Russell Bishop, welcome to the QVC podcast.

Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to what comes forward today.

So am I. And thank you so much for that beautiful

invocation that you opened our interaction with.

I think it really set the tone for opening up

a space for the two of us and anyone who cares to

join us to. To go on their own personal journey.

So I'm just going to start somewhere fun because I was

listening to an interview with you, and my daughter was in the room,

and I didn't know she was paying attention. And all of a sudden she's 11.

All of a sudden she said, you know, mom, that man's

really right. Sometimes it is really simple, but it's not

so easy.

Well, that's good. And she said. And

then she went on to say, you know, like, being the

seeker, when you're playing what's the

game they play at Hogwarts? Anyway, she's like, it's very simple. All you

have to do is catch the snitch. But it's not easy.

It's not easy, mom, to catch that snitch.

So let's just open it up there. Because I think,

you know, I think a lot of the time most people listening are on some

sort of journey, whether it's a personal health journey or a journey of owning their

own business related to health. And I think

sometimes we forget. We're like, oh, it's so simple. Why aren't I doing it

better? Or we make it complicated when it actually is simple

and you've had so much experience with human nature.

Help us out.

Yeah, it might be helpful if I give a little thumbnail about

some of my background, because that informs and

has for a very long time the work that I do.

I was raised in a Presbyterian family. We had

four ministers in the family, and I. So I was at

church a lot, but I always had

a sort of a conflicting experience.

On the one hand, I loved it. On the other hand, I hated it.

And later I was able to identify what I loved was

actually the music, because the music.

In my spiritual practice, we think of two principal connections

into spirit, light and

sound. And of course, music is sound, and. And almost

everybody can relate to music of one kind or another. And

for me, it. I. I just opened and I. I kind of soared with

the music. But when they started doing all their

talk and, you know, blame and all that kind of stuff, I said,

well, maybe not so much. So

I didn't have the conscious awareness at the time. But

that connection into spirit is what I was Experiencing.

So also because. Because we have a little bit of a

health focus in here. I had 14 surgeries by the

time I was 14. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it was kind of

interesting. You know, some of them were accidents. I went through

two windshields when I was a little kid, you know, way before seat belts were

around. And, you know,

I. I guess the one way to say that is they had to keep knocking

me out. So I was gonna say

a lot of. It's a lot of anesthesia in a short

period of time on a little body and a little consciousness

back then. When they used ether. Oh. Which is

like, I thought, oh, my God, they're trying to kill me again.

So in any case,

my father wound up dying of leukemia when he was 42. I

was. Had just turned 19 and

a bunch of circumstances not worth going into right now. But it

bankrupted the family. And I wound up. I had an

old beater of a car, which I lived in for a while. And

that was actually grace in

many ways, because as challenging as it was, I mean, I had

literally $6 to my name. I

never felt like I was in trouble.

I just felt like, okay, so that's how this is right now. And it

was truly experience of being in the now, in

the moment. And that began to

open up the. The distinct awareness for

me that there's a difference between my experience and my ex.

Circumstance. And

I can author the quality of my

experience independent of

what's going on circumstantially. And I

began to see the difference between some people experience their circumstance

as their experience of who they are as

opposed to the condition. There's no gap. There's no choice.

Yeah, exactly. So

about. In 1968, a guy named

Fritz Perls, who was considered the creator of

Gestalt Therapy, wrote a book called Gestalt Therapy

verbatim, which I read. And

he used to be a psychoanalyst who

did traditional psychoanalysis. So three sessions a week for seven years. He

said all of my patients after seven years had well analyzed problems,

and now they just had stacks of reasons why they should have the problem.

But he said, he discovered that what he said, simple awareness can be

curative. So he changed the therapy did

with people to basically asking questions. And

so what are you experiencing? Well, where did that come from? Well, what choices

can you make? What choices did you make? And all of the notion of. He

said, responsibility is the ability to respond. So

he's helping people notice how they chose responses and

how that then created the quality of their experience.

Now I was 20 at the time

when I read that book. And that put me on

a path of saying, I want to work with people in that

regard. And when I applied to

graduate school, I wrote on the

application, give you a window into my arrogance at the

time, which may or may not have been diminished much. I said, I'm willing to

let you have me, a student as I. As long as I don't have to

take any of your courses.

This audience will appreciate the wisdom of that. Actually,

yeah, it was. Was really kind of interesting because the

chairman said, before we throw you out on your ear, what are you

talking? And I said, well, you're going to want me to write a null

hypothesis for a thesis. He said, yeah, and you're going to

want me to prove it at the O5 or 01 level of significance, meaning

at.05 only five times out of 100 or oh, one, only one times

out of 100, could this have shown up by chance? He said, yes.

I said, so if we go through these bookshelves

lined with the theses that have been done heretofore,

will we not find this one with proof that this one

has the opposite proof, and so they can't

both be true, can they? And he kind of went, never thought

of that. So what you really don't want

here. And there's again, the brashness of the time. You're not really

interested in what's true. You're just interested what we can put together within

some kind of statistical summary.

Well, what do you propose? He said, well, rather than having a theory or a

null hypothesis, what I want to do is I just want to bring

different people into the campus who can work with groups of

students for over the course of a year or maybe two, and

simply chronicle what changes take place

without a theory about what changes should take place or

which modality is more effective than the other. So

that became my thesis. And he did say, well, you're going to have to take

three of our courses. All

right, all right, we'll take three. I surrender. Okay, fine. But

that then put me on this whole path of

beginning to understand that knowledge is always

present, but I may not be present with the

knowledge. Oh, that's quite

profound, Russell. Yeah, well, I. I didn't have the

language for that until much later.

