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CNN Larry King Live
Change Your Mind, Change Your Life
Aired August 02, 2008 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LARRY KING, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight, "Change Your Mind, Change Your Life."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The brain does not know the difference of what it sees in its environment and what it remembers.
ANDREW NEWBERG, M.D.: As far whether or not we're just living in a big holo-deck or not, it's not a question that we don't necessarily have a good answer to.
DR. JOSEPH DISPENZA, D.C.: Everybody has that that experience when they've made up their mind that they've wanted something. That's quantum physics in action
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Can your head handle the possibilities?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FRED ALAN WOLF, PHD: Asking these questions opens up new ways of being in the world. It brings in a breath of fresh air. It makes life more joyful. The real trick to life is to not be in the no but to be in the mystery.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Right now on LARRY KING LIVE.
(on camera): We have an outstanding edition of LARRY KING LIVE tonight. We're going to explore the brain and all we're discovering about it in this fascinating look at what the brain does and does not do, and the brain and addiction.
We have an outstanding panel. But we begin our first segment with a young lady who has appeared on this show frequently in the past.
J.Z. Knight has dedicated over 20 years of studying the connection between mind and body, the author of her auto biography, "State of Mind," and the founder of Ramtha School of Enlightenment.
Last time you were here, you said we are all addicted to our emotions.
J.Z. KNIGHT, AUTHOR & FOUNDER, RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT: Yes, we are. KING: Explain.
KNIGHT: Most people do not understand that the greatest addiction in their life is their emotional addiction, emotional addiction to past experiences. We gain our experiences in our life that begin to define us by the time we're about 20 years old. Then we sort of go on automatic. Then we keep playing back the emotions instead of having a new idea and a new thought. So people don't realize that they are led every day by their feelings. They want another emotional head. So they keep reexperiencing the same emotion no matter people, places times, events, no matter who they are, who they meet, they are after the same emotion.
It's the same addiction, Larry, as someone who is an alcoholic, as someone who's on drugs. And all those things do is to allow brain chemistry to happen because it's that high or that state of peace. People are addicted to their past, their past emotions. It's what -- if you have a past emotion you're addicted to, you don't have a future. How can you have a future if every day you wake up and you are living in your past?
KING: But with alcohol and drugs, you can go through a toxic withdrawal. You can break a habit by drying out. What do you do with an emotional habit?
KNIGHT: About a 27-day rehab from your past emotions.
KING: You do a rehab?
KNIGHT: The rehab is, instead of waking up every day and putting your brain on automatic, that your hardwired personality kicks in and goes, oh, this is who are you. Well, OK, this is who we are going to feel today, this is how we want to feel today.
Instead of going on automatic, which everyone in the world does, you stop that and say, this day I'm going to create my day. I'm going to create a day with a new thought, a new experience. I'm going to create the reality of this day and, from the new thought that I create, the new sentences that I say I am, I will manifest that day. That day brings a brand new emotion, no old and lousy.
KING: Isn't that an Eastern philosophy?
KNIGHT: I think it's a human philosophy.
KING: But don't they, in the Eastern world, practice that?
KNIGHT: I don't know if anyone actually ever practices that because if everybody did, we'd be further into the future than we are currently.
KING: So we're just skimming here, the surface?
KNIGHT: We're treading water and we're -- we don't reinvent ourselves. We don't realize that our future is being consumed by our past. The day that we realize, we wake up and go, the reason I'm depressed, the reason I'm uninspired is because I can pretty much predict how I'm going to feel about today. I can pretty much predict everything I'm going to saying today. That's uninspiring. We were really created to be creators.
KING: Isn't depression, though -- if we can overcome that, of the mind, isn't it a disease?
KNIGHT: Well, all disease is from an attitude that pushes the button genetically that begins to create those proteins inside of ourselves that are mutated. Depression really, at the root of it, is that if our brain is hardwired like this and we have no neuroplasticity -- and that neuroplasticity means that thought can travel to other regions of our brain to where we analyze it and we get greater insight. A person that has depression does not allow the -- their brain does not allow the thought to go any further. So it's in a cycle of thinking emotion, thinking emotion, thinking emotion.
