Book Review: Dean Radin's "Supernormal" could (and should) destroy the dominant Western paradigm

Listen to my new interview with Dean Radin

by Kevin Barrett, TruthJihad.com

 
In today’s environment of information overload, how do we decide which issues to investigate?
One answer – the one that makes most sense to me – is to focus on controversies charged with the potential for paradigm shift. These are critically-important issues featuring a sharp and potentially shocking conflict between the data – or “actual reality” if you will – and mainstream consensus reality.
Not all important issues are paradigm-shifters. Global warming, for example, is not really a paradigm shifter. First, it is not obvious that the scientific mainstream has it wrong. Second, we already know that the explosion of the human population of earth to over seven billion and counting is likely to catastrophically alter earth’s ecosystems one way or another…as all population explosions of all species always do. This is obviously true, whether or not mainstream science has global warming right.
Paradigm-shifters are issues where mainstream discourse says one thing, and reality says another; and where accepting reality would radically change the way we see the world…and presumably shock us enough to change our behavior.
One example: Mainstream American discourse holds that US and Israeli wars have been heroic and justified defensive struggles, usually triggered by the perfidious attacks of evil enemies. Historical reality says the precise opposite. In virtually every case a fabricated “enemy attack,” usually a nonexistent one, was engineered by the US or Israel in order to launch a pre-scripted war of aggression and sell it to the public. If we understood this – especially in the case of the 9/11 “New Pearl Harbor” – we would presumably slash our military budget by at least 90%, close all of our foreign bases, assume a purely defensive posture, stop supporting Israel, and return to Constitutional rule.
Another paradigm-shifting issue is political assassinations. If Americans knew (not just suspected) that all of their best leaders of the past fifty years have been assassinated by an unspeakably evil “deep state,” they might be shocked and angry enough to dismantle that deep state and restore transparency and Constitutional rule.
A third paradigm-shifting issue is the financial basis of the deep state itself – the dominant banking families’ secret control of currency. This hidden history, as related by Eustace Mullens, G. Edward Griffin, Ellen Brown, and others, is currently coming to light and fueling the rise of such movements as Occupy and the Ron Paul campaign. If Americans learn that American democracy was murdered by the Federal Reserve coup d’état of 1913, and that most of what they are taught in school and told by the media consists of lies manufactured by this bankster-financed covert dictatorship, they will overthrow the bankster regime.
But important as they are, these closely-related political paradigm-shifters may be less important than Dean Radin’s burning question: Does the human mind have “supernormal” powers?
Yes, I know it sounds goofy. I can practically hear half my audience rolling their eyeballs. (If rolling eyeballs made a noise, it would surely take psi powers to hear it.)
Psi – paranormal psychic abilities- is a taboo topic in some quarters, just like 9/11 truth and the JFK-RFK-MLK-Wellstone assassinations and the bankster families’ covert dictatorship.
Is there a pattern here? Does somebody not want us to talk about paradigm-shift issues?
These taboos seem to spring up whenever a paradigm shift is gathering force. Five hundred years ago, discussing the earth revolving around the sun, or the Pope being a fallible human being, could get you in the same kind of trouble.
Radin’s Supernormal marshals the scientific evidence that has accumulated over the past century – especially the past few decades – to show that such ancient texts as the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali may have been correct in positing that the human mind has extraordinary abilities that can be unlocked by rigorous programs of meditation. According to the Yoga Sutra, those who reach a certain state of proficiency at meditation (which normally requires spending a few decades in a cave or similarly calm, distraction-free environment) are often able to read minds, achieve clairvoyant knowledge of spatially and temporally distant events, and even manifest enough PK ability to change sand into almonds and cashews, levitate, and otherwise use consciousness to directly influence material reality.
Science has not yet proven that people can levitate or use their minds to create platters of food. But it has proven, over and over, that ordinary people can send and receive telepathic messages, clairvoyantly “see” distant events, and foresee the future. And now, thanks to Radin’s experiments, science has shown that some of these psychic abilities vary according to the subject’s proficiency in meditation.
This assertion will undoubtedly shock those who are unfamiliar with the peer-reviewed scientific literature on the topic. Fortunately, there is no reason to remain unfamiliar, since Radin has thoughtfully provided a web page with links so that anyone can download some of the thousands of relevant studies. Here it is: http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
I will not spend a lot of time here trying to convince you that the scientific psi literature is real and valid. For that, download some of the studies, read Radin’s books, take a look at the Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on ESP, and make sure you are sitting down when you finally allow the implications to sink in.
Does the psi research field have a “Building 7” – a smoking gun that can quickly change the opinion of any intelligent open-minded person? One candidate is the ganzfeld studies, which appear to be fully repeatable and show that average people have significant psi ability, to the tune of “guessing” accurately about one-third of the time when chance alone would get it right only one-fourth of the time. This may not sound like much – but apply that to the stock market or the roulette table, and you’d get rich very quickly. And since psi ability, like other human abilities, varies widely, it is reasonable to assume that those with the highest-level abilities are able to perform far beyond the already-impressive “average” shown in the ganzfeld literature.
Radin approaches the question of high-level psi through the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, an Axial Age classic that is considered the central text of Yoga, and one of the world’s great scriptures. According to the Yoga Sutras, people who practice advanced meditation will experience “sidhis” or paranormal phenomena, including various forms of ESP. Patanjali, like most mystical teachers, is not impressed by these abilities, and warns students not to consider them important. He states that they are simply a by product of the meditator’s approaching samadhi, a state of primordial oneness in which the normal dualism of consciousness disappears. The student should not be distracted by psi powers, Pantanjali advises, and should never demonstrate them to anyone – not even the teacher.
Why does Radin disagree, at least to the extent of trying to demonstrate psi – and to scientifically prove that accomplished meditators have vastly greater psi abilities on many tests than non-meditators?
Radin believes that the Western scientific (or, more accurately, “scientistic”) paradigm has reached a dead end. Through quantum physics, information theory, and other disciplines, it has discovered that consciousness plays a constitutive role in the production of space-time and the apparent material reality that fills it. In other words, the 19th-century materialist paradigm is outmoded. Yet it lives on – and it is killing us. It is the disenchantment of the world, produced by Western culture’s blinding itself to the “magic” of consciousness-generated reality, that leads modern man to greedily “pile up” his power over material things, over nature, and over other people.
If the great wisdom teachers like Patanjali (and Christ, Muhammad, Buddha, and so many others) are right, our lives will be immeasurably richer if we relinquish much of our interest in material things, and focus on developing consciousness itself.
And maybe the only way Western culture will ever figure that out is if we whack it over the head with scientific proof that psi is real, and that consciousness, not matter and space-time, is the primordial reality.
It’s worth a try, anyway. And Dean Radin is trying valiantly. His prose is superb, his sense of humor simultaneously wry and acerbic, and his scientific grasp of the psi literature impressive. Whether or not you are sold on his message, you will surely enjoy reading this book.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Kevin Barrett

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.

He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.

He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.

Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.

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