In fact, someone once said, peace is present, Russell. You just may not be present

with the peace. And that's when a bunch of dominoes clicked

together. Oh, that's what that's about. And so

I wound up doing a lot of Work in the gestalt world,

in various kinds of encounter groups and gestalt therapy

and national training labs and sensitivity training and, you know, on and

on and on, because I was, I was just enthralled with

what that process of self discovery was.

So shortening this story by quite a bit.

By the 70s, I was running a personal development

course called Mind Dynamics, which it's something I had

personally experienced and found it amazing how much

change people made in a couple of days. And in 1978,

in concert with my spiritual teacher, whom I wrote a letter

saying, hey, you know, I'm sure the people are doing well spiritually in this group,

but boy, they can't handle the real world very well.

And he called me and I didn't expect the rubber meets the

road boom. Exactly. So

he said, what did you have in mind? I said, well, I can design a

training program, an experiential seminar that would help

people translate what they are learning spiritually into

how they make choices in the real world and how they create the experience of

life. We spoke at length,

we got together in person and he said, well, let's try it. And

so in January of 78, Insight Seminars was birthed

in Santa Monica, California. I thought it was going to be a

once in a while kind of thing, but

strictly by word of mouth, it wound up as a knife

501C3A not for profit. It wound up in 43 countries around the

world. And wow. It was all built on

this notion of awareness. Right. And

so the. And this I think will be really important for those

listening here. We subtitled the program we didn't really have.

Later on we had an insight 1, 2, 3 and a whole bunch of stuff

sort of using an educational model. But

we call insight the awakening heart.

Not mind, body or emotions, but heart.

And using heart as the center of the soul, sort

of trying to make us something spiritual, physical.

But also the principle of awakening was huge.

And so I would say to people, this is going to be two really stupid

questions. The first one is obvious. If you are

awakening, what were you before?

Asleep. Huh. Well, here's the question. No one ever asks.

If you were asleep, what were you before that?

Awake. Ah,

so all this focus on transformation and

change is assuming that something is amiss

and it has to be changed into something else. But what if

it really is? All I have to do is awaken to something that's always been

present. Now let me tie that back to

church. The word religion comes from the Latin

root word ligare, which means to Connect or bind together.

And the prefix re means again, so truly

what religion means is to reconnect, which begs the question

of reconnect to what? And so

insight, the awakening heart, becoming more of who you already are.

And without being preachy to anyone. We never said

you're a soul, you're a spirit. Just people would come into

that awareness in their own way

and their own language. So I like to say God never named itself,

so have at it. I don't care what we. We call this,

but let's find it. And the core essence of it will be loving.

So that's sort of the background to what's informed my

work over these many years. That's so beautiful.

That you've made Russell. And I'm really struck. I'm thinking back

to how you explained what you wanted to do to

the head of the department at graduate school,

and it was to observe people without

an expectation. Something along those lines. Right. Like you

wanted to take away the expectation of having them fit into your

hypothesis or not, and just allow them to

do what they are, do what they need to do. Which strikes me

as an incredibly loving approach

where, because I think so many of us often feel,

even if it's not articulated, although a lot of the times it is articulated,

that we, you know, we're kind of

continuously gauging if we're meeting the expectation

of somebody or something, whether it's to

feel better physically or show up or. So

to have the intuition or the knowledge to create a

space where people were just free to have their own

experience. Like, that's. It seems quite profound.

Yeah, it certainly turned out to be that way. I had no

idea what it was really going to lead to. But,

boy, brain cells fade. This is gray hair.

And I was told gray hair is gray matter leaking out. So.

Boy, how could I forget his name? A longshore philosopher.

Longshoreman and a philosopher. Oh, Eric Hoffer.

Exactly. Hoffer. How can I. We. My husband and

I are reading his book right now, so I. I heard you reference him in.

In one of the interviews I listened to. Yes, exactly. And so

the way I paraphrased that was you can never get enough of what you don't

really want.

And so that's profound.

Yes, because we're locked into

seeking things. Absolutely.

And sort of the.

The myth that people tend

to lead is that if I only get enough of X,

then I'll be happy, or then I'll be full, or

then I'll have peace. And so in sort of the

Western world, it's well, let's just put off all that stuff

because we have to go acquire. But as soon as we've

acquired, you know, whether it's a house, there could be a bigger house or

car, a better car, a certain amount of money. And so in

insight, well, we would. On a big

easel pad, two columns. The

left column was labeled symbols and the right column was

labeled experience. And we say, so what? In

symbols, we just say, those are the things

that people pursue a lot of in life. What are they? And so

people would make their list and we put it up and it always goes things

like money, house, job, car. And some people would say

relationship. So it's kind of like, you know, the trophy,

family, whatever. And we say, so let's take money. Because most people

think they want more money. What's the positive experience that you

associate with having enough money? If I had enough money, then I

could experience. And some people would say, travel. I said, no,

no, that's what you could do. So it's not about buying

more stuff. What would the inner experience be if you had enough money? And people

say, well, eventually, security, peace, peace of mind,

you know, fulfillment, freedom. So in other words, what we're after is

peace and loving and caring, but we're pursuing this other thing

and there's no direct relationship because there's people with tons of money and they're

not very secure. And people with tons of money. There are people with

no money and they're secure and da, da, da, da, da. So let's take all

those definitions out, and if you can focus on the right hand

side column of the quality of experience, then the question is,

what experience are you looking for? How could you produce it?

And then that awakens people to go, oh, oh my God. You mean

my experience is my choice? What a possibility.

