Navigating the Quantum Field: Healing & Connection | 1108 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we have an incredible guest and a friend who is going to talk with you about quantum physics, consciousness and the power of intention. These are things that are really annoying as a biohacker because it would be so much easier if we were just little meat robots, little meat puppets maybe, and we all did things the same way and things were just mechanistic in the world. Except that's not how it works. It's not even a very functional model of reality. And Lynne McTaggart is an award winning journalist, bestselling author, and someone I've known for more than a decade who's been studying what are the things that don't meet the model that we can measure, things that are provable, that are scientific. And what you find is, wow, there really is stuff like that going on. And her groundbreaking book is called the Field, which came out a little bit more than 20 years ago and still stands the test of time. And she basically said, look, there's a quantum energy field that connects all living things. And if that makes you react right now and you're reacting with something besides curiosity, I hate to tell you, you've probably been programmed, right? So it's okay for someone to say here's a theory and for it to be right or wrong. But if someone says here's a theory and you immediately have a visceral response that it can't be that way. But seriously, you need to get a therapist because it's okay to disagree with someone. But if you ever take the time to read one of Lynn's books or to talk with her in person or hear what we're going to go through today, you might learn some other things. Like her book the Power of Eight, talking about why eight people coming together makes a field, or the Intention experiment, or her other book called the Bond. Well, these are tests of reality, test of spirituality, tests of intention and how it all comes together. And that's why I wanted to talk with her on the show today and share some more of her work with you. We are both part of Jack Canfield's Transformational Leadership Council, which is a group of leaders and authors and creators and teachers in the personal development movement. And so we have a chance maybe every year or so to, to spend some time in person, which is always fun. Lynn, welcome to the Human Upgrade.

I'm thrilled to be here, Dave, thanks for inviting me.

Tell me about quantum field theory. Just summarize it for me.

Okay. Well, we are told through conventional science that we are separate and well behaved entities operating according to Fick's laws in time and space. That is the paradigm we've been sold. That's the scientific story we're told. And it's really something that's more than 300 years old, thanks to Isaac Newton, that describes such a world of separate objects. We're also told that those objects compete for survival thanks to Charles Darwin. So we got our paradigm of competitive individualism from essentially from these two people, which has really formed our understanding of our world, of ourselves, of science. But new science, and I say new, it's actually science that was begun to be discovered about 100 years ago, but also followed up about 40 or 50 years ago with investigators, scientists from prestigious universities around the world who began discovering a little bit of a puzzle that put together is a completely new view of the world. And at the heart of this is something in quantum physics that physicists have known about for more than 100 years, which is that when you get right down to our subatomic particles, you know, the very nethermost level of our being, we're not an anything yet. We are a vibrating energy trade, trading with each other, other subatomic particles, but also this quantum field out there, sitting out there like a supercharged backdrop in empty space. And what they recognized, and we are now having to recognize through so much evidence now, is that we are all part of this field. And that really changes the game completely because it indicates that at some level we are all connected. And also at some level we can access all the information out there in the field.

What if I don't like it that I'm part of the field and I want to opt out? What are my choices?

That's not available to you, Dave? Most of us actually operate as though we're part of a field. We operate according to a sense of being separate and also there not being enough out there. So we better damn well get there first. That's our model and that's how we live. But unfortunately, you are part of this. Your subatomic particles are doing an energy trade with other subatomic particles. Whether you like it or not, you don't enter the field. As a lot of people ask me, how do I enter the field? And I say, you're not entering the field. You are the field. You're part of this field. But we don't experience life like that. The only time I see people experiencing a real sense of oneness, I have to say is during group intention, like with the power of eight, with my intention experiments, people, people experience a sense of oneness, and they actually get to feel like, oh, this is what it is. And we know this through a lot of brainwave studies. But generally, generally you are the field, whether you like it or not.

And you say, I am the field, but if I'm with seven other people doing focused intention work, am I still the field?

