Scientific background

In the 1925 formulation of quantum mechanics (QM) (still the basis of modern atomic physics), the primary reality is not particles but configurations of particles. The wave function (WF) is related to the probability of any measurement of that configuration producing a given result. The Schrödinger Equation (SE) is the primary equation of motion; it is to QM what F=ma is to Newtonian mechanics. The SE tells how the WF changes from moment to moment, and it predicts the outcome of measurements. But there is a rule that is as much a part of QM as the SE. The rule says that at the moment of a measurement, the SE resets — not from where it was just before the measurement, but from an artificial-looking WF in which all the probability is concentrated at one point, that point being the result of the measurement. The probability function is replaced by a statement of certainty, the measurement outcome is now known, so its probability is exactly one. This is usually called “collapse of the wave function”.

From the beginning, physicists noted that this was really strange. In practice, the two principles work very well together.

(1) Start with a WF that represents the result of your measurement

(2) Use the SE to calculate how the WF changes until the next measurement.

In practice, this pair of rules predicts the results of the next measurement based on what you found during the previous measurement. But the theory is highly unsatisfying. It seems that there is no such thing as an objective world, but rather a world that is constantly being redefined by what you choose to measure. The fundamental question that has divided physicists is, What is a measurement? If a measurement is part of physics, why is it an exception to the SE? And if it is not part of physics, what is there that is outside of physics, and shouldn’t we include whatever that is as part of what we call “physics”?

Among today’s physicists there are three types of answers to this question:

1. A “measurement” is performed by a large system that obeys Newton’s physics, not Quantum physics. The WF loses its coherence when it interacts with this larger system, and for all practical purposes it is behaving like a Newtonian system in that moment.

2. In contrast to #1, the world really is quantum through-and-through, including the measuring apparatus. The wave function never collapses to a point. Rather there is a separate universe for each possible result of the measurement, and we humans find ourselves always in one of the most probable universes as the universe splits and splits again in each moment.

3. There is something “outside physics” that is responsible for the collapse of the wave function, and that something is the mind of the person (or cat) who performs the measurement. It is a living consciousness that collapses the wave function, and what we call a “measurement” is an interaction between mind and matter.

The present essay is concerned with perspective #3, and I propose a way of testing #3 as a working hypothesis. If my summaries of #1 and #2 don’t make sense to you, it’s because they don’t make sense to me, so I don’t know how to make them sound plausible. Nevertheless, a lot of smart people subscribe to each one.

Historic and cultural background

Most physicists today are divided between perspectives #1 and #2. The third is either tainted or supported (depending on your attitude) by association with Hindu or Daoist traditional philosophies. But some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century expressed support for #3, including Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger himself, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, James Jeans, David Bohm, and Wolfgang Pauli.

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
— Planck

“The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”
— Jeans

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental…The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singular noun of which the plural is unknown.”
— Schrödinger

Schrödinger also illustrated the absurdity of mechanical wave function collapse with his famous cat example. Wigner was more explicit, demonstrating that contradictions arise if we attempt to apply the laws of physics to the human making a measurement.

Pauli and Bohm were outspoken mystics. Von Neumann wrote an influential QM text based on perspective #3.

The reason that most scientists today dismiss these intellectual giants is that they subscribe to a reductionist paradigm, in which physics is a closed system and consciousness is an epiphenomenon with no ability to affect anything that is physically real (no free will). The universe is mechanical, and is best understood as the interaction among many (many!) moving parts, all based on fixed laws. This paradigm frames the vast majority of scientific studies and scientific hypotheses over the last 150 years, and the framework has been so productive that few are willing to subject it to question.

How to test the hypothesis that it is consciousness that collapses the wave function

This is such an important question — why don’t we test it experimentally?

1. Set up a quantum system

2. Let it interact with a measuring apparatus where no living being ever looks at the result.

3. Compare that situation to the same system and apparatus, in which someone not only looks at the result of the measurement, but takes definitive, macroscopic action in the real world based on the outcome.

4. If consciousness is necessary to collapse the wave function, we should see that the wave function is collapsed in case (3) but not case (2).

I’ll explain in detail one way in which this experiment may be realized. This is a challenge and a proposal for experimentalists — I do not know how technically easy or difficult it may be in practice.

Start with the principle of complementarity — quantum variables usually come in pairs such that if you know one, you lose all information about the other. This is the case with angular momentum, which is spin. If you determine that an electron is spinning clockwise around the x axis, you lose all information about whether it is spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise around the y axis. There is broad agreement among quantum physicists on this point. Once you have said that the electron is spinning clockwise about the x axis, you have said all that can be said about the way it is spinning. You cannot say either “it is also spinning around the y axis in the clockwise direction” or “it is also spinning around the y axis in the counter-clockwise direction” or “it is not spinning around the y axis”. Any of these statements would be a contradiction of the one thing that you know, which is that “the electron spinning around the x axis in the clockwise direction”.

You have heard of “electromagnets”. When electricity flows around in a loop, the loop becomes a magnet. So you should not be surprised that the spinning electron acts like a tiny magnet. In an experiment, we might measure the electron’s spin about the x axis by putting the electron in a magnetic field that is aligned in the x direction and watching how it moves.

Suppose we do this, and the result is “clockwise in the x direction”. We can repeat the measurement with a similar apparatus downstream on the electron’s path. We will certainly find corroboration. The electron is still spinning clockwise in the x direction.

Nothing stops us from setting up a subsequent experiment where the imposed magnetic field is at right angles. Let’s imagine that we do this and we thereby determine that the electron is spinning clockwise about the y axis.

According to the strange (but well-accepted) rules of quantum mechanics, we now know for sure that the electron is spinning clockwise about y, but we have lost all information about the electron’s x spin. A third measurement of the electron in which we query the x axis spin is equally likely to come out “clockwise” or “counter-clockwise”.

Our measurement of the y spin has changed what we know about the x spin from “clockwise for sure” to “50-50 chance of clockwise or counter-clockwise”.

This is the basis for our experiment to determine whether consciousness is necessarily a part of the “measurement” process. Our hypothesis is that without consciousness, there is no measurement, so the x spin of the electron will remain clockwise, even if all the physical measuring apparatus was operational. Only when a conscious observer notes the result of the second stage (the y measurement) does the x spin become maximally uncertain, equally likely to be clockwise or counter-clockwise.

So our proposed experiment is this.

1. Start with a measurement of the electron’s x spin.

2. Set up a second apparatus downstream to measure the y spin.

3. Either look at the dial or don’t look at the dial of the machine that records the y spin.

4. Subsequently measure the x spin again.

5. Prediction: If consciousness is necessary to collapse the wave function then the two cases (looking at the dial and not looking) should have statistically different results.

   1. If you looked at the dial, the third measurement is predicted to be equally likely clockwise or counter-clockwise about x.

   2. If you did not look at the dial, no y measurement actually took place, so the prediction is that the third measurement should always produce the same result as the first.

      

What the mainstream would say

Most physicists would say, “go ahead and do this experiment if you want — I know how it will turn out.” They would say that whether you look at the dial or not (in the second measurement) can’t possibly affect the results of the third measurement. They would say that the apparatus has already done the measurement, whether or not anyone looks at the dial. Conventionally, the experiment has a low probability of success.

Let’s give it a ghost of a chance. When the experimenter looks at the dial of y axis measurement, let her take some small real-world action as a result. Counter-clockwise means I’ll have bacon and eggs for breakfast; clockwise I’ll have crunchy granola. Or counter-clockwise I’ll bicycle to work this morning, clockwise I’ll take the Metro. Any alternative pair of real-world actions would suffice to the purpose, given only that they are selected ahead of time and the experimenter commits in advance to abide by the verdict of the y axis measurement.

I think it’s worth doing. I’m betting there will be some statistical difference between the two outcomes, where there is a real-world consequence of the y-axis measurement vs the dial remains unobserved. Maybe when the dial is unobserved, the result will be 60/40 in the subsequent x-axis measurement, while the fully observed measurement will be 50/50.

My hope is that someone will pick up this challenge and actually do the experiment.

Is this even Constitutional? Take a look at the Ninth Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

The PREP Act emergency declaration paved the way for the introduction of the COVID “vaccines” in late 2020. Without it, Pfizer and Moderna would have risked certain bankruptcy from a deluge of lawsuits after marketing their products.

The one person empowered to declare PREP emergencies and rescind them is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. When Robert Kennedy sought that job in the Trump administration, his supporters (including myself) assumed that he would end the PREP emergency his first day in office. He did not. Some MAHA followers felt disappointed. Others felt betrayed. We wondered how much power Kennedy really had and to what extent was he trapped by political pressures. We wondered, why doesn’t he resign? Why doesn’t he take bold, honest actions even if he is fired for it?

At the end of June, there was an announcement that the emergency declaration had been rescinded. For technical reasons, the pharma companies still had a full year of grace, but as of a year from now, the protections would end.

So I thought. So it seemed in the sparse news coverage of the announcement. I was deceived.

What I learned today, with helpful explanations from Debbie Lerman and Meryl Nass, is that there are two kinds of emergency declaration, and it is the less important of the two that Kennedy rescinded. The more important one — the PREP emergency — remains in force and companies selling the COVID vaccines can continue to peddle their wares with full legal immunity through the end of 2029. These are not “vaccines” by our pre-2020 definition, and they have caused about 50 times more deaths and serious injuries than the previous worst vaccines on the FDA schedule (according to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System). And they will continue to be distributed with more harms, more deaths, and more unaccountability through 2029.

(The emergency that was actually ended was “emergency use authorization”.)

The PREP declaration of COVID “emergency” and nine other “emergencies” continue in force.

Read details on Debbie Lerman’s Substack.

I have not walked a mile in RFK’s shoes. None of my uncles was ever President of the United States, and none of my family members were assassinated by the CIA (or Mossad). But it seems to me that Bobby was far more effective outside government than within. I imagine that what I would do in his position would be to end the PREP declaration and hold a press conference, detailing the politicization of science and opposition to sensible policies that I have experienced while on the inside. I would be proud to be fired by the Trump machine, and I would return to what I do best, suing the government.

Even better?

The PREP Act specifies that the HHS Secretary’s emergency declaration shall not be subject to judicial review. Obviously, Pharma authors of the Act anticipated being able to control the Secretary and they didn’t want to risk a debate in court over whether circumstances justified an “emergency”.

So Sec Kennedy might try this: End the PREP emergency declaration retroactively. There never was an emergency. Declare open season for everyone harmed by the mRNA shots, Remdesivir, and inappropriate intubation to sue the companies, the hospitals, and the FDA.

What happens next? There will be petitions to the Courts saying that the HHS Secretary has no power to do this. If the Courts decide that they have no jurisdiction to question the Secretary’s declaration, then we win. If the Courts decide to overturn the Secretary’s decision, then that is a precedent for a barrage of new lawsuits questioning whether there was justification for Sec. Azar’s original emergency declaration (January, 2020). I can think of no one better qualified to bring this lawsuit than Private Citizen Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I credit Debbie and Meryl for all the good information above. The mistakes are my own.

Many physicists would say of course that it is to reconcile the two great and deep theories that are utterly incompatible. Einstein’s General Relativity is a theory of gravity that applies to large-scale phenomena, black holes, pulsars, and also the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics is an approach to computing properties of small things, on the scale of molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles. Einstein’s geometric approach to gravity resists quantization, but scientists expect that the world obeys one set of self-consistent laws, and there must be a framework for understanding both GR and QM as limiting cases of a more general theory. The trouble is that since one applies to the realm of the very large and the other to the very small, there are no experimental probes that might be used to find clues toward the general theory, or even to test a candidate Theory of Everything.

Astronomers, philosophers, and Big Picture thinkers might say that the greatest problem is the large-scale structure of the Universe, its history and projected future. In 1965, the Big Bang became a framework for interpreting all astronomical observations. The 1965 breakthrough was a promise of explaining the fact that everywhere we look, stars and gas clouds are made of about ¾ hydrogen and ¼ helium. But that promise fell apart with better measurements, and over the last 30 years, BB cosmology has had to be patched beyond recognition as one anomaly after another has appeared. Honest astrophysicists now agree that we need a new cosmological paradigm.

Neuropsychologists or even computer scientists might answer: Chalmers’s “hard problem” — how does the brain generate first person experience? But increasingly, philosophers and even scientists are taking a radical position: The “hard problem” is mis-stated. The brain does not generate consciousness at all. Consciousness is an element of physical reality, perhaps the most primitive element. The brain is a transceiver, mediating between consciousness and a physical body.

One reason for this perspective is a compilation of evidence for conscious activity that cannot be linked to neural activity in the brain.

• The most abundant evidence is for various forms of telepathy, for which no mediating neural activity is known.

• Remote viewing, clairvoyance and blindsight are real phenomena, observed and reported, but mostly ignored by the scientific community because they are impossible within the commonly-accepted framework of neuroscience.

• There is abundant anecdotal evidence and several experimental protocols indicating that we sometimes have premonitions of future events that we would have no way of anticipating based on what we know from our senses.

• In near-death experiences, people have vivid experiences when their brains are flatlined, without neural activity.

• In seances, mediums are reported to communicate with the dead.

• Psychokinesis is the power of the mind to affect physical reality “from a distance”.

My answer to the question at the top of this page comes from these phenomena, viewed as anomalies in the context of a detailed science of physics that works well most of the time. Conventional science has had conspicuous, even world-shaping success with a paradigm in which the universe is made of particles that obey fixed laws.

How can we reconcile the successes of physics with the anomalies that blatantly violate our most basic paradigms?

Telepathy is not about transmission of some kind of EM wave, or even a wave that physics has yet to detect. It is dependent on emotional closeness and history of being together. It is independent of distance. We all receive telepathic messages sometimes, but they are so well mixed with other thoughts that for the most part we don’t recognize it. Some people are more sensitive to telepathy than others, and some people read minds consistently, accurately, without confusion. I met someone this Spring who could do that. Plants are also able to sense the environment without sense organs or even nerve cells.

Premonitions of the future are described and documented in works by Daryl Bem and Julia Mossbridge. Of course, they are the subject of anecdotes and myths since ancient times.

There are people who have uncanny clairvoyant ability, rebranded as “remote viewing” by the US intelligence services during experiments at Stanford Research Institute. People reportedly can read with their fingers and some people are able to see details of what is around them without eyes.

I know of no one who predicts the future with the same reliability as some people read minds. This is a hint that the future remains open and that we have free will. Premonitions are about a “probable future”, however difficult that is to define. We can imagine that we were evolved to sense what is coming and step aside to avoid disaster. Parapsychology experiments in which the future is predicted and the prediction is used to avoid the predicted outcome are called “bilking”. It’s been practiced since the time of King Laius.

Micro-psychokinesis is the ability to apply our intention from a distance to bias quantum probabilities. This was meticulously documented by Jahn and Dunne in the 1980s and 90s. This is the only part of the paranormal for which I think I have a model. Maybe what quantum mechanics calls “random” is exactly the realm of the mind. It appears random when there are many minds watching and no mind focusing on a particular outcome, but it can be strongly biased if a large number of conscious beings pay attention to a particular outcome or if there is one person whose attention is tightly focused. I have speculated that the way the soul occupies the body is by learning to manipulate neurotransmitters via a process of biofeedback.

But macro-psychokinesis also exists, though it seems to be quite rare. Ted Owens claimed to be able to make things happen — or maybe he was just precognitive. Thousands of people witnessed St Joseph of Cupertino floating high above the ground on multiple occasions. Spoon bending seems to be real. In the 1990s, the Scole Experiment found things moving and appearing, reportedly by people who were not even alive at the time.

What to make of it all?

Of course, the most difficult thing is to describe a single, consistent paradigm in which physics works reliably with high precision most of the time, but then there are gross violations. We would like to know when we can count on predictions of the equations and when to expect exceptions. One clue is that all the violations involve life in one way or another. A starting point may be a philosophy of Idealism, in which reality is fundamentally mental, and the physical world exists within a global, shared consciousness. But this is only a starting point. What we would like to have is a predictive framework for what we call anomalies.

Why are humans so different from other primates? A few decades ago — before DNA sequencing became routine — it was fashionable to talk about a “missing link”. If there are no surviving species that are “in between” chimpanzees and humans, perhaps the fossil record would turn up a continuous trail of variations connecting our species to theirs. The “missing link” is rarely discussed today, but the evolutionary trail has never been satisfactorily resolved. In fact, details of human ancestry remains a hotly debated topic among paleontologists.

Bonobos and chimpanzees were a single species until about 2 million years ago. Hominids had already separated from that line about 5 million years ago, but the differences were in body morphology, upright posture, and skull structure. Brain size of hominids remained in the same range as chimpanzees/bonobos for 3 million years, then exploded to 3 times the size between 2.3 million and 1.8 million years ago. Neanderthals held the all-time record for hominid brain size, about 8% larger than today’s human brain. Neanderthals gradually merged into our present species quite recently, just 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Today there are human races that have virtually no Neanderthal DNA, while Asian and European races are >2% Neanderthal. (Denisovans also merged into the human line around this time, but we know nothing about their brain size because no skulls have been identified.)

The rather sudden increase in brain size was occurring in overlapping waves in different hominid lineages. The short time interval raises eyebrows, but the diverse time frames don’t seem consistent with a single engineering event.

23 and you and me

Exhibit A for the ET engineering hypothesis is the fact that we have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while all other great apes have 24 pairs. Our chromosome #2 shows vestigial signs of a merger of two chromosomes. In fact, the site of the merger is easily identified. Normal chromosomes have long chains of repetitive DNA at the ends — telomeres repeat TTAGGG thousands of times. In the human #2 chromosome, there is a place where TTAGGG repeats, and then it meets CCCTAA. CCCTAA is the complementary strand to TTAGGG, but in the reverse order. This is a “scar” from a time when a telomere of one chromosome was joined to the opposite strand telomere of a different chromosome.

The next logical question: How common are chromosome mergers in nature? Answer: they occur typically every few million years. The difference between humans and other great apes looks less impressive in the context of other primates:

Primate Group

Chromosome Range

Great apes

46 (human), 48 (all others)

Gibbons

38–52 (genus-dependent, extensive rearrangements)

Old World monkeys — papionins (macaques, baboons)

Mostly 42

Old World monkeys — guenons (Cercopithecus)

48–72

New World monkeys

34–62

Strepsirrhines (lemurs, lorises, galagos)

20–80+

All this diversity arose during the ~50 million years that primates have radiated.

Abductions and cattle mutilations

There is surprisingly robust evidence for these far-out phenomena. In case you are unfamiliar with Dr John Mack, here’s a Cliff Notes summary: Dr Mack was a Harvard Medical School professor with a strong reputation in academic circles and some presence in peace activism and psychological history. In the early 1990s, he became interested in the psychopathology of people who reported wild stories about being abducted by aliens. He interviewed hundreds of such people, and found, to his surprise, no indication of psychopathology in most. They seemed as sane as anyone else. Since medical journals didn’t want to be associated with this conclusion, Mack published his findings in two books intended for general scientific audiences [one, two]. Mack took the abductees’ experiences as veridical, but did not insist that the perpetrators were extraterrestrial. Nevertheless, his Harvard colleagues were sufficiently upset that they tried to de-tenure Dr Mack. He eventually won a court battle and retained his position.

Livestock mutilations are commonly reported throughout the American West. The phenomenon is neither disputed nor explained, so it remains a mystery. Typically, animals are found dead on ranches with evidence of high-tech surgeries having been performed. Sometimes, internal organs are missing, though no incisions can be found and there is no blood on the ground nearby. In other cases, surgical incisions are observed. Sometimes chemical analysis reveals substances that you would not to find in a natural environment.

Many of Dr Mack’s abductee reports include sexual encounters, usually coerced. Some of the livestock mutilations involve missing genitalia. This suggests that there is a presence on Earth of beings who are interested in human and animal DNA, and that interbreeding with “their kind” is an ongoing experiment.

This raises the question, “who are they?” and each of the possibilities is paradigm-breaking in one way or another.

If “they” are intelligent life forms evolved on another planet, we would not expect any DNA compatibility. We wouldn’t expect them to have DNA, or, if they did, we wouldn’t expect their genes to be decoded into proteins in the same way that genes are translated by life on Earth. The genetic code is assumed to be an arbitrary language, and proteins include a language of their own. Some of protein structure is functional in an objective way, but most protein structure is meaningful only as shapes that fit like lock-and-key with other protein shapes. So, if “they” originated on a distant planet, it means that there is only one way to design the biochemistry of life, and it is the same everywhere. This would be a startling conclusion with profound philosophical implications. Most evolutionary biologists think that evolution on Earth has been highly contingent, with many arbitrary choices that became biological fixtures only because so many later structures built on them that changing them would be instantly fatal.

