Explore Interconnectedness for More Harmony and Joy – Dr Jeffrey Dunne (Ep.12)

As we awaken to the reality that everything is interconnected and that we are all interconnected, we can relax in knowing that everything can be easier including our relationship… 

Why? Because then it’s much easier to feel our connection, to relate to each other in more positive ways, to collaborate, to have compassion and SO much more…
 
When we embrace the idea of interconnectedness, and see how everything relates to everything else, how everything is in relationship with everything else, then we can realize that we are part of something bigger. We are all part of the same thing, Life. We are all part of the same Consciousness. We are One. 

Through this interconnectedness:

When we are generous or greedy with one, we are so in all. 

When we are kind or mean with one, we are so in all. 

When we love or hate one, we do so in all…

And so on… 

This has massive implications for self-love, partner-love, and other-love…  

In today’s episode, I have an enlightening and informative conversation about the concept of interconnectedness, unity consciousness, and implications for a more harmonious and loving relationship and a more sustainable future…

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🌟ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne is President of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), an organization established in 1997 to continue the research of the effects of consciousness on physical systems carried out at Princeton University from 1979-2007.  In addition to his own explorations into the nature of consciousness through ICRL, and several decades of research at the Johns Hopkins University in fields that ranged from acoustics to data science and artificial intelligence, Dr. Dunne is an award-winning playwright and author.  You can find him at ICRL.org.

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🌟MENTIONED INSIDE / RESOURCES:

Events: Weekly Share Your Light virtual gatherings

Book: Syntropy - The Spirit of Love

Book: Nexus

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🌟MORE ON THIS EPISODE:

Watch the YouTube Video!

More about the podcast on our Podcast Page

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DISCLAIMER: This content is meant to support your Journey and not as a replacement for professional assistance. Additionally, the ideas and resources provides by our guests are their ideas and recommendations alone and not necessarily a reflection of the host’s.

Transcript

Emma: 0:31

Hello, lovelies, welcome to another episode. I am so excited for today's topic and for a very special guest who is going to share some wonderful insights and concepts about consciousness, dr Jeffrey Dunn, who will help us understand more what consciousness is, how it relates to interconnectedness, connection, how that impacts our relationship and how partners can use these ideas to create more harmonious, collaborative and loving and joyful interactions with their partner and create the life that they desire. So, in other words, how to embrace a love consciousness. Stay tuned, you're in for a treat. Hello, I'm so excited to be here with Jeffrey Dunn today. I am going to read you his bio and then we'll say hello to Jeff.

Emma: 1:30

Dr Jeffrey Dunn is the president of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, an organization established in 1997 to continue the research of the effects of consciousness on physical systems carried out at Princeton University from 1977 to 2007. In addition to his own explorations into the nature of consciousness through the organization and several decades of research at John Hopkins University in the fields that ranged from acoustics to data science and artificial intelligence, dr Dunn is an award-winning playwright and author. Through his recently published novel next is, he weaves the concept of centropy, with the implications of the nature of consciousness into a story that speaks to the potentially existential challenges humanity is facing and highlights a path by which we can navigate towards a healthier, sustainable future. Hello Jeff, how are you?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 2:36

Good, very good, glad to be here, thank you.

Emma: 2:39

Yes, my pleasure. So tell us a little bit about why you're interested in consciousness. What is consciousness in terms of how do you view it, what do you know about it and how do you get into it?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 2:50

Yeah, great. So this has been a part of my life for many, many years. When I was quite small, my mother had joined into a partnership with a professor at Princeton University and they had stood up a research laboratory that was looking at the nature of consciousness and what consciousness, how consciousness interacts with the world around us. It was the result of some really incredible research that had been done before that, and then they continued to do that research and then brought in new kinds of capabilities. So I grew up essentially in the study of consciousness. When I finished school for the day, I would head over to the lab, I would steal a bunch of cookies, plot myself down on the couch, and that was part of my life. So I was constantly in conversation about what is the nature of consciousness and what does this mean to us, and so forth. So this is really. It's almost as if I didn't find myself getting into it at some stage, so much as just grew, as this was just the way things were.

