatever a body, a mass or a system has that allows it to do work and work is defined as anything that changes where a force is being applied. And a Force is anything that changes inertia. Now, magnetic fields are a force. Electromagnetic radiation like things that happen in electromagnetic frequencies are energies. And it's an important distinction to make with respect to understanding this technology because electromagnetic can include things like microwaves and you don't want a microwave wrapped around your head. Whereas magnetic fields are perfectly safe and as I'll be describing shortly where immersed in magnetic fields all the time, most importantly the earth's magnetic field, constantly. So that's a very good point. Now the design for this somewhat complicated arrangement of changing magnetic fields and moving magnetic fields comes from a factor that's at work in the brain called the binding factor. And the binding factor reaches the surface of the brain from a structure deep down in the brain called the fallamus and the fallamus operates to unite all about sensory input, everything from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, our skin, even our internal senses - how do you know we have to go to the bathroom, how do you know if you have eaten something you shouldn't have, how do you feel that it's your stomach, you know it's your upper intestine or your lower intestine. These are all on equal plane to the fallamus . All of them are input from the body, from our eyes, ears, our viscera and so forth. But in addition, two other things get put on even keel and on even footing with our senses and that is our thoughts and our emotions. And the fallamus unites all of this into a single comprehensible entity that we can experience as the input to ourselves. And the binding factor, ones from the front of the brain to the back of the brain; now this is very much slow down but it shows you the kind of movement that it makes and I don't have an illustration it will do it, but if you can think of that big button in the in the basement of the brain that you just saw as the source of this.. this activity. And that it kind of sweeping up from the bottom and back across your head over and over again then you have a kind of image of the binding factor. Among neuroscientists it's often called 'The 40 Hz component' and that's because it crosses the brain in this way twenty five times per second. It has a distinct speed. The reason its called the binding factor is because it tends to bind together all of the input that comes to us in a way that allows us to be conscious of it, whether in whole or in part. And so it got the name 'the binding factor for consciousness'. Now, in my own work thinking about this and developing a technology that works with it, I want to add something to that and that is that it also tends to bind us as individuals to our normal repertoire of states of consciousness. You have a range of states of consciousness. Ingo Swann one can close his eyes and he can see what's going on with missile silos in Siberia. I can't do that. What's the difference? In one state of consciousness you can do that, in another one you can't. That state of consciousness is within his repertoire, it's not within mine. They are unlike masters who can put their hands on your heads and make you see god, the skill and the state they have to be in in order to do that is in their repertoire of states. But it's not in mine. I can't do that. I have been able to stop a couple of people's headaches, made a couple of headaches and small pains go away back in the days when I was trying to learn spiritual healing but I never even got close to what the real masters can do. So how does this technology work with the binding factor? The magnetic fields, the magnetic signals are circulated around the head. As you view the head above they go counter clockwise. The binding factor runs front to back and that means that as these signals are over the right side of the brain, they're running against the grain of the binding factor and when they're running over the left side of the head, they're running with the grain. So they're not trying to push the binding factor out of the way on the left side and they are pushing it out of the way on the right side. And the speed at which the signals move from one pair of coils to the next is actually set by the speed at which the binding factor moves. by coming in around the same speed, not exactly but at close to it the brain can become just a little confused about the state of the binding factor. And what that means is that while this is happening and for a time afterward as I'll be getting into, you are no longer bound to your habitual lifetime repertoire states of consciousness. What you can do with your consciousness when you're receiving this kind of stimulation, this kind of input very much amplifies. The binding factor locks you into the person you normally are and when you alter it, when you perturb it, when you make some changes in it you can become temporarily somewhat of a different person with a wider range of cognitive skills. So here's another illustration that shows the movement of the signals and there you can see the magnetic fields sort of jumping up and down over each position. I would have liked an illustration that changed to speed as it went around but you can imagine what a nightmare of computer graphics work that would have been. So the other point about all of these experiments that I haven't mentioned yet is that there was a further response not just to the signals but also to the Earth's magnetic field. And what they found in looking over the results of these experiments was that the subjects had a more robust response. Their narratives, their free associations while receiving the stimulation tended to match what the other person that they had come to the lab with. More closely when the Earth's magnetic field was quiet. Now this illustration you can see on the left hand side there are some very very small little green blocks and what they indicate is that the Earth's magnetic field measure with just about zero at that time. And that's the time when these kinds of experiments, in fact any kind of psychic or spiritual work especially if it involves inner imaging is more effective when the earth's magnetic field is quiet. I once played around with a set of crystal tools recently, lie down and you hold the tools in your hands and you let their energy do what it will do. I once found an enormous flood of visions coming. This was the first time I have used them in quite some time. And I checked the geomagnetic indices and what I found was the field was flat. And when I spoke up to Dr Persinger about this he said “Oh yes, that's what you should expect”. And ever since then I have expected it and ever since then it hasn't been as powerful. So the other thing worth mentioning is that the feeling of a sensed presence that I described last week where you think there's someone.. you feel that the someone behind you but when you turned to look but no one is there. That's more likely when the measures are higher. Out-of-body experiences are much more likely during times of enhanced geomagnetic activity, louder geomagnetic activity, stronger fields. Psychic perceptions are quite different - they're more likely during quiet times as I just mentioned and the reason for this is quite interesting. And that's because things like out-of-body experiences and sensing a presence involve both sides of the brain, whereas psychic perception seems to involve only one side of the brain - the right side. So not only we are having