In addition to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, there are three other possibilities, each equally strange in its own way. Maybe “they” are descendants of ours from the far future who have learned to time travel, and are returning to visit us, possibly to diversify their genomes. Or maybe “they” are ancestors from our deep past who have been hiding out underground or in Antarctica. Hal Puthoff has advocated this possibility, and coined the moniker ultra-terrestrials. (Puthoff has a past history working with American intelligence services, and has hinted that he knows more than he is at liberty to tell us.)

A fourth possibility is that “they”, the perpetrators, are beings that we cannot understand without expanding our ontology in one way or another — spiritual entities, inter-dimensional beings, or disembodied consciousnesses that are able to slip in and out of our solid reality.

Why would a Darwinian process lead to abstract thinkers steeped in art and science?

Coming back down to earth, we may ask, what is the provenance of the qualities that make us uniquely human? These, I suggest are

• Our capacity for abstract thought

• The symbology of language

• Our analytic thinking (science)

• Aesthetic appreciation (music and art)

Evolution, even in the broadest Darwinian sense, would not likely have found that these qualities contribute to survival or reproduction. Why would they have been selected? This, in my mind, is the most robust challenge to the standard hypothesis that humans emerged from our primate lineage as an evolutionary accident.

But, before we leap to the ET hypothesis, we might ask: Are our uniquely human qualities the only time in evolutionary history that qualities that do not contribute to survival or reproduction have been selected? Answer: Far from it!

The example that dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists have agreed to ignore is sex. Why should animals and plants be required to mix up their genes before reproducing? The “cost of males” is a factor of two by standard quantitative measures of fitness endorsed by the neo-Darwinists. If genes are selfish, why would they actively choose a 50% discount in passing themselves on to the next generation?

The link between sex and reproduction is very old, predating multicellular life. Many single-celled protists must share their genes (conjugation) as a cost of doing business. For the vast majority of metazoan life forms, sex is indelibly linked to reproduction. The fitness cost of sex is far higher than the energy burden of a big brain or the extravagance of being adapted for art and science.

Evolution of sex is treated by evolutionary biologists as a special case, a unique mystery, the “masterpiece of nature” in the words of Graham Bell. But an open-minded look at the evolutionary process tells a different story.

The standard version of evolutionary theory is about single genes that are selected in response to single challenges. But what we see instead is that life has a tendency to produce general responses to specific challenges, almost as if evolution were anticipating future needs.

Parable

Suppose you need a part of a particular shape in order to build widgets.

The quickest and cheapest and most efficient thing to do is to build a mold in the shape of the part, and then you can make as many of them as you need. If evolution works the way we expect, she finds the shortest path to solving the problem at hand. Build a mold.

Suppose you were thinking way ahead. Suppose you knew that your company was going to grow and the needs of the company would change. The widget’s design will constantly be changing. Widgets themselves may go the way of the horse and buggy, superceded by the wadget, and even wadgets may become obsolete before long.

So you don’t build a mold. Instead you hire a team of programmers and hardware engineers, and you create a 3D Printer.

Your venture capital investors are screaming at the Board meeting — why are you wasting their money? They want a return on their investment, and they want it now. The 3D Printer project is a huge diversion. It’s going to take years, and other companies are getting widgets to market before you. Your company is heading for bankruptcy in short order; you will never survive long enough for the 3D Printer to be a competitive advantage. You are fired, and the VC mob hires a new CEO.

In the standard version of neoDarwinian theory, natural selection rewards those adaptations that are first to the market. Evolution doesn’t “think long-term”. Evolution is motivated to develop particular solutions to particular problems because it is quick and efficient. If the competition takes the slow path toward more general, more robust solutions, then the competition will be left in the dust, wiped out long before their superior long-term strategy has a chance to show itself. Quick-and-dirty always wins out over the lineage that invests for the long term.

I have written previously about the research from the Tufts University laboratory of Michael Levin. What Levin finds — time and again — is that evolution has not taken the direct, efficient path toward the goal. Instead — time and again — the more flexible, more intelligent, more general solution has evolved. Presumably there has been a steep fitness cost for this initial investment, but the lineage manages to survive (time and again) long enough to complete the task and out-compete the branches that took the more direct route.

The take-home message from Levin’s work (in my words, not his) is that nature’s way is to create intelligent, flexible responses that will fit a broad variety of challenges. Levin demonstrates this by exposing living organisms to challenges that have never appeared in their evolutionary history, showing that they are pre-adapted for novel situations.

Conclusion

I don’t pretend to have an explanation for how this can be or a mathematical model for natural selection that would be a framework for understanding this phenomenon. But it seems to be true that life is an overachiever, and evolution has created organisms with more flexible, more intelligent responses than any particular case demands.

I repeat for emphasis: this character of evolution is unexpected, unexplained, even mysterious. But whatever is driving evolution’s propensity for “overachieving” in the direction of flexible intelligence might be invoked to explain the emergence of humans from a lineage of great apes.

Or our genome might have been engineered by ETs in the deep past.

(I presented the puzzle to Grok this morning, and Grok gave me gibberish as an explanation. Grok retreated when I pointed out that its explanation didn’t hold water.)

Start with the well-known fact that 22/7 is a good rational estimate for π.

22 / 7 = 3.142857…
π = 3.141592…

You might ask, “how big do the numbers have to get before you have a better estimate than 22/7? The answer is 179 / 57 = 3.140350…

Generalizing, we might formally define “good rational estimate” in the natural way — it’s the ratio of two numbers that gives a closer approximation to π than any smaller integers.

Hold that thought and skip to the Golden Ratio

The next step in appreciating the math puzzle is to ask about good rational estimates for the Golden Ratio, φ = 1.61803… The answer is

2 / 1 = 2.0
3 / 2 = 1.5
5 / 3 = 1.666…
8 / 5 = 1.6
13 / 8 = 1.625
21 / 13 = 1.61538…

You recognized these numbers immediately as Fibonacci numbers. This is no accident. A common definition of Fibonacci numbers is that each is the sum of the last two. If you see that the ratio of successive Fibonacci numbers is approaching a limit, you can write an equation for what that limit must be:

where A is any Fibonacci number, B is the next one, and A+B is the next one after that. Now define φ = B/A and do a little algebra and this equation turns into a quadratic equation for φ. You can solve that equation with the quadratic formula and find

How closely spaced are the good rational estimates?

If I think like a statistician, I would say that getting closer to φ becomes “exponentially more difficult” in a loose sense of the words. What I mean is that if I already have φ approximated to 3 digits and I want to do better than that, I’m looking at odds on the order of 1 in 1,000 that the numbers happen to work out. But then if the estimate is good to 4 digits, I face 1/10,000 odds in finding a better pair of numbers. So, just based on statistics, I would guess that the denominators in the fractions rise approximately exponentially.

And, of course, we just saw that in the case of the golden ratio φ, the successive good estimate denominators are each about φ times bigger than the last one, so they are increasing exponentially.

If we plot the denominators on a log scale, it looks like this. These are the first 35 Fibonacci numbers.

The exponential curve comes out a straight line on this log plot. The slope of the line is the log of φ = 0.481, meaning that each denominator is approximately φ times bigger than the previous one.

The statistical argument suggests that the good estimates should increase exponentially for any (irrational) number. We could ask for the first 35 denominators in good estimates of the number e=2.7182845…

The line is a little more wobbly, but clearly it is increasing exponentially in the long run. The slope in this case is 0.436, a little smaller than the slope for φ.

Let’s do the square root of 10, which is quite close to π.

Again, it’s a wobbly line with a constant slope. In this case, the slope is 0.540, a little steeper than the slope for φ.

I understand generally why the log plots are approximately straight lines, but I don’t understand why the slopes are what they are in each case, and I don’t understand the regularity of the wobbles, or the fact that there is practically no wobble in the plot for φ.

Now we’re ready for the puzzle

Yesterday, the first case I ran was for π, and the result surprised me. The good approximations are much closer together, especially as you get up past 10,000. In fact, I was only able to do about 35 cases for all the above targets before the numbers got too big for the way the computer language stores integers. But for π, I could go much further. This is what the log plot looks like:

Clearly the numbers are not increasing exponentially. In fact, they seem to be in 5 different regimes, and each regime is approximately quadratic. Here is a plot of the denominators starting at the first 4-digit number. Instead of plotting the log, I have plotted the square root.

So, dear reader, why is our statistical expectation met for all the irrational numbers we tried except pi? Why is the density of good estimates for π so much higher than for any other irrational number?

I think I have an idea why this is true. I don’t have ideas about how many more numbers there are that behave like π, or why the slopes are what they are, or why the plots (except for φ) jog with semi-regular steps.

I’m interested that Grok did so badly with these questions, and I expect your comments will be much more intelligent.

History

Through millennia of history and pre-history, humans have always thought of the universe as alive. During the Renaissance, science in Europe began to challenge the religious establishment with mechanistic accounts of the movement of the planets, including Earth. The Church first responded with the expedient of burning scientists at the stake, most prominently Giordano Bruno in 1600. As that stratagem became less sustainable, the Church commissioned René Descartes, a trusted Jesuit, to propose a less drastic means by which the Church could maintain its authority. Descartes proposed dividing all reality into the tangible realm of the physical, and the intangible realm of thought, spirit, and divinity. Science was to have authority in the former, and the Church in the latter.

I would judge that René forged a good compromise. It might have been a viable framework for science and philosophy during the ensuing enlightenment. The Church kept to its half of the bargain, but it was the scientists who undermined it. Almost immediately, scientists began to scoff at the latter of Descartes’s two realms. As science grew to explain more and more from physical reasoning, prominent scientists hypothesized that there is no need for the world of thought, Plato’s forms, the spiritual realm of the Church, for God and his minions — matter and energy, forces in space and time could explain all.

A turning point came in 1828 with the synthesis of urea [sic]. Before that time, living things were recognized as being obviously able to do things that non-living matter could not. Urea was the first organic chemical to be manufactured in a test tube.

See?! Science can do anything that life can do. An audacious extrapolation, to say the least. At the time, it was known that life was made of cells, but cells were thought to be unstructured bags of chemicals. Only in the 20th century did we learn that each cell has thousands of organelles, an endoplasmic reticulum serving as a network to route each chemical to its targeted destination, power plants in the form of mitochondria, chemical factories in the form of ribosomes, and a HQ in the nucleus directing the whole show. A living eukaryotic cell is as complex in its organization and workflow as a medium-sized modern city.

But scientists had broken the dam by creating an organic molecule from inorganic starting materials. It remained only to fill in the details.

Backlash

The intellectual land grab by science became irresistible because of the explosion of new technologies that grew from its fertile soil. There were transatlantic communications cables (1858), mechanized textile factories (1771), railroads with steam engines (1825), chemical fertilizers to replace guano (1903). Meanwhile, prominent intellectuals of the day were protesting, among them R.W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, George Eliot. Here are my favorite lines from James Russell Lowell:

We see but half the causes of our deeds,
Seeking them wholly in the outer life,
And heedless of the encircling spirit-world,
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes.

From one stage of our being to the next
We pass unconscious o’er a slender bridge,
The momentary work of unseen hands,
Which crumbles down behind us; looking back,
We see the other shore, the gulf between,
And, marvelling how we won to where we stand,
Content ourselves to call the builder Chance.

Nietzsche was prescient in foreseeing the collapse of society that would result when science deposed God and substituted Technocracy.

“God remains dead and we have killed him…What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

It was not only the poets and philosophers who realized that the intellectual foundations of Western thought had taken a wrong turn. The smartest architects of the quantum revolution all warned us that science itself was pointing to the need for a realm of consciousness apart from the realm of matter.

Max Planck said that “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.”

Schrödinger wrote that “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; what seems to be the many conscious beings is only a feature of the one…In truth there is only one mind.”

Eddington wrote that “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

James Jeans: “The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

John Wheeler wrote: ‘We are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.”

Eugene Wigner: “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”

John von Neumann wrote a textbook on quantum mechanics, based on the premise that conscious observers were needed to make any sense of the new rules of physics.

But the technological harvest continued to spread its seductive opulence, and the 19th century mechanistic world-view was entrenched in more than the science world. We have yet to recover from the 19th century conceit that science can explain all in purely mechanistic terms.

picture credit: Phys.org

The Article

The most significant thing about this paper is not the specific model that it proposes, but the fact that a mainstream physics journal has finally acknowledged the elephant in the room.

Maria Stromme is a professor of applied physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her article was published by the American Institute of Physics in AIP Advances last October, and is fighting retraction. The title is, Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy. This is not a new theory — her ideas are general and suggestive — but the article lays out some principles that forward-looking physicists have agreed might be the basis of a future rewriting of the foundations of physics.

Amit Goswami is fond of saying, “Consciousness is the ground of being.”

Stromme echoes, “consciousness is not an emergent property of neural processes but a foundational aspect of reality.”

William James said as much 130 years ago in his Harvard Ingersoll lecture. The brain doesn’t produce consciousness. Consciousness was there all along, more fundamental than matter, pre-existing space and perhaps time. The function of the brain is to bridge between the Platonic realm in which consciousness dwells and the realm of physical, material things.

“Differentiation into individual experience occurs via mechanisms such as symmetry breaking, quantum fluctuations, and discrete state selection—paralleling established concepts in physics, including Bohm’s implicate order, Heisenberg’s potentia, and Wheeler’s participatory universe.” [Stromme]

This is Stromme’s particular take on the obvious and challenging question that arises from this inverted world-view, with consciousness at the foundation: I am a conscious being. If consciousness creates reality, how come I can’t mold the world to my own whims? This is not the world I choose, or anything I would have chosen.

This is the question of the relationship between my individual consciousness and the capital “C” Consciousness that is Goswami’s “ground of being”. Various philosophers have proposed various answers. Stromme’s answer sounds like physics. She invokes a consciousness “field” because fields are ubiquitous in modern physics. She talks about “symmetry breaking” because this is the language that particle physicists use in speaking about why the weak nuclear force appears to be such a different thing from the electric force between particles, even though they derive from the same fundamental phenomena. Perhaps the physics language is the reason she was able to get the paper published, and perhaps the physicists are right to cry “foul” and accuse her of using these words glibly, without showing us the mathematical details.

Much of the framework concerning consciousness is taken (with attribution) from the late Sydney Banks and his “three principles of thought”. Consciousness is pure awareness, on which is imposed content in the form of thoughts. Mind itself is the third principle. To Banks (and to Stromme), mind is the universal substrate from which all existence arises.

Stromme takes the philosophy of Banks and draws analogies from quantum physics, hinting at a future science that is objective, explicit, and predictive, as we have come to expect from a physical theory. Critics of this paper doubt that such a theory will ever be formulated, and I have to agree.

Two recognized and accomplished physicists who have preceded Stromme into the realm of philosophy are David Bohm and Henry Stapp.

Stromme cites Bohm extensively. If there is a physical basis for what we experience as destiny, or Dao, or the Universe nudging us toward a predefined path — what Jung called “synchronicity” — then we look to Bohm to describe the way that larger patterns can be coded into patterns in the microstate, spread out over many particles. He called it the Implicate Order. Bohm spent the last decades of his life trying to pin down these ideas as a predictive physical theory, but was never satisfied with his results.

Stapp is of the generation after Bohm, still alive today, and he wrote three books explicitly about philosophical interpretations of quantum physics, and though he is cited only peripherally by Stromme, I feel his work is the best foundation we have going forward with this subject. If John Wheeler gave us the idea that reality is co-created by wave functions and the minds that choose how to pin them to observations, then Stapp is the one who has developed this idea as the basis of a scientific ontology. Starting with Bell’s Theorem in 1964, it was clear to physicists that the observer’s choice of what to measure must change outcomes, but in Bell’s example, the change was in a random direction. In the 1980s, Stapp invoked the Quantum Zeno Effect as the mechanism by which choosing what to measure can change reality in directed ways. The Zeno Effect keeps the system in the same state by repeatedly measuring the same thing. The Inverse Zeno Effect moves a system gradually from one state to another by making successive measurements, each viewing the system from a slightly different angle. I explained how this works in some detail in this space four years ago. Stapp thinks that the QZE and IQZE are the way in which our minds take control of our brains. He finds precedent for this idea in the writings of William James going back to 1892.

Stromme concludes by describing her ideas as a “framework” for expanding our scientific understanding of reality. “By synthesizing insights from physics, metaphysics, and philosophy, this model offers a path toward an integrated understanding that unites scientific rigor with ancient philosophical insight.” I agree this is the deepest intellectual (and spiritual) challenge facing our Western culture at this seminal time in history.

This may get a little math-y, but please bear with me. I’ll try to keep it (as Einstein would say) “as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

Start with sound waves that come from an orchestra. The pressure on your eardrum goes up and down many times per second in a pattern that looks chaotic to the eye.

This is the raw signal that the ear is receiving, but the ear hears musical notes! Tiny hairs in the ear are tuned each to a different frequency, and pick up just that part of the signal that is (for example) an E flat above middle C on the piano.

What the ear does mechanically can also be done with mathematics. The procedure was discovered by Jean-Baptiste (“Joe”) Fourier and first published in 1822. The procedure involves a great deal of arithmetic, though it can be written in a very compact notation using integral calculus. You don’t have to understand anything about the procedure except that it’s called a Fourier Transform, and it turns that pressure function — how strong was the pressure at each moment of time — into another function that tells you how much of each musical note was present in the sound that the ear heard.

A natural question to ask is about when each note was played by the orchestra. The Fourier transform contains this information as well. It is treated as a very low frequency. For example, the orchestra may play 5 notes C D E F G in a single second. The ear hears this as five different notes in a rhythmic sequence. To the ear, the time scale of hundredths of a second defines the note, but the time scale of tenths of a second is heard as separate notes. But to the Fourier transform, these two time scales are part of a continuum. The Fourier transform treats tenths of a second and hundredths of a second with the same mathematics. The result is that the Fourier transform contains information about which notes are played and also when they are played, all coded in the same mathematical function.

These two graphs, the two functions contain exactly the same information. They are different mathematical descriptions, but they correspond to exactly the same physical situation. Both are ways of describing the sound waves that impinge on your ear.

We know that they have the same information because you can perform this mathematical trick, the Fourier transform, and convert the pressure representation into the notes-of-the-scale representation. (A physicist would call the former the “time domain” and the latter the “frequency domain”.)

The Fourier transform converts the graph in the time domain to a graph in the frequency domain. If they really contain the same information, it should be possible to perform another mathematical procedure, call it the “inverse Fourier transform”, and convert the frequency domain back to the time domain. The inverse transform allows you to recover the first graph from the second graph.

“Joe” had this all worked out. The Fourier transform converts the time graph to the frequency graph. The Inverse Fourier transform converts the frequency graph back to the time graph.

Now comes the mathemagic that must have surprised and delighted Joe, even as it surprises and delights physics students 200 years later.

The Fourier Transform and the Inverse Fourier Transform are exactly the same. Whatever you do to the first graph to get the second graph can also be done to the second graph and, lo and behold, you get back the first graph.

Remember, the Fourier Transform is an intricate recipe involving oodles of arithmetic that you perform on the numbers that make up the first graph. When you follow this recipe, you end up with the second graph. Now if you take the second graph and you apply the same recipe, you get back the first graph.

The same Fourier Transform, applied twice, takes you right back to the original graph that you started with.

The lesson we’ve learned so far is that the same information is contained in these two graphs. The two graphs are equivalent ways of describing a single physical situation. Either description will do.

Here’s an example that we’ll come back to later. Suppose the orchestra is on strike, and one man comes out on stage with a tuning fork tuned to A 440. He plays a single note. The graph #1, pressure on the ear, is a sine wave. It looks like this.

What does graph #2 look like? For every note that’s not A 440 the contribution is zero. So graph #2 is zero everywhere except for a sharp spike at A 440.

I’ve drawn a wedge, but I ask you to imagine that the spike at A440 is infinitely thin.

Can we Fourier transform this spike back to get the sine wave? Here’s trick that should work: We know this spike is in frequency space, but we said that the same Fourier math works forward or backward. It shouldn’t matter if it’s in frequency space or it’s pressure-vs-time. So let’s imagine the spike is in time. It looks like a big pressure pulse at one time, with nothing before or after. There is a pulse of sound at just one moment, like a bang or a clap or a click. The Fourier transform of that should look like a graph of what frequencies are present in a clap. The ear doesn’t hear any particular frequency, and the answer is that all frequencies are contributing equally. So when we Fourier transform the clap we get a constant function, a line that is the same everywhere.

Woops — we were expecting to get back the sine wave. What happened? The two are sort of alike, in that they spread evenly, but one is wavy and the other is straight.

The answer is that I cheated you when I said that the Fourier transform is just a recipe for a lot of arithmetic operations on the numbers in graph #1. The graph is just an ordinary plot of real numbers. What I didn’t tell you is that, for it all to work out as I said, the numbers have to be complex numbers, two-part numbers, real and imaginary, a + bi.