KING: Can we control our reaction to external things?
KNIGHT: Yes.
KING: Can we determine to how we'll react to the fire in the house?
KNIGHT: Yes. Instead of being a reactive person, to be a master of the reality, even our house, even our family, our workplace, our greater place of enjoyment. That instead of reacting in the old ways, that we absolutely cultivate the ability to create new realities. We really are.
KING: You've done some work with Selma Hayek?
KNIGHT: Selma's my best friend.
KING: I mean, does she work with you on this concept we're talking about?
KNIGHT: Sue is a student in the school. She created her future.
KING: You changed her?
KNIGHT: Totally.
KING: Changed you?
KNIGHT: Totally, Larry.
KING: We're joined in West Palm Beach by Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon, and founder of noetic sciences.
Were you affected at all by walking on the moon?
EDGAR MITCHELL, APOLLO 14 ASTRONAUT & FOUNDER, NOETIC SCIENCES: Well, not so much by walking on the moon but taking a look at the cosmos from a different perspective and starting to get a big-picture point of view, a much bigger picture than us humans have had before. KING: Did something happen to you on the way back from the moon, Edgar?
MITCHELL: Well, just seeing the larger picture and having some insights as a result of that, I call it an epiphany. And the short version is just seeing the earth, the sun, the moon, all from a different perspective. I would say the big-picture of perspective, like a mountain top experience, or peak experience.
KING: Edgar, you, I imagine, you have led a happier life?
MITCHELL: I think so. I have a very satisfied life, Larry, and it's because of the experience and because of the desire to make a contribution. My whole attitude toward life and for being of service and towards pushing the frontiers has expanded and there's great joy in doing that.
KING: And I salute you. Thank you, Edgar.
J.Z. Knight is with us. More to come. Don't go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where do we come from? An immense quantum mechanical...
DISPENZA: You're brain doesn't know the different between what's taking place out there and what's taking place in their.
WOLF: There is no out there out there, independent of what's going on in here.
MICHAEL LEDWITH, PHD: It's like positive thinking. It's a wonderful idea, positive thinking. What it means is that I have a little smear of positive thinking, covering a whole mass of negative thinking. So thinking positive is not really thinking positive. It's disguising the negative thinking that we have.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Exploring adventures of the mind. J.Z. Knight remains with us. We're now joined by Dr. Dean Radin. He is senior fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and Dr. Candace Pert, the scientific director of Rapid Pharmaceuticals, Incorporated, author of "Everything You Need to Know to Feel Good."
All right, Dr. Radin, first of all, what is neotic sciences?
DR. DEAN RADIN, SENIOR FELLOW, INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES: Noetic science refers to the idea that there are multiple ways of knowing. We usually think in the Western world that we know rationally and that's it. But other people and actually many people experience intuitions, psychic experiences, mystical experiences, and so we look at these other ways of possibly knowing about the world. KING: You study that?
RADIN: Yes.
KING: You meet people that have such gifts?
RADIN: Well, we do. But we actually, in studying people over many years, we see that virtually everyone has multiple ways of knowing.
KING: Dr. Pert, do you agree with what J.Z. Knight has said?
DR. CANDACE PERT, AUTHOR & SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR, RAPID PHARMACEUTICALS, CORP.: It's ironic because I'm a neuroscientist and I studied all the years studying the brain because I thought, by studying the brain, I would understand how to feel good, how to lead a happy life, unlock the mysteries of the universe.
But now what I'm really interested in is in consciousness. And what my research at the NIH revealed is that, yes, the brain is important but consciousness is beyond the brain. I mean, in fact, you know, looking through the microscope and studying the molecules of emotion. And this comes from real hard science, looking through the microscopes, seeing the receptors for all of the emotional chemicals.
KING: You can see that?
PERT: That's what I spent 20 years on, mapping these endorphin receptors, et cetera. But they are not just in your brain. They are in your body.
KING: Dr. Radin, do you agree that you can be addicted to an emotion?