So big stuff. It is big. And so

in your experience, what happens when people choose

to live from there? So instead of saying, okay, I have to wait until

I have the money, I think I'm supposed to have to feel peaceful and

free. I can just feel like that right

now. And then what do you see happen

when, like, do people. Are they able to make that choice? And

then what happens? Well, there's.

Oh, boy. What happens when people

make that conscious choice to.

Well, we call it what if we said this isn't anything

to believe? None of this just play the what if

game. What if it is true that if you focus on

experience, life will change

for the better? What if it is true that the consequences I'm experience

come from the choices I make, not the victimhood.

Because Fritz Pearl's really mad at a burant distinction

between victim and accountable. And we'd ask, so,

you know, if. Let's just take a look at anything in your life.

If it's been positive, were you the victim of something out there?

Very few people play victim to positive, but if it's negative, yeah, they go

victim. So we said, well, let's. Let's try take a look at

how are my circumstances a function of my choices? And then

even regardless of circumstance. So Viktor Frankl comes to mind.

How do you discover that freedom is a choice

while in a Nazi internment camp? I mean,

wow, talk about consciousness. So if people play what if,

Then what usually becomes interesting,

the amount of money or the job I have become less important,

but easier to have. Right. Because I'm not

attached to the thing, because I've already produced the experience inwardly.

Right. Qualitatively and quantitatively different.

So I move toward

the symbols or the signals of what I

want more easily when I'm coming

from the experiential state that I wanted in the

first place as the result of those things. Absolutely. And

from a Buddhist perspective, when you're in that space, you approach life without

attachment, Right? And it's attachment that

usually creates our pain and our suffering and also

blocks us from achieving that which we might

otherwise achieve, which it also

can be interpreted as we might otherwise experience.

So we used to ask people these questions all the time that said, so

have you ever been at peace? Well, yeah.

Well, when you're at peace, did you ever say, wow, I'm at peace?

No, because you're too busy being at peace.

But when you left the peace is when you noticed you were at peace.

And so the question becomes, what did you have to focus on to leave the

peace? If you're in a loving

relationship with someone, you know, husband, wife, boyfriend,

girlfriend, son, daughter, whatever,

what did you have to focus on to leave the loving you had for that

person? And that's like a

bombshell in people's brains to go, oh, my God, yeah, as

soon as I focus on this, that shows up.

Now it's a thing you're focused on

leading you towards the positive experience you want or the negative experience

you want. Now the

critics of the world go, oh, just more of that

positive thinking psychobabble crap.

I go, well, no, not really. When I was editorial director at

Huffington Post for a while, I wrote a series of articles every Monday.

And one I put up was called why Positive Thinking Just

Doesn't Work. Now, the

Huffington Post pioneered the thing of having real live

community and comments. And so people

would throw up on some of my articles every month, and then I

copy some of their comment and put it in the next month. I go, well,

there's a great way to sort of miss the point without,

without being condemning just to say. So let's, let's see what,

what's missing here. And it's understandable it could be missing because

of the programming we've all gone through, so on and so forth. So

this was the, the peak of frustration. And when I write these articles or

when I write my books, same thing. I sit down in front of the

computer, front of my little keyboard, and I go, father, Mother, God, show

me what to be written today in ways I can understand and with the clarity

to put it down. And I don't have notes, it just comes through and

I write it. So that title showed up that

morning, why Positive Thinking Just Doesn't Work. And what I said in

the article was, of course, positive thinking doesn't work.

Positive action works. But how do you take a positive action

without a positive thought? And so what positive thinking really

means, do you have a positive focus? So I

have a good friend who

used to be a cable car gripman in San Francisco, and he was riding

to the cable car barn one day in the 60s on his motorcycle

when a laundry van ran the stoplight. His

gas tank exploded. It burned his face off, burned his fingers down

to not as. No, no finger nub was longer

than my little pinky fingernail. So just

mention that. Several years of

surgeries. When he finally was recovered,

he became the mayor of a small town in Colorado,

and he was a pilot at the time.

So he was taking off to go to the annual Mayor's conference

in D.C. when the plane crashed, and he wound up

paralyzed. And so here's a guy

paralyzed looks grotesque. No, I mean,

he can still pick things up, but with these little nubs.

And he writes a book, it's not what happens to you, it's what you do

about it. And he said,

before I was paralyzed, there were 10,000 things I could do. Now there's

9,000. Should I cry about the thousand I lost or celebrate the nine I

have? And so the epitome of what

you do with a positive focus, no one's saying, oh, it's fantastic.

I'm paralyzed and my face is burned off. No, that's the

circumstance. Now what do I do with it? So back to how do I

author my experience? His name is Mitchell,

and He has a website called wmitchell.com and people

can watch some incredible videos of this guy. Wow.

Yeah. That is a really powerful message to come

from someone who experienced not once but twice.

Yeah, huge. Just amazing. So to what

would you attribute a person's ability

to do that? To live the way Mitchell is living?

Is it. I mean, your most recent book is Soul Talk. Is.

Does Mitchell. Is Mitchell more soul

powered than someone who lives in victimhood?

What. What are your

observations slash thoughts? Yeah, that's great, because

we've chatted about that a few times.

Not telling any school tales out of school. But he doesn't have a

spiritual focus that he would call spiritual

because I think he would think more things in religious,

you know, traditional religious terminology. But

the. The soul is present, whether we want to call it

a soul or not. And it doesn't care what we call it because it didn't

name itself either.

So I think.

Something is inside each of us again that

wants to awaken. And when we

awaken, that's when this power of choice

becomes more evident. Now, when a person, as a person

awakens, it's not like asleep awake done.

No, no, it's awakening. It's an ongoing process.

So as I awaken to my next level of

consciousness, I can look back and see all the

crumbs on that path that I never noticed along

the way. Oh, wow. Yeah, I did that back then.

