Consciousness Explored – Episode 14
Channeling and Intuition (Helané Wahbeh)
Helané Wahbeh: My current thinking around this right now is that we’re all born with an innate ability to channel, and that perhaps that is somewhat related to our genetics, and that the way that our channeling unfolds or expression of our unique channeling is perhaps determined in part by our genetics.
Melissa Deal: Hello, and welcome to Consciousness Explored, where we delve into the human experience and consciousness. I’m your host, Melissa Deal. In each episode, we’ll be diving deep into ways to expand our consciousness and the impact that our understanding of consciousness has on every aspect of our lives.
On today’s episode, I’ve invited Dr. Helané Wahbeh. Dr. Wahbeh is the director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. She has a degree in anthropology and pre medicine from the University of California, Berkeley, a clinical doctorate from National University of Natural Medicine, and a master’s in clinical research from Oregon Health and Science University. She also has completed two postdoctoral research fellowships and has more than 90 peer reviewed publications under her belt. Her latest book, the Science of Channeling, Why You Should Trust Your Intuition and The Force That Connects Us All, invites us to a realm where science meets intuition.
I could not be more thrilled to have her on the show today. This is going to be so good. We’ll be right back with Helané’s story.
Helané: Grew up in a small suburb of San Francisco called Castor Valley, and I was the eldest of two children and my parents were actually immigrants. So I’m first generation Palestinian in this country and Arabic was my first language. And I didn’t learn English until I started preschool and quickly learned that I wanted to fit in and so kind of let go of that and fully embraced our American culture.
So I grew up with a really eclectic diversity of experiences. First was this first-generation immigrant energy. Family was so incredibly important, very strong religious background on my dad’s side, being orthodox Christian, went to church every Sunday and was very engaged in the youth organization of the church. And then on my mom’s side, was very esoteric in their spirituality. So I went to my first spiritualist like seance when I was ten years old at my grandparents’ house and, you know, had this experience of walking into a room with 30 people and witnessing my grandmother doing what they called trans channeling, which was their belief that they were acting as vehicles for non-physical beings to speak through them.
And then to top it all off, I went to Catholic school. So I had this really eclectic kind, kind of spiritual worldview growing up. I wasn’t really confused. When I would hear things from the different perspectives, you know, whether it was Catholicism, or Orthodox Christianity or the spiritualist, I would kind of take it in and feel if it resonated with me, and if it did, I kind of took it as my own, if you will. And if not, I didn’t really put a lot of energy into it. Like, I remember, you know, there’s so many beautiful things about Christianity, and there’s also pieces for me that just really didn’t resonate.
And I, you know, they’d share something in Sunday school and I’d be like, that doesn’t make sense to me. And I would just let it go. And, you know, that was the same with Catholicism and the spiritualist background as well. I kind of put it through my own kind of Helané filter, and if it worked for me, I held it, and if it didn’t, I kind of let it go.
When I was that ten-year-old going to the spiritualist seance for the first time, I was a little scared at first because I was worried that, you know, this supposed being might jump in me. And what’s going to happen if that happens, you know, the worldview of my family is that it is consensual and the trance channeler is giving consent. So it wasn’t like a possession situation or anything like that, but the dialogues that occurred with these supposed beings and the way that my uncle and my grandmother were speaking and how they were speaking was so different from their normal way of being, and they weren’t getting paid.
It wasn’t like it was a job. It was just our close circle friends. Like, there was no motivation for them to fake it. And so that was really a truth telling to me around that our consciousness is not limited to this body, that we do have a aspect of ourselves that is separate from and continues beyond our physical body.
Melissa: After her many expansive childhood experience, Helané went off to university, first at UC Berkeley, which she describes as an eye-opening experience. She then went on to study naturopathic medicine and opened her own private practice. But her continued curiosity compelled her to keep studying and research in an effort to answer deeper questions about the human experience. Her postdoctoral fellowships focused on mind body medicine, which led to research on the impact of meditation on health and healing. She was invited to attend an event at the Institute of Noetic Sciences that opened up a whole new world to her.
Helané: I ended up at IONS or the Institute of Noetic Sciences for this event, and I was just completely blown away because they were courageously asking all these research questions that with my background, I was very, very curious about, but didn’t feel comfortable getting into those in an academic university. So I was very inspired and motivated by that and planted the seed with them to let me join their team, and eventually ended up joining their team as a consultant and then as an employee. And now I find myself director of research of this incredibly wonderful multidisciplinary team, being able to use rigorous science to answer some of these esoteric research questions.
And then as I grew older, another experience that was quite profound for me, you know, I started meditating, I guess, 22 years ago now, and I was in a silent retreat and had the experience of transcendent oneness where, you know, my boundaries just completely dissolved. I was aware, but I was aware of everything. I was Helané, but I was also more than Helané. And that felt experience of, you know, what a lot of people call the oneness or that early Samadhi state just really imprinted in my body in a way that I hadn’t experienced prior to that.