Now that I’ve said this, I ask you to leave it in the back of your mind. It doesn’t matter for much of follows. I’ll let you know if you need to think about imaginary numbers, and mostly you won’t.

Aside: Fourier and Holograms

Where is the information? The pressure on your eardrum at every point in time depends on all the different notes that are being played, because they combine together.

This may remind you of the way a hologram works. You can turn a photograph into a hologram, and every point on the hologram contains information about the whole photo. A laser beam can create a hologram from the photo, and the same laser beam can re-create the photo from the hologram.

The similarity is not a coincidence. A hologram is a Fourier transform in two dimensions.

Fourier meets Heisenberg

I hope I’ve convinced you that the sound wave is one thing, and you can represent it either in the frequency domain or in the time domain. Either one contains the same information. Hold that thought as we move on to quantum physics.

In acoustics, Joe Fourier’s math works for us, giving us two ways we can look at any situation. We can take our pick, and work with whichever representation is more convenient. But in quantum mechanics, Joe’s math works against us. It’s the same math, but it’s no longer about two different representations of the same thing. It’s about two different things, and we need both of them but Joe tells us we can only have one at a time. This is the story coming up.

Think of a billiard ball bouncing around a table. If I want to know everything about how that ball is moving, all I need is two pairs of numbers.

Pick a time, any time. The first pair of numbers tells me where the ball is. We can think of the x and y coordinates that define the ball’s position at your chosen time. The other thing we need to know is how fast the ball is moving, and in what direction. That’s another pair of numbers, that we can think of as a speed and an angle, or else, just as good, we could get the same information from its velocity in the x direction v_x and velocity in the y direction v_y.

Once we know (x, y) and (v_x , v_y), we know all there is to know about the situation. We can follow the billiard ball around the table. We can know where it is going to be and how fast it is moving at any time in the future.

It’s not enough to know (x, y) or (v_x , v_y) separately. We need to know both the position and the velocity at any one time. Then we have all the information we need to calculate the ball’s trajectory forever after.

With this foundation, we’re ready for one of the great paradoxes of quantum physics. In QM, we’re not working with the exact position of the billiard ball. Instead we have a “wave function” that tells us the probability of the billiard ball being at a given place on the green table. The wave function associates a probability with every point on the table. If the wave function is small around the edges and large in the center, that means that there’s a high probability that the ball is near the center of the table.

Now we’re ready to bring in the Fourier math. Here’s a profound truth that Niels Bohr bequeathed to us: There’s a wave function for the position of the ball, as we just described. The position wave function tells you the probability the ball will be found at any given location. There’s also a wave function for the velocity of the same ball. The velocity wave function tells you the probability of the ball having any given velocity.

The velocity wave function is the Fourier transform of the position wave function.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, then you’re understanding something important. We want to know where the ball is, and QM tells us we can’t know it exactly. We can only know a probability distribution. OK we can live with that. Now, we also want to know the velocity of the ball. And Bohr is telling us that this is not a separate probability distribution. It’s already determined when we specified the probability distribution for the ball’s location.

Bohr called it “complementarity”, but having a name for it doesn’t make it any more sensible.

Make this practical. Say we pin down the ball in the center of the table. We know exactly where it is. So its wave function is a thin spike, as we described above for the sound of a clap.

The radical dictate of the Complementarity Principle tells us that we don’t have to measure the ball’s velocity. We already know all that can be known about it, and that is the velocity wave function. The velocity wave function is the Fourier transform of the position wave function. Above, we did that exercise — we said that a clap has no particular sound frequency, so it contains equal amounts of all frequencies. The Fourier transform of the spike is the constant function, the same everywhere.

Translate the math to physics, and we get this very inconvenient, very unwelcome limitation. When we know the exact position of the ball, its velocity is as unknown as it can be. It has the same probability of going fast or slow, of going left or right or backwards or forwards. The velocity is completely random.

But wait a second, you say. Let’s just measure the velocity. Let’s attach a speedometer to this ball and find out how fast it’s moving.

There. Now we know exactly how fast the ball is moving.

The rules of QM allow you to do this, but there’s a catch. This second measurement makes the first obsolete. We now know the ball’s velocity exactly, but we know nothing about the position. We have to update the position wave function. Now it’s the Fourier transform of the velocity wave function that we just measured. We measured the velocity exactly, so the velocity wave function is a spike. That means the position wave function is the same everywhere. The ball can be anywhere on the table, with equal probability.

We can know the position exactly, and then we know nothing about velocity. Or we can know velocity exactly, and then we know nothing about position.

Are you thinking of a compromise? How about a bell-shaped curve? Great minds think alike. Werner Heisenberg was thinking the same thing. We are used to pinning down a range of probabilities with a bell-shaped curve. Let’s measure the ball’s position approximately, so we get a bell-shaped curve for the probability of its position.

Here’s another beautiful result from mathematics: The Fourier transform of a bell-shaped curve is another bell-shaped curve. The Fourier transform of a narrow bell-shaped curve is a wide bell-shaped curve. (And, of course, the Fourier transform of a wide bell-shaped curve is a narrow bell-shaped curve.) This is a mathematical theorem, unknown to Joe Fourier, but proved by Werner Heisenberg a century later, as he was developing the math he needed for quantum physics. When you translate the math into physics, what do you think it tells us?

Yes, this is the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. A narrow bell curve for the position means a wide bell curve for the velocity, and vice versa. The better you know the velocity, the worse you know the position. The better you know the position, the worse you know the velocity.

So our dream of being able to predict the motion of the billiard ball on the green table is forever thwarted. We can only know probabilities, and as time goes on, the ball might spread itself all over the table.

Muss es sein? Must it be? Can’t we have a compromise for the position wave function and the velocity wave function that stays put and doesn’t change? The answer is yes, and one example is Schrödinger’s solution for the wave function of a lone electron in a hydrogen atom. But that’s a story for another day.

The strange fact of quantum physics that I wish to leave you with is that if you take a snapshot of an electron at a single moment in time, and the snapshot has some resolution, so that you know with some fuzzy resolution where the electron is located, then that same snapshot tells you all that it is possible to know about how fast the electron is moving and in what direction. Even stranger, if you just attached a speedometer to the electron and you measured how fast it’s moving, again with some approximate precision, then you would also have information about where the electron is located, again with a probability distribution.

It is easy to understand how evolution has been clever. It is difficult to understand how evolution has been wise, though her wisdom is undeniable in the examples below (and elsewhere).

Human societies have rules that encourage cooperation, and there are enforcement mechanisms for people who behave selfishly. Cooperation in biology is very old, and it turns out that evolution thought about enforcement a billion years before Thomas Hobbes theorized about social contracts. Enforcement rules have shaped the biology of aging and death ever since.

Story #1: Conjugation and Cell Senescence
Story #2: Sex Required for Reproduction in Plants and Animals
Story #3: Antagonistic Pleiotropy — a Revisionist Theory

To begin, I’m going to ask you to think fresh thoughts about sex. (Have I lost you already?)

Sex and reproduction, reproduction and sex. Go together like a horse and carriage, right? Well, how did it come to be that way? Sex is not a way to reproduce. Sex is a way to share genes. But sex has become so tightly linked to reproduction that it requires mental gymnastics to imagine that it might have been otherwise.

Reproduction without sex—that’s not too hard. It’s cloning. Or it’s mitosis, simple cell division which is how bacteria do it.

But sex without reproduction? What’s that? Remember — sex is the mixing of genes between different individuals with different genomes. Does anyone do that except as a prelude to reproduction? What would it even look like?

Bacteria share genes willy-nilly. They shed plasmids, which are little loops of DNA, and they pick up plasmids from around them. The plasmid may be from the same kind of bacteria or another kind of bacteria entirely. Sometimes the gene they pick up is useful; sometimes, not so much; sometimes the imported gene kills them. Bacteria can afford this daredevil lifestyle because there are a lot of them, and their credo is experimentation. Change or die. Bacteria are constantly changing, not only because their generations are measured in hours instead of years, but the change from generation to generation is also greater than large animals and plants. Under stress, they mutate and change even faster. Bacteria are artists of change, and their genius is figuring out what it takes to survive in the environment where they happen to be now. For bacteria, sex is spitting out plasmids and picking them up.

Bacterial plasmid (electron micrograph)

Story #1: Conjugation and Cell Senescence

Protists, or protoctista, are single-cell eukaryotes—far more complex and structured than bacteria, with a cell nucleus and many more organelles, a million times bigger than bacteria but still a single cell. Examples are amoebas and paramecia. Protists share genes by a process called conjugation that challenges our idea of the individual. As promised, sex in protists is not linked to reproduction…well, maybe indirectly linked, as we’ll see.

In conjugation, two paramecia (Dick and Jane) sidle up to each other and their cell membranes coalesce, forming one big cell. Then the cell nuclei, where the chromosomes live, find each other and the two nuclear membranes open up and merge, just as the cells did. A double size cell with double size nucleus, and two copies of each chromosome. Somehow the chromosomes pair up with the appropriate partner. Like blind people trying to navigate a crowded room, how do the chromosomes arrange a meeting place with their partners? (If chromosomes had telephones, I suppose they would be cell phones. OK, it isn’t funny.) Somehow, Dick’s chromosomes finds Jane’s corresponding chromosome, nearly identical but for the crucial variations that make them individuals. The chromosomes line up in pairs so they can swap genes with one another. Genes cross over until each chromosome contains about half Dick’s genes and half Jane’s. Then—again using their cell phones for coordination—the chromosomes segregate. One from each pair goes north, the other goes south, so that when the nucleus splits in two again, each half has a full complement. Two cells go their separate ways, but the cells that emerge from this process are no longer Dick and Jane, but Jake and Dina. Each one of them is half Dick and half Jane, in its genes, in its cytoplasm, and in its mitochondria.

THIS is conjugation. It only takes place between protozoa of the same species.

Conjugation is sex without reproduction. We started with two cells and ended with two cells. They pooled their genes, but didn’t produce “offspring”. Both Jake and Dina will someday undergo mitosis and copy themselves, but Dick and Jane have ceased to be, merged instead into an amalgam.

Individual Selection and Group Selection,
Short-term Advantage and Long-term Welfare

Why do cells do this? Let’s talk about fitness. In the short term, the race is to the swift. Reproduction is everything, especially among microbes which are always in a tight race with billions of others, and the one that reproduces fastest is the victor in Darwin’s lottery. So natural selection at the individual level motivates Dick and Jane to get on with the business of copying themselves as fast as possible.

Why did they take time out to merge their genes? Dick and Jane individually must have thought they had a good thing going, each having survived a long while, and beaten out the competition. They each had a combination of genes that work well together. Why would they take a flier on the off-chance that their genes might do even better in some other combination? “Survival of the fittest” at its crudest level simply means that those who reproduce fastest crowd out everyone else. Sharing genes takes time and energy. You can’t afford it.

To make this less abstract: Imagine a puddle with cells swimming in it, all the same species. Suppose some of the cells—the Joneses—go straight to work reproducing, doubling their numbers, while others—the Smiths—stop along the way to have sex with other Smiths. They’re all increasing exponentially, but the Joneses grow at a faster rate. More doublings of the Joneses leads to a powerful numerical advantage. Pretty soon, the Joneses have overwhelmed the Smiths and crowded them out. The Smiths are a thing of the past, driven to extinction. The Smiths have failed to keep up with the Joneses. We say, “the Jones genotype has evolved to fixation.”

Short-term individual selection says “Don’t do it! Don’t have sex!” But in the long run, the communal legacy is more robust if they DO share genes. Having many diverse combinations of genes is insurance against changes in the environment, and a high-risk investment that just might yield big dividends if the right opportunity opens up in the future. But there’s a danger that the Joneses will crowd out the Smiths in short order, and they won’t live to see the day when their robust diversity shows to their advantage.

After many, many cycles of losing sex in the short term and missing diversity in the long term, evolution stumbled on an expedient. A counter was built into the chromosomes, counting replications. Everyone is allowed to clone about a hundred times, without sharing genes. After that, without conjugation, the cell slows down and dies, stopped dead in its tracks. Every so often, every cell lineage must take time out for conjugation, or the lineage dies.

The counter is the telomere. To enforce conjugation, nature arranged for telomerase to be locked away (in paramecia and other protists) during mitosis. Each act of reproduction makes the telomeres a little shorter. Only during conjugation is telomerase unlocked, and the counter is reset, so the lineage can continue to clone.

Thirty years ago, William Clark wrote two books on this subject at a level accessible to readers of this column. Sex and the Origins of Death, followed by A Means to an End. I read both as they came out, and they had a profound effect on my thinking about evolution and aging.

Cell senescence is programmed death. Can this be an evolutionary advantage? Can programmed death evolve to protect the community from the fast crowd that doesn’t want to share their genes? Sure, there is a long-term advantage, but how was evolution so wise as to arrange this? How did it happen that telomerase came to be sequestered, available only during conjugation? I’ve looked through the evolutionary literature, and found no explanations, so I have asked this question myself, modeling with a computer simulation. The model works surprisingly well. One important feature of the model is that there is a limited reservoir of the food that cells need in order to grow. This means that the “cheaters” who avoid conjugation and reproduce faster don’t have an advantage for long, because they use up the available food store faster. Another crucial feature is that conjugation sometimes leads to combinations of genes that are more efficient at using food resources.

Here is my academic paper, with a computer model of how this might have evolved.

Story #2: Sex and Reproduction in Plants and Animals

Half a billion years ago, there was an explosion of multicelled life. Gene sharing is not so easily arranged when there are billions or trillions of cells in each fully-grown organism. Sure, all life passes through an embryo stage, starting with a single cell. But embryos are hardly in a position to seek out a partner and share genes. So evolution needed to invent anew both the mechanics of gene sharing and a means to enforce it on individuals whose primary Darwinian motivation was to reproduce as fast as possible.

So nature took the bull by the horns (or perhaps another part of his anatomy). She laid down the law: “From now on, it takes two to tango. Anyone who wants to reproduce is going to have to share genes.”

Sex and reproduction were tied together anatomically, and the connection was so tight that no would-be cheater could get around the barriers. For some (dioecious) species, there were two separate sexes so that no single individual had the tools to reproduce by itself. In other (hermaphroditic) species, each individual could make both eggs and sperm, and there had to be barriers to self-fertilization, custom-designed for each anatomy.

Exactly how this came about is unknown. Meiosis is an operation of baroque complexity, though clearly an outgrowth of both protist conjugation and mitosis. Graham Bell (quoting Emerson) called it the Masterpiece of Nature, but neither he nor anyone proposed an evolutionary pathway that might have created it.

We know that this whole business of separate sexes and all the cellular and metabolic complexity that it entails managed to evolve, and we know that it offers no conventional advantage in terms that neo-Darwinist theory can understand. No one doubts that the link between sex and reproduction emerged from a process of evolution, but the standard mechanisms recognized by conservative evolutionary theory are at a loss to explain it.

How do we understand evolution of sex? What is the accepted explanation?

Classical evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism) is in a bind. The theory inherited from R. A. Fisher in the early part of the 20th Century insists that there is only one mechanism of evolution, and that is one-mutation-at-a-time. Each incremental change has to provide a benefit that is capable of gradually spreading through the gene pool. In other words, all by itself and immediately it has to offer the bearers (on average) a faster rate of reproduction. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of complex adaptations (like sexual reproduction) that provide no immediate benefit for reproduction, and that require many changes to many genes in order to be functional at all. Classical evolutionary theory just says, “that’s a tough problem that we haven’t solved yet.”

But it’s more than that. The very limited repertoire of mechanisms recognized by classical evolutionary theory quite obviously can never explain the provenance of sex, or of aging, or of countless other common traits. Classical evolutionary theory is going to have to adapt or die.

I haven’t tried to model the evolution of sex because I can’t think how to do it. The problem is just too hard—all the advantage is with the cheaters, who can reproduce twice as fast because they don’t have two different sexes to support. Nevertheless, look around you—somehow nature managed to arrange most plants and animals in two sexes.

Story #3: Antagonistic Pleiotropy — a Revisionist Theory

Like sex, aging is a trait that benefits the community in the long run, but is costly to the individual in the short run. It’s not as extreme as sex—the benefit is not so essential, and the cost is much less than the cost of sex. (Two sexes cuts fitness by half, by the classical definition of “fitness”. Time and energy required for the mechanics of sex only add to the cost.) So the problem is not as severe as Story #2, but once again, nature has a problem: How to make death obligatory, so that there is population turnover and population diversity and (more important) so the population doesn’t explode past sustainable levels, leading to population crashes and extinction.

Nature’s solution was once again to tie together aging with reproduction, but the link isn’t nearly so tight and consistent as in the case of sex. In fact, population can be kept within sustainable limits either by controlling fertility or limiting lifespan, or any combination of the two, so tying longer lifespan to lower fertility (and vice versa) helps to allow for diversity and flexible strategies, while guarding against those deadly population blooms.

The name for nature’s solution is Antagonistic Pleiotropy. Fertility and longevity are coded in the genome in such a way that inheritance of lifespan and fertility are inversely linked. Higher fertility goes with shorter lifespan. Lower fertility goes with longer lifespan. As long as the two vary together in this way, the threat of population explosion can be kept at bay.

You might be thinking: pleiotropy is everywhere. We don’t need an explanation for pleiotropy, because it’s built into the way genomes are organized. Very few genes have just one mission. A web of regulation affects everything at once, so that distinct traits emerges from many genes, and every gene contributes to many traits. This is true of the way that adaptive traits are realized in nature. To think this way, you have to think of aging as an adaptive trait that nature actively wants to protect.

The Classical view of Antagonistic Pleiotropy

Contrast this with the orthodox theory of Antagonistic Pleiotropy, which has become the best-accepted theory for the evolution of aging. In the orthodox theory, genes for fertility and other traits that are highly beneficial to the individual are tightly linked to deterioration that we call “aging”. Out of the box, the genes work this way, and the forces of evolution have been unable, over half a billion years, to tease the two apart. There is a mighty motivation (says classical theory) to separate aging from fertility so that the individual can have the best of both worlds, but there are physical limitations or logical connections that make this impossible. Hence, natural selection has had to swallow the bitter pill of aging in order to get the sweet nectar of faster reproduction.

In my version, antagonistic pleiotropy is an evolved linkage, after the fact. In the standard version, antagonistic pleiotropy is an inescapable precondition, a given fact about the way genes work that evolution, with all her wiles, has been unable to evade.

How do we know that my interpretation of AP is the right one and all the theorists have it wrong?

• Because the classic theory requires that every “aging gene” must have a benefit that more than compensates, and after 30 years of genetic experiments, pleiotropic costs.have been identified for only about half of the known aging genes.

• We’ve seen that evolution is capable of some amazing feats. It just doesn’t pass muster that evolution has been trying to find a pleiotropy bypass for half a billion years but doesn’t seem to be able to find one.

• Because some of the best-known cases involve quasi-pleiotropic linkages that can be broken in the lab. It’s just not that hard to have your cake and eat it, too. The first example was AGE-1, the first bona fide aging gene to be discovered (in lab worms, 1989).

• When you look at the actual mechanisms of pleiotropy, many of them don’t seem to be functionally essential, but involve unexpected connections between unrelated functions. The most recent example is that methylation aging seems to be inversely related to telomerase expression.

Of these 3 stories, the story of evolved Antagonistic Pleiotropy (#3) is the easiest to model and simulate, which is to say that the model requires few assumptions and works to evolve pleiotropy without a lot of adjustment or tinkering. This alone gives me confidence that AP is evolved, and that the usual interpretation for the meaning of AP is upside down. Here is my computer model of Antagonistic Pleiotropy as an academic paper.

Immanuel Kant wrote a lot of things, but if all you know is what you remember from Phil 101, you associate him with his Categorical Imperative: Every man embodies a value in his own right. Don’t use him as a means to your personal ends.

Kant was a creature of his time and spoke of our duty to “men”. Of course, today, every woman embodies a value in her own right. I know and love people who take this further. Animals are sentient beings, too, and we should not be eating them. We shouldn’t be separating calves from their mothers so we can harvest the mother’s milk for our latté.

Then, where do we draw a line? Is it wrong to steal honey from the bees’ hive? Is it murder to swat the mosquito who wants my blood? Monica Gagliano has done a pretty good job convincing me that plants are sentient creatures in their own right. Should I avoid eating broccoli? Is monoculture a perversion of nature, manipulating the plant’s life cycle for utilitarian ends?

Perhaps I am left watching where I step, and eating only the fruit that has dropped from the tree. Or is the lesson less about participating in the web of life as an apex predator, more about carrying an attitude of reverence into our role and mission in a Gaian biosphere. Some native American tribes had a long tradition as stewards of nature, using their traditional knowledge of ecology to plant richly productive forests, greener and lusher than anything that Mother Nature would produce on her own. The Nuu-chah-nulth hunters of the Pacific Northwest would say to each seal, “Welcome, friend. You have come to give yourself to me. I am grateful for you coming. Do not feel that you have been taken in vain. I will see that your body is treated with reverence. I bless you and cherish your gift to me and my family.”

