Dean Radin’s Wonderful Story on Meaningful Coincidence - Musings and Meditations
- filipvk
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
Dear friends,
In the previous Musing, I shared a very long interview with you, so this time I’m serving up a very short excerpt from an interview. Just to restore the karmic balance. And since I promised you a while back to tell you more about the phenomenon of synchronicity (or meaningful coincidence), that happens to be exactly what this post is about.
You may not have finished watching that previous interview with Alex Gomez-Marin yet. If that is the case, I’d highly recommend giving it another look, because I found it to be one of the most extraordinary and comprehensive interviews I’ve come across in my research so far. If you have already watched it, you know that today there are “serious” scientists investigating phenomena that are usually dismissed as mere myths, such as telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, extrasensory perception, and synchronicity.
One of those scientists is Dean Radin, who is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and an Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
I have featured Dean Radin before: both in the blog post ‘Science and the Emerging New Paradigm’ and in the Musing ‘Five Sigma,’ I shared a video of a lecture Dean Radin gave in 2016 during a conference on the science of consciousness at the University of Arizona.
In this lecture, Dean Radin reported on a groundbreaking experiment that demonstrated that human consciousness can exert a direct influence on the behavior of subatomic particles in a “double-slit” quantum experiment. If you haven’t read those posts yet or watched those videos, I would highly recommend doing so. That experiment, which has since been repeated hundreds of times around the world, was so spectacular that for once it even made it into the mainstream media.
But Dean Radin and his team at IONS have been researching other phenomena for decades—phenomena often classified as “parapsychology,” a term I dislike because it seems to immediately push the subject into a rather esoteric corner. I would rather speak of “non-local psychology,” because all the phenomena investigated here point to the reality of our consciousness as a “non-local” phenomenon that is not produced by the brain but rather facilitated by it.
But to get to the subject of this short video: In eight minutes, Dean Radin tells a remarkable story about an unlikely case of synchronicity that happened to him at the beginning of his research.
Let’s briefly recap what synchronicity is: let’s call it “meaningful coincidence.” The concept was introduced by psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who, together with the eminent physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Pauli, developed a theoretical framework regarding the phenomenon of events that seemingly cannot have a physical causal connection, yet undeniably occur and often prove to be extraordinarily meaningful. As I mentioned in Walkie-Talkie 9, the great psychologist and philosopher William James was also exploring the phenomenon even before Jung, though without using that specific term for it.
Everyone can tell stories of synchronicities, big and small: you think of a certain person and just at that moment you get a phone call from this person; you need a ride and just that day an acquaintance happens to be driving exactly to your destination; a “chance” encounter on the train turns out to be of great importance to your career; you feel like you’re being watched, you turn around, and there really is someone staring at you; an unplanned outing leads to meeting the person who becomes your life partner, and on top of that, you had just dreamed about that the night before. Sometimes these stories are still “modest” and possibly explained by “real” coincidence, but sometimes that explanation is simply statistically untenable.
In our culture, the concept of synchronicity is usually dismissed as superstition, and research into it as “pseudoscience.” And this, of course, because in a materialistic paradigm it MUST be impossible: the only forces that truly exist in that paradigm are the measurable fundamental forces, and beyond that, all events in the universe unfold according to those predictable, purely mechanical forces. And anyone who dares to question this is quickly suspected of wanting to take us back to a kind of religious explanation in the narrow traditional sense: it must be an all-seeing God who governs things and orchestrates it all. In other viewpoints, a kind of “fate” is proposed, in which everything is predetermined and time is merely an illusion—a vision that finds its equivalent in the scientific theory of the “block universe.”
Synchronicity is therefore a difficult subject, because it touches on the fundamental belief that has attained an almost sacred status in our society: that of materialism or physicalism (see Walkie-Talkie 11 and Walkie-Talkie 12).
But what if our usual ways of thinking on this matter are far too limited, and trapped in false dichotomies and flawed premises?
A bit like in politics: if you’re against capitalism, then you must be a communist, right? The entire range of possible views on economics and society is reduced in this way to an extremely simple—and therefore false—duality. Something similar happens when we want to talk about metaphysics: if you doubt materialism or physicalism, then you must surely be some kind of religious zealot or gullible New Age hippie, right?
But what if there is something at play that is far more subtle and complex? What if we assume that, as both contemporary physics and process philosophy teach us, there is no such thing as “things existing independently of one another”? (See Walkie-Talkie 5)
I’m going to exercise the utmost self-restraint and not delve deeper into this right now: brevity remains the message, and we have time: I’ll come back to this, and I’ll also share stories from my personal life that point to extraordinary synchronicity.
And in doing so, I’d like to invite you to think back to instances of extraordinary “meaningful coincidences” in your own lives. You may have always dismissed them as mere... well, coincidence, because that is simply what is considered “common sense” in our culture and consensus reality. But try to recall the events in your own life and consider them anew with a kind of openness, without immediately trying to explain them.
And for now, I’d like to invite you to listen to Dean Radin’s remarkable story, which suggests that our intentions and desires do indeed seem to exert an influence on the material world—something that has been convincingly demonstrated at the quantum level by the experiments at IONS, but which also appears to be the case at the classical “macro” level of reality.
The video was originally shared by the platform of The Scientific and Medical Network in collaboration with the Galileo Commission, two organizations dedicated to post-materialist science that you will also find on the page with links ‘Science and the New Paradigm’ on the website of A Biosphere Project.
I would also highly recommend exploring the links on this webpage further, if you haven’t already done so.
Thank you for reading and watching, and until the next episode,
All the best to you,
Filip