Oh, you're always part of the field because you're all part of the field. We have to realize this is pretty democratic. Everybody listening to this, everybody in the universe is part of the field. All things are part of the field. All living things are part of the field. So it's not like, well, only us and not them over there are part of the field. It's everybody. It's just that when people come together in a small or large group, which I discovered after writing the field, I was curious about some of the evidence that I'd found from some of these scientists demonstrating that thoughts are things, and not only things, but things that affect other things. And so, being the nosy and curious and skeptical journalist that I am at heart, I wanted to know, okay, how far can we take this? You know, we talking about curing cancer with our thoughts? You know, what can we do with this? And what happens if lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? So that's how I got into looking at studying, quantifying group intention. And when you say we put people in a group of eight, what I have found is when people come together in a group, two things happen. Well, lots of things happen, but one is their thoughts as a group. Magnify their effects of intention that we've demonstrated and that have been demonstrated in loads and loads of evidence and study in research. Their thoughts, which can affect things, actually affect things more. When I was looking at intention and the fact that thoughts are things, this was evident when I was studying the field. There were scientists who were experimenting with the power of intention, and they found that they could affect everything from single celled organisms to full fledged human beings. So thoughts weren't just things. Thoughts were things that affect other things. So the skeptical journalist in me wanted to know how far we can take this. You know, are we talking about a very subtle effect, like affecting a quantum particle, or are we talking about curing cancer with your thoughts? And I also was curious what happens when lots of people come together at the same time? And I decided to test that with a thing called the intention experiment. Because I knew lots of scientists working in consciousness research and I also had a good number of readers by that time because the field was in 30 languages. So I thought if I brought them together, I could have the biggest global laboratory in the world. And that's what happened. I started testing the power of intention, inviting my readers every so often to, to send intention to some well organized, well controlled target set up by one of the scientists. And we've run 40 experiments to date. Everything from trying to make seeds grow faster, to purifying water, to lowering violence in war torn areas, to healing someone of post traumatic stress. Of those 40, 36 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects as recorded and studied and quantified by these scientists. Now getting back to the group of eight that came about. When I tried to shrink this down in a workshop back in 2008, I thought, well, if we have these effects on a giant scale, what happens with just a small group? So I decided to do it in a workshop. And I thought it was going to be a very mild little feel good effect, like getting your back rubbed or something like that. But that's not what happened with these first groups. We did it on a Saturday. I told them to come back the next day. And I didn't discuss what I was going to ask them, but I asked them, okay, any change? And I was shocked to hear the result. We had somebody who was limping all weekend who was walking normally that day. And she said, I have bad arthritis, but I'm walking normally today. And somebody else with depression said, it really feels lifted today. And somebody else with irritable bowel syndrome who said, you know, my gut's normal today. And somebody else with cataracts who said, I'm about 80% better. So I was shocked by this, but I started testing it, experimenting with it. And I've worked with thousands of people over the years and seen thousands of healings. What happens, I think in a group, Getting back to your original question, what happens in a group is that we do experience the field. I, I've done some brainwave studies with teams of neuroscientists and we found that when people come together to intend in a small group doesn't have to be exactly eight, by the way, seven works, nine works, 12 works. But a group, small group, what happens is in the brain. The parts of the brain that make us feel separate very quickly turn off. Those are the parietal lobes back here. They help us navigate through space. They tell us, this is me, this is not me, this is how to Go. Those are dialed way down. And that is very much involved in making us feel separate. And so do the parts of the brain like the right frontal lobes, the executive function, and parts of those that are involved with worry, doubt, negativity, those are also dialed way down. So people are in a state of ecstatic oneness. Brainwave studies almost identical to those done by the University of Pennsylvania on Sufi masters doing chanting or Buddhist monks in ecstatic prayer. So the long and short of it is power of eight groups get people in a state of an altered state of essentially a mystical state, like ecstatic oneness. And then we actually feel the field.

Wow. So you move into a state, then you feel the field, but you don't feel the field unless you're in the state.