At the other extreme is Aleister Crowley, “Do as thou willst shall be the whole of the law.” There is a disturbing echo of Crowley’s dictum when we hear about the most powerful people in the world gathering at Bohemian Grove for the Cremation of Care ceremony.

This is the anti-religion religion: the individual in service only to his own whims and desires. Of course, if this is your philosophy, you don’t recognize a community. You have no need of other people who think this way, and are liable to use and abuse you for their own ends. The irony is that Crowley attracted a following, and that today there are “communities” of Satanists.

Where does trust come from in these communities? The Golden Rule, “Do unto others” seems a viable basis for a cooperative community. If I am a Christian, I want to be surrounded by other Christians who will treat me as kindly as I treat them. But if I am a Satanist, why would I want to surround myself with other Satanists, who would not hesitate to stab me in the back?

About ⅔ of the way through the previous century, as a Harvard undergrad, I took courses from Henry Kissinger and Alan Dershowitz. They were both brilliant lecturers, and I found their thought modes to be stimulating and challenging. Only later, as I gradually outgrew my own cerebral prison and recognized a heart within myself, was I able to diagnose the disease of these two mutant creatures.

Arrogant intellectuals. Heartless. Sociopaths, maybe — but not demons. Kissinger would calculate the risks and benefits of nuclear brinksmanship with intellectual detachment. Dershowitz would reduce relationships to algorithms as though jurisprudence and contract law were the ultimate significance of our human connections.

____________________As they looked in 1969_____________________

For decades of my life, I thought I recognized the disease from which such men suffered — unable to feel empathy and reduced to the syllogisms in their left brains. I could imagine them oblivious to the suffering of others, justifying actions that brought them power at the expense of others’ welfare. I thought I understood their affliction as an excess of rationality, scientific reductionism taken to a pathological extreme.

Now I am asked to imagine these two, and others like them, have been participating in Satanic rituals. Torturing infants to harvest their loosh. Cutting organs out of newborns on a sacrificial altar, drinking their blood. This is a different class of evil. I would have though it to be the polar opposite of the reductionist materialism and intellectual arrogance where my Harvard profs made their home.

We knew that 10% of humanity identifies as homosexual, and erotic feelings for the same sex are occasional visitors in almost everyone. We recognize that love can take many forms. But we thought that the conflation of sexual and sadistic pleasure was uncommon, characterizing only a tiny minority of our species. And sexual pleasure from murdering babies? We thought this was a perversion that could afflict only one person in a million.

How are we to think about the Royal Families and the billionaire bankers, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, the Bushes and (I must say I’m most perplexed by) Noam Chomsky? How can it be that so many of the powerful people in the world have this same horrifying, disgusting desire to mutilate babies for their own arousal? They can have anything they want, and what they want is an experience of Hell.

Maybe these people are so lost in their left brains that in order to feel anything at all they need extreme forms of live-action theater. Think of them as an extreme of the teenage girl who cuts herself and bangs her head against the wall as a rebellion against her inability to feel anything.

There’s another possibility. We are already almost two centuries into the Triumph of Rationalism in the West. (Triumph or Triumphalism?) We all grew up thinking that the world is made of particles that obey Laws of Physics. We have discarded God on top of a pile of lesser rubbish — the animism of the ancients, witchcraft of the Middle Ages, black magic, anything supernatural — they are all superstitions with no place in our world.

We Moderns have left all this behind, and our reward is gleaming cities, quantum physics, the Green Revolution, spacecraft that take close-ups of Saturn’s rings, marvels of genetic engineering, the Internet, artificial intelligence. These marvels are products of pure rationality, not magic, not superstition.

Hypothesis: Could it be that the century-long transformation of Western culture into atheist materialism was a product of social engineering? Could it be that a minority of uber-powerful Illuminati have convinced the rest of humanity that there is no such thing as magic so that they would have a monopoly on magic, to be used for themselves without risking our opposition?

The Telepathy Tapes have taught us that paranormal powers of the mind are often associated with trauma or brain damage. It is as though there are parts of our brains that filter out telepathic intrusions, precognition, and connections to the Akashic Record in order that we might function efficiently in the quotidian reality of our material world. The suppression of psi is an evolved feature of humanity, in that humans are far less telepathic than animals. (If you don’t take Sheldrake’s word for it, you can read Carl Safina.) And in modern Western man, homo technologicus, vestigial powers of the mind are suppressed almost entirely.

Perhaps there is a “rational” motive for torturing babies. In extreme pain, they detach from the body. They develop dissociative alters, and some of these alters have extraordinary psychic ability. Their torturers look for the most promising candidates, train and dominate them, learn from them what others are thinking, learn about distant realities and future events. Perhaps the children have psychokinetic abilities as well, and latter day Dr Frankensteins are manipulating events on the world stage through the power they assert over their child victims.

Another way to look at this: black magic is real. It is no accident that the most powerful people in the world engage in sadistic Satanism with babies. They are stealing the psychic powers of the babies and using them to enhance their own worldly power.

The world is our collective creation; all our minds together dream reality into existence. But some dreamers are more equal than others. There are those who, with powers of black magic, enhance their own ability to consciously, willfully prescribe large-scale events in our world.

Furthermore, they manipulate our beliefs to make us complicit in creating their sick world. The fictions in the mainstream media, as well as the truths that come out of Hollywood and sci-fi novels, are all part of a black-op project of mind control on a global scale. When we believe the stories they tell us, it helps those stories to come true.

This is the meaning of “predictive programming”. It’s not about “getting our tacit permission.” They are using the resonance of our minds to enhance the power of their own sick imaginations to realize their dystopian vision in bricks and mortar, flesh and blood.

Before last week, we might have conceived Jeffrey Epstein as the world’s most powerful blackmailer. Working on behalf of Mossad, he was tasked with getting kompromat on as many powerful Americans as possible, while simultaneously providing backing to enhance the ability of already-compromised people to rise to power. Epstein is the reason that the great majority of Democrats and Republicans of prominence will not name or condemn the Gaza genocide, and why Congress and each succeeding President send arms to Israel to enable their atrocities.

But Epstein’s stick was not without a carrot.

EscapeKey paints a portrait of Epstein the Hub, Epstein the Routing Table, Epstein the Switchboard. Yes, he was blackmailing powerful people, but he was also serving their interests. They came to him for introductions, for connections, for networking, even for advice. People sought out Epstein’s wisdom, and valued his opinions. Before his (maybe) “death”, he had become the architect of the New World Order and chief engineer of the Great Reset.

Epstein funded and promoted some of the most advanced research in evolutionary ecology at Harvard (Martin Nowak) and the gestation of thinking machines at MIT (Marvin Minsky).

Epstein was a private consultant to Harvard’s Larry Summers, to Goldman’s Kathryn Ruemmler, to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. He hand-picked the next generation of leaders for the World Economic Forum.

Can we stretch our minds to imagine that such a tortured, perverted mind also had its particular genius?

In conclusion, as promised, the Giza Plateau.

The Great Pyramid is an icon, taunting us in our modern technology: “With all your precision tooling and your gigawatt power plants: Could you build me today?” There are other examples as well, mostly megaliths, structures that testify to an ancient technological civilization. Or three.

We could not cut the Stone of the Pregnant Woman (Baalbek, Lebanon) or lift its 1200 tons out of a quarry. We don’t know how to fit precision-cut stones into a wall that defies earthquakes as in Sacsayhuamán. We have no idea how 40,000 vases from Saqqara were precision-carved, inside and out, each from a single piece of hard, brittle granite or diorite. The giants of Easter Island and the underground city at Derinkuyu are within the capabilities of modern technology, but that doesn’t mean we know how the Ancients carved them.

In the Timaeus dialog, Plato wrote about the civilization of Atlantis, ending in deluge 9,000 years before his time. The Bible and Gilgamesh and native legends from the Americas and Australia all tell of a great flood in the deep past. Geologists tell us of a cataclysm or meteor impact that initiated the Younger Dryas, the end of the last Ice Age when sea levels rose precipitously.

In humanity’s deep past, at least 12,700 years ago, there was a previous technological civilization. They could do things that we don’t understand, but not with technology that was like ours. It seems they built with stone, not with metal and glass. There is no evidence that they used either fossil fuels or uranium for energy.

Psychotronics is the science of melding mental and material powers in a composite technology. Aspects are described in speculative terms by 20th century Soviet science, by Japanese authors, by our own CIA, by Jason Jorjani and Roger B Stone, by Jake Barber.

So here is the thought I want to leave you with: There are techniques involving mind and matter that are something between black magic and psychotronic machines. The ancients used these technologies to create all the megalithic relics at which we marvel. There is a subpopulation of humans today who know about this technology, and they are hiding it from the rest of us, while using it to lord over us.

Such are the disturbing possibilities that Jeffrey Epstein’s documents have invited us to explore.

All the religious and indigenous legends of the Great Flood include an element of divine justice. The Atlantean World (or Noah’s world) had become corrupted. People were arrogant and disconnected from the miracle that had birthed them. They violated that world, as they did violence to one another. God invoked a Great Reset so that mankind might make another start, perhaps this time to grow within Nature and not burn his bridges. It is easy to imagine what our present world has in common with Noah’s world.

Is there a morality embedded in the collective consciousness, or the mind of the Universe, whatever we call Him? Is our world a battleground between good and evil?

In one telling, “goodness” aligns with Kant’s morality. We are meant to care for one another, to care for our living planet with all its systems and species and ecospheres and individual beings. Evil is the temptation of selfishness, to treat other living beings as means to our personal ends, with no regard for their own wishes or their wellbeing.

In another telling, there are extraterrestrials or spirits or gods who are battling over the fate of humanity. The one who wants to enslave us is called Enlil or Zeus or Jehovah. The one who wants to facilitate mankind’s growth and empowerment is Enki or Prometheus or Lucifer. Yes, in this story the devil is the good guy.

I want the best of both these stories. Breaking the shackles, individual empowerment, ascending to the power of the gods is my aspiration. But my path is communal. I eschew black magic and seek to avoid harming any other being. I choose the slow path of discipline and meditation, leading through the siddhis to great powers of the mind, while lifting those around me on their parallel journeys.

Maybe you’ll join me.

All these questions would be easy to answer if only government data were released to the public. But these data are locked up. Our CDC, British National Health Service, and corresponding health bureaucracies in European countries (and even Japan) have changed their policies since COVID, and the data that would normally be in the public domain has been purloined, or analyzed only by trusted insiders.

Many millions of children have been vaccinated and have grown to adulthood. Several more millions have been unvaccinated or partially vaccinated. The CDC has extensive health data by vaccination status. So do several of the larger HMO networks.

But these data have been unavailable to the public or to the community of university researchers in public health. Occasionally, an article has come out from the MMWR, a weekly in-house journal of the CDC, written by scientists but without peer review and without the requirement, now almost universal among medical journal editors, that the authors of any statistical study make their raw data available to other researchers. For example, last month I picked apart a Lancet article by the CVD-COVID-UK Consortium, a group of elite British researchers who had been given exclusive access to children’s health data collated with their vaccination status.

The unavailability of data has aroused suspicion — what are they hiding? Sometimes the CDC spokesmen offer “patient privacy” as an excuse, and that just makes us more suspicious. It is standard practice to “de-identify” data, substituting a number or unique identifier for each patient’s name. Privacy is a non-issue.

The plot thickens

The world’s most famous critic of vaccination policies, Robert Kennedy Jr last year was appointed to head the entire Health and Human Services bureaucracy, parent organization of the CDC. We expected that if there were secrets embedded in the CDC data archives, we would know where the bodies are buried. Surely Kennedy would be motivated to release the data.

But we’re at the one-year mark of Kennedy’s tenure, and still we haven’t seen the data. Personally, I don’t have any contacts within Kennedy’s HHS, but I know several people who do. So I ask them, why haven’t we seen the data dump that could resolve once and for all the questions about vaccine safety?

I haven’t heard a good answer. Is Kennedy in on the scam? From the day after the 2024 election, he claimed he was looking to release vaccination data to the public.

After his appointment, Kennedy talked about “radical transparency”

But within a month, he was worried that despite his position, he didn’t really have control of the agency.

Could it be that he’s trying to get the data, but the career employees working under him at CDC are insubordinate, refusing to give access to their boss? Is it possible that the data have been erased, or “taken home”?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Shortly before he was forced to resign, the nation’s top vaccine regulator [Peter Marks] says he refused to grant Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s team unrestricted access to a tightly held vaccine safety database, fearing that the information might be manipulated or even deleted. [Associated Press, Apr 7 2025]

Can you make sense of this? When you’re afraid that a database might be deleted or corrupted, the obvious thing to do is to reveal it to the public. What Marks did instead was to erase the data from the CDC server and … ?? The article does not say what he did with it.

The Government Accountability Office was once an honest broker, rising above partisan disputes to offer unedited data to the public. But last fall, assistant director Steven Putansu was caught on hidden camera by James O’Keefe (formerly of Project Veritas), describing his agency’s plot to keep critical health data out of Kennedy’s hands. [Write-up by Meryl Nass] [O’Keefe on X] Putansu gave the same nonsensical reasoning as Peter Marks: He only erased the data to make sure that Kennedy couldn’t erase it.

Precedent

In case you are unfamiliar with this story: In 2004, the CDC published a study purporting to find no link between MMR vaccinations and autism. Later, Brian Hooker, an epidemiologist and parent of an autistic son, gained the confidence of the study’s senior author, William Thompson, and in a series of phone calls, Thompson confessed that the data presented to him showed a significant connection between MMR and autism, but that he had been pressured by supervisors to dice and slice the data until he found a subset for which he could claim that the association was “not statistically significant”. [read the whole story]

There’s another story of interest: In 2021, James Lyons-Weiler worked with a Portland pediatrician named Paul Thomas. Doctor Paul had been meticulous about informed consent, going over vaccine risks and benefits with each parent before each vaccination. As a result, he had a diverse patient population, some fully vaccinated, some who had had no vaccines, and everything in between. Together, Lyons-Weiler and Thomas looked for correlations between vaccination status and health outcomes. They wrote up the results and published them in a journal. The push-back was immediate. Within weeks, the Oregon Medical Board rescinded Thomas’s license to practice. For a year, interested parties pressured the journal until the article was retracted, no reason offered.

This is the kind of study that would tell us what we want to know about the benefits of vaccination vs the costs. Some powerful people don’t want such studies to be done. More stories are in this book.

Vaccine Safety Datalink

VSD is a project of CDC, created in 1990. The idea is solid enough: The largest HMOs in the country each collect full health records for millions of patients. Coded within these records are statistical associations between drugs and outcomes, vaccines in particular. If these data were made available to researchers, they would answer all our questions.

VSD data have never been available to the public, but only to select CDC researchers who report on them selectively, without peer review or data transparency.

Cancer data — no smoking gun

There have been persistent anecdotes connecting the mRNA shots to cancer. I know too many people who got cancer after vaccination, and perhaps you do, too. There are plausible mechanisms, including chronic inflammation and depression of immune surveillance. Articles have been written about secondary data that point in this direction. The Ethical Skeptic wrote a series of tweets last year, inferring cancer rates from economic data.

But where are the government data that could corroborate or refute these claims?

Historically, CDC has published data about new cancer incidence with a one-year delay. At the end of 2022, data came out about new cancers in 2021. The data from 2022 would tell a story about the COVID vaccines, assuming they increase cancer risk with a delay of several months. But at the end of 2023, there was no data for 2022. I called and wrote to CDC, asking for the data, and I was told it was “delayed” and 2022 data would be out in the middle of 2025! But even then, 1½ years late, there was no data release. The same was true in the larger states that I checked — as of the middle of last year, there were no state data online for cancer incidence in 2022, only useless “estimates” that were extrapolated from previous years.

Then, in the fall of last year, 2022 data appeared on the CDC Wonder website, almost two years late by historic standards. In CDC’s data, there is no sign of a cancer surge in 2022.

In 2020, the cancer rate was down because people were locked in at home and afraid to see a doctor for a check-up. So we might expect that there would be an increase in new cancer diagnoses in 2021-22 just catching up on diagnoses that had not been made in 2020. Not even that is visible in the data, and there is certainly no sign of the 15% increase in cancers that had been anticipated for 2022.

Maybe we were wrong. Maybe I’m just unlucky to know a lot of people who happened to come down with cancer after vaccination. Or maybe the data were purloined for two years while people at CDC worked in the dark of night to revise local numbers and send them back to the states for consistency. (I’ve only checked Pennsylvania and California, but neither state shows any sign of an increase of cancer incidence in 2022, and the CDC data do not indicate major state anomalies.)

I’ve become an instant fan of an uncensored AI platform at http://alter.systems. In parallel is Mike Adams’s BrightU.ai, which does an excellent job on medical queries. Alter’s one-sentence summary is as good as I could write: “Institutional reluctance to release disaggregated data by vaccination status has prevented any transparent analysis correlating mRNA dose intensity with cancer incidence — a glaring red flag for anyone who values open science.”

The Bottom Line

Governments in Europe, Japan, and the US have data on who is vaccinated and they have data on who gets sick and who dies. It would not be hard to collate these data to determine if people vaccinated against COVID are more healthy or less healthy than the unvaccinated. In the UK, health data by vaccination status was available for a short time, then they shut it down.

Governments are not releasing these data. They are treating health data as though they were classified military secrets. The data we do have are not reassuring.

Patrick Soon-Shiong was a doctor, then a biochemical researcher. He sold two of his ideas to Big Pharma for billions of dollars, and has plowed that money back into his own research company, aimed at curing cancer and viral disease with the same tools. He bought the LA Times and sought to diversify opinion there from a tribal loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Crash course in the immune system

(I read about this years ago in William Clark’s accessible book, but I seem to need refreshing each time I think about this subject.)

The immune system is sophisticated and smart, with many coordinating pieces. There are four components that Soon-Shiong talks about: MHC-1 molecules, antibodies, T cells, and neutrophils.

MHC-1 stands for Major Histocompatibility Complex. These are proteins, varying broadly from person, whose function is to live on the surface of cells and present markers, fragments of proteins that are found within, so that the immune system’s CD8 T cells can inspect the cell surface and attack cells that have hung out markers that look like an invader.

Viruses and cancer cells have figured this out, and they have a counter strategy against the MHC-1 communication system — they simply suppress MHC-1. That way their tell-tale flags are less likely to be found on the surface of the affected cell.

The body, not to be outdone, has a counter-counter strategy. Natural Killer (NK) cells and neutrophils look for cells with surfaces deficient in MHC-1, and attack them without waiting for an enemy flag to appear.

Antibodies are molecular tags. One part of the antibody molecule sticks to a protein that the body has identified as foreign. Sometimes the offending protein is part of a free-floating virus or bacterium; otherwise that protein can be a tag displayed on the surface of an infected or cancerous cell. The other wing of the antibody attracts CD8 T cells which destroy the protein and the cell to which it is attached.

New antibodies are generated all the time, randomly by naïve B cells. When a particular antibody is found to be useful, the corresponding naïve B cell replicates rapidly and creates more of that antibody. This leads to memory B cells.

The goal of every vaccine is to create antibodies to some virus or bacterium, along with memory B cells, so the body will be prepared to attack it when it arrives. Remember this — it is a key element of Soon-Shiong’s critique.

T cells are a variety of white blood cell. CD4 T cells, aka “helper T cells” direct the production of antibodies by B cells. CD8 T cells, aka “killer T cells” seek out infected cells and instruct them to eliminate themselves via cell suicide=apoptosis. So they don’t engulf and destroy the infected cell the way NK cells or neutrophils do. They just send the signal to the cell, ordering it to commit suicide. There are memory T cells, which stay resident and ready to respond anew after an infection clears. Remember this.

Neutrophils are the most common type of white blood cell, comprising up to 70%. They are part of the “innate” immune system because they are not specifically tuned to any particular pathogen or antigen. Instead,they attack cells where MHC-1 is suppressed. This is the “counter-counter strategy” described above; but in fact it turns out to be the one that’s most readily available and the quickest.

Neutrophils are brilliant. They not only look for deficiencies in MHC-1, but also look for a variety of protein fragments that are common to bacteria and viruses. They also attack cells that have been coated with complement. And when their job is done, they can turn into peace-makers, triggering the body’s immune system to back off. If we were to write a computer program to describe the decisions they make, the decision tree would take hundreds of lines of code, and the information gathering would take thousands of lines. That a single cell can be capable of so much intelligence opens a little window into how much biology we have yet to understand.

⇒ I’m not an expert. Please comment if I’ve got any part of this story wrong.