different responses to the Earth's magnetic field and its activity there's actually different brain parts working when you're having what's classically called the spiritual or religious experience then there are working when you're having a psychic experience. And that is, well, good to know, especially if are in my line of work. The other thing worth mentioning is that those times of crisis relief psychic perception - the mother in one place knowing when the daughter in another is in trouble - they're more likely when it's quiet at. The brain is more responsive to psychic input when a quiet period comes just after a noisy period. So first the Earth's magnetic field is at its peak, there's lots of turbulence going on and might even be a geomagnetic storm, a few hours later things settle down and things are very quiet. Right then is a launch window for more effective psychic work. And the interesting thing about it is that it suggests that the brain is accommodating, that there's some mechanism in our brains that changes our consciousness following the Earth's magnetic field. And that from time to time when these extra bits of information, these extra psychic perceptions are more available, our brain is over compensating, not for geomagnetic noise which you might think would interfere with the brain's functioning but rather for geomagnetic quiet. So that our brains which are normally.. which are normally 'ON' everywhere through the brain unless those areas are told to be turned 'OFF', everything is active unless it's inhibited, leave us more sensitive to quiet times in the Earth's magnetic field. And the other thing about our brains is that they're filled with magnetite. Our brains are actually responding to the earth's magnetic field because we are wired up to do so with a heavy load of actual magnetite crystals. There are five million of them per gram in the center of the brain - the normal brain tissues - five million per gram And there are fourteen hundred grams in the average human brain. Interestingly, the outer area of the brain - the meninges - the membrane that surrounds it has a hundred million of these magnetite crystals per gram. And the shape of these magnetic crystals doesn't occur in nature. It's only found in biological tissue. Now, since this was discovered - it was published in December of 1992 under the somewhat heavy title of 'BioMagnetite Mineralization in the Human Brain' published by Joseph Kirschvink and a group of researchers that he worked with. I actually called him on the phone because I was very interested in the evolution of this system. And he did tell me which hadn't been published that other primate brains have been found to have the same minerals in them - chimpanzees, gibbons, lab monkeys. You know.. I don't know what the primates were but he confirmed that we are not the only species that has this. And not only are the crystals formed in the brain tissue and it's hard to explain how that unique shape would appear if they weren't formed there. They are also organized and they tend to occur in nice neat chains and this maximizes a thing called the magnetic moment, which is kind of a magnetic analog to momentum. It allows them to actually handle more force and that's a magnetic fields are - they are force not an energy. It allows them to handle more magnetic force. which perhaps is why the brain seems to compensate not for geomagnetic noise or storms but for quiet is because they are actually arranged in such a way as to be able to more readily handle huge amounts of information from the Earth's magnetic field, large changes, big magnetic fields. And when things suddenly drop and become quiet, these long chains of magnetite crystals must need to change their function as well. And they don't seem to do it on a dime; seems to take several hours for this to happen. And because of this kind of correlation, there are some other effects that have been reported. And this came long before the 'Octopus' studies, maybe 10-15 years in some cases. One thing that Dr Presinger did was he took a large number of Psi experiments and he studied all of them and saw how pronounced the effects were, just how radical a psychic phenomena had been for the researchers who did this study and that study involving such things as remote viewing, extra sensory perception with the little cards - well you name it - the whole range. And what he did was he took a size of the effect in those studies year-by-year and compared them to the overall yearly activity for the Earth's magnetic fields. And he found that the Earth's magnetic field was quieter during the years in which the most effective studies were done. And so of course, this result cuts across the entire field of what's come to be called Psi research because it says not only experiments that seemed to be failures because the effect size was so small, actually were successes because the small effects were gotten in the face of very active geomagnetic years. In another one of the studies and I think this is perhaps the most fascinating one of all, Dr Persinger found a number of cases in "Fate" magazine - now Fate magazine does not have a high reputation among many scientists - but one thing they have done, over their many years of publication, is get people who report their psychic experiences for publication in their magazine to say when they made the psychic prediction and when the event they predicted actually took place. Now he didn't have this information down to the hour but he did have it to the day and what he found was that the levels for the Earth's magnetic field, whether high or low, were the same on the day the psychic made the prediction and the day teh event they predicted actually took place. So there's a definite pairing of prediction and event through the Earth's magnetic field. And the other one I already mentioned is that the out-of-body experiences are more likely during times of geomagnetic storm. And one of the things that he said when he published that paper was that it was very likely that it wasn't the actual field strength that was the active agent, it wasn't just how strong or how weak the field is, rather during times of geomagnetic storm or when it is simply unsettled or it is very quiet, there is information either present or absent that's play a role in it. It's not how strong the field is, but rather what kind of information is imbedded in it. And the information will be different during a geomagnetic storm than it is during geomagnetic quiet. The other thing he had to say in that publication which I think I've already quoted in this series a couple of times is that one hypothesis to explore why this is the case Is that it's possible that some part of our consciousness is actually interacting with, taking information from, literally connected like gears are connected, to the Earth's magnetic field. If the geomagnetic field shut off tomorrow it wouldn't just be that there was less magnetism around - perhaps a change in electrical storms, each and every individual on the planet might feel a shift in their consciousness. And this is worth considering when you think about how many psychics are predicting pole shifts and how many geologists have told us that there are such things as a shifting of north and south of the Earth's magnetic field. And the one brain part and there's a nice, very engaging image of the Earth's magnetic field, it does tend to underscore how heavily small changes in the Earth's magnetic field can rely on big changes in the .. in solar winds. They are all part of one large system. And I'm fond of saying that because all of our brains are embedded