Well, we don't normally because we have been programmed to look at the world from a certain way also. We all have this healing capacity in us. Everybody is born with this amazing gift, but it's denied. You know, as children, we all know it, but our authority figures tell us you're just imagining things. You don't really have that ability, all of those kinds of things. And so we stop believing it. And then we start thinking, okay, the world is as described as I described before. We are all part of a lonely planet. And we're lonely people on a lonely planet in a lonely universe. We are separate. But that isn't reality. And I've seen it, as I say, thousands of times. I've seen two people get up out of their wheelchairs. Not only seen it, I've videoed it. I've had dozens and dozens of people reverse end stage cancer and everything in between. So I know it exists. We just don't experience life like that.

And when, when you say that there are definitely some people listening, are going, well, that, that can't happen, therefore it didn't. The, the one of the things that stands out about your work is you're saying, well, let's be curious about that. So let's look at the percentage likelihood of this. Let's document it. Well, and now we have Dr. Joe Dispenza, another mutual friend who's does funny. There's eight people doing healings and he's showing effects at least as strong as pharmaceutical drugs from eight people focusing on healing someone. So what this means is, is if you're listening to this and you're saying, I've never heard of any of this. Look, your model of reality, while functional, isn't accurate because everything we just talked about, which is not one example, it's thousands of examples that are well founded in science and statistics. If this is possible, which it's more than possible, it is proven to exist to the highest standard, then your model might need an update. And I think you're one of the very early voices talking about this in modernity. Of course, we've known about this for 5 or 10,000 years in ancient traditions, Right?

Absolutely. I'm just bringing science to it. And I know Joe was very influenced by the work I was doing and we've talked about it many times. He's a dear friend.

Yeah, he definitely talks about you and, you know, is very open with sharing credit and he has his own body of work that's pretty, pretty enormous. But you can tell, like you can see your work when you go to a Joe workshop. You know, there's eight people for a reason.

As I say, it doesn't have to be eight. What I have you asked about, you asked about eight is, by the way, like a Goldilocks figure. It's not too big, it's not too little, and it's got a lot of symbolic ideas associated with it. You know, it's good luck in Chinese. It's a sideways infinity sign. So there's a lot of great things about eight. What I've tried to do is to document why this works, as you say, for those people in the audience who say it can't work, it can't work for me. So I do it in two ways and many ways, actually studying things and looking at the science of it, et cetera. But I've done it with intention experiments, working with Princeton University, University of Arizona, Penn State University, University of California and many European universities. And we've set up very controlled experiments. I'll give you an example of a great peace intention experiment. We decided to choose the most violent place in America, which happens to be St. Louis, Missouri, believe it or not. And there's an area of St. Louis that is particularly violent. It is the most violent place in America. It's called Fairground. And if you saw the real estate there, it's pretty shocking. So we did an experiment, 10 minutes a day for six days, where me and my audience around the world focused on fairground. And I worked with a statistician, a professor of statistics called Dr. Jessica Otz of the University of California. We got hold of police data of violence of St. Louis as a whole. Different neighborhoods around fairground and fairground. We looked at violence data and property, crime. All of them had been going absolutely inexorably up. So we Looked at it for three years before and six months afterward, and we found that all of the areas, St. Louis as a whole, all the neighborhoods, violent crime continued to go up. So did property crime in fairground, property crime continued to go up, but violent crime, the focus of our intention, went down by 43%. And it was the only area in that whole part of St. Louis, or St. Louis as a whole, where that happened. So we've done that. And we've also done very controlled experiments with water and seeds and all kinds of things. And it's clear there's no pharmaceutical drug out there that can claim. Out of 40 experiments, 36 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects. And what I've seen in the power of eight groups in terms of documenting it, not only those brainwave studies, but what happens when I put people in a group for a year? That's what I do when I work with them. When I first saw these effects, I thought, oh, what if I taught them for six weeks, I taught them live and interactive, and I mean live on zoom, and then put them into groups and had them meet with each other every week. Let's see what happens. Would everything in their lives begin to heal? And I can tell you heart on hand or hand on heart, that those people who continue to meet regularly, that's the big secret sauce, those are the people who experience health healings, financial healings, relationship healings, new careers, a new life purpose. Those are the people. And it's complex, but that's the important thing. You don't need to prime for this. You don't need hours of priming or any kind of thing like that with a group. What you need is a consistent group and they become essentially your attention, family. And it is that alchemy that creates the healing.