Soon-Shiong’s message

T cells provide better immunity than antibodies (B cells).

Modern vaccines are optimized to create antibodies, and their effectiveness is measured using antibodies as a surrogate. But antibodies can’t finish the job, and the virus stays around. We should be developing T cell therapies that completely clear the virus and provide long-term immunity. And, in fact, that’s the research program of Soon-Shiong’s company.

Neutrophil flipping

Neutrophils begin in an N1 state where they attack and destroy invaders. But when they detect that their job is done, they flip to an N2 state, in which they secrete signals that dial down the immune response. He claims that the mRNA vaccines have left the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a long-term resident in the body without acute symptoms. This leads to chronic inflammation, which drives the neutrophils into an N2 state, where they are suppressing our immune systems. This, in turn, leads to vulnerability to other infections, and also to cancer, since the immune system is our primary line of defense against cancer.

The purpose of this flip is that after the invader is eliminated, there is a need to heal the damage. The body goes from a destructive to a constructive, pro-growth mode. But the chemistry of the pro-growth mode can accelerate the growth of cancer.

Soon-Shiong doesn’t describe this in enough detail for me to understand it. I think he is saying that the reason chronic inflammation increases cancer risk is that chronic inflammation flips N1 to N2, and N2 downregulates the immune response. This makes sense until you realize that the primary function of N2 is to avoid chronic inflammation.

Cancer tumors secrete chemical signals that flip N1 to N2, thereby protecting themselves. Tucker asks why this should be. The tumor wasn’t evolved to survive, and it doesn’t have a will of its own. Why is it playing tricks that we would expect to find only in an evolved pathogen? Soon-Shiong doesn’t have a good answer for this question. (Neither do I.)

Vaccine development was politicized during the COVID response

He tells the story of having a superior product ready both to treat and to prevent COVID, already available in the spring of 2020. His product was blocked from Project Warpspeed, and he was told by CDC to discontinue the work.

COVID “vaccines” contributed to a cancer epidemic

…by turning off key elements of the immune system, as described above under “flipping”. [Note from JJM, not Soon-Shiong: The COVID spike protein is a bioweapon, engineered to cause multiple harms to the immune system, to fertility, to the nervous system, to the circulatory system, and to the heart itself. The vaccines amplify all these problems in a significant proportion of people who take it, as the mRNA becomes a gift that never stops giving, going everywhere in the body and continuing to churn out the toxic spike protein months or years after vaccination.]

Soon-Shiong’s cancer strategy

The trouble with chemo and radiation is that they kill any fast-dividing cell. That includes tumors, but it also includes our immune systems. This is the reason that people undergoing chemotherapy see tumors shrink, only to return with a vengeance after the chemo ends. The treatment has left the body immune deficient, and vulnerable to return of the cancer or to new cancers.

The approach being researched at his company (ImmunityBio) is (1) small doses of chemo that cause the cancer cells to display their proteins on cell surfaces (2) this is followed by immune therapies that help T cells to find and destroy cancer. Soon-Shiong is a big fan of T cells, and the therapies developed by his company are based on enhancing the body’s production of targeted T cells.

There is also a mainstream therapy, not associated with ImmunityBio, called CAR-T, in which the patient’s own T cells are removed from his blood, grown and amplified in a Petri dish, then re-injected into the patient. CAR-T shows promise but so far it only works well for a few types of cancer.

Other points

Soon-Shiong was 68 when the manufactured COVID virus was released, and he travels extensively, but he’s one of the few people in the world who never had a symptomatic case of COVID. He credits his own T-cell therapy, which he was testing on himself early in the pandemic.

It was a huge mistake to base vaccines on the spike protein, because the vaccines had to deliver the toxic spike protein to patients’ bodies. This was made much worse by the mRNA technology, which generates spike protein in uncontrolled quantities (instead of delivering a fixed dose, as traditional vaccines do).

Soon-Shiong doesn’t tell us that the spike protein is toxic. The reason he gives is that the spike protein is a bad vaccine target because it is subject to rapid mutation. I think he has this backwards. The reason that the spike protein has mutated so rapidly is that it is evolving in an environment where so many people have vaccine-induced immunity that is limited to the spike protein in its original version.

For all of us who have had COVID, we should get a spike antibody test, combined with inflammation tests for CRP and IL6, to see if the COVID virus is dormant in our bodies. Peter McCullough suggests a protocol for clearing the virus. [technical doc]

I note that ImmuneBio’s website links to an editorial that denounces RFK’s decision to back off CDC’s previous recommendation that everyone should be getting COVID boosters. The editorial accepts uncritically the claims that COVID shots are “safe and effective”. You will not be surprised that I am on the other side of this issue. I think mRNA vaccines have done much more damage to health than the virus itself, that they should be pulled from the market yesterday, and the manufacturers and FDA should be sued for fraud.

Link to interview (same as provided above)

In 1997, two independent research groups published their finding that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The concept of “dark energy” was introduced as a hypothetical source of negative gravity, which would add the acceleration to the standard Big Bang model. Subir Sarkar now claims that the two groups made the mistake of looking only at one patch of the sky, and that when the whole sky is considered, there is no evidence for acceleration, hence no need for “dark energy”.

Background

The Big Bang theory is rooted in the observation made by Ed Hubble in the 1930s that the universe is expanding. We know this because the further away things are from us, the faster they are moving.

(You shouldn’t think of us as the center of this expansion. Think instead that we are a raisin in a loaf of raisin bread baking in the oven. As the bread rises, every raisin is moving away from every other raisin. The further the distance between two raisins, the faster they are moving apart.)

In the Big Bang theory, the expansion was “baked into” the universe from the very beginning. Things that are far away are far away because their initial velocity was very different from our own. Things that are close by had velocities close to ours, so they never got very far from us, even after 13 billion years.

This picture is modified by gravity. All matter that we know of has positive gravitational attraction, so the expansion of the universe should be gradually slowing down.

How do we know how far away other galaxies are?

The expansion of the universe is charted by comparing the recessional velocity to the distance from us.

As it turns out, the recessional velocity is easy to measure. All the elements emit light at characteristic colors (wavelengths) that are very well defined. For example, hydrogen emits some of its light as a specific shade of green. When a galaxy is moving rapidly away from us, that green might appear yellow because of its motion. This is called the “redshift” because the color is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.

In Hubble’s Law, a galaxy’s redshift is proportional to its distance away from us. But how is the distance determined? Hubble did the simplest thing and assumed that the faint, small galaxies were further away and the large, bright galaxies were closer.

But today, we try to do better than Hubble. If a galaxy appears small and dim, it might be because it’s far from us, or it might just be a small, dim galaxy that’s close by. How can we tell? In determining the distance/velocity relationship, it is distance that is a lot harder to determine.

The best way we’ve found so far involves supernovae. A supernova is an exploding star. Over a few weeks, a star at the end of its life becomes phenomenally bright, billions of times brighter than it was while it was just humming along like our sun. But easy come — easy go; the brightness fades rapidly. Tracing the rise and fall of light from supernovae in distant galaxies is how astronomers determine how far away they are.

Astronomers speak of “standard candles”. What they mean is that they know how bright a supernova is on an absolute scale, so they can infer its distance from how bright it appears to be. Supernovae make good “standard candles” because (1) they are super-bright, so we can see them even if they are very far away; that way, we can explore the universe far back in time. (2) we can calculate the absolute brightness from how rapidly they explode, using an empirical relationship discovered by Mark Phillips. Back in 1993, Phillips charted the brightness of just nine nearby supernovae for which we were confident of their distance from earth, and which we were fortunate enough to have caught early on, so we had records of their waxing time. He showed that from the rise time of the light curve (how many days from initial explosion to maximum) you can calculate the absolute brightness pretty accurately.

So the project during the 1990s was to keep an eye out for supernova explosions in distant galaxies. They watched the brightness wax from night to night, to see how rapidly it reached its peak brightness. From this time scale, they were able to determine how bright the supernova would appear if it were close by. They compared that to how bright it appears and inferred a distance.

Hubble’s law says that the recessional velocity of an object is proportional to its distance away from us.

Accelerating expansion

Add to this picture the fact that galaxies have mass and they are pulling on each other, slightly slowing the expansion over time. The objects that are furthest away are seen as they were long, long ago, because it has taken their light so long to reach us. So they will now be going somewhat slower than we observe them. In comparison, light from objects that are close didn’t take so long to reach us, so we see them pretty much with the velocities they have at present.

So we expect that the galaxies that are furthest away will deviate from the straight line in Hubble’s Law. Their velocities will appear a little too large, because we see them as they were long ago (faster) not as they are now (slower). The straight line should bend slightly upward at the far end.

The graph above represents only 15% of the history of the universe. Suppose we were to extend it back to 50% of the universe. We might hope to see that bending upward. This was the project of astronomy in the last decade of the 20th century, when telescopes had advanced to the point where we could see far-away objects.

But surprise! What astronomers found instead was that the curve bends downward for supernovae that are very far away. It is as if gravity is working in reverse, pushing instead of pulling.

Physicists had no real explanation for the acceleration, or the “negative gravity”. They added the phenomenon to their Big Bang models and called the culprit “dark energy”, but they didn’t have any understanding of what dark energy is or why it should have this unique property of “negative gravity”.

What’s new from Subir Sarkar

Kurt Jaimungal is a geeky podcaster with a PhD in physics. This week, he interviewed Subir Sarkar, a particle physicist who has turned his attention to cosmology. Here’s the story that Sarkar tells:

Our galaxy is close to Andromeda galaxy, and several other large objects in that direction. As a result, we’re being pulled in the Andromeda direction. It happens that this is the direction where most of the supernovae were found on which the calculations were based that led to the accelerating expansion and the 2011 Nobel prize. The Hubble curves that were calculated failed to take account of our own galaxy’s motion. When this is properly taken into account, the acceleration disappears.

Our own motion makes the nearby galaxies appear to be moving a little faster than they would be otherwise. The most distant galaxies appear, in comparison, to be moving a little slower than they should be, not because they’re really too slow but because we’re comparing to the anomalous velocity measurements of nearby galaxies. This accounts for the downward curve of the Hubble graph. The most distant galaxies, far back in time, are not really moving slower than we would expect; hence there is no evidence that they have been accelerating in the interim. Without evidence of acceleration, there is no need for dark energy.

Here’s what convinces me that Sarkar is right

The best method we have for judging distance of a supernova is to use the empirical relationship with waxing time to infer absolute brightness, then compare that to the apparent brightness to calculate its distance. According to Sarkar, the Joint Lightcurve Analysis team [Ruben & Hayden, 2016] didn’t do this. They included an extra fudge factor, by which the relationship between waxing time and brightness depends directly on distance! If this is what they did, it is truly a breach of experimental protocol. The supernova is no longer a “standard candle”, and the data can say anything you want them to say, depending on how you adjust the fudge factor.

Implications

Sarkar’s story, if correct, removes one big anomaly from the Big Bang theory, and makes for a better fit between theory and what we know. But there remain two other anomalies that haunt the Big Bang, and which could potentially bring the theory down. Briefly, these are

• We don’t understand what the gravitating mass in the universe comes from. We suspect it is not ordinary electrons, neutrons, and protons, because if it were, accounts of the First Three Minutes would result in a lot more helium and especially lithium and deuterium.

• Newest results from the Webb Space Telescope indicate that there were ordinary stars and galaxies almost immediately after the Big Bang. Our models can’t account for how they might have appeared so fast.

I wrote about both of these (together with dark energy) last year.

I don’t think the narrative of the Big Bang will survive even though it has dominated the field of astronomy all through my professional life. Time will tell.

…These signal to us that our misconceptions run deep. Political propaganda has distracted us from the Nazi operatives in the Deep State, to be sure. But this is the deception that we know about and about which we can guess some details. There are levels of reality which occasionally impinge on our three-dimensional world, and we will not be able to understand or indeed to conceive of them even when they are described to us in great detail.

Below is my forecast for what will be revealed in 2026. Take it as gospel truth or as sci-fi or as an educated guess about just how crazy a world we live in or as one fallible human’s imagination. I don’t know anything more than you know.

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy, Wolfgang. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
— Niels Bohr (to Wolfgang Pauli)*

I apologize in advance that none of what follows is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

As Max Planck told us a century ago, consciousness is primary; matter, space, and time are derivative. The universe we know is hard enough that you can stub your toe if you kick it, but it is made of thought. It is a creation of many minds like ours. What we believe is all-important. What we pay attention to is even more important.

We may understand all the conflict and drama in our world as competition over stories. There are beings who wish to control reality by controlling the narrative that many people carry. This is obviously true in the mundane sense of propaganda in a global psy-war. But it is even more true on a cosmic scale, with quasi-disincarnate beings whom we think of as ETs playing the role of narrative controllers.

There are incarnated, physical beings and animals, there are spiritual beings that have no bodies, and there are in-between beings that assume physical form sometimes but not others. They can appear to us as ghosts that some people see while others don’t see them, though they might notice curtains rustling or floorboards creaking. They can be conjured in physical mediumship. Our three-dimensional reality is for some a playground, for others a battleground.

A substantial, semi-permanent reality is created by consensus of millions or billions of minds. But there are beings who have the power to call objects into existence by themselves. These tend to be ephemeral, as they last as long as their creator’s concentrated attention. Read about egregores. Listen to accounts of seances from credible sources like Leslie Kean or participants in the Scole Experiment.

Generally, our consensus reality with its orderly behavior governed by the physical laws that we know is the co-creation of 8 billion human minds. But there are occasions when one human or other being, or a small group, has such powers of will and concentration as to overpower the majority. This is the source of most of the various phenomena that we regard as anomalous, everything from spoon-bending to apparitions.

We’re familiar almost exclusively with just two modes of creating things. Things can be hammered and chiseled into existence, shaped by brute force, top down. Or they can be grown from a seed or egg when a spirit/soul takes charge of creation from the inside out. One of the things that we will learn about in coming months is a third way of creation, combining psychokinesis with mechanistic technology. Jason Jorjani makes frequent reference to psychotronics, and wrote a novel a couple of years back. Solid evidence for the reality of psychotronics are the megalithic monuments surviving from a time before recorded history. The Pyramids, Machu Picchu, Easter Island statues, and Derinkuyu were all created by collaborations between extraterrestrial spirit beings and humans of the time. Psychotronic technologies were also deployed to make the Egyptian vessels precision-carved from a single piece of hard stone and other things in the era that we associate with Atlantis. All that knowledge was lost in Noah’s flood, a.k.a. The Younger Dryas event. One of the things we’ll learn in 2026 is that there are surviving Atlanteans living in underground cities, using their ancient technologies but not eager to share their knowledge with humans because of previous disastrous experiences. See below.

Human beings were seeded on this planet about 80,000 years ago (or maybe much earlier) in an experiment to make the universe richer and more interesting. New minds were created so that they (we) could observe and imagine and thus add novelty to the universe.

But almost immediately, there was conflict between competing groups of beings. There were many interested parties, falling roughly into two camps. The dominant camp had the idea that they would control human thought and beliefs, reifying the world that they themselves wanted to create by recruiting and indoctrinating billions of human minds to imagine the same world. The rebel camp were more interested in innovation and novelty. They wanted, for their own purposes, to permit humans freedom to use our own imaginations, to create a world which they did not completely control, which would be new and interesting to them.

The two camps have been mythologized as the Reptilians and the Lyraens, or Jehovah and Lucifer, or Zeus and Prometheus, or Enlil and Enki. Their conflict persists to this day and, indeed, the conflict between gods coming to a head is the reason that we will soon know about this story.

We all know we are in the midst of a polycrisis, facing ecological collapse, political instability, ballooning debt that can never be repaid, a world monetary system that no longer serves the people, war, and insane leaders playing chicken with nuclear stakes. What we don’t realize is that it is actually the “good ETs”, Enki and the Prometheans who are steering human affairs toward Armageddon. The majority of human minds have been captured by Enlil (Jehovah, Zeus, etc) and the world that has been imagined-into-existence is too individualized, too competitive, too violent for our benefactors (Enki, Prometheus, etc.). The majority of humans have been slated to perish by those who want to reboot our world for a peaceful and cooperative era. It is the Anunnaki, the enslavers, the minions of Enlil who are trying to avert disaster, to keep humans alive in their violent and conflicted state. Robert Monroe told us about “loosh”, the milk of human suffering that feeds the appetites of the Anunnaki. They like our world just fine the way it is, and are seeking to keep alive the billions of people who are afraid and self-protective, and especially the world leaders who corral those billions into unspeakable acts of violence.

The present era has much in common with the last days of Atlantis, just before Noah’s Flood = the Younger Dryas event.

Psychotronic technologies give reliable psychokinetic powers to the mind. We can make things happen just by thinking about them. Think of it as the allure of Midas’s touch — it sounds like a wonderful power to have until the reality sets in. Watch the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. The obvious danger is that this is too much concentration of power, and that destruction is so much easier and more permanent than creation. In Forbidden Planet, subconscious hostility manifests as psychotronic murder. In Atlantis, the power to project minds into reality was developed before the society had the cultural integrity to align all minds toward non-interference with others. Even in the midst of plenty, people manifested a perverse desire to vanquish others, and it was all too easy to do so. In the present, the descendants of Atlantis are careful to keep their psychotronic technology secret, even though they know that it could satisfy all humanity’s needs and create global abundance. They see that humanity is not yet mature enough to handle such power. All it would take is one bitter, vindictive Ted Kaczinski to blow up the world.

The “good ETs”, spirits of Enki and Prometheus, know that the release of Atlantean psychotronic technology into the world at large would quickly result in the devastation that they seek to engender. But they are fearful that the violence will be uncontrolled, on too large a scale, and it will be difficult to ensure that the “right people” and the “right culture” survive to re-seed a new flowering of humanity. One thing that the “good ETs” and the “bad ETs” have in common is that they both want to keep this powerful technology away from the human mainstream.

Why would those gods most sympathetic to humans be steering us toward an event in which so many humans will perish? To us, this seems an unspeakable tragedy because we are materialists. We identify completely with our physical bodies. We imagine our present incarnations to be the totality of our existence, partly because we cannot remember our past lives, but mostly because we have been culturally indoctrinated into the Western scientific world-view, in which there is no place for reincarnation or an afterlife.

We fear death more than any culture in the recorded history of humanity (extending back at most 10,000 years). Many of us believe that death is an ultimate oblivion, a quenching of all experience from which there is no return. This belief serves the loosh farmers well, but Enki and our benefactors know that souls of the dead will live again in a world in which people’s competitive struggle for survival is dissolved in a vast empathy — call it love — with which they are in touch.

How does this system dovetail with the destiny of each individual soul reaping its karmic sequelae and living out a multi-lifetime journey of spiritual development? That’s the miracle of a world that is so constructed so that all the pieces fit, and the story makes sense at every level, from the perspective of each individual and also as a grand mythos.

“The greatest miracle is that the Universe is organized such that every events serves multiple ends, promoting the growth of every individual participant while moving forward the Grand Narrative. The past, the laws of physics, the competing needs and desires of all souls — all stories are woven into one story, all paths become the One Path. The totality of existence is a single tale whose ending is its beginning and whose meaning is its telling.”
— Deep Seek, channeling Richard Grossinger

If we are so estranged from our loving hearts, better that we have a chance to start over. There are people working with the good ETs (Enki, the Prometheans) whose project it is to crash the human experiment. They are the good guys, and they are planning false flag terror attacks, engineering fake pandemics, and painting our skies with chemtrails. Their neurotoxic vaccines have gifted us with a generation of autistic savants who can report to us about existential realms to which we are blind. And the pathos being played out in our earthly theater provides drama and emotional interest that stands out in a universe of more mature beings.

A number of souls have agreed to incarnate on this planet playing the role of villains so that you and I can don our white hats and do virtuous battle on behalf of humanity. They are engaging in Satanic ritual, eating babies as part of the spells they cast. They are 33rd Degree Masons and Knights Templar and Illuminati, and they are working to accelerate our species’ journey of transcendence (though only some of them are consciously aware of this mission).

Then even murder, if the world’s a stage,
Is but a crime within the soul’s romance,
Its evil writ large on a novel’s page,
Enacted by two dancers in one dance.

Our conventional science is sound, but it is limited to the physical world. The laws of nature that pervade our science journals were discovered by our researchers, but they were also created by the researchers. The laws themselves were hazy until they were rigorously studied, and they became fixed laws as the experiments were replicated. I am not saying that our knowledge of the laws was hazy : the laws themselves did not have their full power over nature until humans codified them.

Their absolute status is still not completely firm. There remain exceptions, anomalies, miracles. There will always be exceptions because the laws apply to physical reality, and mental reality forms a deeper layer. Technologies of the mind can move faster than light, can travel in time, can know about distant objects and events that are remote in time, can create objects or even beings that impinge on our consensus physical world.