RADIN: I always defer to Candace when that comes up. But what I could say though is whether it is actually true that the brain and mind are the same thing. Now, in standard neuroscience, the answer is yes. The brain equals the mind. The kind of research that I do, and I think J.Z. would agree, we have evidence that the mind and the brain are actually not exactly the same thing.
KING: Not the same?
RADIN: Not the same. That if something like telepathy were real, for example, that there was some kind of mind-to-mind connection, this is not well accounted for with the idea that the brain is the mind and that's all there is. But if there's evidence, and there is evidence that minds can connect through a distance, then it suggests that whatever the mind is, the brain plus something else.
KING: Dr. Pert, can I be addicted to an emotion?
PERT: Well, it was pretty stunning some 30 odd years ago when we found out that the brain stimulates morphine. It has little receptors for it. So real morphine we have in our brains. You know, so people were looking for a non-addictive analgesic and we thought maybe we could find that one of these peptides would do it.
KING: So you can't?
PERT: Well, I think we're addicted to pleasure and it's our natural state to be addicted to pleasure because that's how we're wired up.
KING: Can we be addicted to non-pleasure?
PERT: Yes, we can. That's one of the things. People do get into these addictive self-sabotaging habits
KING: And is that often depression?
PERT: Well, that's another thing. Depression is Prozac inefficiency -- only kidding. Depression is -- I think people are just not living in the right paradigm. They are not aware that we still have the same bodies and brains that we had thousands of years ago. Too much is going on and there's toxic problems. People are stressed out. People have toxic build up and society treats it all with medication, which is not the answer.
KING: Not the answer.
PERT: No, am I'm a pharmacologist. I am a Johns Hopkins University- trained pharmacologist. No, it's not the answer. It's said. I'm not saying people should go off their anti-depressants. And it certainly has saved some lives. But at this point, there's a lot of overmedication going on. We make our own drugs in our brain. We make our own morphine and valium.
KING: J.Z., can I retrain my brain?
KNIGHT: Yes. But it's restraining -- your only using a small aspect of your brain. Your personality that is Larry King is only using a small aspect of your brain's possibility as is everyone. When we make a decision to evolve ourselves beyond our own personality, our brain is like any computer that has capacity for a new program. And a new program can be lit up inside of the brain. In other words, we can evolve our personality outside of our hard wiring in our brain.
KING: What do you make of what J.Z. and Candace are talking about with regard to emotions and personality?
RADIN: Well, I think it shows that it expands our notion of what we think the brain is doing and actually the entire body. How does it actually work and, more importantly, what is our potential? Is our potential limited in the way we see the advertisements pushing pharmaceuticals to help us or can we do this internally. And I think all of this research on both sides suggests we have an enormous capacity to change ourselves and we're just beginning to learn how to do that.
KING: And in changing ourselves, we change our brain?
RADIN: We change our brain and our body both.
PERT: It seems to me that this ties to what J.Z. was saying earlier. The key thing that makes humans unique from animals -- we have the same receptors and brains pretty much. But we have this big frontal cortex here, which even chimpanzees who have 99 percent of the same DNA that we do don't have this. And this is where planning and choice happens. So we can chose and we can actually start to exercise our muscle up there and start to choose what we want and manifest what we want in the outside world.
KING: We'll come right back.
(voice-over): Coming up, I sat down with CNN's own Dr. Sanjay Gupta to pick his brain. But then we sent him to the Biocybernaut Institute to get wired.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DISPENZA: Who is in the driver's seat when we control our emotions or we respond to our emotions? We know physiologically that nerve cells that fire together are wired together. If you practice something over and over again, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, feel frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer on a daily basis, if you give reason for the victimization in your life, you're rewiring and reintegrating that neuronet on a daily basis and that neuronet now has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an identity.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: If anybody knows how our heads work, it's CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I sat down with him for a talk and then shipped him off to the Biocybernaut Institute for a very unusual assignment. Check it out.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KING: We are on-set with Dr. Sanjay Gupta and we have a brain here with us.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: The two things are mutually exclusive.
KING: It ain't that big a brain.
OK, can you be addicted to emotions?