So, you know, so many people can really relate with kind of like a gut hunch of like, I just know this is true. I don’t have, like, facts to show you or any sort of thing to back it up, but I just know in my bones that this is a truth. And so that oneness experience during meditation really solidified that for me.
Melissa: As we all discover at some point in our expansion of consciousness, inner healing becomes paramount to continuing forward motion on that path. Helané ‘shealing work included an incredible journey through her family lineage that resulted in a multigenerational memoir called Free to Be Me, a journey of transformation through generational healing that she co-authored with her mother.
Helané: It was really spiritually guided, if you will, for my mother and I to write that. And it really is about the transformation that can occur from generational trauma. So it’s the story of our matrilineal lineage, of our grandmother’s great grandmothers, and their experience as women at that time. Then my mother tells the story of herself growing up and the limitations that she experienced being a Palestinian woman in Palestine, and then also here in the United States, having children. And then the story continues with my experience, my challenges, sort of inheriting that trauma and finding my voice and both of my mother and I’s journey in finding our voice and empowering ourselves as women and also as mothers.
So it’s not just for women, it’s also for men and people who identify as men because the mothers raise the boys right. So acknowledging the kind of victim tyrant patterns and all the ways that we are suppressed or even self-repressed and bringing awareness to that, we think, is a really beautiful path to healing and acknowledging that often some of the symptoms we experience in our daily lives could be carryovers from our ancestors. How do we acknowledge that and then work to clear those patterns? So, it is a memoir, but it is also filled with tools for people to, if they choose to, empower themselves in their own egoic clearing and empowering their own voice.
Melissa: That is so beautiful. I just discovered that book, and I can’t wait to read it. A lot of people don’t know that we store ancestral memories and trauma in our DNA, and that’s not, like, my opinion or anything. I mean, science has verified that. So I’m glad you talked about that book and the importance of doing that deep healing. Thank you so much and for sharing your whole story. I do want to move on now and ask if you could tell us how you define, describe, or explain consciousness.
Helané: That’s such a wonderful question, and we could probably take a week to get into that, but I’ll try to distill it, starting with what I don’t think is consciousness. So, you know, the prevalent understanding right now is that our consciousness arises from our brain, from the neurons firing in our brain. And it is the state of us being awake and aware, and that you give someone anesthesia, and their consciousness goes away. And then when they wake up, it’s back again.
So I would describe that as little sea consciousness. So that’s what neurologists are really into. I have an understanding of something called big C consciousness, which you can liken to a field that pervades everything and is fundamental to everything else. And when people hear that, they’re like, well, okay, maybe, but why I? Why, you know, why is there a Helané in this big C consciousness? And the way I like to think about it, it was described to me in this way, and I really resonated with it is if you imagine the electromagnetic spectrum, it’s one thing, right? It’s this one spectrum.
But if you look at one frequency on there, like, say, the difference between red and green light on that spectrum, those are different frequencies on the one large spectrum. Red and green are completely different. They have different unique characteristics ascribe to them, and yet they’re still part of this larger whole. So I envision consciousness as a both, and it is this larger piece, but then there are expressions of it that are unique characteristics that can then enliven these physical bodies that we move around in, but my consciousness is not stuck. Well, it is, at the moment, stuck to this body. But when this body goes away, that my consciousness doesn’t go away with it, that it actually persists. So I believe in a survival of consciousness.
Melissa: I love that answer. It’s definitely one of my favorite answers that I’ve ever gotten before. I don’t personally subscribe to a materialism view, obviously, but I also don’t completely adopt views of dualism or idealism. But if you wouldn’t mind, for the listeners, if you could give us kind of a broad overview of the different views of consciousness and where you fit in there.
Helané: So I’ll just start by saying I’m not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination. I’m an experimentalist. So I can give you very broad strokes around the philosophy of consciousness. And so the dominant camp right now is materialism or physicalism, really. And that puts forth that everything is physical, that all we can see around us is all there is, and that there is nothing beyond the physicalist matter. Now, what’s becoming more and more challenged is that physicalism’s not explaining everything, and so people are struggling. And there’s this, I think, huge paradigm shift where we’re straddling two paradigms.
One in which physicalism is king and explains everything, and another when it’s not. And I’m not a proponent of getting rid of physicalism. I think it does explain a lot, but I don’t think it’s the full picture. I think it’s just one piece of it. And so you move into a post materialist world where things like dualism and idealism are put forth. Dualism shares that there’s a split between mind and matter and that both exist. And I think the key is trying to figure out how they actually interact with each other. And does one generate the other, vice versa? Then you have idealism, which is, I think, where I lean more towards where I shared earlier about consciousness being fundamental, and that consciousness is the core from which material manifests.