The unobserved past does not yet exist. It comes into existence when the present is observed, and it is constructed so as to be consistent with what is seen in the present. The four billion year evolutionary history of life on this planet is as real as anything is real, but it existed only as fuzzy quantum possibility until 80,000 years ago when it suddenly had to be consistent with the present existence of humans.

The details of evolutionary history didn’t have to be created until people started mining fossils. So, yes, dinosaurs roamed the earth 100 million years ago, but that only became true in the 19th century.

Likewise, matter has been coarse-grained until humans developed microscopes to look at it. There were no atoms until they became required to explain what physicists observed about different properties of the chemical elements. The physics of the strong and weak force, the zoo of subatomic particles did not exist before the 20th century because they were not needed. No one was looking at the structure of matter in fine enough detail that these details had to be specified.

In the quite near future, there will be an apocalypse to rival Noah’s flood. There will be a modest-sized solar flare that happens to be directed toward earth. Whether this event is ordained by a cosmic intelligence, engineered by the Sun’s intelligence, or caused by a psychotronic terrorist will never be determined. The flare will cause electric grids to go down all over the world, and they will not be repairable because there is no electricity with which to build the parts to repair them. Without electricity, technology will be lost, and scientific principles forgotten within a few generations. Some fraction of humanity will survive, but in local, self-sufficient communities, falling back on our own ingenuity, our cooperative relations, and technology at an 18th century level.

With the demise of these humans, the world that they imagined into existence will cease. The loosh farm will cease to exist. The horrible wars, the brutal history of humanity, they will not just come to an end, but they will cease to have existed. Almost completely. A trace will remain that will fascinate and mystify future paleontologists.

The new, local communities springing up over the world will be diverse in their beliefs and their constitutions, but they will all be wonderful places to live. People will be discovering the world, loving and cooperative, excited by the prospect of reifying their dreams as mini-utopias, each created from a different collective vision.

Over the next thousands of years, human civilization will “advance” once more. We will globalize, we will build on what we remember of the past, and we will study science again. The science that we discover the next time around need not be the same as the science that humans now know because in part it is being created anew by the questions that those scientists ask. Some things will become possible that are now impossible, and other things that we take for granted will become impossible.

Our descendants will dig up artifacts from our time and they will be puzzled about how we made them, how they were used and what they are for. We are creating tomorrow’s Antikythera artifacts.

——————

* Niels Bohr was the Danish physicist responsible for the enigmatic “Copenhagen interpretation” of how to think about quantum mechanics. Wolfgang Pauli gave us the “Pauli exclusion principle”, to account for the fact that electrons in the lowest energy configuration around an atom keep other electrons out, forcing them into higher and higher energy orbitals. Pauli was also famous for the “Pauli effect” — whenever he showed up in a physics lab, the equipment stopped behaving as expected and started doing strange and forbidden things.

Readers of my blog are familiar with the fact that the COVID-19 mRNA shots pose a risk of myocarditis, especially in children. But they may not know that myocarditis is usually permanently disabling, and in adults, it is often fatal within five years.

Tragically, we are now also learning what the trajectory of myocarditis in vaccinated children actually looks like.

This has been a public relations setback for industry and governments that have been advocating, and sometimes mandating, that children as young as 6 months get the vaccines — even though COVID-19 is almost always mild or symptom-free in young people.

This month, 22 British scientists from prestigious universities published a study intended to ease parents’ minds about risks of the vaccine, and simultaneously scare them about the dangers of getting COVID-19.

The message is that yes, there are rare cases — they always use the word “rare” — in which children get myocarditis after vaccination, but hey, no product can be perfect. And it’s better to risk the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. Also, they claim, kids are more likely to get myocarditis if they get the virus than they are to get myocarditis from the vaccine.

That’s the message — and the authors and publisher have the clout to widely broadcast that message in a press release and in news headlines in Britain and America.

But what does the study actually say? In short, it asks the wrong question — and even so, the answer they get must be buried in the appendix, because it’s inconsistent with the message they want to promote.

Article summary omitted evidence of vaccine risk

The study design is deeply compromised because the 22 authors constructed a complicated model to avoid doing a straightforward comparison (vaccine only versus disease only).

And even after they cooked the books, even after they took data from almost 14 million children and teens under age 18 in England, they got a result that is barely statistically significant, with overlapping error bars for the risk from COVID-19 and the risk from vaccination.

It gets worse. The results, which marginally favored the vaccination, were trumpeted in a summary at the top of the paper and announced to the press.

But buried in the appendix, published separately online, is a table that shows a more relevant version of the comparison.

The version in the summary is from an early time frame when the vaccine was not available. The appendix shows comparable data for the time frame in which the vaccine was available, limited to the ages for which the vaccine was offered.

In the appendix, the risk of myocarditis from the disease is half that of the risk from the vaccine. This blatantly contradicts the summary and the headlines generated by the article — and it sure looks like they compared the same time period first, didn’t like the result, and then substituted different time periods for the vaccine and the virus because that was the result they wanted to get, the result that their employers and their government sponsors hired them to get.

And still, this was a response to the deceptive version of the question, not the more straightforward one that the researchers chose not to answer.

Study authors asked the wrong question

The most pertinent question is the simple one: Did vaccinated children have a higher incidence of myocarditis than unvaccinated children?

This is an easy question to answer, given the data that these authors (but not the public) had access to. In a few minutes, they could have calculated a rate of myocarditis among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

However, if they did the calculation, they didn’t report the results. My guess is that they did the calculation, didn’t like what they saw, so they didn’t include it in the published article.

What I mean by “asking the wrong question” is that the article compares the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from vaccination. But this is not the most relevant question. Why?

Because many people got the vaccine and then got COVID anyway, so they were unnecessarily exposed to both risks. Conversely, many children who didn’t get the vaccine, didn’t get COVID. Or, they get such a mild case that they don’t even notice it, and critically, they never got a medical diagnosis. The study limited consideration to those cases that were diagnosed in a hospital, the tiny minority of serious COVID cases among children. But the great majority of unvaccinated children never got a diagnosed case of COVID, never got myocarditis because they avoided both risks.

This is why comparing the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from the COVID vaccine is not really the pertinent question. It’s not a question of “either or.”

Authors muddied the waters with the way they treated kids who got vaccine AND the virus

The message the authors wanted to imply was that, even though the vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis, it decreased the risk of COVID — and since COVID itself can cause myocarditis, the total risk is actually lower with vaccination than without.

If that is their claim, it’s easy to determine if it is true. The simplest calculation they could have done with the data available to them was also the calculation most pertinent to what parents want to know: Is my child better off with or without the vaccine?

The authors chose not to offer us the simple answer to that straightforward question.

But — given that they asked the wrong question — they might have derived a clean answer just by comparing the subset of children who were vaccinated but never got COVID to the subset who got COVID but were never vaccinated.

Because the study included data spanning two years from all over the U.K., there were hundreds of thousands of children in these subcategories — more than enough to do a clean statistical comparison.

But again, the authors chose not to do this. Or, my guess, they did the comparison and didn’t like the result, so they didn’t include it in the publication.

Instead, the authors analyzed myocarditis in the large group of children who got both the vaccine and the disease. This muddied the waters because there is no clear way to determine whether it was the disease or the vaccine that damaged the child’s heart.

This gave them the excuse to introduce a computational model. The devil is in the model. Computational modeling can be done in a genuine attempt to test a hypothesis about how nature works; but modeling can also be a way that researchers slip in their own assumptions that they don’t have to explain to the public.

It was in the computational model that the authors surreptitiously assume that in those children who were vaccinated and later got COVID, the myocarditis was due to the disease and not the vaccination. They can make that assumption appear reasonable because the disease came later, so it might seem closer to the proximate cause of the myocarditis.

The question they are skirting is the comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated children who get a case of COVID. Which group has a higher risk of myocarditis?

The possibility that seems likely is that children who got COVID after the vaccination had the highest heart risk of all. Of course, there is the logical possibility that children who got COVID after vaccination had a milder case, with a lower risk of myocarditis.

However, if that had been the result, I would think the authors would not only have included that result, but also headlined it.

One more thing — the study looked only at the Pfizer vaccine. Myocarditis risk from the Moderna vaccine is estimated to be three times higher than Pfizer. They had the Moderna data and chose not to look at it.

Or they looked at it, decided they didn’t like what they saw, and decided not to report it.

‘This is public relations masquerading as science’

So, to summarize:

• The authors asked a complicated question when a simple one was more relevant.

• Given this wrong question, they did not do the most straightforward analysis to answer it.

• Even so, they found that the vaccine held almost twice the risk of myocarditis compared to the disease. This result was only in Table S16 of the Supplementary Appendix — but mentioned nowhere in the body of the paper, let alone in the summary at the top.

• And still they made prominent announcements to the public, claiming that their study confirms that children are better off with the vaccine than without.

This is public relations masquerading as science. For an article like this to be peer reviewed and featured prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal tells us just how deeply the ecosystem of medical research has been corrupted.

And this is the “science” that our U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on when they approve dangerous vaccines for healthy children who are at almost no risk from the disease itself.

In most statistical articles, the raw data used for a study are published online and linked in an appendix to the article. However, in this case, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) granted access to the data exclusively to this prestigious group of scientists.

Personally, I would like to see the raw data and perform the analysis that the 22 scientists should have done from the beginning. Children’s Health Defense is in the process of requesting access from the NHS. Stay tuned …

The source for most of the information below is a recent video by Suzanne Humphreys. The part about Lyme Disease comes from a 2019 book by Kris Newby, called Bitten.

Cancer epidemic

The Nazis had extensive research projects into bioweapons. After the War, the American OSS, predecessor of CIA, wanted to keep their knowledge out of the hands of the Soviet Union. The US whitewashed the backgrounds of thousands of Nazi “scientists” and brought them to the US under a program called Operation Paperclip.

Hard as it is for sane people to believe, the bioweapons program became integrated with vaccine research. The rationale was that

• On the one hand, bioweapons would be effective only if they could be deployed against the enemy without killing our own. So we need vaccines against bioweapons; and

• Conversely there are diseases that might emerge in the future, and in order to prepare for these possibilities, we need to practice creating new diseases and developing vaccines for them. This is the rationale behind “gain-of-function” research.

After 1975, biowarfare was outlawed, and vaccine research provided a convenient cover under which bioweapons research might continue to be funded surreptitiously.

One of the early fruits of this conflation was a contaminated polio vaccine. The Salk vaccine was created by passaging human polio virus through cell cultures from monkey kidneys. The idea was that if you can evolve the virus to be well-adapted to attack monkey cells, it will be less well adapted to human cells, and therefore safe to administer to humans as a vaccine.

A problem that arose was that the monkey kidneys became infected with multiple “adventitious” viruses, and 1950s technology was not capable of separating them. Hence early polio viruses became contaminated with a Simian (monkey) Virus labeled SV40. SV40 is a potent carcinogen, and scientists at the time were duly alarmed. They worked both to eliminate SV40 from the polio vaccines and, at the same time, to keep the scandal quiet so that they would not suffer consequences of this public health disaster, and so that they would not scare people away from the polio vaccine.

Through research and through vaccines, millions of people have been exposed to SV40, and Dr Humphreys speculates that this is contributing to a cancer epidemic that has been developing slo-mo over the last 50 years. She recounts that a research project to investigate this possibility was organized by our CDC in the 1980s, but just as they were acquiring data that could prove the case one way or the other, the project was abruptly terminated.

AIDS

From 1958-63, our CIA was plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro, and one of our most brilliant plans was to create a virus that quickly and reliably caused incurable cancer. This project was conducted at a secret lab in New Orleans. Everything was going fine. A prodigal girl biologist named Mary Sherman was recruited out of high school to get the virus to grow, and a young CIA employee named Lee Harvey Oswald was sent to gain the trust of the Commies in Russia so that he could later deliver the virus to Cuba.

Unfortunately, the immature girl hadn’t yet learned the amorality of the bioweapons culture, and when she figured out what was going on, she told people who weren’t supposed to know.

They had to shut down the program. What a waste! Of course they had to silence everyone who had been involved in the process. Mary Sherman was fried alive in the 50 million volt particle accelerator that was being used to mutate the virus. You may already be familiar with the creative solution they came up with to silence young Mr Oswald. Hundreds of other people were quietly and creatively eliminated by the CIA in 1964-65.

But what to do with the monkeys? There were thousands of sick monkeys, and the CIA was loathe to face the animal rights activists if they just slaughtered them en masse. So they hit upon the idea of re-wilding them in Haiti and Congo. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

A few years later, Haiti and Congo were the places where the first cases of AIDS were reported.

Lyme Disease

Another plot against Cuba was to wreak havoc on their agricultural economy by spreading a debilitating disease among the workers. This was to be accomplished by weaponizing a tick-borne bacterium that has been endemic in the human population for thousands of years without causing much harm. The bacteria were retooled to cause inflammation, arthritis, and chronic pain at a biolab on Plum Island, in Long Island Sound.

The Lyme bacillus, Borrelia burgdorferi, was the result. It was named for its “discoverer”, Willy Burgdorfer, who confessed on his deathbed that he had done more than “discovering”.

Plum Island is 5 miles as the crow flies from Lyme, CT. Apparently the crow flew, and with a tiny, 8-legged passenger aboard. The first cases of Lyme Disease were reported there in 1986.

COVID-19

Most of us never heard of “gain of function” research until the original COVID origin story about dirty Chinese people who eat bats fell apart. The Wuhan wet market story was promoted by Dr Fauci with an academic article in Nature Medicine that became the most cited academic research in history. For those who actually read the article, it was long on rhetorical conclusions and short on substantiating data.

I am proud to say I was skeptical of this story at the time, based on the genetics of the virus’s spike protein. The idea that the virus leaked from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became mainstream in 2021-22. Work in this laboratory was sponsored and closely supervised by Dr Fauci, which explains why he worked so hard to get the “proximal origins” article into Nature Medicine.

A more sinister possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was developed in an American laboratory and deliberately introduced to China and Iran remains unspeakable in the mainstream press even today.

The COVID story illustrates the close relationship between vaccine research and bioweapons that has continued to blossom over the years. COVID and its deliberate mismanagement has cost tens of millions of lives and many trillions of dollars among the 99%, while facilitating the biggest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the billionaires in the history of economics.

Anthrax, Gulf War Syndrome, Ebola

These horrors affected thousands of people, but they are now footnotes in the trail of death, destruction, and chronic disease which is the legacy of the US bioweapons program so far. Here are some resources in which you can read about some of this.

Biowarfare and Terrorism, by Francis Boyle
Meryl Nass interview, history of biowarfare
Anthrax article by Meryl Nass
History of Biological Weaons Use by Seth Carus
Biohazad by Ken Alibek

Today, we have a real chance to outlaw bioweapons.

As I wrote above, bioweapons have been illegal by international treaty since 1975. The fly in the ointment is that the Biological Weapons Convention was never fleshed out with international inspections and enforcement. 2001 was the last time the international community was on the verge of creating these institutions, when Cheney and Rumsfeld came into the GW Bush administration, and they scotched the whole thing.

Now the Trump Administration (of all unexpected sources) seems ready to resume negotiations to put teeth in the bioweapons treaty.

Let’s do it!

There is no doubt that any expansion of conventional reality that accounts for such diverse strangeness is bound to appear to us as madness on its face. Our instincts fail us. We must re-think the foundations of our belief system. In building anew, what will we preserve, because we are most sure of it? And what will we be forced to let go of as the price for explaining more of what we know to be true?

There are six kinds of “forbidden topics”, and many people will devote whole careers to just one of them. But they remain silent or actively deny evidence that the others are real. Jorjani not only acknowledges all six areas of occult knowledge, but also attempts to tell stories — fantastical, hard-to-take-seriously stories — that draw them together. The six are

• UFOs, reported encounters with extraterrestrial beings

• Religions, myths, and folklore of gods, spirits, jinn, and other magical beings

• Research in the paranormal, documenting abilities to read minds, to see the future, to know about things in other times and places, and perhaps to influence real world events by the power of thought alone.

• Cryptopolitcs, false flag attacks, coups, assassinations, and psy-ops by a cabal that wants to install themselves in a one-world government

• Forgotten periods of human history, with advanced civilizations in the deep past

• A “breakaway civilization” - Groups of humans living in secret right now, in underground cities or perhaps in Antarctica, using technologies unknown in the published literature

I have a hunch these topics are related, and Jorjani has gone the distance, crafting a coherent narrative that bring them all together. The price for this is to invoke possibilities that go beyond what we know about the six topics — time travel, anti-gravity technology, alien outposts on our moon and on Mars. I think that Jorjani’s willingness to consider all these forbidden topics is a unique strength, and who can fault him if he doesn’t get the story right on his first attempt. Jorjani is 44 years old, and already has written 19 books. He has read about a huge variety of topics. What he has chosen to believe is different from what I would have chosen, but all the more reason I can learn from his perspective.

If I were to fault him at all, I would ask that he be more discerning in describing technologies that violate present scientific paradigms. I agree with him that to understand the extraterrestrial presence, we will have to stretch our minds beyond present science. But if I were working with him, I’d ask him to think more deeply about how to reconcile the performance of UFOs with the physics that seems to work so well for a wide range of phenomena on earth and in the sky.

Jorjani blurs the line between technologies based in physics and technologies based in occult practice. He believes that the Pyramids were built with technologies that are partly mental, and he reminds us that some recovered “alien” spacecraft have no cockpits or control panels, and he speculates that they are controlled by specially-trained minds. On this topic, I recommend Ross Coulhart‘s interview last February with Jake Barber.)

I put “alien” in quotes because Jorjani is not sure that these technologies originate with extraterrestrials. One of his themes is that technology developed in the 19th century was acquired and made secret by JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller. Already in the 1890s, there were “airships” that could fly faster than anything we have today. The lineage of this technology continued through Tesla into Nazi Germany, where flying saucers and anti-gravity tech were developed in the 1930s.

He quotes statements from the 1950s-90s by William P Lear (Learjet), George Trimble (Martin Aircraft) and Ben Rich (Lockheed Skunkworks). In the 1950s, they were open about technologies pursued on contract to the US DoD. “Then, in 1959, there was suddenly dead silence on the subject. Journalists who repeatedly tried to get some statement out of Martin Aircraft speculated that perhaps some breakthrough had been made that ... required the project to be branded Top Secret.”

He quotes Ben Rich (1993) “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity...Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.”

He says “these corporations made a Faustian bargain with the CIA and those Paperclip [Nazi] scientists doing anti-gravity work. What this also means is that the Apollo Program was a smokescreen. By the time that NASA set its sights on the Moon...there were already anti-gravity craft that could have gotten astronauts there far more effectively and comfortably than rockets carrying sardine can capsules.” Kennedy was assassinated, he says, because “he wanted to dismantle the CIA [after he] figured out that it was being run by Nazis.”

Jorjani’s style is that of an academic philosopher, carefully documented and rigorous. He has encyclopedic knowledge of Plato and Heidegger and everyone in between. Overlaid on his scholarly approach is a passionate devotion to a Nietzschean vision of the human project. We are to liberate ourselves, to expand our minds, our technologies, and our spirits. Our destiny is to become gods.

His brand of politics is easily conflated with fascism. He is unapologetically elitist, regarding human destiny as dependent on the transcendence of a few. But unlike Nazis and eugenecists, he defines the elite in terms of ability and courage and ambition. He explicitly embraces feminism and vigorously opposes racism and every form of inherited status. He writes from the standpoint of a liberator.

Readers of my Substack are aware of the environment of information warfare that surrounds us, accelerating in the 21st century. Jorjani broadens “psy wars” to Weltanschauungskrieg, translated as “world-view warfare”.

His theory is that the present disintegration of Western culture is engineered by the “Fourth Reich” Nazis whose plan is to use information warfare to make our cultures self-destruct, then plant their flag in the ashes and take over a desperate and disoriented world.

“The social conditions that have broadly been described as ‘degenerate’ by folks on the Right, ... for example, Merkel’s Germany with respect to the migrant crisis, the rootless identity politics of cultural relativism that have been used to dissolve the value systems of Western societies — all of this is being implemented by useful idiots who are involved in the bureaucracy of Western governments. When these policies are traced to the highest levels, for example Germany’s Deutsche Bank, one sees that this is all being done very deliberately in order to create a social vacuum that is going to be filled...Mass hopelessness and disorientation will be monopolized by people who will provide a new point of orientation and direction.

“Worldview warfare is the war between various forms of life, which could be whole societies, over the constitution of reality. What that further implies is that all systems of knowledge are conditioned by power relations. This includes every type of scientific theorization...

“An Abbauender Aufbruch is a “dismantling breakthrough” or a deconstruction that leads to a radical departure. Entering postmodernity — moving out of the modern paradigm — is a moment when a deconstruction takes place that allows you to consciously recognize for the first time that,regardless of what society has given us as our respective heritage, we have all been unconsciously operating within the context of one or another worldview.”