GUPTA: Yes. And I thought long and hard about this. We've done some specials on this on CNN. But it's interesting. And people, like an anxious person, a person who is anxious all the time tends to change their brain chemistry a little bit. So much so that when they are not anxious, their brain craves anxiousness. Their receptors are saying feed us, feed us with anxiety a little bit. Even if there's nothing to be anxious about, they are still anxious. So you can develop an anxious personality, if you will.
KING: How does it work in relation to depression? GUPTA: We know a lot more about depression than we ever did. It used to be this thing that was in the realm of psychology purely, like are you sleeping well, are you eating well, and sort of making sense of that.
But now they actually do studies where they image the brain in someone who's depressed and in someone who has been treated for depression and they find something very interesting. These areas over here, the frontal lobes, tend to be a little bit depressed or suppressed, I should say. They don't activate as well in someone who's depressed, who is having thoughts of depression. But if they are treated, and that treatment is successful, you start to see an activation in the frontal lobes again, so this area in here, probably the most responsible for depression.
But what is so interesting, Larry, is that taking this psychological thing and actually assigning it a real physical attribute, saying, look, I know this person's depression is better. Do you know how I know? Because their frontal lobes are lighting up. This is a brave new world of neuroscience, actually being able to assign some sort of a physical attributes to what were typically considered psychological diseases.
KING: Where is the mind?
GUPTA: I don't know that we can locate it. We can say that the mind is in a specific place. It's sort of a metaphysical thing almost. I'm fascinated about that. I think this idea of spirituality, this idea of religion and meeting science and how we can hope for improvements, all of that is fascinating to me.
KING: Thanks, Sanjay.
GUPTA: Anytime, Larry.
KING: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and our special guest, the brain.
GUPTA: Never leave home without it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KING: Then we sent him to the Biocybernaut Institute where he led himself to science and spoke to Dr. James Hardt.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. JAMES HARDT: I'm the inventor, the creator of the technology. Some of these circuit boards are actually soldered by hand.
My mentor, Dr. Joe Camien (ph), in 1962, discovered that the conventional wisdom was wrong about brain waves. Joe Camien (ph) discovered that people can learn to voluntarily control their brain waves. When you control your brain waves and you produce certain beneficial patterns, you get rid of anxiety, depression, hostility, paranoia, psychostenia. It's a function your brain waves, your personality -- they are linked. And if you change your brain waves, you will change, in profound and lasting ways, your personality. So I would see this is the future of psychology.
You want to listen to the tones and do whatever is necessary in your mind to pause and suppression the tones, to stay quieter or an enhancement to cause them to get louder.
Left occipital, right occipital, left central, right central, occipital-hemming (ph) coherence and central-hemming (ph) coherence.
Whether they are anxious or depressed or using drugs or having relationship problems -- this training does only one thing, it improves central nervous system function. But then what in life don't you use your central nervous system for.
GUPTA: Right.
HARDT: So as you improve central nervous system function, you're going to see improvements in anything that you're applying your attention to.
I don't usually give hints the first day but I'll make an exception. If you do intense visual imagery or mental arithmetic, anything that challenges your mind intellectually, that may reduce the alpha.
GUPTA: The first part, with the sort of alpha suppression, I think I started to get a little bit of a sense of focusing on something and that seemed to suppress the alpha to some extent. I was actually doing three-digit multiplication in my head.
HARDT: Impressive.
GUPTA: I wasn't getting it right, I don't think.
HARDT: But you were trying?
GUPTA: I was trying, yes.
How effective is this?
HARDT: Well, it's profoundly effective. When we did experiments with scientists from Stanford Research Institute, we measured their creativity before and after. That went up, on average, 50 percent. When we took a group and we measured I.Q. before and after the training, the average increase was 11.7 points, stable a year out.
GUPTA: We're asking people to give their lives for a week and you're offering a reward in return.
HARDT: Yes, indeed. A new life.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEDWITH: Who are we? What should we do? And where are we going? STUART HAMEROFF, MD.: Why are we here? Well, that is the ultimate question, isn't it?
KNIGHT: What is reality?
WOLF: What I thought was unreal, now, for me, seems to some ways be more real than white I think to be real.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: We're now joined by Will Arntz, the co-producer, co-director and financier of the film, "What the Bleep Do We Know."
