Dean Radin research: Cook excerpt #21

Nick Cook writes: In seeking the best experiencers from each of FREE’s ‘contact modalities’, I received the valued advice of Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at IONS and Associated and Distinguished Professor of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Dean had been a close colleague of Dr Mitchell for many years, until Dr Mitchell’s death in 2016.

Having explained what I was looking to do, Dean put me in touch with experiencers whom he said were amongst the best exemplars across the modalities that I wanted to explore.

They included:

*An ‘evidential medium’ (mediums whose data is deemed to be provable via third party evidence) tested exhaustively at IONS and at the University of Arizona;

*A California-based shaman, tested extensively at IONS, who has worked with native healers around the world, most notably in North and Central America and South and East Asia;

*A trance-channeler tested exhaustively at IONS;

*And a neuroscientist whose 2008 near-death experience of realms he visited when ‘clinically brain-dead’ was detailed in a best-selling book.

In addition, I spoke with:

*An ex-US Navy officer who had undergone a series of unnerving experiences with ‘non-human intelligences’ after his ship encountered a UFO in the North Atlantic;

*A former US Army officer trained to remote view by Ingo Swann in the 1980s;

*And several practitioners of ‘DMT therapy’, in which experiencers – known as ‘DMT voyagers’ – open their minds supposedly to other realms via ingestion of the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine.

While I couldn’t claim the approach was rigorously scientific, it would employ proof- of-principles that would test the core assumptions.

A set of commonly ascribed features of different paranormal experiences would be plotted as yes/no responses along the x-axis. The experiencers would populate the y-axis. These, per the above, were: a UFO/ET contactee; an evidential medium; an NDE’er; a shaman; a channeler; a remote viewer; a deep meditator/lucid dreamer; and a DMT voyager.

The commonly ascribed paranormal features were: 

• Entoptics⁶³ and symbols;
• Entity and NHI encounters;
• A sense of knowing and deep connection;
• Instances of warning and precognition;
• ‘Psi gifts’ – psychic abilities that are claimed to be given to, or acquired by the experiencer during or after a psychic event;
• Instances of ‘miracle healing’;
• An overcoming or conquering of the fear of death;
• The acquisition of a sense of clear mission and/or purpose following an experience;
• An encounter with light;
• And an encounter with, or a profound sense of an omniscient intelligence at the heart of the encounter/experience expressed as ‘creator’ or ‘source’.

A tick (check) denoted a strong feature of the encounter/ experience⁶⁴.

As can be seen from the table below, certain modalities gather more ticks than others.

The near-death and shamanistic experiences, for example, score fully across the scorecard, while the remote viewing and meditation/lucid dreaming experiences do less well.

 

To repeat: the scorecard was never intended to capture all the features of an experience; the registering of a tick (check) is indicative of weighting only; and the modalities themselves are not exhaustive. What the table does show, however, is the degree of overlap amongst typically reported features of inner experiences – revealing, in effect, a set of common or shared features. These can be said to provide us with a level of ‘intersubjective verifiability’ about non-ordinary states of consciousness.

What it also shows – per the two pink shaded columns – is that all contactees across the modalities attested to encounters with ‘entities’ or ‘non-human intelligences’; and almost all to the presence of an omniscient, all-pervading intelligence – described variously as a ‘creator-presence’ or ‘source’ – as being embedded in the encounter.

The question is: are any of these entities, which include amongst them the souls of the departed, real?

63 ‘Entoptics’ appear as seemingly nonsensical symbols and hieroglyphs in a kaleidoscopic format, often, in the case of a DMT voyager, at the beginning of the encounter/experience. See Graham Hancock’s book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
64 The data are drawn from the interviewees and the literature I had researched during Phase 2 and are not intended to be exhaustive, merely indicative. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.