Emma: 3:54

The listeners must be thinking like what Right? Like who has that for an upbringing? That's an interesting background In that you didn't have to find a path, you didn't have to find your way. It was organic for you. You lived it.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 4:11

And it has it definitely has advantages because, as running ICO, which stands for the International Consciousness Research Laboratory, I can talk a little bit more about this in a moment, but it's essentially it is the organization that followed the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory that I just mentioned, and so, in that context and running this organization, I'm constantly meeting people who are telling me about their sort of awakening into a lot of these topics. Why is consciousness interesting? Why is important? Why is it? What is it that it can do for my life that can lead, help me be more fulfilled, spend less time in my own personal circles of learning until we eventually get that lesson and can move on to the next one.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 4:55

But and for most of those people, they're, they're engaging in this even if it's in their 30s or 40s, but for many, maybe even most of them, it's in their 50s, 60s, 70s, where they're going wait a minute, there's more. And I there's something else in here that I've been missing the whole time and then they have a lifetime of things to unlearn, and unlearning is actually far harder than learning right? So for those of us who were, who were quite fortunate to grow up in an environment like this, you know we didn't learn a lot of the a lot of the bad habits about the way that we think about the world and sort of treating ourselves as these disconnected biological machine kind of things, but recognizing right from the beginning that there's an interconnectedness going on here. That is part of the way reality is structured, or in fact one might even say is the way reality is structured. So it has tremendous advantage to have come from. I consider myself very blessed to have grown up in that kind of environment.

Emma: 5:53

For real, for real. So I love how you said all of that and that some people come to this realization much later in life and now they have all these patterns, all these ways of thinking, of looking at the world and it's like wait what Like? Like what happens, and how did I do my life? That's messed up right and what a regret. Like you feel like you must have wasted decades. And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on, because I think that we should share this information a lot more to a larger audience. Even though for you feels like second nature, for a lot of people this is still not everyday mainstream concept.

Emma: 6:38

So this is one of the main reasons that I wanted to have this conversation with you, so we could explain all that language that you just used interconnectedness and you see some other things. So just if we could explain them some more, right? So the people who are listening understand if they come from that old view, we're all biological, just machines, there's nothing, we die and there's nothing else, right? And what do you mean? The structure of consciousness and that's the way life is. And so interconnectedness like that's just real language to most people. What is Jeff saying? Why am I bringing this guy on Right? So if we could be like we could really explain all that, that would be so awesome, because I think that people will really benefit from having that knowledge.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 7:21

This is something that actually would kind of be easiest to explain, maybe in a little bit of a chronological sense. So let me use the Princeton lab is to introduce the point of this. The idea that we are more than just physical stuff is obviously that has been around for thousands of years. In fact one might say it's been around for as long as we've been around. This is not a new idea.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 7:48

But from several hundred years ago, particularly with the scientific revolution and so forth, we took a kind of an unfortunate path that led a lot of sort of mainstream thinking to believe that what we are is we're atoms, and atoms interact with other atoms and then and follow the physics and it does what it does and that's it right. And so you get a whole, a whole regime of people who will tell you that consciousness, for example, our awareness, is an emergent property of neurons in the brain and so forth. And despite the fact that there's an overwhelming body of evidence that says that is not possible, people like I don't want to know. I'm just going to stick with this model, and it's an awful model it does not promote happiness, it does not promote quality of life.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 8:41

There's just all kinds of problems with it.

Emma: 8:43

So a little side note on that. So, as you turn to thought, just a little side note. I find with my clients that they want that really hold on to that mindset and model, versus the one who are a little bit more open minded to the conversation that we're having today, this very different approach to treatment what the relationship is and there will be in their health and everything.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 9:08

Yeah Well, we're going to start to break that wide open because it does, and I'll tell you why. It doesn't hold the experiments that were done at Princeton. Prior to that. Let me say this prior to that, people have looked at what they call psychic phenomena. Can I affect systems with my mind? Can I receive information outside of the quote, unquote, normal channels and so forth? This is something that's been studied, had been studied for many, many centuries.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 9:35

What Pair did that was a little bit different is that, first of all, it took a very scientific approach to it. This is in an engineering lab at Princeton University. This is not in a psychology lab. This is an engineering lab. It's a very objective approach to it, unlike prior studies. What Pair did is they said we don't want to look at gifted people, people who say, hey, I've got this incredible capability, or so forth. If they did this, they said, great, we'll have a nice conversation, but you're not going to be part of the experiments, the experiments that were run, used as operators, just whoever it happened of, in students, people in the town, but not explicitly not gifted people. This is something that everybody. This is the normal people.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 10:24