Is this about quantum physics, Will?
WILL ARNTZ, CO-PRODUCER OF THE FILM "WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?": Well, it's part of it. But the movie has -- there's the quantum physics part, there is the stuff you were talking about - emotions, addictions, peptides and how that affects our lives -- and there is a fair amount of silly humor, too.
KING: How did you come upon this?
ARNTZ: Well, I was interested. I was a physicist originally, and then I got interested in computers, and then I got interested in meditation and spiritual practices, and I eventually started combining them all. I started attending the Ramtha School, where a lot of these subjects were talked about.
And interestingly enough, when I started telling friends who weren't into this about it, they got fascinated - the bit about being addicted to emotions, the thing about the quantum, the weird world of the quantum -- Fred will probably talk about, which is just mind-blowing.
When I started telling them, they all were like, "Wow, we want more," and that's when I got the idea to make this movie.
KING: Give me an example, Candace, of what we can do to change -- let's say you're addicted to a human being who is bad for you.
CANDACE PERT, PH.D: Well, the simplest thing -- and Louise Hay was a pioneer in this idea that your thoughts can control your future and your health and make things happen in your life.
It can be as simple as saying, affirming many times a day, "I love and accept myself just as I am." Now, that's hard for some people to do. That's very powerful -- just saying, "I love and accept myself just as I am" and saying that 30 times a day.
I mean, it sounds crazy, but it's very powerful because a lot of these emotional memories that they go all the way through our body and our spinal cord, and we are living in the past and reenacting things that happened years ago. So if we consciously speaking is at the very top of our brain and by affirming again and again, we set up new neuro- networks, and once our brain and body/mind is aligned, we just start to emit... KING: That's one thing to do. What's another, J.Z.?
J.Z.KNIGHT, FOUNDER, RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT: I absolutely agree with Candace Pert, and it's amazing that she's on your show as a brilliant doctor talking about how a person can absolutely change their life -- and she should know.
We're taught at the school to create your day, and Ramtha has been teaching that for three decades. And the reason for that is - is just as Candace said - thought is there in your brain to construct reality.
It is important what we think. Thoughts matter. When we decide we don't want to suffer anymore, we don't want to be addicted anymore, we have to do. We learn to make a small list. It's important. And the small list says, "This day, I'm going to create my day. This day I have always been filled with joy." Not that I will be -- but that I've always been filled with joy. About three times.
Why three times? To get present with the word you're saying. So they are seeing here, those manufacture the day. "This day I've always been radiantly healthy." Your body hears every thought in your brain. You begin to heal yourself -- "This day I've always been fabulously wealthy," "this day I am 30 years younger."
KING: You're reaffirming yourself?
KNIGHT: No. You are affirming a new reality. You are intentionally creating a reality that you are not yet in, and that redeems you from the addiction.
KING: Do you buy this, Dean?
DEAN RADIN, PH.D., PARAPSYCHOLOGY EXPERT: Yes, and I actually can offer something which is even much further out, which suggests that if you want to change, one of the ways to help yourself do that is if a loved one mentally gives you an additional prayer to push you in that direction.
I'm not talking about a religious thing here, but simply the intention of a loved one has a strong intention to help you. We know from laboratory tests that that intention actually causes a change in your physiology - even if you are at a distance.
KING: Really?
RADIN: Yes. So this suggests that if someone is struggling with some kind of addiction, or they want to change, they can do what Candace and J.Z. are saying, but they can be helped actually by someone who is strongly intending to help them.
KING: Have you changed, Will?
ARNTZ: Yes. Yes
KING: Significantly? ARNTZ: Well, going through the process of making the film was difficult in that we were forced - there was three of us who made the film - and we were forced to look at ourselves through the lens of being addicted.
So you get three headstrong people trying to make one movie, and we had to come to terms with our addictions, and, like, for instance, mine, since you'll probably ask -- I wanted to be right all the time. So I would tell Mark or Betsy, "Let's do it this way," and they'd say, "Ah, you're full of it." And then I would lose it. Then they would laugh at me and say, "Oh, Will, you enjoying the peptides?"