in the Earth's magnetic field, we may not all be one, but we are all connected. So the single brain part that is most implicated in all of this is a brain structure called the hippocampus. And not just both of them but specifically the one on the right side where language centers are not found. And so far no one has been able to define exactly what's happening in the right hemisphere of the brain in the mirror image spots where language happens on the left, but the crucial point is that psychic information is nonverbal information. The hippocampus is a very cognitive structure. It has been called the 'contextualization engine' in the brain. It takes things, finds context for them, makes connections between things and if it has no context for something, it will literally create one. It's heavily involved in spatial memory, spatial perception. It's instrumental in maintaining our internal maps - how you get from your bedroom to front door down to the corner store and back without having to actually think of the route through is something that the hippocampus is very much involved in. It creates memories, turns our present moment experience and takes our present moment experience and turns them into memories that we can retrieve later on. It also is very much involved in coming up with the content of our dreams. It picks, so to speak along never by itself, always in connection with other structures, but it will pick the details that will appear in our dreams for us. And the other thing is that it's the source of theta waves from within the brain. These are very low frequency 5 - 8 Hz waves that our brain produces when we are involved in things like meditation, trance, when we are under hypnosis or we are in twilight sleep. The other thing that I want to mention - has to do with the binding factor. As long as I mentioned sleep here the binding factor is not always present in the human brain. Its there when we're awake, when we're in fairly normal consciousness It's there when we're dreaming which is like normal consciousness insofar as dreaming an activity activates same brain parts that are involved when you are actually in that activity. And that's kind of an amazing thing. This has led some researchers to wonder if perhaps the binding factor isn't also intimately related to our sense of self. When you're in a dream you're there, when you're in your normal states of consciousness again you are there, but when you're in dreamless asleep, where are you? This is a slightly mind boggling concept - first, you're there, then you're not, then you're there, then you're not and you can watch it on the EEG - dream sleep: present, dreamless sleep: absent. There are five stages of it. I won't bother you with all of them but you appear, you disappear, you appear, you disappear. It happens every night to everybody and yet we still allow ourselves such wide berth in making assumptions about who we are as individuals. So, this is an actual example of the technology I have been discussing tonight. This version is called Shiva partly because Shiva is the lord of mediators and psychic skills are common among people who do spiritual practice. So, those of you who have been wondering, wanting to see it - there it is. And we're done it'll be possible for you to come up and take a closer look at it if you like. So, there it is. And before I move on to the material that I have for the second part of tonight's talk 0:42:57.099,0:42:58.430 I was wondering if anyone has any questions about the technology. Not much in the way of physical sensations using the session design that's proven most effective. This typically a mild altered state that comes at the beginning of the session which lasts about 45 minutes and then towards the end of the session the person can actually find themselves becoming a little bit fatigued or relaxed, very relaxed. Their mind tends to want to shut down a little bit because the.. the target of the stimulation is on the right side of the brain right hemispheric experiences and phenomena tend to dominate the person's awareness. And one of the most easily noticed right hemispheric phenomena is fatigue or relaxation. Anybody else have something to ask? Yes. No problem. Yes, if you were to obtain one yourself through www.spiritualbrain.com then this would arrive in the mail requiring a little bit of setup. And there is a software and all of the instructions to user are embedded in the software. And that's important because we want to make sure that no one has access to the signals without, at the same time, having access to the information about them. Soon as you separate the technology from the information, manuals get lost material is forgotten, that's when it's possible for people to make mistakes. Not that any of those mistakes would be harmful but we want the technology to be effective and keeping the information right at your fingertips all the time is one of the best ways to do that. Were the signals picked at random? Or how did he decide which signals to use? No. As far as how he chose the signals to be used in this experiment is concerned, he actually wasn't shooting in the dark at all. He used two signals for some of the early experiments and some of the ones that are going on now and haven't been published yet. There's only one signal being used although the speed at which the signals move from one pair of coils to the next changes with each phase of the session so that in one phase it moves a bit faster and the next one - a bit slower, and then a bit slower, and a bit slower. Earlier these two signals had had a track record - one of them, derived from the amygdala, which is referred to in the literature as burst X because it duplicates the pattern that occurs with burst firing in the amygdala . had a track record for producing spiritual experiences. In fact, that's the one that was used in the God helmet studies where some 1% of the subjects actually saw God in the laboratory. The other one was devised.. tailored after a chirp pattern, from a piece of equipment called a function generator and that one had some track record for inducing powerful altered states when applied over the right hemisphere. And because psychic effects are not religious experiences per se, that ruled out the first. and the strong response from the right hemisphere tended to include the second. So that's how that choice was made. Let's move on to the next bit of material and I warn you in advance that this area that I'll be discussing next - Miracles is much more speculative than what I have talked about before. There is less evidence to guide us in our thinking on the subject and yet at the same time it's worth talking about. Partly because this strong role that miracles have had in our World's religions - Christ performed miracles, so did the Buddha and they are worth knowing about. The public is curious about them, and ultimately it is the public who pays the bill for all science that is done of any kind. And yet there is a chain of evidence that I can follow and one of them involves a personal case history that I was involved with a few years ago. And just like the one where Dr Persinger worked with Ingo Swann, a single subject, if they're well chosen and the stimulation they receive is well targeted to the subject you're investigating, it can still be worthwhile even with just one subject. It's not conclusive, it's not decisive, perhaps the most you can do is call for more research and yet that doesn't keep it from being significant. Just like .. Yes, a question. Can you give a definition for the word miracle Yes miracles are.. well I have to use another word