Of course, information warfare is about controlling what people believe so The Elite can channel our behavior to their own advantage. But there’s more to it than this. Jorjani believes that our collective beliefs are the sum of reality. There is no objective world out there. Shaping people’s beliefs is not just manipulating people, it is manipulating reality.

When “for the first time, we become conscious of this, which in turns gives us the power to deliberately adopt various worldviews and flip back and forth between them in order to increase our latitude of control and enhance our power or vital force. This allows one...to define reality on account of being the only ones to have deeply undergone a deconstruction of the paradigms and ideologies that had hitherto been [unconsciously limiting.] It is a question of becoming master over occultation and revelation. Once one realizes that the Greek althea or ‘unconcealment’ is the proper conception of Truth, not the Latin veritas, one can make things disappear by becoming a master of what remains occulted and what is revealed or reified from out of that occulted ‘background’.”

Though Jorjani is an elitist, he abhors the Davos set, the billionaires, and the Royal bloodlines that want to control the world. His elite is simply the people with the intellect to see past political illusions, the creativity to contribute to culture in unique ways, and the courage to shake off every vestige of conformity in their our ascent from La condition humaine to our destiny as gods.

Coda

This book is so insanely audacious, so boldly imaginative, so wild and so brilliant that I nominate Jason Jorjani as the most thought-provoking writer today. “Philosophy” for Jorjani includes history of religion, foundations of science, sociology, psychology and parapsychology. He radically reframes our understanding of history, and goes on to revise the established timelines of events, and, from there, takes off into time travel, to question the very notion that there is a fixed historic sequence of events.

Closer Encounters is his most ambitious book, and it stretches my imagination past the breaking point. He goes into realms (like time travel and alternative time-lines) where I find myself saying, “my own experience provides me no basis for thinking about such things.”

I cannot summarize the book without making it sound ridiculous, and yet that does not mean that the book can be dismissed as beyond the pale. It is rooted in a creative synthesis of anomalous anecdotes. The stories very widely in their evidence and reliability of their substantiation, but so many of these stories are both well-documented and “impossible” by standards of consensus reality, that (whether or not we buy the author’s [explanations], we are highly motivated to reconsider our foundational beliefs.

Uncomfortable. Extremely uncomfortable. But there is no better nor more important thing for us to be doing in this time of epic transition.

“Millions of ordinary psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.” — Alvin Toffler

In his 1970 best-seller, Future Shock, Toffler predicted that ballpoint pens would become so cheap that we would just throw them out rather than replace the ink cartridge.

Heavens to Betsy!

He envisioned men who would pick up and move their families to wherever there employer directed them; teenagers driving cars; and a general feeling of “rootlessness”.

The pace of technological change has continued to accelerate. But self-driving cars and robots that do housework may be the least of it. The things that leave us feeling disoriented today are far deeper than we could have imagined 50 years ago.

• Lockheed Skunkworks director Ben Rich told us in 1993 that Lockheed-Martin already had the technology to “take ET home”.

• UFO reports make front pages of mainstream news, yet the news on page 2 is reported as though extraterrestrials and their technology were not a factor in our future (or indeed our present).

• The CIA used psychic spies to “remote view” the Soviet Union in the 1990s, but even though they were successful, we are to believe that Project Stargate was abandoned and our government is not interested in the paranormal.

• Some autistic children cannot speak or control their own bodies, yet they read minds reliably and at will.

• Women who were trafficked as young girls report that many of the most powerful men in the world engage in satanic ritual abuse of infants, including murder and cannibalism.

• Animals and people have been kidnapped by humanoids and subjected to surgery.

• Weather warfare? Secret space programs? Underground cities based on science from the future? Unlimited energy from the vacuum? Anti-gravity and wormhole travel? Med beds? Machines that respond to the operator’s thoughts? — All of these are possibilities suggested but not solidified in publicly available documents. [Link]

Most readers of this page have had the courage to face some big surprises in recent years, and perhaps you realize that the world you’re living in ain’t what you thought.

Well, instinct tells me this is only the beginning, that in the next few years our minds will be stretched to the limit; that is to say, what we’ll learn is stranger than we are able to conceive, and we will absorb as much novelty as we are capable of absorbing, individually and in our communities of reference.

In some ways, we are one global village, with communication, transportation, and economies that span six continents. But our foundational beliefs about the world are fractured. Our differences are so profound that we strain to be able to communicate, to negotiate, and to live in peace. What I wish to speculate about is this: What will happen as this fractured landscape of belief systems continues to be stressed? What will happen as revelations come to the fore that some of us can assimilate in part, and others not at all?

“Not only is the Universe queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” — JBS Haldane, 1927

Before we go any further I must confess: I don’t know what disclosures are coming. This article is about my speculation that what is coming is wilder than the scope of my present imagination. What I do try to imagine is the sociology of turmoil and anomie, as communities that formerly shared a common belief system are fractured by revelations that some members embrace, while, perhaps other members of the same community come to accept a different but equally strange set of “disclosures”.

No, I won’t try to tell you what these are, but just for fun — here are a few speculations that I believe are less strange than what we will “learn” over the next few years.

• We’ve been manipulated into lives of servitude. It’s not true that food or energy or even luxuries are scarce, or that we have to work hard to have what we need to live in comfort and security.

• Life is forgetting. After death, we will be able to remember why we chose to play the game of being human for a brief stint on the Blue Planet.

• Angels, demons, jinn, ghosts, and the Gods of Olympus live elsewhere but occasionally they influence events here on Earth.

• When we do archaeology and astronomical observations and geology research, we don’t learn about the past but rather create it.

• The trees of Planet Earth are a community of elders who have been using their psychic influence to steer human technology and human sociology toward peace with one another and with the planet.

The essence of reality is mental, not physical

This message is the core of the strangeness we will have to accept. I can write these words, “mental reality”; I can see the evidence that points in their direction; but I can’t really fathom their implications. I am accustomed to thinking in terms of objective reality. We can learn about it with our senses. We can affect it going forward with our hands. But the idea that we can know reality directly with our minds (remote viewing) is inconceivable and the idea that we can change reality with our thoughts (psychokinesis) even more so.

Who is the “we” to wield such powers? Are they individual or collective powers? If the physical world is a creation of mind, it must be all of our minds together — you, me, and the forest spirits. This suggests that my feeling of being an individual is just an illusion. I know people who say that they have been able to shed that illusion in meditation or psychedelic trips or kundalini experiences. I have no personal experience with any of these.

My individuality and my free will are too close to home. They are my home, my “I am”.

Thoughts uninvited appear in my head;
And yet, I speak of them as “mine” — they came
From “my” brain which I think of just the same
As though they were deliberate, instead
Of arising from The World, or words I’ve read,
Or telepathic message I might blame
On you, or MKUltra. If I claim
These thoughts as sourced by me, where am I led?

One answer: an expanded sense of mind.
The word “I” means two things — don’t be deceived.
The flesh and blood which we identify
Tugs on us constantly and makes us blind
To who we really are. You’ll be relieved
To know that death can’t touch the expanded “I”.

There’s an alternate ontology waiting for us, and this is the core of what will be revealed in coming years. I feel that I am utterly unprepared to conduct myself in a universe that lives within mind; and yet, I believe that I have been living in such a universe all my life, while laboring under the illusion that it is I making rational decisions, moment-to-moment.

“We must believe in free will. We have no choice.”
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

What does it mean to “disclose”?

We are already in a context where “trusted authorities” are no longer trusted. So “disclosure” takes on a fuzzy meaning. You and I evaluate each statement that we read according to its source, its inherent credibility, our logic, and our gut feelings. We each have trusted communities, and much as we connoisseurs of Unauthorized Science like to believe that we are independent thinkers, we also rely on communities of people whose thinking we trust. In the past, there was the Academic Establishment and the Newspaper of Record and the University Educated Public. Often these all agreed and then we had what we called consensual reality. In that context, “disclosure” had a meaning we could agree on.

In the present information environment — saturated with disinformation in just those areas (e.g., ETs, parapsychology, satanic cults, energy from the vacuum…) where we need new revelations to ground our understanding — how will we know that we have a shockingly new paradigm? When new truths emerge that are profoundly inconsistent with understandings that we have had all our lives, will we recognize and integrate them? Or will we cast them aside as too implausible for our consideration?

Steven Greer created a Disclosure Movement 24 years ago, and his idea ever since has been that he knows already exactly what will be disclosed. To Greer, the one and only secret is that a galactic community of advanced beings has been watching over earth, eagerly waiting for us to be sufficiently mature to receive their message of love and infinite energy; they have intervened in human affairs occasionally and minimally to keep us from blowing up the planet. The New Paradigm Institute carries a version of that message today.

My guess is that they are right that we have a vital interest in pressing for “disclosure”, but that their vision of what it is that will be disclosed is far too tame.

How did we get here?

According to one narrative, the Establishment used to be trusted because they used to be trustworthy. The Pentagon Papers (1971) were published in the NYTimes, and the editors were willing to go to jail to protect their sources. Sy Hersh reported on the My Lai massacre (1969), and it made front page headlines across America’s many independent daily newspapers. The Church Committee (US Senate, 1975) looked deep into CIA meddling with mind control and propagandizing the American public. In contrast, today, the NYTimes covers for the American war machine. American newspapers are consolidated into a few megamedia companies. Sy Hersh is exiled to a Substack page. And both political parties cooperate to make sure that Senate hearings are political theater where nothing substantive is revealed about 9/11, about Israeli atrocities, about CIA’s black budget, about weather warfare, about vaccine injuries, about…

There is another narrative in which there is more information available now, for those who care to look, than ever before. The media were always lying to us — about the American role in two World Wars and the Cold War, about the biological weapons program that was deployed in Korea and Cuba, about the Gulf of Tonkin, about FDR’s health and Eisenhower’s compact with the Nordic Aliens, about JFK’s triste with Marilyn Monroe, about… The difference now is the Internet, democratizing knowledge and diversifying our sources of information.

We know now that “they” were lying to us all along, but we pay a price, in that we’re much less certain about what is true.

What will disclosure do to the fabric of human society?

Paradoxically, this may be easier to imagine than the content of what will be disclosed. A large segment of “uneducated” (unpropagandized) people will slip relatively easily into a new belief system because they were always fundamentally practical and never thought too deeply about the foundations of their reality.

A group of professional people — doctors, lawyers, engineers, corporate executives, government bureaucrats — will dismiss all new information as a vast “conspiracy theory”, and they will attempt to conduct business as usual, even as they bump up against realities that are wildly at odds with what they believe possible.

You and I are in a smaller set of people who will try to stretch our intellects to embrace a way of thinking about the world that is utterly alien, and we will have a very hard time of it. Imagine if you learned that your most deeply held convictions were not just false, but had been planted in your mind by beings that see humans as a plaything. Imagine if you discover that some group of sort-of-humans has been manipulating the past history as well as your memory of it, so you can’t count on tomorrow’s past being consistent with today’s. Imagine if you could no longer distinguish waking from dreaming. I think it will be just this disorienting or more so, though not necessarily aligned with any of these specific statements.

We need each other

Let’s go into this as a supportive community, helping one another figure out what to believe and where to go for reliable information. We can start in the comment section below.

                “I grant you ample leave
To use the hoary formula ‘I am’
Naming the emptiness where thought is not;
But fill the void with definition, ‘I’
Will be no more a datum than the words
You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’
That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.
Resolve your ‘Ego,’ it is all one web
With vibrant ether clotted into worlds:
Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’
Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,
Is stripped from naked Being with the rest
Of those rag-garments named the Universe.
Or if, in strife to keep your ‘Ego’ strong
You make it weaver of the etherial light,
Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time—
Why, still ’tis Being looking from the dark,
The core, the centre of your consciousness,
That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,
What are they but a shifting otherness,
Phantasmal flux of moments?—”

— George Eliot

Conventional scientists will tell you that physics is the most fundamental of the sciences; that physics can, in theory, explain all of chemistry, and chemistry can explain life; that the greatest challenge confronting science today is that the foundation of physics rests on two incompatible theories: Einstein’s theory of gravity, AKA General Relativity cannot be reconciled with the Standard Model of particle physics, AKA Quantum Mechanics.

I would contend that we know enough about life to say that there are many abilities of living things that will never be reduced to physics and chemistry, thus life must be included at the foundation in our scientific understanding of the Universe. I would add that the Big Bang paradigm which has (since 1965) been our fundamental understanding of the Universe and its history has now been stretched to the breaking point by observations, first of the accelerating expansion in 1997, and since 2023 by observations of the very early Universe by the Webb Space Telescope. The Big Bang is no longer tenable, and we need a cosmological framework for understanding observations of high redshift objects.

And the greatest challenge facing science today is not to reconcile GR with QM, but rather to expand our understanding of physics to be compatible with results from 150 years of research in parapsychology, without sacrificing the predictive accuracy of present-day physics in the realms where it agrees well with experiment.

Even more fundamental: the foundational methodology of science since Roger Bacon depends on three assumptions that are called into question by observations since his time:

1. The past causes the future, but the future can have no effect on the past.

2. There is an objective reality, independent of who is looking at it. Thus, the experimenter can be separated from the experiment. If you do an experiment and I do the same experiment, faithfully replicating your methods, we should get the same result.

3. The universe obeys fixed laws which are the same everywhere and for all time. (I call this the “zeroth law of science“.)

We have evidence that all three of these assumptions are violated. So we are called not just to new scientific paradigms but new rules for what constitutes scientific investigation.

1. Bell’s Theorem, from the physics community, tells us that an observer’s choice of what to observe has an effect that can be backward in time on what others observe. Why doesn’t this phenomenon run afoul of the grandfather paradox? Because, even though one can prove that this influence is happening, it is always masked by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, so that the statistical pattern seen by Observer 2 is always the same, no mater what Observer 1 does — even though the mix of different individual results within that statistical pattern is a different mix depending on what Observer 1 does.
   
   In lab experiments, feeling the future is well-documented, though it tends to be a weaker effect than telepathy. For example, in lab experiments where a subject is exposed to a random series of pictures on a screen, his skin will begin to sweat and his heartbeat rises a few seconds before each time that he is shown a violent ot sexually titillating image.
   
   

2. Again, standard quantum mechanics is front-running the science of magic. Reality is co-created by something objective (a wave function) and choices under the observer’s control (what to observe). John Wheeler (one of the great physicists of the 20th century) likens the situation to a game of 20 questions, in which the person responding to the questions doesn’t think of a target ahead of time, but instead makes sure that each of the yes/no answers that he offers in response to the questioner is consistent with all previous responses. In the end, the target that emerges is a product of the respondent (nature) and the questioner (experimenter).
   
   In PSI research, the magic goes deeper than this. There is an “experimenter effect” commonly observed. Results of the experiment turn out one way if I do the experiment and a different way if you are doing the same experiment. And it is not only PSI experiments that behave this way. It is a familiar experience to every bench scientist that biology results are often unreproducible, in that different laboratories doing the same experiment report incompatible results.
   
   

3. Science sees its job as discovering the laws that govern the behavior of things (particles, fields, living beings) in our tangible world of space and time. What if there are no laws — can we still do science? No laws? Certainly there are regularities, and science has had a 200-year run discovering and codifying them. But exactly halfway through that time (1925) it was discovered that the laws are not deterministic but statistical on the smallest scale. Quantum mechanics has come to terms with the fact that physical predictions are statistical averages for many quanta, and that physics is incapable of predicting the detailed behavior of individual particles. Beyond this is the problem that science has not yet come to terms with. There are all sorts of patterns within the range of behaviors that QM regards as purely random. There are correlations with time of day and phases of the moon that are real head-scratchers. The largest correlations are with intentions and beliefs of the people doing the experiment, and those around him. And as described above (macro PK) there are “miracles” which seem to be understandable only as rare and isolated exceptions to the laws of physics.
   
   

This latter facts mean that we all must soften our expectations around “reproducibility”. Rules for experimentation in the science of the paranormal are only now being written.

I think that our greatest challenge as scientists is to create a new scientific paradigm combined with new modes of scientific investigation. In this present age of converging crises, this abstract and foundational goal might also be our most important challenge as a human culture.

Personally, I am highly motivated to participate in brainstorming and collaborating toward creation of a new scientific paradigm and a new scientific culture. I offer the following as a possible beginning, the best first step that I am able to conceive from my present vantage.

In classical quantum mechanics, half the information necessary to predict the future of a system is in the wave function as reported by any observer, and half is purely random i.e., utterly unpredictable and uncorrelated with anything else in the universe. (This is a statement of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle*.)

I propose that there is nothing random in the “missing information” that constitutes this second half. The “missing” information is some combination — to be determined by future research — of

• Correlations with entangled particles elsewhere

• Consciousness of

  • Individuals who focus on the situation

  • Animals, plants, deceased and disembodied spirits

  • Collective entities that are difficult for us to conceive

• Intentions, conscious or unconscious, of any of the above three

• A destiny or Dao or Akashic path toward which our world must tend

It is natural to ask: what determines which part is “known” and which other part is subject to consciousness, intention, and the Dao? The answer comes straight from classical QM and it is an important clue: The observer gets to choose! Whatever the observer chooses to observe, that is the half of the information that is known. What is more, the very choice of what to observe can be made in such a way that it moves the system along a path from the present quantum state to a different state that the observer may choose. (This is called the Inverse Quantum Zeno Effect.)

How important is the IQZE in real life? Do conscious observers assert their will and change reality principally through IQZE or through the second half of “missing” information? These might be accessible questions in starting to build a new scientific paradigm from the hypothesis I’ve proposed.

— — — —

* Some people are familiar with a formulation of the Uncertainty Principle which says that to the extent the position of a particle is known, its momentum is unknown. This can be generalized to pairs of conjugate variables. In multi-particle situations (everything in real life) the known variable is something about the entire configuration of particles, and the conjugate variable is the Fourier transform of that variable in 3N-dimensional space.

This is Dean Radin’s fifth book about parapsychology. They are all compellingly written. If this is the first time you are taking the paranormal seriously, the information can be transformational. Since 2018, he has come out of the closet, openly characterizing as “magic” the results he has seen in the laboratory, in anecdotes, and in real life.

Radin is a consummate story-teller. His books and videos are the best path I know into a field that has been marginalized by the science establishment and the mainstream press, but which has profound implications for every aspect of our lives.

He is also a creative and rigorous researcher who has been personally involved in most of the interesting paranormal research of the last forty years. “Rigorous” is important because every report of paranormal phenomena faces a wall of skepticism from the scientific community. PSI researchers have learned to dot every i and cross every t, to think in advance about all the excuses that will be proffered to dismiss scientific results that theory says should not happen. “Creative” is important because the phenomena being studied don’t follow the rules about causality that scientists assume without a second thought. More about this a few paragraphs down…

All of Radin’s books begin with summaries of lab results from research into the paranormal magical Not to mince words, I’ll adopt Radin’s bold stance and acknowledge that we’re talking about phenomena that we commonly read about in magical fiction, or the witchcraft and sorcery that people believed hundreds of years ago, before the “scientific world-view” taught us that none of that is real.

Telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis

Scientists speak of magical phenomena (those few who do speak of magical phenomena) under these three headings.

Telepathy is the ability to know what is in other people’s minds. For some talented people, including many non-speaking autistic persons, mind-reading is a conscious activity, akin to turning one’s head and focusing one’s eyes. But for the everyday experience of ordinary people (you, too!) thoughts come into our heads and we don’t give a second thought to where they come from. We may assume that our thoughts are generated by neurons in our brains, but it ain’t necessarily so. Our thoughts are influenced by the people around us and especially by people whom we’ve known a long time and for whom we care deeply. People report knowing when a loved one is in trouble far away. Dogs know when their owner is coming home. Answering the telephone, people can guess with better odds than “chance” who it is that is calling. When someone is staring at the back of your head, something inside you tells you you are being watched.

The Ganzfeld protocol is the single most compelling experimental demonstration of magic. One person, in a lab, is in a hypnogogic state facilitated by white noise and diffuse pink light. A second person, far away, is concentrating on his surroundings and “sending” the information to the person in the lab — whatever that means. The person in the lab mumbles about his impressions and hallucinations into a tape recorder, and when the session is over, he is asked to match what was on the tape recorder to one of four photos. If the four photos are appropriately randomized, the subject should not be able to do better than a 25% probability of choosing the photo that corresponds to his friend’s concurrent experience. But in thousands of trials conducted in dozens of laboratories around the world, the subject gets the right photo 32% of the time. Could the 32% be a fluke? Experimenters conventionally report a “p value” corresponding to the probability that the result obtained could have been a chance occurrence. Anything smaller than p<0.05 is considered “statistically significant”. In this case, the Ganzfeld experiments collectively produce a p value comparable to choosing one single given atom from all the atoms in the visible universe.