(LAUGHTER)
KING: And now you don't do that anymore?
ARNTZ: Not as much.
KING: So you're saying people can really change, Will?
ARNTZ: People can fundamentally change. The big limit, as everyone is, as everyone has been saying, in your mind what you think you can do. If you don't think you can change, you won't. It's kind of so simple that you trip over it, but there you have it.
KING: So it's as simple as "you can do it"?
ARNTZ: Well, and then you have to -- that has to be where you start. But then, like Candace says, you have to -- the mind is going to want to go back to -- it's a habit. It's going to want to go back to "the same old, same old," so you have to at that point use your awareness, or the observer we sometimes call it, and say, "Ah, I'm going back there."
It's like the guy who goes out on a Friday night - "Ah, I'm looking for a fight." It's because he's actually addicted to the chemicals that the adrenaline gives. And he'll - guess what - he'll probably find one.
KING: Thanks, Will. Will Arntz.
Our panel returns, and we will meet Fred Alan Wolf, the physicist known as "Dr. Quantum." Don't go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The brain is capable of (unintelligible)...
The brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment and what it remembers.
JOHN HAGELIN, PH.D.: Have you ever thought about what thoughts are made of? PERT: I think some of the things we are seeing with the children today is a sign that the culture is in the wrong paradigm and not appreciating the power of thought.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: We are now joined in San Francisco by Fred Alan Wolf. Dr. Wolf is a physicist also known as "Dr. Quantum." He is author of "Dr. Quantum's Little Book of Big Ideas" and co-author of the new book "Dr. Quantum in the Grandfather Paradox."
Since the Law of Attraction says we attract everything in our lives, how does the Law of Repulsion work?
FRED ALAN WOLF, AUTHOR: Well, if there wasn't a Law of Repulsion, we'd be in a big soup and nobody would be able to get away from anything, so we've got to have both attraction and repulsion.
In fact, when you get down to the very level of where the whole universe begins, it starts by a huge repulsion, and that is what is called "The Big Bang," and in the nucleus of every atom of every part of your body, that kind of dance of attraction and repulsion is constantly going on, and that's what makes life fascinating.
KING: Why are we intimidated by physics?
WOLF: Because you didn't have guys like me teaching it, who said to you, "Look, this is fun, guys. Look what you can do."
Instead you had people, "Well, we think that it's very dull that you do this the right way," and try to get people to think in rigid boxes, and the whole idea is that physics is a fun thing that can expand your mind, expand the way you think about the whole universe and in fact have a good time doing so. That's been my life, Larry, and I just love what I'm doing.
KING: Tell me, Dr. Physicist, Dr. Quantum, how do I apply this to - how do I apply physics? Dr. Edward Teller told me once - but it was years ago, and I forgot -- how do I apply physics to wanting to get rid of this addiction or being unhappy in this situation?
WOLF: The question really is, what do you think you are? Who do you think you are? And can you change who the observer is that you think you are? And the whole idea is -- quantum physics says that the observer affects reality. Therefore, if you can change how you go about observing what you call life, you can change the reality that you're living in, and that is where it comes from.
KING: All right. Give me a simple example. Give me a situation.
WOLF: Let's say that right now you're sitting and you're saying, "Oh, I'm so depressed. I feel so bad. I feel terrible."
I tell people, just do one simple thing. It's very simple. Ask yourself this question: "Who is feeling depressed?" But don't answer the question. Just posing the question without answering it changes the chemistry inside the body, and just by asking, you can begin to lift yourself from that depression.
You've got to keep doing it for a while because it isn't like automatic pilot. It's not like, throw a switch. You've got to keep doing it, and after a while you begin to realize that the person who is saying "I am depressed" is not you.
KING: Is the mind an amazing organ?
WOLF: The mind is a process, and it's related to what is happening at the level of what we call the quantum field of reality.
The brain, on the other hand, is an organ. It's a bunch of "stuff." But the mind is not made of "stuff." In fact, it's not made of anything. In fact, from the point of view of quantum physics, the mind doesn't even exist in the material space/time world. It comes before it.
KING: We can change the way we think.