Now, when I think about it in terms of vibration and frequency and density, and I think about how much space actually exists within each atom, it’s like, okay, my body that appears solid to me is actually mostly space if we really look at it. Then it kind of makes more logical sense to my human mind, because sometimes I think, okay, really? Like, this table really came from a thought, or this came from a thought. Like, the operationalization of how idealism work is still a little murky to me, but when I think of it as different densities of vibration, it’s like, okay, that makes sense. So I definitely lean much more towards the idealistic camp.
Melissa: I like that a lot. I appreciate your input on that and your perspective on that. That’s very interesting.
Helané: Often it’s presented as a black or white. You know, there’s no both end. There’s, like, not a lot of nuance. And we’re viewing it all from our human filter, right?
Melissa: And might that be the point is that there is no or except through our own filters. There’s always and only the end.
Helané: Right.
Melissa: And so it can be this and this and this and this and this. And the whole point is that there are infinite possibilities, you know. And potential experiences and experiencers and ways to experience. And let’s talk about your research with channeling. But before we get into that, let’s make sure that the listeners understand what you mean by channeling, what types of channeling there are and that kind of thing.
Helané: Yeah. So, you know, when people hear the word channeling, they can often think of different things. And in fact, it was one of the, my biggest challenges when I started working in this field were all the different terms and all the different meanings that were often ascribed to the same terms. So I’m going to introduce another definition just so that the listeners know what I mean when I say the word channeling. So I use a very broad umbrella definition of channeling, which is this experience of accessing information and energy from beyond our conventional notions of time and space. And that can appear receptive and expressive.
What do I mean by that exactly? So receptive is things like remote viewing or clairvoyance or getting, like, an aha moment and receiving information that you couldn’t possibly know in any sort of traditional way. And expressive is more about what people think of a mind over matter or psychokinesis or being able to use your intention to shift something in the physical world. And I’m proposing that all humans have the capacity to channel, that it’s just an innate ability. And yet the way that channeling shows up for people is really incredibly diverse. It exists on a spectrum of, you know, things like general intuition or gut hunches that, you know, just about everybody could say, oh, yeah, I’ve had something happen where, you know, I had a hit and then it came true.
To the other end of things like trans channeling, which is much more rare. And so I would consider trans channeling under the umbrella of channeling. And things like mediumship where people believe they can communicate with deceased humans. And then you have everything in between. And that the way that I express channeling is different than how you do it. And each person who’s listening to this right now has their own beautiful signature for their channeling expression. And so at IONS, we call that the Noetic Signature.
Melissa: I like that, the Noetic Signature. We’re going to get into that, too, in a minute. So would you say that even though you’re kind of grabbing information, let’s say, if you’re channeling, you’re grabbing information from somewhere out there in the field of consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. I know people get kind of testy about certain words or ways you refer to the field, but you’re grabbing it from out there. How pure is that? I would think it always kind of has to go through a filter.
Helané: Yes.
Melissa: It has to go through the filter in order for it to go from field to expressive channeling.
Helané: You know, I can share with you my personal experience around that. And also research studies around that. I’ll start with the research piece of it. So there hasn’t been a lot of work done around this. But from what has been done, we know that people who are meditators or do some other focused attention type of practice are better channelers, have more spontaneous experiences, and do better in laboratory tasks around channeling. So having that clear kind of focused attention. Aso believing that you can channel is actually one of the strongest predictors of having spontaneous experiences and doing better at channeling tasks. So those are two common pieces.
My personal experience and I write a lot about this in the book in terms of how to embark on your channeling journey and how to strengthen your channeling experience is, yes, definitely belief, definitely intention, definitely meditation or some other focused attention training but also the layers of the ego. You know, if we have unconscious patterns, unconscious motivators that will cloud or infuse your ability to channel more accurately. You know, our mind is the filter through which that information comes through. And so in our trans channeling studies, we asked this particular question, and this information came up about the library of the mind of the channeler.
So their education, their vocabulary, their life experiences influence the information coming through for sure. There’s a trend in some channeling research now to do group channeling because of this very reason. So if everyone has their different filter, you ask the same question of multiple channelers, see what information you get and where they cross over. And those common elements are likely more kind of grounded truth, if you will.
Melissa: Yeah, I totally get that. And I kind of thought that because to me, channeling and intuition are pretty much the same thing. But I know in strengthening my own intuition, that there was a long process of peeling the onion because, let’s say, I’m about to embark on something and I feel fear. It’s not my intuition necessarily that’s telling me that’s a bad thing to do. It’s my programming that I’m going to fail at that or something’s going to go wrong, or this could happen, or a number of other things. That’s the filter I was talking about. Do you feel like intuition and channeling that’s the same?
Helané: I do. Yeah. I would put intuition on that sort of more common side of the spectrum, the whole channeling spectrum that, you know, intuition and I’ll talk about it in a little bit when we get into the Noetic Signature, that sort of general intuition piece.