that will call for further definition - 'non-ordinary'. Miracles are non-ordinary events outside the normal range of experiences that can be explained with medical neuroscience or the normal mainstream laws of physics. And just like with psychic phenomena, I wasn't talking about all kinds of psychic phenomena, and anything to do with tea leaves doesn't fit into the discussion that I just gave you. We're primarily concerned with miracles that have their source in human consciousness. So, for example, I will not be offering you a deep explanation for the tortilla that manifested in my kitchen the day before yesterday bearing an image of the *** Mary. (... after being drawn on it by my friend) :-) Miracles from God and that is what tortillas bearing an image of the *** Mary will be taken as - this is a sign from god, a gift from god, are different from miracles of mind. And for those of you who are curious about the tortilla I can tell you that it originates with Jose's Mexican Products. It's a corn tortilla and it was made in Salinas, California. (laughter) OK, now talking about miracles a little more seriously, there is one classical religious text, comes from the Buddhist tradition, that does give you detailed instructions on how to perform miracles. It's called the Visudhamagga which means the path or the road or the trail to purification. It was written by Buddhagosha Acharya, I believe in the twelfth century and this is now O.. 1500 years after the Buddha's time. And there had been enormous amount of information that had accumulated in monasteries all over the world. But there was no tradition of centralized information exchange, there were no journals, there were no websites certainly, there was no calling up the abbot of another temple and sharing information. So this man acquired information from many many sources and condensed it into a single book and I say condensed tongue-in-cheek because in fact the book runs over a thousand pages. And there is a chapter in it, I believe it's chapter 12 'The Description of Concentration' and in that chapter you will find, if you read between the lines and don't mind some very heavy reading and an occasional trip to the dictionary, you'll find descriptions of how miracles are performed. And I am going to be giving you some of that information tonight. According to the Buddhaghosha Acharya, there is a state of consciousness called "the realm of infinite space" and it's a formless absorption state. It's state of consciousness that only appears when you are absorbed in a meditation object. And it involves the perception of infinite space. Now, this image which has appeared so far in every one of these talks one of the more common manifestations of that for more ordinary people and its got the nickname 'the void'. In near-death experiences it can appear with its point of light at the middle. It's been reported through *** visions. I've talked a couple people who've had it following head injuries. And without the point of light it's simply an infinite black space. But there's more to it than just space It has a texture, it has a vibration, it has a sound that isn't heard , the texture that isn't touched, it has information to convey and yet words do not appear in which to receive the information. And what I think is happening in this state, when the person is simply face to face with infinity in their minds, is that the spatial perception which is the the arena, so to speak, of the hippocampus is disinhibited. Ordinarily, in order for me to perceive a space, I have to take the space that I'm in and shrink it down from the most that my mind is capable of handling. Same... if it's true for me it's going to be true for everyone else. So it's actually possible. Now, some people don't get this but it's actually possible to be in a room like this and focus your attention not on what's in the room but the amount of space that's displaced in the room so that instead of getting a sense of the place, you cue in on, your focus on the space that's contained within it. And if you disinhibit that, the brain.. it's been said the brain works by creating a function somewhere our evolutionary history and then inhibiting the function and then inhibiting the inhibition and then inhibiting the inhibition to the inhibition to the function so that the brains complexity grows through evolutionary history by inhibiting more and more of it through more and more complicated levels until you can have five or six layers of inhibition to a single function. Turn one 'ON', turn the other 'OFF' three of them 'ON' two of them 'OFF' and so forth. So that a single brain structure with one or two core functions can actually be expanded to function in hundreds-thousands of different ways and this is one of their ways that many scientists believe the brain evolved from a simple thing that only tells a flatworm what's food and what isn't to the kinds of brains that we have where we can tell what's food and what isn't but, if we have the head for it, we can also learn calculus. And I sincerely hope that will be the last mention of calculus that we have tonight. Again it's the hippocampus on the right side and this is the most likely source for the experience of the void because it's the one on the right side, the one that processes information that does not come in words. That is the most crucial, at least as far as deeper structures are concerned, in our ability to perceive space, spatial relationships, and to work with our mental maps of things. It's also implicated in out-of-body experiences, in which you perceive your own body as having a different location in space than it ordinarily would. One of the ways that you know that you're having an out-of-body experience is that you are in a different place than you would be if you're in the body. And this small, subtle, perhaps unimportant detail to those who've had them actually gives us a very strong and crucial guide to understanding which brain parts are involved in it. Another thing about the hippocampus and I think I said this before but it's worth saying again is the main source, possibly the only source, of theta output from the brain and again that involves things like twilight, sleep, hypnosis, meditation, trance and so forth. And in order to give you all a first-hand taste of what the hippocampus can do and why the one on the right is so very different from the one on the left, I'm going to ask you all to participate with me in a short guided imagination; a guided visualization except you're not going to be visualizing something that you would ordinarily see. What you do for the first part of it is you imagine ... I want all of you now please close your eyes, having seen that picture. Everyone just take a couple deep breaths, as much trance as you can get in a few seconds. Please.. Please pull it in now. And I want you to imagine that the space behind you and to your left is expanded out to infinity literally into outer space. Well, the space in your right is closed off behind you. Now I'm going to ask you all to keep your concentration, keep your eyes closed, keep your posture and now I want you to switch the sides so that now that vast black empty infinite space is behind you and to your right. And the space behind you on the left is closed off as if by a wall. And if you could all come back now, open your eyes, be with me again here. So I want to ask how many people noticed a difference in sensation that came visualizing the space on each side? That is a very high number. We must have a very holy crowd with us tonight. What you experienced when you imagined that on the right was the