PERT: We are naturally hardwired for bliss.
KING: For bliss?
PERT: For bliss. We've got the whole system in our brain, in our frontal cortex. That's what I talked about in my book, and everybody wants to feel good. And, you know, we don't have to try so hard. It's almost like we just have to get out of our own way, sort of a paradox.
KING: Do you use physics, Dr. Radin?
RADIN: Most of my work is based on physics. One thing that Fred said which is perhaps glossed over a little bit is we've been discussing a lot about inside the body stuff, and one of the implications of observation changing reality or influencing it, is that that also happens outside the body.
So if you observe a system which happens to be outside of yourself, somewhere out there that system will change as well.
KING: Are you an optimist in all of this, Dr. Wolf?
WOLF: I am more than an optimist. I am both - let's say I'm willing to enjoy my pessimism and my optimism. I am willing to enjoy and rejoice in my skepticism as well as my believability. So, in other words, all of these things are part of what I use in my "kit of life."
KING: We're going to have you back. Thanks, Dr. Wolf.
WOLF: You're welcome.
KING: We'll be back with our panel right after this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WOLF: Are people affecting the world of reality that they see? You bet they are. Every single one of us affects the reality that we see, even if we try to hide from that and play victim. We all are doing it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think the more you look at quantum physics, the more mysterious and wondrous it becomes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Quantum physics is, very succinctly speaking, is a physics of possibility.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These are questions. These are addressing questions of how the world feels to us, of whether there's a difference between the way the world feels to us and the way it really is.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: This is for all of you. We'll start with you, Dr. Wolf. Can you control your state of mind?
WOLF: Yes and no. It depends on who you are. The funny thing is, if you try to control the state of mind by thinking, "I am going to control everything," it seems to elude your grasp because there's this funny thing in physics. We call it the principle of indeterminism or the principle of uncertainty, which means the more you try to control something, the more it's going to escape you.
But if you begin to change who you think you are, if you begin to take on a witness kind of point of view, begin to look at the whole thing as drama from a bigger perspective, then you see that you no longer even desire to make things change because you are what's changing.
KING: Dr. Pert, why do smart people do dumb things?
PERT: Why do smart people do dumb things?
KING: It's the brain, isn't it?
PERT: It's the maybe the spinal cord because they were young children once and things happened to them, and people -- Freud had a concept called reenactment whereby we tend to go back and try to reenact things that sort of traumatized us a long time ago.
So even very smart people were once stupid little children that had bad things happen to them, and they, you know - they - until their consciousness, until those memories can bubble up to consciousness, and you can do it with psychotherapy - it takes a little too much time.
KING: What about a factor you can't control, like a disease? Cancer. You can't control cancer. KNIGHT: I disagree with that because I believe that the ability of the brain and our ability to access it properly to produce the mind that essentially - the concept mind over matter, that we produce a powerful mind. We can cure our own cancer.
I mean, the whole act of the placebo act -- you have to take all these placebos in a drug test because if you believe it cures you, it will. And it's the same concept.
We have an amazing untapped ability inside of us, and as Dean Radin said here, that we create, even affect external activity, the external reality. We affect the physical reality as well. We affect - our body, our DNA hears everything we think. Our DNA is based upon our thought patterns in general. But we evolve them; we change the disease.
KING: Dean, the lab has never created a brain, has it?
RADIN: Not yet.
KING: We're going to take a break and come back with our remaining moments with Candace Pert, J.Z. Knight and Dr. Fred Alan Wolf. Don't go away.
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AMIT GOSWAMI, PH.D.: If reality is my possibility, possibility of consciousness itself, then immediately comes the question of "How can I change it? How can I make it better? How can I make it happier?"
You see how we are extending the image of ourselves? In the old thinking, I cannot change anything because I don't have any role at all in reality. Reality is already there. It's material objects moving in their own way from deterministic laws, and mathematics determines what they will do in a given situation. In the new view, I choose that experience, and, therefore, literally I create my own reality.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Dr. Wolf, why can't we create a brain?
WOLF: Well, we're trying. Right now, there is a whole new field which is developing called quantum computing -- very mysterious sounding things.
