Larry Dossey on Premonitions

Tell me about the first Dean Radin book, Entangled Minds.

It expresses a view of consciousness which I find extremely accurate from a scientific as well as a personal point of view. Radin’s idea, basically, is that consciousness is not confined to individuals, which is the traditional view, but rather that consciousness extends beyond the individual brain and body to envelop people at a distance, and even outside the present moment. It sounds like a crazy idea to many people who stumble upon it for the first time, but it’s important to recognise that there is a good deal of science that supports this view of extended consciousness. I’ve written widely in the past about this view of consciousness – I call it ‘non-local mind’. It’s a very ancient idea. We’re not making this stuff up. It has been around for ever and it has been affirmed, as I say, by careful scientific study.

How did he come upon this idea?

Dean Radin is a highly trained scientist. His field is mathematics, physics and engineering. There is simply a huge database going back decades looking at the human ability to convey information to other people at a distance, and also to acquire information from people at a distance and outside the present moment. Dean is a pioneer, and a group of studies have now been replicated by researchers around the world that are called ‘pre-sentiment’ studies. 

So you’re sitting in front of a computer and that computer is going to show you one of two images. Either a lovely scene from nature or a gruesome war scene, an autopsy, a car accident with bodies strewn around. You don’t know which it is going to be and the computer doesn’t yet know either as they are chosen at random. Here’s what happens. You’re wired up to get a physical measurement of a stress reaction – and here’s where it gets strange. If the image that will be shown to you in the future is one of the horrible images, your body starts to generate a stress response – even before the computer selects the image that will be shown. Your unconscious mind and body know what is going to happen in the future. This is profound evidence that we need to expand our views of consciousness. We say that consciousness is confined to the present and everybody believes that, but these experiments say something else. If we do good science we are going to have to come to terms with this.

Do these studies suggest that consciousness is separate from the physical body, so that you can be conscious after you’re dead or before you’re alive?

Consciousness, obviously, operates through the brain and through the body, but it is not limited to the brain and body. I suppose we’ll all find out whether we can still be conscious after we’re dead. Nobody has come back and staged a press conference yet.

But people often say they have spoken to people who are dead.

They certainly do, all the time, but those are stories and this is a science. However, my own opinion is that we should give these stories some serious consideration. It seems to me that consciousness can exist outside the body and, though we cannot say for sure, this gives a lot of hope for the survival of consciousness after bodily death. My personal view is that consciousness does survive death and is present before the birth of the physical body. That is what I mean when I say that consciousness is ‘non-local’.

Is the second book you’ve chosen by Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe, different, or is it an expansion of the same theme?

It’s an expansion of the same theme. Dr Radin’s books all go into the scientific evidence for his view that consciousness is not restricted to brain, body or the present moment.

It sounds very religious.

It can be religious. Many people would relate this to the idea of the soul, but it would be a mistake to put Radin’s books in the religious category as he certainly doesn’t intend them in that way. Although, if people find religious meaning in the books, I’m sure he would have no objection to that.

Tell me about the Stephan A Schwartz book, Opening to the Infinite.

He is one of the inventors of the field called ‘remote viewing’, in which people undergo procedures to visualise things that are a long way off – on the other side of the world, for example. This might sound quite strange to someone bumping into it for the first time, but in his book he describes how he has put these experiments to the test and how people have found sunken shipwrecks that have never been seen before, and buried cities in the desert which had resisted archaeological detection in the past.

Why is this not better known though? Why wasn’t he in Iraq looking for WMD?

I think many people are aware of it and it is a hot topic in, for example, archaeology. There is a whole history of this kind of work in archaeology, and in other fields. As I’m sure you can imagine though, this goes against the grain in the academic world and a lot of scholars simply don’t take the time to inform themselves of the fact that this evidence simply does exist. It’s like that all the time in science – you have people on the boundaries, pushing the edges, being adventuresome.