Well, if I did that back then, what could I do now? So what's

the choice in front of me right now that wants

me to awaken to so that I can make the next step in

expanding my life? And, you know,

we can get into all the. The neuroscience behind all that.

There's a lot of theory about what's there and what's my.

And what's in my genetic coding and my DNA and all that kind of good

stuff. But yet people can learn,

even if they don't come cold, sort of naturally predisposed

to this. But if I preach at them, you

can make a choice and you can do this and da, da, da, da, da.

It's just like, oh, get away. But if I simply ask, what are you

experiencing? Do you like that? If so, well,

great. How would you have even more of it? You don't like it? What could

you do to change it? And if we just keep persisting in

what could you. How could you people slowly take

the blinders off and start to see? And once a

person has begun the process of seeing and

actualizing what they see, it becomes

something that has its own momentum that we can build on.

But it really helps like crazy to be in a community.

And I don't mean I live in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a place,

but not necessarily a community. The community of the people

that I hang with who have a like focus.

Because if I'm surrounded by people with a like focus and if

one of us starts to slip, there's consciousness

around us to help support us. Now most

people these days are choosing communities that

are not all that uplifting, especially when we start

looking at the political world. And that

becomes a perfect example of, well, what does you have to focus on in the

news today in order to ruin your day?

And if you didn't open the news that day, would your day have been different?

So asking people that kind of stuff, that

thing, well now that starts to open some

doors or windows to other parts of the universe which

are really interesting, which is about the power of thought.

So I like to remind people that the universe. Just go back

to school. What they tell us the universe is made of it's energy. Can you

create energy? No. You can generate it, but you can't

create it. Can you destroy energy? No. What can you

do with it? Well, you can change its form.

Well, what's that mean? So I'll ask people

something. Maybe your listeners here would be interested in just

matching along the way. Anybody listening to the BBC radio

right now? Like dumb question for

you. Are you listening to the BBC right now? Meredith? No. Is

BBC in the room right now? No. Yes it

is. That's the trick.

Because what is BBC radio? It's a

frequency upon which rides information.

So at 9 o' clock the show is X and at 10 o' clock the

show is Y. But it's always the same frequency being broadcast.

Now if you had a radio in your room, you could

attune to the BBC. That's why I say is the BBC in the

room? Yeah. The difference

is for those kind of frequencies we need an external

device called a radio. What if I'm the radio?

What if I'm the tv? You ever have pictures come into your mind? You. You

wonder where they came from? Yes, great question.

Yes. Or a person. And then the next day they call

all of that. But see, since the.

You know, I don't recall the article. I

read it about four or five years ago, somewhere

up in one of the Harvard northeast teaching

hospitals or universities, someone

discovered a device that can

detect your thought without any

physical contact to your body. So we know

we can put probes all over your head. And then we can watch what happens,

which part of the brain, and yada, yada, yada. Well, this thing

sits outside the body, and it can detect your thoughts. It can't tell

you what you're thinking. It can just detect the changes in thought,

which is one of the first beginnings to say, hey, wait. This is

an energetic process, just like the

BBC radio is an energetic process. Just like

light is an energy, when you run it through a prism, you see

colors that were always there, just not visible. So if

we begin to play with it, you go, well, so

what is thought then? What is a being? What is aliveness? What is

energy? And that's the kind of stuff that becomes very

interesting. So during COVID I did a lot of free

coaching and counseling, most particularly for families

because their kids were getting stressed.

And, well, now, how much do you and your partner spend

stressing over Covid and the change in the

economy? And you talk about it with your kids?

No, but are they picking it up anyway? Yes,

because stress is just another frequency or another.

Maybe like a content writing on the frequency of who you are,

and the kid picks up who you are, and then they pick up that content

called stress. Now, most parents will

relate to the notion of having a young baby. The

baby is just fine. And someone walks into the room and the

baby gets all distressed. That person leaves, they calm down.

Or the inverse baby's all stressed. Certain person walks in, they calm

down. Well, why? And maybe it's

the quality of energy that that person is holding,

and one's easy to flow with, and the other is in conflict.

So how do we monitor that? So if I begin to think of

myself as the radio receiver, so I can pick

up. My teacher used to say, you're not responsible for the thoughts that

come into your head, only the ones you hold on to,

because thoughts are all over the place. But what if, besides being the receiver,

we're also the transmitter? So now

what energies am I transmitting into the universe, whether it's with my

wife or my family or whether it's out to the broader universe?

And what's the amplification effect when a bunch of us start holding the same

thought pattern and then other people pick it up and now we're in

this kind of thing, which is the predominant pattern today.

But I think what's coming onto the planet is a time for greater

awakening into loving as the,

I guess, preferred way, but perhaps the only way

for true life.

Yes. I think we're. It feels to me like

we're being shown that and that

Right now, I feel, it seems to me that a lot of the work

we have to do is to disconnect ourselves

from whatever would like to

be in charge of that frequency and those thought frequencies. You

know, I'm thinking of the media and particularly the news,

where their. Their business model is to have us in a certain

state of fear all of the time. And what I'm

hearing you say is that it's up. You know, the.

This soul connection is calling us to choose

always.

Always.

And I feel like we are

choosing collectively towards the love.

And I also feel like each time we make a big leap or

even a small leap, the fear

ratchets up and the

headlines become more intense. This

feeling of being enveloped by a manipulation

every time you open the computer becomes more

intense. But I also feel like then we up level again and

choose. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of us like

making a different choice.

Well, my wife has a sort of

a metaphor for how she sees what's going on.