input of the hippocampus on the right. Now ordinarily left brain is right body and so forth but at the level of imagination, that is reversed. If you ever found that the visualization you just did came to you as a full-blown hallucination, you would find that the sides were reversed. And if you're like most people what you experience on the right side was far more engaging, really interesting - you really wanted to go into that space that was the second phase. And the space, the sensation that you created for yourself imagining the space on the left could have been boring, stale, flat, dry or something like that. And that is because the hippocampus on the right is far more forward-looking, positive and optimistic. This is a thinking structure, a cognitive structure and it has a different, what they call, cognitive style on the right than it has on the left. And the right side is far more spiritual, the left side is far more worldly, if I can use so unscientific a term. So, how can I put this, welcome to your hippocampus. Now for those of you who want to take something away from tonight's talk, I would suggest if you take anything away you it would be to take that. Imagining space behind you on the right can be an excellent way to prime your system for meditation, prayer, yoga, or anything like that. You don't need to spend 20 minutes trying to attain a perfect concentration with complete focus and excellent posture. You simply go in, establish a space and then move on to the other practice. This isn't a stand-alone spiritual practice, it's one that does its best in service of other practices. So that's that. And now that I have brought you through your hippocampus a little bit, I can proceed to tell you a little more about miracles. Now, what Buddhagosha Acharya said in the book 'Visudhamagga', the path of purification, is that the way to do miracles is to close your eyes and get into a state of consciousness where you're seeing an infinite space behind your eyes. And he has a number of meditation techniques which are intended to make this state of consciousness easier to get. And in the flyer advertising this event, it said that I would explain how to do miracles. Perhaps there wasn't enough room on the paper but I didn't, maybe I didn't say not to be too put out if you find that you go away from tonight's meeting unable to turn water into wine. I've been to Napa Valley (grape farms), and it's an overrated skill. but he said first you get into that state of consciousness. Now he's not talking about the void with the point of light. He's just talking about having your eyes closed, and instead of seeing the dull darkness of the inside of your eyelids, you're pushing into infinite space. It's got to have that sense of spaciousness to it. Then the foreground is an area in which visualizations can appear. That if you're in the state of consciousness and you visualize something, you can actually have a mental image of that thing appear. The other thing is that when you're in that state of consciousness, you can project an intention. And the most common technique that I know of for this which many psychics have confirmed from me and yet strangely enough I haven't seen written down even once is that the way to put a thought in someone else's mind is to imagine the sound of their voice, saying the thing that you want them to be thinking. And then, unless there is some reason for them to resist it, those words, whatever they are, will come to their consciousness. And I used to do a simple, almost parlor trick to illustrate this. I would take a word and in one case I chose the word 'Afghanistan' - this was when the war in Afghanistan was still very much in the news. And I was sitting with a friend and I said I can make you say a word. He said "go ahead and try”. So I wrote the word 'Afghanistan' on the piece of paper, folded it up, stuck it in his pocket reaching across the scrambled eggs and bacon to do so and started hearing his voice saying the word Afghanistan. Then at one point the conversation had to refer to a friend of his who was having trouble with a shopkeeper. And he said “ya..the guy's Afghanistan. No, the guy.. No, the guy is.. he is from Afghanistan. He's..” and I said “Afghani”. He said “Yes, that's it. He's Afghani” and I said “Okay, read the word in your pocket and check it out”. There was he.. He was blown away! I had succeeded in putting the word in his consciousness. So one of the reasons I chose that word was that it wasn't too likely. It could come up in a normal conversation and it wasn't a word with the religious, ***, scientific, mathematical implication to it. So that he would have no reason to resist it. If I use the word polynomial and he was one of these people who is convinced he will never learn math, it would have failed. This is Bhawagan Das. Now, ordinarily I don't mention the names of my subjects, but when I told Bhawagan Das who is the author of a book called 'It's Here Now, Are You?' about his life experiences including with his teacher, he said “No, no, use my name all you can. Use it everywhere you can. I want to be famous. Don't anonymous me, please”. And I said “Okay, I'll use your name all I can”. So therefore, Bhagwan Das, Bhagwan Das, Bhagwan Das. And I hope he sees this video and I hope he's pleased. So, Bhagawan Das and I had a conversation where I told him about 'the void' experience and he said “Oh.. I know that state of consciousness. That's the womb of Kali”. I said “the womb of Kali?”. He says “Yes, I'm a Kali worshiper, I do Kali bhajans and Kali pooja and ceremonies. I worship Kali every morning in front pf my altar with a tambura, with bhajans - Hindu sacred songs and when he was doing this, he would go into the state of consciousness. And it didn't happen with some other deities, it happened with Kali. I can't give you a sound explanation for that, and I'm not going to try. But certainly, he was a man who knew the experience I talked about. We compared some details, the sense of vibration and aliveness in the void state. And yes, we were.. we were talking about the same thing - the realm of infinite space, the void, the womb of Kali - call it what you will. It's not all too rare an experience. Now Buddhaghosha Acharya said you have to get into this state if you want to do miracles and when you're in that state, the thing you imagine will come to pass, if your state is locked down enough. If you get into that state and your easily distracted, other phenomenon appear, you're not ready. So Bhagwan Das had another teacher Neem Karoli Baba. Let ritual be satisfied - I will say Jai Shree Shree Neem Karoli Baba for you. He was an amazing teacher, a powerful teacher with tremendous psychic skills. And he did miracles. But unlike Jesus he did miracles in modern times, permitted cameras, and did them in front of large groups of people. On certain holy days in the Hindu calendar. hundreds of people would come to his ashram and someone would give him an apple and he put the apple under his blanket and he would start throwing apple after apple to the crowd. The loaves and the fishes thing seems almost pale by comparison . The certainly the divinity of the two men does not. And he could manifest things literally out of thin air. A disciple came to him once and said “I'm having terrible trouble with money. What should I do?”. And he was an Indian businessman, an executive. He said “Okay..okay Go with your best suit, immediately take the train to Delhi, and be on this corner at this time and your problems will be solved.”