It feels like the, the repeated meetings so that it feels like your energy fields get to know each other and there's like a knowingness where you see someone, you've talked to them, and then there's like they feel comfortable with you. And you see this. There's a group called YPO or Young Presidents Organization. And this is a group of entrepreneurs. There's a chapter probably in your city. And I've been a member for a long time. And you have to have started or be running a $10 million plus company. And so it's, you know, I was in Dubai and I was hanging out with the YPO people there. So a very global organization, but they put people in seven person, not eight person forums and they'll be together sometimes for years, where they meet, you know, every month and they go through stuff and it feels like there's an energetic that comes in that small number. And you also see in MBA research, the maximum effective size of a team is seven or eight people. That's enough. You can know everyone. You kind of know what's going on. But there's some kind of like a team vibe that comes together that seems like it's part of manifesting. And am I translating that right?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think several things happen, Dave. First of all, we are. So you look at all of the evidence about human beings, you see that we need to belong. We need to belong more than we need to eat. Essentially, the worst thing you can do to someone is to ostracize them. And in fact, the evidence shows from psychology that people who commit suicide suffer from what psychologists call excessive individuation. Translation, they feel left out. And being left out is the thing that we can't bear the most. So suddenly you have a little tribe that meets every week that has your back, that is intending for you. And remember, with intention groups, seven eighths of the time, you're intending for someone else. And something about all of that is so healing and strengthening. One of the big pieces of my work is altruism. You know, we all talk about self help, but my work is other help. And the reason this is so important is that the evidence shows in science. When you look at the evidence for altruism, it's like a bulletproof vest. People who do stuff for other people live longer, healthier, happier lives. Anything volunteering, they're, you know, it's something like they're 40% more likely to live a longer life. If you join a group, according to Harvard University, just one group, bowling group, book club, whatever, you will have your chances of dying. So connection and altruism are really important. If you're ill and you help somebody with the same illness, you're more likely to heal. But I tell you what, there was one piece of evidence that absolutely clinched it for me. It was a study of two groups of people. They wanted to see how lifestyle affected the immune system. First group, super successful, super wealthy pleasure seekers, they called them, went on the whole, you know, went on every holiday going, had loads of money to spend all of that, but no real, you know, noble pursuit, as Aristotle would call it. When they looked at their immune systems, they thought, these are going to be really good. These people are living the good life, they're living the dream. They were terrible, Dave. They were perfect candidates. For heart attacks, stroke, Alzheimer's, they didn't have a noble pursuit. Whereas the other group of people, maybe not as successful, but they were living a life of service. These people had totally robust immune systems. They were going to live forever. That to me spoke volumes about why power groups work. It gets them into a state of altruism and that is one of the big secret sauces. But the other bit of this that's really important, why groups are powerful is that state of oneness, you know, during lockdown. So I have this year long intention masterclass that I run and one of the people who came on one of my students was a guy called Jerry. And at the end of the year, Jerry said he loved it so much that he joined again. Now he learned all the same stuff, but he had another group he was assigned. We assigned the groups our team does. And he loved that group too. And by the end he said, you know what, really, I've had all my miracles, but the most important thing for me was compassion, love. I've had more of that during the COVID season than I've had at any point in my life. He said, I now know what love is. And that's another aspect of healing. We don't get that so much in our lives. We really don't. And so it's that healing connection of people who have your back. That state of oneness I told you about, it doesn't need priming. Our study with neuroscientists. We worked with Life University, the largest and most prestigious chiropractic university in the world. They put their neuroscience team at our disposal. We measured what was going on and as I said, these parts of the brain turned off. But this was in total novices who had never done anything like meditation before, certainly never power V groups and it happened within a minute or so. So you don't need exhaustive priming like you do with a Buddhist monk or years of practice, like a Sufi master. You can do this within a few minutes. And I've seen people, as I say, get up out of their wheelchairs or cure a genetic disease. We've had lots of those too. Two people have cured going blind. They were going blind in the reverse to that retinal detachment and other things with one power of eight group. That's how powerful it is. But as I say, I think a really important point, and you made it too with your young presidents group is the consistency of meeting over and over again. That is powerful, that creates your tribe and that's a root for your healing.

