Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [116]
He recalled one data point that grabbed his attention and prompted him to revisit his concept of time and reality. He was in his first year of private practice and had recently moved from “agnosticism bordering on atheism” to a yen for Buddhist writings.
“I had a dream one night in which I saw a patient undergoing certain tests,” he recalled.“I even saw how the outcome of the tests would manifest. I went to my office the next day, and the scenario played out in camera-like detail. This was non-locality of consciousness manifesting outside of time—precognitively, as we say, anticipating something in architectural and camera-like detail before it even happened.
“Now, my experience doesn’t amount to very much,” he conceded, sitting back in his chair. “But you couple this with the record of the human race as far back as we know, and even surveys in contemporary America would show that precognitive dreams—dreaming something before it happens—are one of the commonest so-called parapsychological experiences that human beings have. One option is to say that the vast majority of Americans are nuts. There could be a case for that. But I don’t think that we’re all fooling ourselves when we talk about these non-local manifestations of consciousness.”
I want to step back from seeing the future in “camera-like detail,” to the more commonplace “gut feelings” that most of us have felt. A mother waking up certain that her son is curled up with stomach flu on his bunk bed at summer camp. A man sensing that his wife has just been in a car accident. Almost everyone carries around an anecdote like that. To test the hypothesis, simply tell one of these stories at a dinner party and wait for the dam to burst.
Dean Radin’s Entangled Minds
Such stories present circumstantial evidence of a stripped-down God 1.0, an infinite intelligence that knows past, present, and future, is everywhere, and can communicate with us through our own (local) minds. But science always demands a mechanism, in this case, an explanation of how these uncanny, some would say spiritual, phenomena occur, including prayer and healing.
Dean Radin has a hypothesis: We have “entangled minds.” Radin, who authored a book by that title,11 is a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), a research organization founded by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell to rigorously study the “inner space” of consciousness. Radin could be a middle-class computer whiz straight out of central casting—bespectacled and balding, with a pencil-thin mustache, his voice a tad nasal and his speech hyperarticulate. Radin loves his numbers—he performs all the statistical analysis for the research projects at IONS—but he possesses an original mind that is two parts science and one part imagination.
As a child, Radin practiced violin several hours a day and eventually played professionally. His brain, as I understood from my exposure to virtuoso minds, was physically molded by the hours of practice. He was a loner who devoured hundreds of books in the public library, beginning with fairy tales, moving on to science fiction, and finally to mythology.
“Early on I was attracted to the notion that there were multiple layers to any story,” he recalled, gazing out his window at the mountains surrounding the IONS compound, a wilderness paradise some forty miles north of San Francisco.“I never forgot that virtually anything that people are presenting to you, even in science, has multiple levels of meaning.”
This intuition—that there may be a hidden reality—led Radin to entanglement. The idea of entanglement is this: when you delve down to the subatomic or quantum level, particles remain connected even when they are apparently separated. Albert Einstein called these connections in quantum theory “spooky action at a distance.”
When Einstein was alive, entanglement was only an idea that was predicted by mathematics, but it had not yet been demonstrated in the laboratory. That would begin to happen in the 1970s, when researchers first started to explore whether the predicted properties