. And the guy said “You are the master. Of course, I'll do exactly what you say.” The man was in Delhi wearing his best suit, at the specified time and place when along comes his old buddy who has just closed in an enormous business deal and needs a working limited partner. And oh by the way if you join under this limited partnership will give you a sign.. a signer's fee.. a sign up fee of 'x' million Rupees. The man was there, they walked over to the coffee shop, made the contract, signed the contract, got a cheque, went to the bank, put the money in his pockets, went back to the ashram - - problem solved. Now, that's a good trick. In fact, I wish someone would do that trick with me. But the point is he could manifest things out of thin air and like Jesus, he would not just manifest an object. He would take an object and make copies of it. As you know from our previous discussion, our brains, because of there are electrical activity are constantly broadcasting matching magnetic activity via the Earth's magnetic field to every brain that surround them. Considering that magnetic fields never drop to zero in their strength, but only fall off constantly, You know, at one distance it's half what it was before, the next distance. it's half what it was there again - the so called inverse square law. But they never reach to zero. So, whenever Neem Karoli Baba was performing a miracle he was in the state of consciousness that miracles require. Bhaganwas Das was in his presence while he was in these states of consciousness. So could Bhagwan Das's brain have picked up information from Neem Karoli Baba's brain that would allow him a greater chance of performing miracles? One of the things I like to point out about the investigation that I'll be discussing now is that involves a postulate, an assumption and that is that performing miracles is a veridical human behavior. It's a human behavior the actually amounts to something real happening. And the assumption is worthwhile because belief in miracles is so incredibly widespread and you can't investigate them, except to dismiss them, without making it. Sooner or later someone in the scientific community somewhere has to decide 'Okay.. miracles happen. Let's look into that.” instead of simply “there are no such things”. And to respond to the wealth of reports and stories of miraculous events happening around certain special people throughout human history simply by saying it's all nonsense seems one that isn't really worthy of the well developed scientific community that we have today. And the other thing I like to point out about it is that it's not a cultural transmission. In Sanskrit there's a word 'vidya' means knowledge. In Thai the word is 'vichaa' related and we have our own modern English word 'video' and all of these words come from the Indo-European language root. So that it's culturally transmitted from one area to the other. Miracles happen in place and are reported from places like Australia with the aboriginals, from the new world with native Americans. And that is not a cultural transmission. The belief in miracles does not happen because your father believe in miracles who got it from his father who got it from his father who got it from his father going all the way back. The belief in miracles is a belief that sprang up separately in many different places in the world. And that to me removes one of the main objections that skeptical scientists have towards accepting their reality, their.. their validity is they try to explain it as a cultural transmission. People just believe in that stuff. If you stop believing in things because they're traditional you wouldn't believe in the stuff anymore and that doesn't account for wide appears in cultures have never had the opportunity to communicate. So Bhagawan Das may or may not have picked up the transmission from the brain of his master that would allow him to enter the state in which miracles occur. Miracles, because they involve, according to Buddhaghosh Acharya, the experience of an infinite space in your mind, and that in turn, through quite straight forward neuroscience implicates the hippocampus on the right side of the brain. That said, we need to put a signal derived from the hippocampus over the right side and this is more or less the set-up that we used for Bhagawan Das . And the sessions that he experienced - he had three sessions - the Shiva device, the Octopus device involves 16 magnetic coils, this involved just two. So we put it over the right side of his brain - one positive, one negatives of the fields would run between the two coils and we applied a signal derived from the hippocampus. And this signal which is got a mid line and then going down shows that the signal is entirely positive. Most neural signals have positive and negative. This one is only positive and it has the somewhat technical but not frighteningly so name of long-term potentiation meaning moments of experience being turned into something with long-term potential. That is to say something we can remember over the long term. a signal like this occurs when the hippocampus is taking present moment experience and turning it into a memory. And again you can see that the shape of the signal shows how the field will rise, magnetic field will rise and fall over time. And so this is the signal that we applied to the right side of Bhagwan Das's head. The first of his three sessions he found that he was in the void of Kali and I had told him “Don't think about Kali. If you have to.. if you sit down with your eyes close it has to go religious ponder Confucius, ponder Lao Tzu, ponder a Zen Master but don't think about Kali because that's not where we're going.”. Then he said “Oh.. no problem. I love Lao Tzu .”. Great. So, he sat down and he said that actually for a little while his mind was on very Taoist and Chinese themes. This happened within a minute or two. Now, when he prayed to Kali, it would usually take him about five minutes to go from starting to pluck his stringed instrument and warming up his voice to actually getting into the womb of Kali, as he called it. This time he was in there within a minute, perhaps two. Now, two days after his second session he found himself at an event where he was leading some Hindu worshipers and he found that he could do Shaktipat. The people came and asked him for blessings which consisted of him putting his hands on their head was before he had done kind of as a ritual action like catholic priests do for confirmation. They're not putting the power of god in you when they put their hands on your head during the confirmation ceremony; the coming of age ceremony for Catholics. They are just putting their hands on the head and God works through them as he will. And it's not a common context for miracles and epiphanies to be reported. But Bhagawan Das was now doing this in his context and he found there when he did this a tremendous amount of heat and electrical sensations appeared in his hands and the people that he touched in this way went into bliss attacks. They would almost collapse in front of him, their arms would expand, their heads would pullback. He said.. I couldn't even keep my grip, they're.. they're leaning back. how I am supposed to do this? He said “Hey, I only do the neuroscience. Ceremonial stuff is your department, dude.”