There's data that shows most people in the US Maybe not most, the average number of friends. So I'm bastardizing the statistics, but basically, the number of people who report having more than one good friend is at astoundingly low levels, much less having eight people where they get together once a week. In my own experience as a father, you might have this in your late 20s, early 30s, and then you all start having kids, and then it just kind of falls apart because your kids are different ages and they're pooping on themselves and doing all the stuff that kids do. Uh, so how. How do people in practice really do this? I mean, do you have to be in person? Can you do this remotely? Can you do it every other week? Like. Like, how do you make this fit into a normal life?

Okay, that's such a great question. Um, you can meet in person, and that is very powerful. And I do that in, you know, retreats and court and weekend workshops and all that kinds of thing. But most of the people I know who are meeting in powervate groups do so virtually. In my masterclass, everybody is assigned people in their time zones, but they're working virtually. So they're meeting on zoom. They're meeting like we're meeting right now. And what we suggest, really, really emphasize and encourage people to do is one hour once a week. Most people can find an hour once a week to meet. And as I say, we even put people into their preferred time zone, their preferred meeting times. Morning, afternoon, night. And the people who are successful at the end of the year, the people who have amazing stories to tell, are the people who showed up all the time. But isn't that true in all of life?

It's true. I mean, the people who show up and do the work consistently, whether it's meditation or breath work or neurofeedback or a gratitude practice or cold tubs, any of the biohacks. You know, if you have knowledge of a biohack and you only do it once every six months, it probably isn't going to work very well. So the showing up thing, it works. And you're saying it works for something like this. What happens if it's not eight people, but it's 80 million people at the same time? What happens?

Okay, that's a great question, Dave. First of all, I should say that size of group doesn't seem to matter. And we know this because we've done several studies where we've repeated it with different size groups to see if it supersized even more with a bigger group. So, for instance, I did an experiment, this is back in 2007, the University of Arizona. And I worked with the team there, headed by Dr. Gary Schwartz, a noted psychologist who has an entire consciousness laboratory. They set up four sets of seeds, 30 seeds each, labeled them A, B, C, D, sent me the photos of them. And I was about to speak in front of an audience of about 700 in Sydney, Australia. So I thought, oh, this is an interesting test of this. So I showed the audience the four pictures. I allowed them to choose which one we were going to intend for. Let's say it was seeds A. We did intention for seeds A, didn't tell the scientists that we were when we were doing it or which seeds we chose. But when we were done, we just told them, okay, now you can plant the seeds. So that was their cue. We still didn't tell them which seeds. They measured them. They let them grow, measured them four or five days later, whichever we had specified. And then I unblinded the study. Once they were finished measuring them, lo and behold, the seed sent intention grew significantly higher than the controls. Now, we ran that six times. We had a much smaller audience with workshop of about 100 in New York. We had a big audience of healing touch practitioners in South Carolina, about 800. We had a big audience in California. We had a smaller audience in Dallas, Texas. And then I ran it over the Internet with thousands of people from around the world doing intention, sending it to my website, and lo and behold, we got the same result, no matter what size group. So we realized from that in some other studies like this that it didn't matter what size. You know, there is the Maharishi effect, where they say you need the square root of 1% of the world's population meditating and the crime rate will go down. And they have some very compelling studies of meditation. A certain quota of the population studying and performing meditation in different cities has the crime rate go down. Our work's different from that in that we have a specific intention that we're doing. Very specific intention, not just an exercise like meditation where it's changing. Obviously it's changing individuals. And there is no doubt a field effect caused by that. But this is a different procedure. So size doesn't seem to matter. What seems to matter is being specific. But also just let's unpack this for a minute. I told you about the seeds experiments, so just think about this for a second. I'm in Sydney, Australia. The seeds are in Tucson, Arizona. So my audience and I are intending for something that is 8,000 miles away. Plus the fact we're sending an intention to the photo, we're not even intending to the thing itself. We're sending an intention to the photographic representation of those seeds, a symbol essentially of those seeds. And yet it's still having an effect. That to me is the big mind blower because it's suggesting that we have some sort of psychic Internet when we do group intention that can reach across the miles we that can be stimulated by just a symbol and affect the target.