She does a lot of work with consciousness and

judgments that people hold inside and get locked into their

bodies. And then how do you do forgiveness? Not forgiveness

of the other, but forgiveness of self. And it's really

powerful work. But she. She says the image he has is

like from a planetary consciousness level.

We're in a birthing process. So as

a male, I can only relate to birthing from a

theoretic point of view, but from a woman who's gone through it,

incredibly messy, painful experience that

results in joy most of the time.

And so she says she kind of sees that as a

conscious birthing out of the planet of a new day of

loving. But it has to go through all that painful,

perhaps even stressful process.

Right? Yes. That feels. Yeah, that feels like an apt

metaphor. And the contractions and then the release

and we move forward a little bit. Yeah.

So you mentioned a few minutes ago about opening

doors into some cosmic.

Let's call it cosmic science. I know you've

been involved in some organizations that are really on the cutting edge of looking at

consciousness and where we're headed

from that perspective. What are you

seeing. Happening?

Yeah, it's a really interesting thing that's going on

right now because it's a. I've

come at this from. There's so many angles to come in on this. So I'm

going to come in it from a. Odd one. First,

the world of science

can pretty much get stuck on itself. Yes.

And yet there's a. There's no such thing as the world of science.

There's a thing we call science, of which

there are many practitioners. But one of the issues that

science has dealt with for a very long time is the lack of

reproducibility. So

just like I told my chairman of the department, well, this

thing proved that when this one proved that. And they're different, they're in

conflict, direct conflict. So how's that

if it's real? So

what? A lot of scientists, there's a. I think it's called

the center for Open Science, something like that,

they're really working to provide a very sound set

of protocols that start with. Before you even form

your hypothesis. And there's a

whole litany of steps that

they would like to see people go through, regardless of what area they're

looking into. I don't care whether it's vitamins or how do you

operate on a liver, whatever it is,

that will make it more likely that a true

finding can be reproduced. And the reproducibility

issue is, you know, people can run an experiment, Somebody else

runs the exact same experiment with the same protocol and get a different result.

So what's that about, you know? Well, some of it is about

maybe the. The actual protocols were, were not

identical. So they're trying to eliminate one of those

variables. Now, we all know this thing called the observer phenomena.

So maybe the issue is that it's. It's not

what's happening, apparently, but it's the impact

that the observer has because, remember, it's thought and energy

that then disrupts something. So

way back, I went to school at University of

California at Davis, and Charlie Tart was a professor

there who's one of the early people looking into

various paranormal phenomena. And I got

to work with them, and we did some very interesting experiments and all the things

about, you know, remote viewing. And then we looked at

energetic transfer between plants. Like you could hook up

a plant to

gsr. I guess it was a galvanomic spins response

meter. If you took a cutting from the plant and grew

it in another room, you could take a pair of

scissors and threaten the plant in room B. And the mother

plant in room A would have a. A

measurable spike take place. And those are

some early things we were looking at. What's the nature of energy and how does

it communicate? And if it communicates from a plant to a

plant, what's that about?

So that's still the big question. What's that about? So there's a lot

of work going on, and it's.

Oh, let's see, what would be a good.

I don't Know what the right metaphor is? It's an

amazingly conflicted world because there's people out there

who are doing their best to study

and observe. Remember, key word

observe. What truth might be

about any of these things, whether it's remote viewing or absent healing or

just the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, any of this kind of

stuff. And then there's, there are those out

there who want to become famous because of it, and those

who want to then generate, how many grants can they get and how much

money? And one of

the, I'm not going to be naming any names here for

obvious reasons, but there's some pretty big names out there that

seem to be engaging

in something called P hacking. Have you heard that term?

No. P for probability.

So you set up your null hypothesis. You, you say if

this happens, it's, then it's less than, it's a P

of O1, you know, less than one time out of a hundred.

So they don't get the result they wanted. So then they start

running the data to see how it can be manipulated so they can

hack the P. And now all of a sudden the study gets

produced and nobody can begin to reproduce it

because it didn't actually happen. So now you got

the problem of the people who are trying to do something and they don't get

what they thought, then they scratch their head and go, hmm, so I wonder what

it is. And those who go, I didn't get what I want, how can I

make it look like I did? And so that creates

conflict in the world of the scientific community.

So there's a number of folks out there looking

to do really high quality works

because they all know, we all know

intuitively that this thing about it's all energy is real,

but we don't have the tools. I keep telling the folks that I

work with what would happen if you

ask Spirit this question.

What do we need that we don't have? And the

parallel question, what do we have that we don't need? So what's in the

way? And well, why would you ask Spirit? Well, because spirit is

the source of all energy.

So maybe if we could go into that consciousness, we could precipitate

down the next step or the next thing that we

need in order to move these things along. Now,

I don't know if I.

Thought I had one in here. Well,

I don't. You will recognize

this. Yes, we have. This is a high tech science tool.

Paperclip. Yeah. Okay. And.

I haven't done it a long time, but I would use the larger size

paperclip. I take a piece of thread about

24 inches long, tie it to one end, and then have a person

just dangle it like a pendulum while balancing their elbow. Okay, now

I want you to visualize the paperclip swinging back and forth, left to

right, and pretty soon it's going, and then north, south, then

in a circle. Now visualize it changing. And almost everybody

can do that. And I was doing this for a group of

MDs up at,

I forget Mass Eye and Ear, Mass General, one of those

Boston area leading hospital groups.

They were primarily neuroscientists and

endocrinologists. And those are two groups who really

know that thought changes what happens in the body.

So this thing is going like this, and there's one neuroscientist in the back. This

is back like around 1980. 81 just goes, this is

all. And I said, oh, interesting. What

do you mean? He says, you want me to think that my mind is

making the paperclip move? I said, that's interesting. Did I say that? He said,

no, but this is still. I said, why? Well,

what's happening is that I'm making little micro movements with

my hand or fingers. And because of the length of the string, it's amplified

and it looks bigger down here, but it's all because of movement up here.