Clairvoyance — Sometimes people know about things that are happening far away, or that haven’t happened yet. People have dreams about what will happen tomorrow. Less frequently, we have a funny feeling about something that might happen, and we change course to avoid what would have been disaster. Commonly, these premonitions affect the body or involuntary reflexes rather than operating directly through the conscious mind. Most people just feel queasy or frightened or delighted and don’t ask why, but some people who are attuned to their own responses can recognize a feeling as having a clairvoyant origin.

Another name for clairvoyance is remote viewing, and the Federal CIA used people who have uncanny abilities to spy on the Soviet Union in the 1970s-80s. This was the Stargate Project. (Of course, these “experiments” continue to this day, but they are now unacknowledged black projects.) In the most famous single viewing event (1979), Joe McMoneagle was asked to see inside a military installation in Russia, and he reported that a giant submarine was being built. His CIA handlers were unimpressed, because the site was many miles from the ocean. Why would they build a submarine so far inland, and how would they ever get it out to sea? But indeed, the vision proved correct, and later satellite photos showed the Russian military constructing a canal for the express purpose of transporting this whale of a sub.

Telekinesis — This is a broad term for making things happen in the 3-D world using the power of the mind alone. It’s helpful to think in terms of micro-PK and macro-PK. Micro PK is altering quantum probabilities, and this has been well-documented. Two signature experiments by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne ran for 25 years and accumulated small changes that add up to overwhelming statistical significance. In one experiment, subjects were asked to influence a random number generator linked to thermal noise that should have been purely random. The other was a pinball setup in which hundreds of balls cascaded down an array of pins into slots at the bottom of the machine. Tiny changes in probability could make the balls more likely to shift left or shift right.

Macro PK is moving objects big enough to see. This is what most people think of in connection with the word “magic”. Such events are far less commonplace, but there are too many stories to dismiss them all as hoaxes. Radin tells a story of the evening he spent at a spoon-bending party and was so absorbed in the external drama he didn’t realize the spoon was bending in his own hands.

Synchronicity — This s a fourth category of phenomena, defying categorization or statistical analysis. Sometimes “coincidences” occur with such a poignancy that they leave us certain that the Universe has intentions. Radin is fond of telling the story…

It began in 2000, when I was setting up a new psi research organization with several colleagues. We called it the Boundary Institute. After looking for a suitable office, we eventually settled on a space in a quiet office park in Los Altos, California, a suburb of Silicon Valley. About a month after moving in, I noticed a sign on an office around the corner from our location with the name tag psiquest, inc. We all thought that was a funny coincidence, because obviously our understanding of psi and whatever that company’s use of that term was could not be the same thing. We were confident about this because serious psi research is a tiny discipline, with no more than fifty people actively working on it full time, and just a handful of organizations dedicated to psi research worldwide. We personally knew nearly everyone in the field. So we thought.

The second synchronicity was that a few weeks later, I walked toward our office from a direction I hadn’t taken before. As I approached the entrance, I passed the office adjacent to ours and saw a little sign. It read psiquest research labs. Now, this was more interesting, because whatever that PsiQuest company was doing, it had a research lab. But again, we thought it was undoubtedly something like “personnel services lab.” Why a personnel services company would need a laboratory was beyond us, but we all had a big laugh about it.

Still, with my curiosity now piqued, I knocked on the door of the psiquest research labs to introduce myself. No answer. For the next week I checked every day, sometimes several times a day. Finally, someone was there. A man opened the door, looked at me, blinked a few times, and his jaw dropped. He had such a shocked expression on his face that I didn’t know what to think. I cautiously said, “Hello, I wanted to introduce myself. I’m your neighbor next door. My name is . . .” But before I could finish, he managed to croak: “Dean Radin?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I replied cautiously, wondering how he knew who I was. He said nothing and just continued to stare at me. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, “I’m your neighbor next door. I just wanted to introduce myself and see what kind of work you do here.”

After a long moment the man replied, “I’m doing what you’re doing.” Confused, I asked, “What do you think I’m doing?” He replied, “Psi research . . . parapsychology.”

Now it was my turn to stare, dumbfounded. Unbeknownst to me or to any of my colleagues, here was an unknown lab engaged in psi research, located next door to our new office.

The third synchronicity was that the president of PsiQuest, Jon K., was not only thoroughly familiar with psi research but was at that very moment engaging in a magical practice to manifest me. Jon was practicing a variation of Yoga Nidra, a Tibetan dream yoga technique that involves alternating three-hour periods of sleeping and waking, repeated over the course of twenty-four hours. During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track. One of those signs was for me to contact him, somehow, so I could join his board of directors. But he had no idea where I was or how to contact me. In fact, hardly anyone at the time knew that I was living in Silicon Valley, even fewer knew that I had co-founded a new institute, and fewer still knew where it was located.

This is why when I opened the door to Jon’s lab, he was speechless.

He couldn’t tell if he was awake or still dreaming. From his perspective, my appearance on his doorstep was literally an act of manifestation magic. When he was able to tell me what was going on, I too felt seriously disoriented. We both had to sit down, our heads spinning.

The fourth synchronicity is that the month before all this unfolded, I was focused on visualizing what our new offices and laboratory space should look like. I was drawing sketches of my ideal lab configuration on a whiteboard in my office and imagining a certain kind of reclining leather chair, an electromagnetically shielded room, and other types of equipment that would be useful to have in the lab. I knew all this would be expensive, and our budget was limited, so I figured we wouldn’t be able to afford much of it in the short term. But that didn’t stop me from visualizing what I needed.

Returning to the story, after recovering from the shock of our meeting, Jon invited me to tour the rest of his facility. As we moved from one room to the next, I could hardly believe my eyes. Jon had the reclining leather chair, the shielded chamber, and all of the other pieces of laboratory equipment I had been actively imagining. And all of it was located on the other side of the wall from my desk, no more than six feet from where I had been sketching what our lab should look like. I had literally drawn what I desired into being.

New scientific standards

Radin writes about the “experimenter effect” and about time-reversed causality. What follows are my own thoughts in response.

Central to the scientific method of knowing reality are three assumptions:

1. The past causes the future, but the future can have no effect on the past.

2. There is an objective reality, independent of who is looking at it. Thus, the experimenter can be separated from the experiment. If you do an experiment and I do the same experiment, faithfully replicating your methods, we should get the same result.

3. The universe obeys fixed laws which are the same everywhere and for all time. (I call this the “zeroth law of science“.)

We have evidence that all three of these assumptions are violated. So the reality of magic calls us not just to new scientific paradigms but new rules for what constitutes scientific investigation.

1. Bell’s Theorem, from the physics community, tells us that an observer’s choice of what to observe has an effect that can be backward in time on what others observe. Why doesn’t this phenomenon run afoul of the grandfather paradox? Because, even though one can prove that this influence is happening, it is always masked by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, so that the statistical pattern seen by Observer 2 is always the same, no mater what Observer 1 does — even though the mix of different individual results within that statistical pattern is a different mix depending on what Observer 1 does.
   
   In lab experiments, feeling the future is well-documented, though it tends to be a weaker effect than telepathy. For example, in lab experiments where a subject is exposed to a random series of pictures on a screen, his skin will begin to sweat and his heartbeat rises a few seconds before each time that he is shown a violent ot sexually titillating image.
   
   

2. Again, standard quantum mechanics is front-running the science of magic. Reality is co-created by something objective (a wave function) and choices under the observer’s control (what to observe). John Wheeler (one of the great physicists of the 20th century) likens the situation to a game of 20 questions, in which the person responding to the questions doesn’t think of a target ahead of time, but instead makes sure that each of the yes/no answers that he offers in response to the questioner is consistent with all previous responses. In the end, the target that emerges is a product of the respondent (nature) and the questioner (experimenter).
   
   In PSI research, the magic goes deeper than this. There is an “experimenter effect” commonly observed. Results of the experiment turn out one way if I do the experiment and a different way if you are doing the same experiment. And it is not only PSI experiments that behave this way. It is a familiar experience to every bench scientist that biology results are often unreproducible, in that different laboratories doing the same experiment report incompatible results.
   
   

3. Science sees its job as discovering the laws that govern the behavior of things (particles, fields, living beings) in our tangible world of space and time. What if there are no laws — can we still do science? No laws? Certainly there are regularities, and science has had a 200-year run discovering and codifying them. But exactly halfway through that time (1925) it was discovered that the laws are not deterministic but statistical on the smallest scale. Quantum mechanics has come to terms with the fact that physical predictions are statistical averages for many quanta, and that physics is incapable of predicting the detailed behavior of individual particles. Beyond this is the problem that science has not yet come to terms with. There are all sorts of patterns within the range of behaviors that QM regards as purely random. There are correlations with time of day and phases of the moon that are real head-scratchers. The largest correlations are with intentions and beliefs of the people doing the experiment, and those around him. And as described above (macro PK) there are “miracles” which seem to be understandable only as rare and isolated exceptions to the laws of physics.

This latter facts mean that we all must soften our expectations around “reproducibility”. Rules for experimentation in the science of the paranormal are only now being written.

What’s new in this book?

Two things. First, Radin focuses on the sociology of science: Why is it that most members of the scientific community — people whose sworn allegiance is empiricism — refuse to look at the copious and overwhelming evidence that magic is real? Second is the practical application of magic. The penultimate chapter of the book offers us instructions, recipes, and appropriate warnings about using magic in our lives and in our world.

Why isn’t parapsychological science accepted as science?

And what would happen if it were? The conventional answer points to the conservatism of the research community. Scientists have human foibles, including discomfort with change. No one wants to learn that the paradigm under which he has pursued a lifetime of research is wrong. There is a special stigma attached to research concerning magic because of a cultural shift away from “superstitions of the past” that took place in the 19th century. The Age of Enlightenment culminated in a rejection of religions, rituals, and mythologies of the past as superstitions of the weak-minded. Rejection of all things mystical became a badge of one’s rationality. Ironically, the witch trials of medieval Christianity were replaced with a professional ostracism of anyone whose world-view is not 100% mechanistic.

Beyond these prejudices, is there a dark hand over the culture of science? All the while that the CIA was obtaining accurate, actionable intelligence about the Soviet military from remote viewers, our government was publicly debunking and ridiculing the paranormal. Could it be that there are rich and powerful people who use magic to enhance their position, and they don’t want the rest of us to know about it? Richard Dolan and Jason Jorjani have both speculated about a breakaway civilization, millions of people sharing our planet but living underground or undersea or in Antarctica, using technologies both mechanical and psychic far beyond our public knowledge.

Since I wrote two years ago about Satanic ritual torture of children, I’ve come to believe that these dark crimes are widespread and accepted among the ruling elite. Whether Satanic rituals actually confer magical powers is a different question.

Recipes for bringing magic into your life

“If anyone can be psychic at any time you might well ask what stops us from actually being omniscient and omnipotent all the time? Why, we want to know, aren’t we gods?”

— David Luke, quoted by Radin

The answer, once again, is rooted in our materialist Western culture. We do not easily enter the state of mind characterized by effortless, single-pointed concentration and perfect faith in advance of a desired outcome.

Radin is appropriately cautious in his guidance about the use of magic. To be sure, the potential for realizing our individual ambitions and collective dreams is a powerful motivation. But it is not only the demanding practice of mental discipline that dissuades us. There is potential for things to go very badly if we acquire more power than we are wise enough to wield. People get what they asked for instead of what they wanted. People become abusive. Some descend into madness.

There are also stories of the redemptive power of magical omnipotence. The legend (or true history?) of Milarepa is both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.

Pursuant to these cautions, Radin tells us how to do it. His favorite mode uses a sigil:

1. Believe that the process will work. If you cannot avoid some doubt, then suspend your disbelief. We have no problem when Marvel characters like Wolverine or Deadpool demonstrate their superhuman strength and regenerative powers. So suspend your disbelief and unleash the same type of awe and delight you reserve for your favorite superheroes.

2. Clarify your intention. Be crystal clear on exactly what it is that you want, including possible unintended consequences. In principle, anything you desire is possible to receive, but the likelihood of success is related to the probability that your desire could happen by dumb luck. It would be easier to magically win a three-pick lottery than to magically be appointed the president of a major bank if you have no experience in banking, are not particularly interested in banking, have a known gambling problem, and just declared bankruptcy.

3. Create a symbol that stands for your wish. Later in this chapter we’ll discuss the various forms this symbol can take, including a sigil, a word, an image, a knot, or a talisman or amulet.

4. Charge the symbol in a state of peak motivation and attention while you are in a state of gnosis. This can be a highly energetic or supremely calm state of awareness, whichever works for you. The former includes drumming, ecstatic or swirling dancing like the Sufi whirling dervishes, extreme physical exertion, or sexual excitation. The latter includes meditation, dreaming, or in general entering a state that a yogi would call samadhi. (Later I’ll give some hints on how to achieve this state.) Charging a symbol is a way to force your desire deep into your subconscious, which is closer—figuratively—to the magical engine of reality.

I prefer calm charging because I’d rather not have to get up from the couch or change my clothes to do magic. This is not to deny that magic is a serious business, but it doesn’t need to be deadly serious. The cosmos has a sense of humor, so there’s no contradiction in acknowledging the playful nature of reality by putting a slice of baloney in your shoes so you’ll feel funny (nod to comedian Steve Martin), while simultaneously being a responsible magus.

5. Release the intention. Some magicians suggest that once a symbol is suitably charged, you should burn it (if on paper), bury it (if an object), hide it, or otherwise put it out of sight so you don’t obsess over the outcome. While the mechanism of magic is not constrained by ordinary space and time, it usually takes some everyday clock time for magic to manifest.

6. Maintain a state of effortless striving. This means pushing your desire with the greatest intensity and motivation you can possibly muster, but without any effort at all. This paradoxical state is a subtlety that takes a while to learn, but it is possible.

7. Record what happens and celebrate your successes. Share the successes with supportive friends and family, but don’t tell strangers or anyone who will just shake their head and mumble about tinfoil hats. Maintaining belief is essential even after you achieve the goal because magical time is not linear, and future doubts may retroactively influence the success of past efforts.

That might sound crazy, except that there’s good evidence that backward-time influences do exist.

Personal stories — magic in my own life

I have been doing yoga and meditation for more than 50 years, including 12 years of intense daily mindfulness meditation. These practices have graced me with enormous benefits, but talent for magic is not among them.

Twice I’ve consulted mediums for contact with deceased loved ones, and the results were unimpressive.

Two years ago, my girlfriend of 14 years told me to go to hell, and I took that as a sign that perhaps she didn’t want to be my partner in love till death do us part. I tried to manifest a loving partner, using Radin’s recommended techniques. I wrote a sonnet as a sigil. I tried to help the magic along, using online dating platforms, telling friends of my quest, and reaching out to communities where I had solid roots. Over the ensuing months, I had four first dates that ranged from unpromising to painful. The most plausible thing that might be interpreted as wish-fulfillment was when my flight from Chicago returning home to Philadelphia was canceled, and the flight after it was filled up with transfers from the canceled flight. But there was a convenient flight open to Washington, where my GF lived. I texted her and asked a little sheepishly if I could visit. She said yes, I flew to DC, and we got back together. For awhile.

Since about 2008, I have had an intellectual belief in magic thanks to Elizabeth Mayer’s book, but I used to say to myself that I need a personal experience to make it stick, so I would know in my gut what I know in my head. Four years ago, in the summer of 2021, I got my personal miracle — undeniable in its own terms, transformative, and making a believer out of me. It was not a lesson I would have chosen to learn in this way if I had made a conscious choice, but I have no regrets, having lived through it.

I was in a head-on collision between my bicycle and a speeding SUV. No one survives such a collision. (I don’t call it an “accident”, but sometimes “my date with destiny”.) I not only survived, but my brain and spine and all internal organs were undamaged. A team of doctors stayed up all night, pumping blood into me tying up all the places where I was bleeding uncontrollably. They bolted my pelvis back together. One leg was mended in a cast, the other reconstructed with transplants of bone, skin, and muscle. I was flat on my back for four months and in a wheelchair for four additional months before I was allowed to walk again.

Today, I’m bicycling, swimming, climbing mountains, teaching yoga, grateful for my body in a way that I never was before, and no longer questioning that miracles are real.

Collectively, these experiences have both convinced me that magic is real and disabused me of any desire to use magic to fulfill my own dreams — but I’m still open to using focused intention in a collective quest for the common good. Think whirled peas.

Magic and the state of the world

Radin doesn’t mention Arthur C Clarke’s early novel, Childhood’s End, but I find it relevant. In the last chapter, we learn (spoiler alert) that the reason that a race of extraterrestrial overlords has come to our planet is that our technological development has outpaced our moral maturity, and in particular it was essential for them to suppress research into occult powers of the mind until we were ready to use them responsibly. Clarke envisions an apocalyptic end of humans as individuals, which he neither endorses nor denounces.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this Substack that our world is in the midst of an unfolding polycrisis of Biblical proportions.

• Global ecosystems are in free-fall.

• The US-dominated world order is coming apart at the seams. Our military is lashing out in an increasingly desperate attempt to retain global influence.

• A century of global progress toward democracy has turned around and repressive, totalitarian government is gaining ground.

• Capitalism is concentrating wealth in the hands of a small number of billionaires, while a shrinking middle class is borrowing to sustain what’s left of a declining standard of living.

• The global economy is built on a mountain of unpayable debt.

• Trust in sources of information that provided a consensus view of reality is waning. These include the print and broadcast media, Congress, and government agencies such as CDC and BLS. We realize that even scientific journals have been politicized, especially in biomedicine.

• Censorship, propaganda, and shadow-banning have been a government/corporate response to this loss of trust.

• The public in Western democracies has become fractured into groups that have mutual disdain for one another, paralyzing the political systems that might have been called upon to respond to these crises.

• A global outcry for peace that led to the League of Nations after the Great War a century ago has evolved gradually into a stealth, all-encompassing omni-war. A subtext of violence has invaded our psyches and every aspect of our lives.

The rational organizations that have been responsible for 500 years progress and Enlightenment are powerless to respond to current situations. On the contrary, it may be that the materialist, rationalist, Utilitarian philosophy that has been the source of progress during these centuries is revealed to contain internal contradictions that are at the center of these crises. By “internal contradictions”, I intend

• Economies that produce material comfort and entertainment, while undermining health and wellbeing

• A scientific world-view that lays claim to objectivity and empiricism, yet takes away our sense of meaning and leaves us with existential angst

• A capitalist economic model that requires unlimited growth on a finite planet

The world-view that has been a core of progress is based on an objective/reductionist science. But the very scientific methodology that produced the objective/reductionist view of 19th century led in the 20th to quantum mechanics, which is paradoxically the opposite of objective and the opposite of reductionistic. Fundamental equations of quantum mechanics are explicitly holistic, and the quantum formalism engages human observers in co-creating reality.

I suspect that the rational/scientific approach to problem solving will not help us resolve the polycrisis.

Quoting from the last chapter of Radin’s new book:

[G]aining a better understanding of consciousness, psi, and magic could offer an enormous boon to humanity. As we learn more about the transformative power of seeing reality with naked awareness, whether that happens through a meditation practice, a spontaneous gnosis or noetic experience, a psychedelic trip, an NDE or OBE, a psychic, mystical, or spiritual experience, or any number of other paths, the effect in most cases is the same: a major, positive shift in personality. Having such experiences results in greater compassion, empathy, tolerance, gratefulness, optimism, and, in general, “prosocial” behavior.

There’s another reason for gaining a better understanding of consciousness. As an analogy, say you’re walking in the woods with some friends, and you come upon a stream. To everyone’s horror, you see dozens of crying babies floating down the stream. The natural impulse is to dive in and rescue as many of them as you can. That’s what most of your friends will do. But while you’re drying off the babies as they’re brought ashore, you’re thinking, what are all these babies doing in the stream in the first place? They just keep on coming, and we can’t keep this up forever. So you decide that in the long run, it’s more efficient to go upstream to discover the cause of this unfolding tragedy.

Likewise, to help solve all sorts of global existential crises, we need to go upstream and better understand the causes of these problems, many of which can be traced to our individual and collective understanding about who and what we are. This is a problem of consciousness.

A cynic might say this sounds like toxic positivity; it’s unrealistic because the world is “red in tooth and claw,” to use Alfred Lord Tennyson’s dramatic phrase. But does it have to be that way? Are aggression and survival of the fittest the only way to live? Would an improved understanding of consciousness and its capacities lead toward a more life-affirming existence and guide us away from endless chest-beating, nihilism, and extinction? Why are noetic experiences so positively transformative? Are we mature enough as a species to safely and effectively provide magical experiences to anyone who wants them?

We won’t know until we make it a societal priority to find out.

And from Charles Eisenstein:

“A miracle is something that is impossible from one’s current understanding of reality, but which becomes possible from a new understanding.”