Melissa: Yeah, I want to talk about the Noetic Signature, how we validate the accuracy of channeling and what is the kind of scientific process behind that and the research behind that?
Helané: So, you know, when I first got to IONS, I was just so excited to be able to outwardly study what I had been experiencing all my life. And what I didn’t know growing up is that there’s like 150 years’ worth of research on this phenomenon in parapsychology. And a lot of people don’t know about that. They’re like, oh, this is new. It’s like, it is not new. I mean, scientists have been studying this since the late, you know, mid to late 18 hundreds in the western world. And of course that’s a very western centric view. There’s cultures around the world who just live this and they have their own indigenous science about their experience of applying this in their daily life to survive, to find food, to, you know, you name it, it is just integrated into their worldview and how they live.
So in terms of verifying its existence from a western lens, there are particular channeling phenomenon that have a lot more evidence than the others. One is something called remote viewing, or being able to access information about distant locations. And there have been numerous formal studies conducted on remote viewing with significant positive effect sizes. There have been meta-analyses done on that just over and over again, we see that. And why I like remote viewing so much is there’s also practical applications for it that you can just see immediately.
People making money in the stock market, winning, you know, sport bets, finding missing persons in police cases, finding archeological sites. There’s all these just blatantly obvious applications of remote viewing that demonstrate its validity as a real phenomenon. Another area is a protocol called the distant mental intention of living systems, DMILS. It’s kind of a big, long name, but it’s quite simple in theory.
So imagine you and your friend came into our lab, and, you know, you’re really good friends, really close to each other. We took you, and we put you in one room, and we took your friend and put them in a completely opposite side of the building in a different room. And we hooked up both of you to, let’s say, EEG, brainwaves, heart waves, electrodes on your skin to see what’s going on in your skin. And then in front of you, we put a closed caption TV that had a picture of your friend in the other room so you could see them, right?
And we would tell you, okay, when you see their face on the screen, direct your positive intention towards them. And when the face goes away, stop. And then you would repeat that over and over again. So this protocol has been done all over the world in multiple labs. And what we find is that the physiological measures of the people line up when the sender you are actually sending, when you see your friend’s face. So there’s a shift in your friend’s physiology when you’re directing positive intention to them, and then it goes away when you’re not. So the data is different when you’re sending versus not sending.
So, to me, this just kind of blows me away, and that’s been done over and over again. So it’s quite a remarkable testament that our intention matters. Another area is similar to that in applying that to healing. So there’ve been numerous studies looking at positive healing intention on people, on animals, on cells, in a petri dish, and with overwhelmingly significant values. And from my perspective, there’s enough studies now showing that this is really something, and we need to be paying more attention to it and doing larger studies around it.
There’s also the large body of evidence around telepathy or mind to mind impression. There’s large body of evidence around knowing the future, whether it’s through precognition or pre sentiment, whether you know it or you can know the future through your physical body. And there’s also telepathy during dream states. So there’s some really large chunks of evidence and this different phenomenon that when you put it all together, it just makes you scratch your head and be like, huh, there’s something going on here. It’s really surprising to me that people can see all that and just completely dismiss it.
Melissa: Yeah. Willful ignorance. Yeah, that’s a real thing. You know, we do tend to, as humans, get very attached emotionally to the things that we believe, and because we’re attached, it’s like ripping away a part of your identity that makes you question so many things.
Helané: Yeah, absolutely. I think some of it is motivated by fear. There’s just a fear about, well, what would it mean to our world if telepathy was real, you know, and that you could read my mind. That, I think, really scares people.
Melissa: Yeah. And I think probably fewer people are as gracious as you and thinking, what does that mean to our world? But they do think, what does that mean to me? What could that mean for me? What trouble could this cause for me? I think that can be very scary for a lot of people. But you guys have on your website, don’t you have a test?
Helané: Yes. So what I just described was kind of the evidence we have out there validating the realness of these phenomenon. You can also take tests to evaluate your skill. And so we have a website where you can actually take tasks online to see how good you are at some of these experiences, like clairvoyance or precognition, knowing the future. And we have a suite of online tasks that people can take just to see their skill or abilities. Now, there’s a whole other research program that we’re doing on people’s subjective experience of the phenomenon. And that’s what we call the Noetic Signature.
So, you know, we’ve done a number of different studies now evaluating how people experience channeling, the wide diversity of expressions of their Noetic Signature. And it began with asking over 500 people just free text to write out all their different experiences of this. And we took that information and distilled it down into 350 questions. And we gave that to people. And then we used statistics to narrow those down to 44 items that basically encompassed the greatest variability of people’s experiences. So that’s what we call the Noetic Signature inventory. And people can go to our website and take that if they’re interested in checking it out.
