Surviving the Workday

I found an interview in Finding My Religion with parapsychology researcher Dean Radin. Radin has studied psychic phenomenon at Princeton and the University of Nevada, and has explored whether intentionally-blessed chocolate tastes better (and it does, apparently, keep that in mind when you’re cooking).

At the end of the interview, the interviewer brings up The Secret.

There has been this craze of late about “The Secret.” And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, since a lot of the work you do relates to how our minds affect reality.

Well, craze is a good word. I mean, it’s a little overblown and embellished, but I think the general idea that intention can help either push us or pull us towards goals that we have is not a bad idea. It’s not significantly different from the power of positive thinking, nor is it too different from the effects that we see in our intentional chocolate experiment and many other experiments like that. There is something about intention that seems to be the underlying focus for a mind-matter interaction.

One reason people cringe when they hear about “The Secret” is that it suggests we have far more control over our lives than we probably do. So if you get cancer, let’s say, you should be able to cure yourself with your thinking.

It does create this sort of New Age guilt, and actually I think that the intentional effects that we see in the lab (from positive thinking) are pretty small. It’s not as if you’re in a boat without a paddle and you’re about to go over Niagara Falls — you can’t simply zoom off to the shore by wishing that it will happen. But you can, if you pay a little bit of attention beforehand, move it very slightly, and if you do it systematically you might be lucky enough to move it to a place of safety. Obviously, if you are near the falls, it’s too late.

It’s definitely too late for me! But at least I don’t suffer from New Age Guilt. I prefer the centuries old Catholic kind.

You might enjoy reading the entire interview though including an in-depth description of the intentional chocolate experiment.

This entry was posted by Ms. Theologian on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under spirituality You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.