I said, well, that's really interesting. And so you think it's,

huh? He goes, yes. I said, so let me ask you this.

In order for that paper gut to move, even if it's just micro movements up

here, did you have to engage a neuromuscular pathway for that to happen?

Yeah. Well, did you know which neuromuscular pathway

you engaged? No. Did you know how

you engaged it? No.

And yet it was engaged. And

he kind of sat there dumbfounded. And I said, so what if

the real key is how you hold the focus and

inside your body already knows how to make that happen? And it

sure is a little movement up here. Not disputing that.

But the question is, did you have to know the

particulars or was the result enough

to allow the particulars to take place? He still was scratching

his head. And I said, so you deal with people

who are paraplegic? Yeah. He

said, so what's the problem? Is it neuromuscular?

I mean, muscular, skeletal? No, it's neuromuscular. What's that mean? Well, below

the level of entry, no information is getting out.

So, I mean, this is like 80, 81, 82 somewhere. And I just said,

well, what if you could take some little titanium wires and stick it into the

motor control center of the brain and hardwire it down to their muscles. Could you,

could they think about their arm moving and get the signal out there and have

it move because it was hardwired. Well, guess

what? That's what's happening today in the world

of prosthesis

as well as people are. I mean, there's, there's images you can see on

the Internet of a guy who's paralyzed picking up his baby

by thinking about it. So we're only.

This is like the dark ages of what we're learning about. What's the

nature of energy and thought and how do you

both work with it as it is and harness it for whatever might

be. So sometimes these things

start out there in the world of that's impossible and

become every day sooner or later.

Yes. And that's such a good example with the paperclip

because. Yeah, it was our thought.

Our thought imaged the result and the.

Without our conscious intervention on the,

on the how we just got the result. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's interesting that that kind of thinking has been known in the

world of sport for a very long time. Yeah.

You know, high end athletes, whether or gymnasts or skiers or

golfers or whatever, visualize

the outcome and their body knows how to

produce it. But when you get outside of the world of sport, people go,

yeah, well that worked over there, but that won't work over here. Oh,

okay. Henry Ford famously said it does not. Whether you believe, whether

you can or you cannot, you're probably right. Right.

So. So you're engaged and connected to some,

you know, to some people, some scientists who are

very curious and engaged in these

types, in this type of research. So

where's it headed? And if you could, you know, and what are

your hypotheses? Even if they haven't, we haven't don't have the

mechanisms to, to show it.

Well, it's

as I mentioned before, you know, these energies and the

simple ones are things like light. You shine a beacon

beam of light through a prism and you see all the colors that are resonant

within it. But even that's not true.

We see the colors that our eyes are capable of perceiving.

And yet animals can perceive colors outside what we can perceive.

And the same thing is with sound. You know, we can hear within a

certain range. You know, men hear a certain range, women hear a certain range.

They're not the same. And then bring a dog around or

a cat or anything else and there's all kinds of sounds that we

don't. So because we don't notice it, we think it doesn't exist.

So the basic theory here is there's a whole lot to be discovered around

what exists that we do not yet know how to present perceive.

And then if we can learn it,

you know, there's,

let's see, where do we go with this?

One area of research that's going on is about telepathy

and this whole thing about, well, can you hold a thought, can it be

detected by another person? And then you have this whole thing about,

oh, can you influence an electron flow with thought?

It's sort of a classic experiment which then

produces some baffling results. But it's only

baffling because we don't have a framework to understand it yet. So

I think the main thing that's going on right now is the understanding

is that we only understand a tiny bit.

And yet the things we know just enough

to either shut us down going, well, why bother? Or

enough to awaken us and enliven us and go, oh my God,

what's really possible here? So it's all around what's really possible

and beyond possible. See,

in this world, when you get into the scientific community

and conventions and meetings, they talk about

paranormal, abnormal things like that. And I

go, so we're starting with a thought assumption

that it's not normal, right?

So if you already know the observer effect and you, you, you come

in going, it's, this is not normal. Do you expect to find

it? No, we expect not to find it, except rarely.

But what if it's entirely normal?

Just like the little baby who can sense who just walked in the room and

then later we have to train it out of them. Stop being so sensitive.

Oh, okay, I'll shut off. Sensitive

doesn't mean sensitive isn't there now it just shows up in another

way that shows up as a internalized

self judgment or it

internalizes as resentment which eventually bubbles out

in terms of anger. But all it was was I sensed something,

but I didn't know enough about what I was sensing to

either work with it, change it, or get out of

it. So there's a, I mean the, the

implications for everyday life are huge.

Yes. And it's like the way that you're

describing the limitations that we put on

science or that the scientific community puts on

itself are mirrored in the

limitations that we put on our, on our own energies.

I'm sort of hearing is where we, we may have

these expanded capacities if we did Ask Spirit what was

needed instead of trying to figure out how to iterate the

machine that we have to the machine that we could to the next version of

it. If we did, ask Spirit, what would that open up in

terms of our capacity? Well,

there's no way to validate what I'm about to tell you anymore

because he's dead. But George

Washington Carver may be a name that, you know, he was a black

botanist just after the Civil War.

I mean, he was born for that. But so He's a black

PhD botanist in, I think

Georgia, maybe it was Alabama somewhere down there. And all of these

now, now freed slaves had their land,

but the primary crop that they knew was not cotton, it was

peanuts. And so now all of a sudden,

all kinds of people are growing peanuts.