There's abundant evidence that quantum effects are real. So if two particles are entangled, a change to one creates change in the other instantaneously with no lag time, there's no speed of light required. There's also evidence, relatively recent evidence that shows every time your heart beats, the proton spin of everything in your brain changes with your heartbeat. Which is like very strong physics based proof that we are quantum systems, even if we think of ourselves as chemical or electrical systems, where those are higher level on riding on top of quantum. So like there's a mechanism for this to be real and for it to work. And then we have Stan Grof's work. And for listeners, I know that you know of Stan's work. Stan Grof wrote a book called the Holo.

Geez.

Holographic. Holotropic. Holotropic universe. Holographic universe. Which one was it?

Do you remember Holographic Universe with Michael?

He writes about holotropic breathing. And I did a breathwork event with him. I hosted one for the Upgrade Collective years ago and interviewed him a couple times. And he says like the whole universe is a holograph. And in a holograph when you break something apart, there's basically a map of the hole in each picture, no matter how hard or how small you go. And his argument is that reality is actually a big holograph. And this is all weird, you know, mind bending stuff. But if that's real, then you should be able to look at a picture of something because the entire universe is in the picture. It just helps you to focus your intention. Right?

Yeah. There are so many mechanisms at work here and we're just beginning to discover, as you say, quantum effects in our bodies, quantum effects in all kinds of things, the world at large. Because you know, the belief even in current science is that, and mainstream science is that there's a science of the small, the quantum effects, and there's a science of the large. Now that never made sense to me because I thought, oh right, subatomic particles do all these weird things like entanglement, nonlocality, you know, superposition, until they realize they're part of some something bigger. And then they start acting, behaving themselves and acting according to mainstream physics, the, you know, the more mainstream rules of the game. That never made sense to me. And we're now seeing that, for instance, photosynthesis, the very crucible of a plant that takes sunlight and turns it into oxygen, which makes us all be able to be here, is a quantum process. Electrons in there are operating in a state of superposition, essentially. And other studies are showing that giant molecules, molecules you could even see under a microscope, are operating according to quantum principles. So the problem isn't with these, you know, the physics of the small, the physics of the large. The problem is our knowledge is just beginning to understand that this is the physics of the world at large.

Yep. There will have to be alignment of those models. And funny enough, all the big physics models don't describe reality that well. Like, describes it within a couple percentage points. And when you get the quantum people who come out like, he's been on the show a while ago, he says, well, I. I figured out how to use other math and I can beat the standard model by 8%. Which standard model is how they predict physics. And they chased him out of CERN and wouldn't let him speak there because he's a ski instructor, not a physics PhD. And we talked about it on the show. And so it turns out there's different ways of modeling reality. And if your model doesn't account for quantum effects and be able to predict the very largest things we know, then your model isn't inaccurate representation of reality. And so then now we feel deeply unsafe because you mean the story I've told myself about the entire universe is probably false? Well, yeah, so. And if that makes you feel unsafe, you should get a therapist or maybe do some breath work or something, because you're exactly as safe as you were before, whether or not you knew the nature of reality. The reality is you don't know the nature of reality. I don't know. Lynn doesn't know. We're just all figuring it out. And we'll probably be figuring out for as long as there's life on, well, life in the universe. Right. That's just kind of how it works.

We should remember too, Dave, that, you know, science is just a story. We act as though science is this sort of finite truth and that everything that we are supposed to know has largely been written.