But what it has to do with is using computers that can choose realities rather than being chosen by the users because quantum computers work with the idea that things aren't so firmly decided, they work with things which are called qubits, which are capable of being in any state rather than just being on or off. So, I think the next step in creating artificial intelligence will be through this new advent of this new field called quantum computing.
KING: Dr. Pert wanted to say something about the cancer angle.
PERT: Well, I was just going to say my focus is health, and what we're talking about here is a really a new way of thinking that --
KING: Can make you healthier if you accept it --
PERT: Yes. Certainly there is ample data that, you know, what we believe can come true, particularly about our bodies. But I just wanted to say that the most important cause of cancer has nothing to do with what thoughts you're thinking, it's the pollutants in the environment, the plasticizers. I want to be very clear about that.
KING: Dr. Radin, you wrote a book called "Entangled Minds," right?
RADIN: Right.
KING: Are they untangling?
RADIN: No, they're still entangled and probably will remain so.
KING: You think we're ever really going to make a leap where most of society -- this is strange -- can be happy? The betting is most of society is unhappy. They don't like the job, they don't like the wife, they don't like the husband. They don't like...
PERT: They don't like themselves.
WOLF: Yes.
KNIGHT: And that's the root of it. They don't like themselves because they don't know who they are.
WOLF: And given the way that civilization is constructed right now, I'm not sure that we can achieve that. We may need to evolve into a new human in order to achieve that level.
PERT: No, I think we have to go backwards to the way we once were. You know what the biggest predictor of longevity is?
KING: What?
PERT: How many people that you speak to everyday, how many people you know. So it's really about...
KING: The more, more you live?
PERT: The more people that you are in contact with, the longer you live.
KING: Hermits die early.
PERT: You would predict that.
(LAUGHTER)
KING: Do we have a compulsion toward unhappiness, J.Z.? KNIGHT: Yes, we do.
And like Candace pointed out, that we're wired for bliss, but we have a compulsion to it because we're insecure about what we are. We don't know if we're -- we don't know if we are secure. We're insecure with our reality. We don't know what we are. We don't know how we are.
KING: Dr. Wolf, what did you want to say?
WOLF: I just wanted to say that one of the big things is we all are recognizing that we're going to die. We have this death thing that we're going pass out of this body, and that's the big bugaboo.
So the thing is, if we can begin to re-look at who we are, what we are, then even death itself may not have the fear that it has over us. And I think once that hurdle has been overcome, I think that happiness is a state that can be achieved.
KING: Well said. J.Z., are you optimistic?
KNIGHT: Very. I think -- I think people are wonderful. I think we're all remarkable. I mean, if people just knew how remarkable they really were, our world would evolve very quickly, our civilization would evolve very quickly. I am very optimistic because I think we're in such a pickle now, people are really endeavoring to find answers, solutions, to the problems that we're facing today. There's a whole world, 6.5 billion of us.
KING: And world events don't make you pessimistic?
KNIGHT: Oh, no, because I --
KING: People killing people don't make you pessimistic?
KNIGHT: It's a sad story that's been going on for a long, long time, and at the root of that has always been religion and special interests -- and that's disheartening. When we evolve beyond both of those, we're going to find that our respect for life is going to grow and we belong to the future then, not to the past.
KING: Quick tip now -- if somebody makes you really unhappy and you're driven toward them, it is a relationship that's not beneficial to you, what should you do?
KNIGHT: If that person is in my life, if it's an aspect of myself -- you only get in your life -- this is what the Rahm (ph) taught -- you only have people, places, things, time and events in your life that reflect you. You can only see in another person the identity of yourself. So, if another person is very unhappy and is coming toward me, very angry, that aspect is in me. So, the solution is in me first. Then the answer into them.
WOLF: I totally agree with what J.Z. is saying here because what we do is, we look for our own reflections in the out there world, and then we look at them so they can reflect back to us something of our nature... KING: And well said.
WOLF: ... that's been in the shadow.
KING: We're out of time. J.Z., as always, thank you.
KNIGHT: Thank you.
KING: J.Z. Knight, Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Candace Pert and Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, thank you all very, very much.