. We were very good friends, we were quite informal with one another, enjoyed one another's company immensely. And then he did his third session and two days after, he was at a Hindu temple leading a pooja, a worship ceremony for Kali and he found that when it ended, when it was time for him to do the final ritual acts which consisted of him putting flowers on an altar, that he wished.. that he was putting these pink carnations and red carnations and white carnations all around, very pretty, very traditionally Hindu. But the color of Kali as shown in the background of this very powerful image in which she stands on the dead body of her husband Shiva - is scarlet - or vermillion. And he said now wouldn't it be wonderful if he could find scarlet carnations so that he could actually give the flowers that were Kali's associated color to her as an offering. And for some reason in that moment it seem like a very delightful, even delicious thing to do Oh.. for a scarlet carnation. And as he leaned down to meet the final prostration when he got up there was a flower his hands and it was a scarlet carnation. Now, go to a flower store and try and find one. But he manifested it. Now this is his story. And I once told the story to a neuroscientist who actually is a graduate student wanting to sign on to be a neuroscientist and he said “You know, the simplest explanation for that - and in neuroscience we always prefer the simple explanation to the complicated one", which I agree with - “is that Bhagawan Das was just hallucinating.”. And that might be true; could be a normal garden variety hallucination except that he would have had to have a tactile and a visual hallucination at the same time and it would have ignored the reason, the rationale, behind this experimental case history. We were testing a specific thing - transmission of the energy from a miracle performing guru to the disciple - recruiting his 'void' hippocampal room of Kali state into his more.. making it more immediate so that it wasn't just Kali as he saw her from the inside but actually a dynamic thing, a tool a vehicle that could be taken out for a ride, and trying to make a specific thing happen. Now if it weren't for that rationale, if it weren't designed to create a miracle - in this case, then the simplest explanation would be preferred. Now, it may be that it was just a hallucination and if that's the case we don't have a case history that illustrates performing miracles. We have a case history that illustrates the propensity to report miracles. And that's also a serious step forward in the scientific understanding of miracles. There's a story I would like to tell about another class of miraculous event. And just as we saw with the discussion of the Octopus and the circumcerebral - - the around the head stimulation, it's possible for information to be transmitted from one brain to the next. And there was an occasion when I had a girlfriend and she wanted to break up with me. Why, I can't possibly imagine, but (laughter) she wanted to.. And she came over to my place and said “when.. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to.. I don't want to see you anymore. I want to get another boyfriend.”. Later on I learned that she had someone all lined up. But, I was upset about it and I went into a really bad state. It was kind of despair sort of thing. And, this went on and on for quite a while. And she was upset about it too, partly because she wasn't completely sure that she wanted to end the relationship and if I would have just been so kind as to say “Well, okay, it's over. Bye. .I have go and get a burrito now” and been just that easy about it, it would've been easy for her. But, it wasn't. And she got upset. And then, something happened. Both of our capacities to stay in a bad mood stopped at the same moment. And suddenly, I saw her head surrounded with a blue aura. And I told her “Wow! This is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.”. She said “I'm seeing the same thing around you.” And she said “ Yes, it's incredibly beautiful. It's not YOU.”. And I said “Well, its not YOU either. It's this aura that I'm seeing around you.”. You know, we would throw potato chips at each other from time to time. It was not a great relationship, but it was a magnificent moment. Something happened, our brains were sharing information. There was a case involving Shakti, a technology that's in the same family as the Shiva device, but much simpler. And the woman who had done a shocky session using a signal derived from amygdala that burst 'X', that burst firing signal actually had a six hour episode in which he saw auras around everybody. And there was a group of people who came over to her house that day and she said “Oh! I can't do” - it was a spiritual discussion group - I can't do the discussion groups tonight. I'm in this state.”. They said “Well, let us try it.”. So they did and each went around the room for 20 minutes, everyone put this headset on with the same signal over the same areas and they each went into the same state of consciousness. Now, with unconnected individuals, this would be astronomically unlikely. With this class of technology people have very individualized experience - what you get is what you get, what another person gets is what they get. You might see God, they might get nothing. And this normal wide range of response is expected. And here was a group of people who were all having the same experience one after the other. In the annals of spiritual experience I've never heard of it. And I have read a lot of books in that field, if I can call it a field. For you and I to both go into a state because we've each been exposed to the blessings of a master, for example, that's.. that's normal, but you'll get what you get and I get what I get. For each one of us to go one after the other, taking turns, all accessing the same altered state is unheard of. What was happening? The answer, I think, is that the first woman with her amygdala very active and clanging away in producing her experience had far less random activity in her brain, so that her brain was on a narrow track and everybody else was on a wider one. And through the stimulation, and through contact with her it narrowed them down until they were each picking up the state that her brain was broadcasting. And they each went into the same experience. This is the amygdala, the brain part used in that session I'm sorry. It's not coming through clearly but you'll notice three black buttons towards the bottom and the one furthest forward is the amygdala. I'm not sure why it's not flashing but it isn't. And this is the signal that was used. You remember the hippocampus signal which had all of its business end below the mid-line this is evenly distributed top and bottom. This is the same signal the Dr. Persinger used in his God Helmet experiments. And the other context for this group sharing of information where it isn't just brain to brain but brain to brains, or possibly brains to brains is in the visions of the *** Mary which seemed to crop up fairly regularly even without any contribution from Jose's Mexican Products of Salinas, California. This is a picture of the Church at Zeitoun ,Egypt where, from between 1968 and 1971 there were regular visions of the *** Mary being reported. Some people saw the *** Mary, this is the important part, other people just saw lights. The same thing happened with a very famous visions at Fatima. And, I think what's happening here is that the people who were most prone to altered state experiences, who are in one of these locations during one of these episodes, if they're very very suggestible, very very sensitive and they expect to see the *** Mary and that's what the vision that these somewhat hallucinogenic balls of light will induce in them. These balls of light seem to have their origin in geomagnetic activity and it comes from the stress that builds up in the bedrock that's released in an earthquake. And shortly after the Zeitoun, Egypt sighting of the *** Mary