But you have to trust the science A very important person told me that recently.

That what?

A very important person recently said, trust the science, and they were telling only the truth, that there's nothing made up, there's no financial motive in there at all. Right.

Oh, no. And we all know that pharmaceutical companies are doing this for philanthropy, of course. Yeah.

And for science, it's only science.

Well, we all know that that's not true. Looking at the state of side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, we know that a lot of that data is. Is very, very suspect. But even if we weren't going to look at things like that, where there is a financial component to the outcome of the studies and that determines the outcome, they used to say, well, there's no such thing as rocks coming from the sky, because rocks don't come from the sky until they realize, well, actually there are asteroids and that happen and all of those kinds of things from thinking the world was flat. You know, science is a story, and new chapters are constantly written that rewrite the chapters before. And so it's a constantly written story. We can't ever say, yeah, we've got it all figured out. And as Nassim says, the standard model is about as close to reality as a cyborg is to a human. It's a little model they've invented to try to say, yup, we figured it all out, we found it. Here it is, the smallest piece of the universe. And I always say it's a bit like Russian dolls. You know, those little dolls where one. You open one up and a little one is inside of it. Well, that's what's happened with science. They keep thinking, yep, I found the smallest piece of the universe. And because I know that I can figure out all the other pieces and put it all together like one great big old radio. But the problem is, every time they look, there's another littler doll inside. So we're still discovering. Just as you say, Dave.

Yeah, I'm disagreeing with you. We're figuring it out. And I'm thinking about. I'm working with one guy who is working with an unknown subatomic particle. And, oh, this has huge effects on biology, but no one has measured before and it isn't acknowledged. So there's. There's all kinds of stuff. And, and that's why in the world of biohacking, I just want to find the outliers. Like, oh, how does that person seem to be able to do this? Is it transmissible? What is the state of the person? Can we make it teachable? And that's. That's behind some of my 40 years of Zen work and behind, you know, longevity. Well, if one person can make it to 120, well, we can probably do better than that over the next 100 years. So it's the things that don't match that are the gold. But unfortunately, we're programmed, I don't want to say taught even just to automatically reject those and to be unable to see them because they're impossible. Right. Because we believe so strongly in our story. And somehow you broke out of that and you start asking questions and gathering data. And once you start gathering data, it gets easier and easier to break out of it because you can see the data and like, oh, I'm onto something here. I want to ask you about some new modalities that support your work for years. Wouldn't it be fun if you could do, you know, neurofeedback, but with a SPECT scan or FMRI? And for listeners, SPECT is what Dr. Daniel Amen has used to scan hundreds of thousands of brains. Dear friend, I'm on his board of directors, and his SPEC scan changed my life. FMRI is kind of similar. And then you have things like meg, using magnetic signals coming out of the brain, and heg, which is blood flow, in addition to eeg, which is electrical signals, which is the primary modality I work with. So all this new understanding of the brain, since you wrote your first. Your first book, has it supported your theories? Has it proven them? Is it going against them? Kind of. What's the latest state of understanding the field and intention?

Let's look at functional mri. Walter Schimp revolutionized MRI scanning, which used to take hugely long time. And he did this, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, making it functional so that we could watch a brain in real time, essentially just see how it works that operates through getting information that is holographic out of the body. He was a really early proponent of. Of holography and in fact came up with a whole theory with numerous people, including the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell, called quantum holography. So they were actually using that to create this imagery that we now use widely. When you say other modalities, do they support the stuff that I do? Absolutely, because we see that we used QEEGs to study brainwave mechanisms during power of eight groups. And we found, as I say, as I talked about before, extraordinary outcomes because we thought what we were going to see was brainwave signatures that were identical to meditation. And I was. And so was the lead neuroscientist. And the team Were all shocked to see that the brainwave signatures look nothing like meditation. They were the opposite of meditation. Meditation causes an increase in slower brainwave activity, like alpha waves and even theta waves. Ours were turned off, ours were brain waves that were turning down. We were people in a state, as I say, an altered state, a state of ecstatic oneness. And so the equipment just proved what we were seeing empirically, what we were seeing from people. What was going on?