So in the world of the market, you know, capitalist forces

now supply is way more than demand. So what happens to the

price of peanuts? It crashes. So now everyone's producing all these

peanuts they can't do anything with. And

I read that George Washington Carver went out into

the field of peanuts, a field of peanuts,

sat down with the peanuts, meditated

and asked the peanuts, tell me what to do with you.

And he came up with, I think the number was 114 different uses

for peanuts. You could use it for dyes, you could make

cloth out of them, out of the shells. I mean, it goes on and on

and on. But the. He said the peanuts told him what to

do. And that radically transformed the economy for

those now newly freed slaves.

I love that. But it might be,

I mean, it could possibly be back

to where we started. That simple, maybe not easy for some of

us, but that simple is that if we're surrounded by all

this information and all this energy and we're only limited to

by the, you know, ability of our, what we think of

as our five senses, it could just be that, that all the

information, all the piece, all the everything, all the knowledge is

just sitting there waiting for us. Well, it's open

to it and it's all. What's really interesting, it's all

inside of us too, because it's all energy.

So, you know, in insight,

we created something called a heart chart. And outside

the heart we had opinions which were thinking and beliefs

and all the mental stuff. And the other side of the chart we had

the emotional content and what we feel. Well, I

feel this is true is different from it's true. And I think it's true. It's

different from it's true. But in the heart center we said that's A

center of natural knowing. And if you can learn how to access your heart. And

obviously we didn't mean the physical organization, but another

place, all kinds of information becomes available

to us, but we have to become available to it.

So everybody has what I. I

call an internal bell just to create a metaphor

for it. And people have heard the phrase, well, that rings

true. So have you ever had a conversation

with somebody and your internal bell just rings

and you just know it's true? And you ever had a conversation

and the bell goes thud, because

it ain't true? So we know that.

We know we have the ability to know, which

we shut down because then we want to run it all

through this brain. We already know that there's bundles of

neurons in the heart, just like we knew a few years before that

there's bundles of neurons in the gut. When you say, my gut told me. Yeah,

it did. You just have to learn to listen to it. Well,

I knew in my heart. Well, you did, but can you

expand that to include more and more? So

we usually just train people out of it. Oh, be logical.

Be rational. I love the word rational. Lies. To

frame it as two words, rational and lies.

So we can tell ourselves rational lies. And doesn't change what's true, it just

change our experience of it. So my

teacher, you know, he would not

say he taught meditation, he taught what he called spiritual exercises.

And he said, so, you know, if you want to get strong physically, what do

you. Do you exercise physically? Well, if you wanted to get

strong spiritually, you might want to do spiritual exercises.

So if we wanted to develop these other

abilities which are native within us. So that's the theory. It's

native within everybody. Well, then what would you do to strengthen

those? So first we have to detect them just

to understand if it's even there.

But we all know intuitively, for most of us, it is there,

unless we've really had that beaten heart out of us. But

even the most jaded person has had that sense they knew

something. They had the intuition. Well, yeah. So what would it

do to develop that? And if you look at the word intuition, it's really

incredible that I like to look at words from their original

root meaning. And the Latin

vulgate, Latin root for intuition, was intuire, which meant

to look at. Isn't that amazing?

Intuition means simply to look. And my

spiritual teacher told me years and years ago I was about to go in for

a procedure called radial keratotomy, which is they use a

scalp and put little slits like bicycle spokes around your

iris in the cornea, and it flattened the lens so you

could see. I was basically coke bottle blind at the time.

He said, so, Russell, the source of the. I mean, the

problem is now physical, meaning your eyes, but the source

isn't. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, you've been straining for

years to see things with your physical eyes that can only be seen with your

spiritual eyes.

So if we take spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, go inside,

what do I need to see? Show me that which I'm not yet.

And sometimes we've all had things show up inwardly.

So can. Can that. Is that an actual

muscle that can be trained? Yeah.

Yeah, it is. So

I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I love

that. I think so. And it's. It's.

Yeah, I love that idea of practicing. Just

practicing it. Ask. And

I, you know, a lot of my audience is on a health journey, as you

know, we all are in some capacity, I guess, and it's just

opening up to what. What's next? What. What's

next on the path, not trying to hit a specific destination.

Well, yeah, you know, years and years ago, I saw

a doctor who was.

I was there for general health interest and curiosity. But he

did a lot of work with people with cancers and whatnot. He says, you know,

people will come in and they'll see me and they'll say I was just fine.

And then all of a sudden. And he said, no, this was

at least 12 to 14 years in the making,

so. Well, yeah, so

now you have a. An issue. Like, as my eyesight

deteriorated, there was actually a physical problem with the eyes, which they could

correct, but the source wasn't.

So then the question is, well, now how do I move forward with that in

this or any other area? And something I like to do for

anybody. Imagine I've got a couple hundred

people in a room to a couple thousand people in the room, and I say,

take a hand and make a fist. The hardest, tightest

squeezing as fist you can make. How's it feel?

Not so good. Is this good hand good for anything? Well,

yeah, only a couple things. And if you look

at the top of your hand. Yeah. You can probably even see it

on the screen. You'll see that there's parts would have gone all white

where the blood is left, and there's parts that are. Now you can

be a black person, but keep squeezing for a second.

And as you keep squeezing, the blood is pooling up, and pretty soon that

hand starts to go Numb. Now, if you take the other hand and make a

hard squeezing fist, too, then pretty soon you got all kinds

of things. And this is an image of resistance only. What, am I

resisting my own self. And if a person

squeezes down inside going, I hate this, or I

resent them, or. Yeah. And you hold, ah,

which is all this stuff going on in the political, social world

right now. They're squeezing on their own cells and the blood's pooling up. They go,

no, numb inside. And the only thing they're left with is the ability to react.