What they did is they didn't look for this incredible, fantastic I can levitate tables kinds of things they said. I want to look at this in a very statistical way. Can I detect any kind of change? Rather than looking at a few events, a few spectacular events, they looked at huge numbers of experiments, billions of trials, and looked for the details of whether you could affect a machine, for example, using your intention, if I sit in front of a device that has this mechanical cascade of balls, can I make the balls be more likely to fall the left or to the right? If I have an electronic coin flipper, can I have it have slightly more heads than tails, right Ones or zeros, same thing. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about electronics. They did it with fluid mechanics and thermal optical, all of it. What they found proven out as much I hate the word proven, because science should not be talking about proven, it should be failure to disprove different sop it. What they recognized was that these effects, if they were to happen by chance, you'd have to run the universe over a few hundred times, about a few times, to have the statistics that they were seeing. In other words, there was no question that when you had somebody who had an intention, it was changing the behavior of the systems.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 11:45

Interestingly enough, the funding for this program came right at the very beginning. When they were talking to in the aerospace industry the original funding was aerospace money they said we're noticing this kind of thing. One of the leaders in aerospace said oh, we've known that was a thing. We've always known that was a thing, because when people get into planes and the pilots are stressed, the machines behave weird. We know that that's an effect. We just have no explanation for it. If you can figure out an explanation for it, we will fund that program because we want to know.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 12:19

Anyway, here's what you do. Here's the thing. You do this kind of thing.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 12:24

At some point you ask the question well, all right, I've got this thing. Whatever it is, this device, this is the only physical object on my desk. I'm going to use my cup as a prop. This is the thing and I'm going to try to affect it. Well, do I have to touch it? No, what if I just put it over here? What if I'm sitting in front of it? Is that close enough? Yeah, that's fine, you don't have to touch it. What if I'm in the next room? Wait a minute. What if I'm in the next building? What if I'm in the next state? What if I'm in the next country and what they discovered is distance has nothing to do with this. You can have the effect on that system, regardless of where you are. This isn't about spatial separation.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 13:05

Right, there was the beginning of something that said look, there's a level of interconnectedness that has nothing to do with space, and if that didn't upset you, the next one will. If it doesn't have anything to do with time, what if I want to have an effect on this and the system's going to run today, but I want to have my intention yesterday, or I want to have my intention tomorrow, with the right protocols in place, doesn't matter. There is an inherent. The unescapable conclusion out of this is that there's an inherent interconnectedness that exists, and it's not physical. It's not atoms in your brain or neurons in your brain bouncing around doing their thing. It's not electrical signals. These are all things that would never be able to do with what they were seeing according to these traditional models that we are matter and that's the end of the story.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 13:57

But if you look at the philosophies that have been around for thousands of years, that say no, we're more than that and the idea of being close to something. Well, space and time is just one way of doing that. We can be emotionally close to things and all of a sudden, this kind of thing makes a lot more sense. Why is it, for example, that loved ones have a sense when the other person's in trouble? Why is it that we can have a sense that somebody's staring at us, only to turn around and see, yep, someone was staring at us. We have lots of ways of being close and the only way that it makes sense in that context is to recognize that there's a much deeper thing that's going on and that it has to do with the interconnectedness of people, and that what is really important and having, in fact, is the degree to which you establish some kind of resonance, some relationship with something else.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 14:55

And in fact, the people who ran those experiments would say how'd you do it? What did you try to do? And some people would say, well, I tried to just sort of concentrate and get it to do. It never worked. But the things that worked was when they said I reached out, I tried to, I became friends, I had a relationship, we, the machine and I did this together. This was a relationship, a resonance between people, and set a different way, a way that I personally like to say it is where this magic happens, if you will, is where you sort of blur the boundaries of where you end and the other begins. Right, you become a we instead of a you and a me. And now it's a different thing. Right, you're functioning as a pair, as a relationship, and that's. And now, all of a sudden, you know it's sensible. At that point I'm affecting the us. Well, of course, I should be able to affect the us. I'm part of it, right, hello, it makes perfect sense when you look at it that way.