But through that work, we found twelve different expressions of the Noetic Signature. And one of those is what we were talking about earlier, which is this general intuition. And that’s really this feeling of knowing something to be true. And it comes in three flavors. There’s the emotional intuition, where you just feel something is true, or just know something is true through the mind. So that’s the second flavor. And then the third flavor is like gut body sensations. Like, I just had a gut feeling and you know that something is true. So general intuition is just one of these twelve characteristics of the Noetic Signature. So you can take this inventory and see where you lie on each of these twelve parameters.
Melissa: Oh, that is exciting. And I agree. I mean, I know that there are reasons, obviously, that research can’t just take subjective experience and go, oh, well, clearly that’s the truth of it. But I also feel like it doesn’t get as much weight as it should. I really feel like personal experience is incredibly valid and important and should be considered a valid marker.
Helané: Yeah, some people will say, oh, that’s just subjective. It doesn’t really count, which I totally disagree with. It doesn’t mean that you just look at the subjective, but the subjective is one incredibly important piece of the puzzle. And so, you know, we talked about materialism and the dominant paradigm and all those pieces. And, you know, we touched on the taboos. People are afraid to talk about this stuff. And it is so incredibly common. We’ve done multiple studies surveying people and others have done this surveying people around the world.
These phenomenon are experienced globally by many people. They are not rare, they’re not, you know, fringe. Like, if there’s a room of ten people, I’d say at least eight out of ten of those people will have had some type of non-local consciousness experience. And so one of the big goals of this Noetic Signature work is to characterize it and give people kind of a way to explore it more fully. But it’s really about normalizing it and giving people tools so that they can actually begin to transparently have conversations around it.
And so, you know, I just mentioned the first one, but there’s eleven more, you know, embodied sensations, which is strong for me. Like, I get goosebumps on my body. How many of you listeners get goosebumps when you feel something is like, true or right? Then we have visualizing to access or affect, which we touched on with this remote viewing or using intention. Inner knowing through touch, some people can hold an object in their hand and actually get information about it that they couldn’t possibly know in any other way. Then there’s healing, which we talked about a little bit. Knowing the future, which is called precognition or pre sentience. Getting physical sensations from other people.
This is another very interesting one where, and it’s not talked about, but I think it affects a lot more people than we realize. People can be sensitive to the physical sensations of others. So let’s say, you know, I’m feeling totally fine, and then I go visit a friend, I walk into their house and I like, immediately have a headache. And I’m like, whoa, where did this come from? And then you start talking to your friend, and they’re like, oh, I feel horrible. I’ve had this headache all day. I don’t know what’s going on. And I’m basically picking up my friend’s headache. And then often, as soon as you acknowledge that, then your sensation of a headache goes away. I think that’s a really fascinating experience.
Knowing other minds that we talked about. Telepathy, apparent communication with non-physical beings, which we talked about with trance channeling and mediumship. Knowing through dreams, so actually getting information from your dream state and then inner voice, or having internal voice, hearing experiences that kind of guide you. And we have so many stories of these where people heard a voice that basically saved them. Like being at a stoplight, the light turns green, you’re about to go, someone heard stop in their mind very loud, so they didn’t go. And then this 18-wheeler just ran through the intersection, and they would have been completely squashed from that accident.
Or there was another story of a nurse who was going to do a home visit, was arriving at the patient’s home and heard a voice saying, don’t go in yet. And it was like, that’s kind of strange. Don’t go in yet. Heard it again, and was like, okay, I’m going to listen to this. Went and, you know, did some other things, and then came back later and learned that there was a violent perpetrator in the lobby of the patient at the time when they would have been arriving.
These experiences are really quite profound for people. And, you know, when I first started at IONS, I would start talking about this in person. I’d have a line afterwards, and people would come whisper to me, you know, this happened to me. Thank you so much. I haven’t told anybody about it. And then the next person would come. Thank you so much. This happened to me. I haven’t told anybody about it. And that would happen over and over again.
So we got to start telling people about it and talking about it and learning more about it. This research needs to grow exponentially. And for me, it’s all about understanding the full potential of us as humans, and most importantly, using it to help improve our situation on this planet. We need all the help we can get. And if these are resources that we could tap into, then why not? What’s the harm?
Melissa: Absolutely. I absolutely agree, and I so appreciate you listing the rest of those and going in and giving some examples so that it’s very clear, because when you give the examples, they sound so normal, because they are, you know. But if you speak of it in a way of channeling or ESP or just something I know, well, then it’s just, woo, that’s crazy. But it’s, you know, we’ve got to bridge those two and bring that together. And I think one of the last things I want to kind of cover with you comes from what that makes me think about is how for so long, we’ve been so programmed to feel so small and insignificant. I mean, eventually, somehow, randomly, we got here. We used to be apes. There’s nothing significant about you, little human.