When you say they shut down, are you saying that there were just no brainwaves or that the amplitude of the brain was lower, there was a shift towards delta or what does that mean?

No, it means, well, there are different brain waves, that the brain has different speeds of brain. Brain waves. In certain parts of the brain there was less activity. So the parietal lobes, the temporal lobes, and parts of the right frontal lobes were turned way down. There was far less activity there. So these were people where it was dialed down. And as I say, the brainwave signatures look nothing like meditation, but they look virtually identical to, to the work done by Dr. Andrew Newberg using some of this equipment you're talking about as well. To look at Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer, nuns during ecstatic prayer, Sufi masters during chanting and Sufi dance, all in a state of ecstatic oneness. Virtually identical brainwave signatures as what we're seeing with a group of people doing an intention to one member of the group for 10 minutes.

This is really important, and I talk about this a lot in when we're talking about neurofeedback, because 40 years of Zen is so focused on that. Number one, it is a group activity. You're doing it in a small group, up to eight people. Surprisingly. I wonder why that is. And what people like to say is, oh look, I raised alpha brainwaves or I raised gamma brain waves. Woohoo. I'm a meditator. Actually, no, that's like saying I made C note, I made G note. Great. Like, were you playing a song? Was it, you know, was it an Eminem song or was it Mozart? Like they have different vibes in them. And what you're talking about isn't that you had more of this or that. It was that it was the right frequency at the right part of the brain in the right order, which is more of a musical, like a resonance kind of a thing. And then when you have eight people doing that, were their brains all like basically incoherence with each other or were they each playing a different instrument?

Well, I don't use the term coherence because in physics that means something very specific. I know it's used a lot and by lots of my dear friends. What in physics it means not just your body is somehow operating in sync. What it means is a resonance effect, as you said, it means so waves. Let's take sound waves, because you talked about sound. So they, they do that. They do a sideways S. And most waves do that. When lots of waves are doing the same thing at the same time, they're peaking and troughing at the same time. That makes the signal much loud, louder and larger. So that's why a laser is so bright compared to an individual light bulb. It's all of the waves are waving at the same time. When people are doing the same intention at the same time and they're literally holding the same words at the same time. In my way of doing it, as you say, we're not measuring, hey, didn't we get more of this or less of that? We, we're seeing essentially people brains in sync. We're seeing people brains in sync. This happens in guitar playing. Now, I don't. Or any musical instrument playing. I don't measure what happens with brainwaves in guitar players, let's say, but there have been studies showing that when two guitar players start playing together, their brain waves operate in synchrony very quickly. So some of that is going on. But I want to make the point that I was curious what was going on in the brains of my participants. So we did this study with student volunteers, as I said, who had never done this before, never even meditated before, got this amazing outcome to see what was going on inside. But I don't measure that. I measure well, what happened in their lives. Did they heal those cataracts? Did they reverse their blindness? Are they standing up out of their wheelchair? Have they made up with their estranged partner or found new love in their lives or found an amazing new job? And that's my measurement. How did it work in the world? And here's a key thing too, Dave, that we haven't talked about, which is the effect of being a sender. You know, I told you there's an altruistic component to this. But I find that the results work for people. They heal an aspect of their lives, all of their life, as much when they're senders as when they're receivers. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Example of this, a guy who is I met called Wesley. I had asked for a volunteer group of intenders at one of the new age churches, the Mile high church outside of Denver. So I assembled two groups. He was in one of them. He was going to put himself forward as a receiver. And these guys had never done this before. They were just volunteers and they were in the same room. He was going to put himself forward because he had suffered from depression for his whole life after university, because in the last year of university, he was studying to be a biochemist. He got called up for the very last year, the Vietnam War. The whole situation was so traumatic and he couldn't get out of it. There were no more student deferments. Last year, the war comes back, freaked out, quits university, and his life goes in a terrible downward spiral for years, even meeting the love of his life. She turns out that didn't.