Now, if you take those two hands, which we've only been squeezing for

less than a minute, count of three, I want you to

take one hand and shoot it open and the other hand open

as slowly as you possibly can. Okay? Okay.

Count of three. 1, 2,

3. How did the hand feel that

you shot? Open. Tingly. And it

had a little beat up, but it was. And now it's fine. What's

the other hand like? Going really, really slow. It feels

still really, really tight. And it's not very fluid, is it?

No. And so the question becomes,

if you find yourself stuck someplace, do you find yourself in resistance? You find

yourself in pain? Did you want to shoot it open

or just go? Until finally you just go, oh, that feels fine.

And you're not in a very useful hand position. Now, it's just a

matter of metaphor, but the question might be, if

I'm dealing with a medical issue, what

am I resisting inside?

Am I resisting some part of me? Am I resisting some part of you?

Is it a thought? What am I holding inside that's

constricting and blocking the flow? Now, if

you get it early enough, you know, like a headache. What do people

do with headaches? Pop aspirins or Advil or something?

Well, did the headache show up because it

wanted to be killed, or was it there to say, something's going

on, let's pay attention? And what's usually going on is stress.

And we squeeze down. We squeeze across here.

Blocks the constrict. It constricts the flow of blood. The capillaries don't get

enough, and then you have a headache. Now, not all

headaches are from that, but many are. So what if

you said, I just may need to go in and relax? What tension am

I holding? Is it in my tmj? Is it, you know, is it up

here? You know, what's the tension? What am I

resisting? What am I judging? And if you can find the thing you're resisting

or judging, maybe then you can go, oh, so I release

that. I forgive myself for judging.

Judging what? Well, I start out judging you,

but if the thing I've been talking about is true, we all are part of

the same divine energy. As soon as I judge you, I've judged the divine

without thinking about it. As soon as I judge the divine, guess

what? I'm connected to the divine. So now I've judged myself as well. And

I cut myself off from the divine flow. So just like you

can cut yourself off from the blood flow, you can cut yourself off from the

divine flow. Not that the divine stopped flowing. I just

cut myself off from experiencing it. So the sooner I can find where

I cut off and release, the more I can move back into

flow again, which is then part of the

awakening process. But now we have a dilemma.

I was running a program with my teacher. We were both

co facilitating and on a break. He said, russell, you seem so

frustrated. I said, yeah, they're so slow to wake up. He said,

oh, Russell, if you had a little baby and it was

asleep, would you shake it? Say, wake up, grow

faster? No, because the sleep is part of the

growth process. So with a human and consciousness.

Yeah. Bingo. Yeah. We may receive something and

we may have to sleep on it for a while, because in the

internal state that never sleeps, that's where

we have a greater openness for the spiritual

flow of education, if you will, that awakens us and then we can go,

oh, now I'm ready for the next phase. So we do

have these rhythms, just like the heart has an up and a

down, open and a close, a breath in and a breath out.

Well, let's let all that happen. And then

perhaps the most interesting part of this, in my way, thinking about it, I used

to do the work I call. I do the work. The work I used to

call transformation. And everyone likes transformation.

And I do too, at one level. But the word, if you look it up

in a dictionary, means a change in form or appearance.

Okay? So I say, well, let's pretend I had an

old, old Volkswagen, but I always wanted a Ferrari.

You can go online and you can buy a Ferrari car kit. So you get

the body and it's literally. You can literally do this. And it's

designed to go over the frame of a Volkswagen.

Now the question is, do I have a Ferrari? No. But I did

transform the Volkswagen because it changed the former

appearance. Transmutation

is the same thing. It says it's a change in form or appearance to a

higher order of energy. Well, now we're progressing

but we still just change the form or appearance, although the energetic flow

is different. So imagine you put a different grade of

gasoline or something inside of your Ferrari

Volkswagen. But the real thing we're after is transcendence.

And to transcend something means to rise above, especially over

the negative. And so how do we learn to

transcend the apparent limitations of my mind, my

emotions, what's going on in the world, so I can create the

qualitative experience that rises above and stay loving?

Nelson Mandela, you know,

all these people who've shown us what it means to be loving in the

presence of oppression so we

don't have to be oppressed in the presence of

oppression. Although from the outside it will look that way.

But can I still be free? So we can use all these as

inspirations. And inspiration. I mean, I have so many of these things. Inspiration

comes from a Latin word, inspirari, which means to be breathed by

spirit. It's not something

that happens to me from the outside. It's the

spirit breathes me and I arise in its

awakening. So.

So we'll step into that.

Into being breathed. Yeah.

Russell, thank you so much for your time today.

This has been beautiful. And

I was going to say transformative. I'll say

transcendent. That's okay. See, the challenge

is, you know, we need the words to communicate. Yeah. But

we can use it to communicate to a higher level

so I don't have to say to somebody, oh, wrong word.

Just go. Okay, so what I think what you may be meaning is the ability

to expand in the presence of this. Oh, yeah, that's good. Fine,

we'll do that. Yeah.

And that's what I mentioned at a before, but I do want to end on

it as well, is your approach of there is a real

space of allowing in your presence,

which I think from the perspective

of the observer, effect has

an extremely loving resonance

for whomever is getting observed

by you. So thank you for bringing that.

Bringing that energy to it. It's very profound and important.

Yeah. Well, lest anyone be

misinformed, I am not the model of loving

kindness. We always teach the thing we most need

to learn. Yes. No, I will

not hold you to that standard all of the time, but thank you.

You certainly are able to embody it,

which is most appreciated. Well,

thank you. Your loving essence

radiates beautifully. Thank you, Russell. Thank

you for being here.