And I think that comes across in a lot of our scientific theories that we’ve accepted as truth, which are just theories. A theory is a theory. It’s something someone thought and people put more thought into it, but that doesn’t make it the way things are. And I think we so easily accept that, that kind of unworthiness and that kind of smallness. And one example of that that I have that I would like to talk to you about is what researchers used to call junk DNA. It’s like, oh, you’ve got all this stuff in here, in this DNA, and we don’t know what it does. And since we know everything, it’s just junk.
As though there’s any precedent in nature for a bunch of random crap that doesn’t do anything. Like, there’s just no precedent for that. Why would you even think that? Is there any chance that perhaps those non-coding parts turn on? Or do we have any research on those things having any correlation between people with strong extrasensory skills?
Helané: That’s a wonderful question. So, I’m not a geneticist, but I am very, very interested in genetics around the topic of channeling, because, you know, it runs in my family. So what is the relationship between nature and nurture? And what is the relationship between coding DNA and non-coding DNA? And I’m going to share my personal thoughts and then I’ll share with you a study that we completed and one that we’re working on.
My current thinking around this right now is that we’re all born with an innate ability to channel, and that perhaps that is somewhat related to our genetics, and that the way that our channeling unfolds or our expression of our unique channeling is perhaps determined in part by our genetics. So maybe I can do trans channeling really well and you can do precognition really well, and maybe those are more determined by genetics, but that we both could get better at either of them if we focused and practiced and got training and built our skill level at it.
And I often use this silly example of, you know, I’m 5’2” and I can take a basketball, I can dribble it down a court, and I can shoot a basket, but I am never, ever going to be in the NBA. So the capacity to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to be really, really good at it. And this is an area that we want to continue exploring. We did do one really cool pilot study where we looked at high functioning psychics and age, gender, and race matched controls. And what we found was an area on the non-coding region of the DNA of chromosome seven, and which is highly expressed in the brain.
And we found that the psychics had the wild type or the original form of that gene, and the controls had a mutated form of that gene. So that was really fascinating to us. If the psychic expression was the original version, what would pressure it to change? One idea was technology. So if I don’t need to intuit where my next meal is going to come from, because we have GPS and civilization, technology, et cetera, then maybe more technologically advanced countries would have more controls. And we found that was true.
We also did a side analysis where we looked at it, thinking of Christianity and its horrible historical persecution of people expressing these types of experiences, perhaps countries with greater or earlier Christianity would also have less psychics, more controls. And we found that there was a relationship there as well. So this was a really small pilot study, and we really want to do a bigger study around it and are excited to do that.
Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. When we were talking about the information stored in DNA, learned behavior, I mean, I know if your ancestors burned at the stake, that information’s in there.
Helané: That’s right.
Melissa: And first and foremost, we’re survival wired. And so if that information’s in there, and it is not safe to be psychic or intuitive in any way, I would imagine that gets shut down at the filter before you ever know anything about it, you know?
Helané: Absolutely. And the other thing to say about that, you know, we thought that it was going to be really easy to find the controls. We had a really hard time finding controls, which were people who hadn’t had these experiences and had no family history of it. Like, it was incredibly challenging. And that also supports this idea that we all have this innate ability at some level, you know, and maybe it’s not completely fully expressed in everybody, but that all of us at some level have this intuitive capacity.
Melissa: I absolutely agree. I absolutely agree. What is one thought that you would like to leave listeners with as it relates to the work that you do and the expansion of consciousness.
Helané: I would invite the listeners to, while taking in external information, to take some time to just sit in their own quiet space, to ask within for their own selves. What resonates with you? What inspires you about intuition? What are your experiences around knowing something that you couldn’t possibly know? And if it feels right to you, I would invite you to explore going down that path and see how it can support you in your daily life.
Melissa: Where would you suggest someone start with that?
Helané: You can begin a daily practice, even if it’s just two or three minutes a day, where you get still, you get quiet and you set the intention as best you can. Believe that it’s possible and believe that you can do it. And practice that attention training muscle to sit in that quiet space. Ask a question that you’re curious about, ideally starting with yes, nos and then see what comes to you.
Melissa: I love it. And where can listeners support your work? Find out more about you and keep up with the research that you’re doing.
Helané: We have a wonderful website at noetic N-O-E-T-IC dot org. We have all our papers there, participate in research page, we have free webinars. Find out about our books and educational programs as well. Join our community. We’d love to share more with you about the work that we’re doing.
Melissa: Thank you so, so much Dr. Wahbeh. This is just amazing and wonderful and I appreciate your time and I appreciate you agreeing to come on the show and share your wonderful expertise with us.
Helané: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Melissa: I had such a wonderful time talking with Dr. Wahbeh. She is a gifted researcher and an inspiring human being. As I mentioned in the interview, I really appreciated her explanation of her understanding of consciousness. She talked about how she differentiates what she calls little c consciousness and big C consciousness. She used the example of being under anesthesia and that our little c consciousness goes away as she puts it, and comes back when the anesthesia wears off.