there was an earthquake at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula in 1971, and after that earthquake, the visions at Zeitoun stopped. And the final thing in this discussion of psychic skills and miracles has to do with a bit of practical instruction for those of you who want to develop psychic skills. And you notice two brain structures here, both of whom have been referred to earlier in tonight's talk. One of them is the amygdala, the other is the hippocampus. The amygdala is a very very emotional structure - on the left side it seems to be specialized for positive emotions and on the right it specialized for negative ones, most importantly fear. But the reason for showing you this illustration is that they're not just connected by a bunch of nerve fibers, they're actually interwoven, they haven intimate relationship with one another. Thoughts have emotional impact, emotions inspire thoughts immediately. So, when one of them is active the other tends to be quiet. They work in the kind of seesaw relationship - each one continually inviting the other to take the top position. They don't always accept the invitation but they are quite capable of doing it. You can go into thinking mode where you are doing nothing but calculus. Oh! I am sorry. I thought I wasn't going to say that again. (laughter) Or your emotional mode where you're in nothing but joy or fear and I might say that when I can. So, one of the traditional teachings that comes from anyone who instructs on how to acquire psychic skills is that emotions interfere with psychic perception. It's easy for me to know having, used the Shiva device who's on the phone when the phone rings - Oh! that's my brother, Oh! that's my mother, that's call from my kid, or something like that. that's not heavy-duty stuff. But if there was a call coming in from someone with a really bad news or call with something fantastic happening I usually won't know about it. If it's someone I really want to hear from and the phone rings, I'll guess it wrong. Emotions tend to crowd out psychic perceptions just the way emotions tend to crowd out intellectual understanding in our normal daily lives. So, having said all that, how do you be psychic? And the answer seems to be that when an event happens about which you want a psychic perception, and that's a misnomer because as soon as you WANT a psychic perception you make it hard to have it. So, when an event appears your mind, your brain, will produce a large number of responses to it, most of which will be below your threshold of awareness. But, when something happens one of the first responses will be a bit of information from inside your mind - an image, a picture a thought, what have you. That very very first; that instantaneous response to the event, whatever it is, that is where the psychic perception is to be found. And the difference between a psychic and non-psychic person is simply that the psychic is able to pay attention and know that the immediate instant response to something IS the psychic perception. The psychic is able to keep that moment, that instant, from disappearing quite as quickly so that instead of lasting five milliseconds for them it might last five hundred half a second. And in neurological terms half a second can be an eon. So, the reason I have this picture here is because it illustrates how it works and it also illustrates a personal story for me where I learned what psychic perceptions were. There's a saying in the Samurai arts that if you want to be a master swordsman, your sword must move 'as the flint flies from the steel'. The flint hits the steel, and there is a spark and there is no interval, no gap whatsoever between the moment of contact of flint and steel and the production of the spark. It's instant, it's immediate with no intervening stages of any kind. So something happens, your first impression, your first inner response, with no intervening stages, that's where the psychic perception is to be had. And the event I'm thinking of is a time when I was visiting someone in their new apartment. And they loved their new apartment. It was absolutely perfect for them. And they said “Well, you know, there is one thing I miss here.” And as soon as they said 'there's something I miss here' I got an image in my mind of fireworks and having read a Llewelenn series tract. on developing psychic perceptions a day before I said fireworks.”. She said “Yes, that's absolutely right. how would you know that?”. She said that in her previous home they had been a small barbecue made of brick set in the ground. And as a private spiritual practice, she would sit in front of it and throw colored bath salts into the fire and the dye, the salts, will ignite and give her different colors sparks. And this was a kind of private, devotional ritual she had come up with for herself. And she was absolutely stunned. “How did you know that?” I said “Well, you said what I really miss here is and I got a picture of fireworks, so I said fireworks.” And that was a moment when I understood how to develop psychic skills. The (right)hippocampus creates cognitive responses, non verbal responses The hippocampus on the right, away from the language center will create cognitive responses to events with enormous speed. The amygdala with its emotional functions comes in a few seconds afterward coloring everything we do with emotional content - is it a blessing or is it a curse? Is it a threat or is it going to help me out in some way? So that immediately we interpret events as they are to ourselves. What does this mean to ME? And the question that psychic perceptions answer, is not what does it mean to me but rather what is it. As soon as you personalize it you take some of the gas out of the the vehicle. The other question is can anyone be psychic? And the answer is “Yes”. But not everyone will have the same challenges in developing those skills. If you are an heavily emotional person, if your emotions respond first, always, by default, if you feel that you ARE your emotions on some deep, artistic, poetic level then you're going to have a hard time to developing it, in developing psychic perception. If you feel that you are your thoughts it'll get a bit easier. But if you feel identified with those thoughts that cannot be expressed in words, color, form, taste, texture, if your cook chords, melodies if you're a musician. If you feel on a deeper level, on a deep level that you are something that cannot be expressed in words you'll have a much easier time doing it. You may not, however be given a funny hat. (laughter) Now I wouldn't mind having a funny hat like that. I don't think I'd wear it but there is a good deal of posturing that goes on with traditional psychics. One of my spiritual teachers are referred to an earlier talk, Karmu, once said to me “The shaman must be a showman”. So, because we personalize our responses to things almost as soon as those 1:32:17.829,1:32:20.259 responses appear and those do seem to interfere with psychic perceptions, we can validate another one of those traditional teachings from psychic teachers, from intuitive teachers and that is "ego". Not so much the sense of individual existence, but that sense of self importance that this psychic perception is important because it happened to you must be abandoned. It's not what YOU get. There is the psychic information. Now, what it means to you ? It is as some of the old Buddhist teacher said a matter of tathata, a matter of "suchness". It is what it is and you like Jehova and popeye, "am what I am". So, that's it. We're done for tonight. And I thank you all for listening. The End