I have a similar understanding except that I don’t separate consciousness into big and little or local and non-local. I feel that it is all one consciousness, non-local and that its simply our frame of reference for the conscious experience that makes the difference. For me, the reason our conscious awareness appears to go away under circumstances like anesthesia is because the nervous system has been interrupted. I see our physical bodies as a remarkable piece of advanced technology that consciousness uses to navigate a physical experience. And the way consciousness connects to these physical bodies in order to have this 3d experience is through our nervous system.
So we’re plugged into these physical bodies through the nervous system. I think of the nervous system as a type of technology that interprets frequency and vibration and translates it into what we describe as physical experience. So when the nervous system is overwhelmed or interrupted, either unintentionally through trauma or intentionally through something like anesthesia, the result is a disconnect or disruption between consciousness and the physical avatar for lack of a better word.
In other words, we could consider that base consciousness is all that is with infinite possibilities. But for consciousness to have an experience within certain parameters, like the perspective of a human being, it must limit access to that infinite awareness. In that way, consciousness can limit its experience to being a singular instead of an infinite all. It can experience being a Melissa or a Dr. Wahbeh, for example. And let’s consider that it does so by plugging in to the perspective of a singular physical container through the nervous system. Much like we might plug into or connect ourselves to a VR headset world that only exists when we’re wearing the headset.
This is just my personal theory, so take it or leave it. But it is fascinating to think about and play with. So I wanted to share it with you guys for this episode because I thought it might be fun for us to explore my conversation with Dr. Wahbeh through this lens. Dr. Wahbeh talked about her belief that all humans have the capacity to channel. And I agree 100%. I think we all channel, whether we’re aware of it or not. In fact, I’m not sure we even have a choice.
If we continue looking through the lens I just proposed and connect it to Dr. Wahbeh’s explanation of channeling, what might that look like? If the nervous system is a kind of biological technology that receives information by way of frequency and vibration, and those frequencies and vibrations are experienced by us as individuations of consciousness, then that transmission is the very essence of channeling. For example, when lightning rips through the sky, it results in a vibration. That vibration is received by our nervous system as sound. A sound that we interpret and define as thunder. That’s channeling.
We channel information from somewhere we perceive to be external to us and interpret it. Our entire existence and everything we experience is based on this process, on our response to frequencies and vibrations received and translated by the various parts of our nervous system. It doesn’t matter if it’s something we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or feel within our body. It’s all the same process. Receiving information through the nervous system and interpreting it. Dr. Wahbeh talked about how important it is for us to normalize the idea of channeling. And I agree.
So let’s play with this a little more and further explore and expand through this same lens. And consider that perhaps it truly can’t be anything but normal. We know through science that everything, both seen and unseen, vibrates and has a frequency that includes thoughts and emotions. Consider for a moment that time and space are relative. And that the way we experience linear time is but a feature or property of the 3D construct in which we have this human experience.
Therefore, consider that every thought or idea that has ever been thought in the universe, in any time, in any realm, past, present or future, from our perspective, actually exists right now. What if none of our thoughts are generated from our brain? What if the neurons in our heart and brain are but transmitters that send and receive frequencies, thought frequencies that already exist? And that the interconnectedness of all existence allows transmissions of frequencies to be sent and received regardless of our perceived limitations of time and space?
And what if the frequency that we emit determines which thoughts are received? And what if it is our individual filters or subconscious beliefs that determine our frequency. And thus also our interpretation of what we receive? It’s the interpreting part that gets really interesting to me because that’s the basis for our individual experience. That, I believe, is the value to the consciousness that is all that is. It can also be incredibly valuable for us as individuated parts of the whole in our human experience.
But in order to really extract that value, we must understand ourselves more fully and be intimately aware of the filters through which we channel our experiences. We have a lot more control than we think we do over how enjoyable this whole human being thing is or isn’t. Like I said, I don’t think that we generate thoughts from our brain. And I haven’t been able to find any evidence that says we do. The very idea just seems incomplete to me. I think we choose the frequency of our own energy whether we do it on purpose or not. We choose it with our free will. We decide how we’re going to think, feel, and respond. And that determines the frequency we emit. And therefore, the information we receive back through our nervous systems.
We interpret that information through the filters of our experience and awareness and send that data back out like a continuous flow of energetic data; a two-way street of data constantly flowing back and forth. Think of a movie projector. It uses light to project images on a screen that flow together and appear to create a linear story. Imagine that the movie projector also had the capacity to perceive the images it projected. It could observe the movie it was playing. To me, that’s similar to how we work. We project reality to appear as a story outside of us that also includes us.
We use all the things inside of us, light and shadow, conscious and subconscious to create this film, our story. And then we observe it. It creates an enormously entertaining and immersive environment that, through our senses and our nervous system, feels and seems like a separate reality; a very real and true experience. We project, and then we perceive and interact. Project, perceive and interact. It’s brilliant and marvelous and completely malleable.
The only problem is that many of us don’t realize that it is we who are doing the projecting. We often are operating as though something or someone outside of us is operating the projector. And we are powerless and forced to simply observe and react. That’s not the case. But until we truly understand that, we can at least help ourselves by observing and responding in ways that ease the burden of that illusion.
If we are constantly stressed, worried, anxious, sad, waiting for the other shoe to drop, looking around every corner for the next monster, we are operating from the sympathetic nervous system. And in that state of existence, we literally don’t have access to the thought frequencies that would provide answers and solutions to the things that we’re stressed and worried about. We’re only able to receive thoughts that exist within the limits of the frequencies that we are exuding.
But if from that chaotic state of existence, we make a free will choice to stop, breathe, and purposely move ourselves out of that state and into a state of being that is within the frequency of the parasympathetic nervous system, our access to ideas and solutions opens up. It opens up to the thoughts that exist within the parameters of those frequencies. And those would be very different options from the thoughts that we have access to while operating in a chaotic or stressful frequency. That intentional moving through frequencies and opening up to new possibilities is the very act of expanding consciousness.
It can happen unintentionally, of course, as in the case of, say, a near death experience or something like that. Also, people can find it helpful to use the assistance of something to aid that expansion like plant medicine. But we can do it on purpose using only our intention. It might take practice, depending on your current state of being and how long you practiced your current state of being. But it’s definitely doable. If we think of our nervous systems as the conduit between our physical being and our energetic being, we can see why it’s so important to protect our nervous systems and work with them and not against them.
We cannot fill our senses with fears, judgments and woes of things we perceive to be going wrong in the world, things we have no control over. Think back on your own experiences. When was the last time that filling your energy with world news, politics, or fear mongering actually saved you from anything? You or anyone else? When was the last time it made you feel safe, secure, prepared and peaceful? When was the last time it brought you joy and hope instead of fret, anxiety and anger? When was the last time it actually impacted your daily life in a significant way?
Two events occurred at me that were significant in most of our lives. Those were 911 and the pandemic. In both instances, those who watched the news every day and would consider themselves really up on what’s going on, and those who never watched it were equally surprised and unprepared. No one that operated under the illusion of being informed by mass media was less surprised by either event than anyone else. And in both instances, those who didn’t bombard their nervous systems with fear and angst fared far better in the aftermath. That’s just how it works.
No amount of keeping your nervous system ready for impending doom will ever make you more prepared or better suited to weather a storm that does come. You won’t know ahead of time. And if you’re keeping yourself in survival mode 24/7, you will be among the weakest and least able to be of any value to yourself or anyone else. It’s an illusion of control within the ego mind that random, often inaccurate, and always incomplete information puts you in some kind of position of strength and control. It’s just not the truth, ever.
The truth is that it’s static, static that interrupts your connection, your nervous system, so that when something does happen, you are ill prepared to deal with it and less likely to come out stronger and wiser. Again, these are my ideas and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the ideas and opinions of Dr. Wahbeh or anyone else. It’s my subjective opinion based on my own understanding, research, intuition and objective observation. But as Dr. Wahbeh and I spoke about, subjective experience is valid data and certainly relevant to the outcome of the experiencer themselves.
I believe it’s important to validate our personal experience with acceptance, but also with curiosity. I think the best way to do that is to prioritize our self-awareness, not more awareness of what others say is going on. Get to know yourself. Really, truly know yourself; your fears, hopes, beliefs, perceived limitations. Analyze your choices with deep curiosity and brutal honesty. In addition to prioritizing self-awareness, we have to prioritize inner healing, even science acknowledges that generations of energetic memories, fears, and experiences are stored in our DNA. Those traumas are part of us, whether we realize it or not.
But we can heal from generational trauma and from our own trauma, and I can tell you from personal experience that it will dramatically change your life. We should be creating, exploring, expanding, and having a little fun here. And it doesn’t seem to me like a whole lot of us are doing that, so maybe we should get curious about that.
If you’re still with me at this point, first, thank you, because that was long. And second, I’d like to mention that our next episode will be our season finale, and we have a special treat for you guys. I’ve invited a channeler on the show to discuss her own journey and to channel a group of non-physical energy to answer some questions for us. You won’t want to miss that, so hit your notification and join us for our season finale episode.
Thank you for listening to Consciousness explored. Consciousness Explored is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Making It and Teacher Tom’s Podcast. A very special thanks to Dr. Wahbeh for generously sharing her time and expertise today. In the show notes, you’ll find the links to her book and research. If you’d like to reach out to me, I would love to hear from you. My contact information is also in the show notes or just below on YouTube. I personally read and respond to all my emails and I absolutely love hearing from you guys.
To make sure you don’t miss great episodes coming up on Consciousness Explored, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It really is the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thanks and I’ll see you next time.