Emma: 16:06

That's beautiful. That was great, very good. So the research started in Princeton. It was your mom's lab. I think you want to say more about that and then with that partnership initially was for her, and then how you came to take over, and then what it became and just kind of what's happening there now.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 16:27

So, yeah, the laboratory itself closed in 2006 or 2007. And as they were getting closer to the retirement stage of life, they realized, you know what? We're going to shut the laboratory down. It's not, it's not something to continue in that way anymore. But they wanted, they didn't want the work to stop, they didn't want the impact to stop, and so my mother, brenda, and Bob John was the professor at the university they established the International Consciousness Research Laboratory.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 17:03

So this is a 501c3 charity whose purpose was to carry on the work that was being done there and over the next 20 years or so it kind of took on its own characterization when I stepped in. I stepped in originally as the chairman of the board when Bob passed away, and then my mother passed away about two years ago, two and a half years ago, and then I became president as well, so I became much more active in the operations of it. So the organization has always had sort of three main areas of focus. One was to continue the research and to understand better what was going on. Two was to develop the applications, as we called it, the way that you could use this knowledge to make somebody's life better in a real and functional way. And the third was an educational piece to let people know about what was going on.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 17:57

So in those first say 15 years of ICRLs being, most of the focus is on the education, specifically in publishing. So ICRL now has 20 books that we publish. The 20th one is actually mine. Yeah, I know, I'm excited about that.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 18:12

I'll tell you about that in a minute, and most of that was intended to document what was done at Pear but beyond that and to make that accessible. So several of our books do that and several others talk about the same kinds of things from different angles. My book that is a little unique. It's the only book that we publish that actually takes a fictional novel approach to this. So I take sort of these ideas of centropy which is a topic we'll talk about, I think, in a little bit and I say how can I get the idea out there, but without somebody requiring a scientific background or an academic background, just woven into a story to get the feeling of it, the emotion of it, the flavor of it in a way that you can just enjoy. And so that was that book called Nexus. The purpose of that was to introduce this idea, but in a very comfortable way. Hey, don't stress out, we're going to call it fiction and I do fictionalize it right, so it's science fiction, but mostly to introduce the scientific ideas. So that was really where IZero was going.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 19:18

And then in the last, say, five years we've taken on a much more active focus on research and getting the word out there.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 19:27

So we have lots of events that we do now to help people learn about it.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 19:31

We do experiments just this morning was talking about we're going to re-engage with an experiment studying bees and the consciousness of bees, something that we wanted to do.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 19:41

And then then COVID said why don't you wait for a few years? Well, we did, and now we're getting back to it, but we've done some fascinating research and experiments looking at moment of death and what consciousness does in that moment of death, which is very encouraging because it gives some scientific credence to these ideas that people have wanted to believe, have believed that death is not an end, it's a transition, it's a change, and we do not need to feel loss of the other person, perhaps a loss of our ability to interact in the usual ways, but it's not the disappearance of a soul or disappearance of a consciousness. It's a transition into a different stage. So really impactful I believe to be very impactful studies and then a lot with art trying to fold in and, as you know, we're talking about doing some art related things as well, because art is, in many ways, our most foundational language as humans. It is what speaks to us at the emotional level, without getting the head in the way they intellect, which tends to muddy the waters a lot.

Emma: 20:53

Totally. Something that I usually say in sessions like this is not a logical problem, this is an emotional problem. Yeah, very good, wow, so what is the main things you think that you're trying to impasse or teach the science that you're teaching in Nexus?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 21:11

One of the things that I hear all the time when I engage with people talking about this kind of stuff is a lot of people will come at this right from the beginning and say, well, I'm not a scientist. And then I go wait, are you sure? So what I mean by that is that there's a lot of different definitions of science, but what I consider to be the most important definition of what is science is the scientific method, which is, in essence I observe something, I wonder about it, I become interested, fascinated, curious, and then I go I wonder if I understand that correctly. And then you try something. And there is no greater scientist than the infant. We, as infants, this is what we do, and we do it brilliantly. We build up an understanding of the world, and so, above and beyond everything else, I think the best thing that anybody can take from this is don't lose that willingness to explore, that freedom to be wrong, to be able to say you know what? Okay, I didn't get it right there, let me see if there's something else I can learn about it. All of it comes down to that that freedom to allow yourself to say, yeah, I made a mistake, I was wrong and I didn't get it, but there's nothing wrong with that. That's growth. That's fine. You want to recognize that's. The greatest gift you can get is to recognize hey, I made a mistake, so now I'm going to be able to do this better in the future. That's just transformational for people when they recognize that it's okay to do that. So there's.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 22:44

And then the other piece, I think or one of the other pieces is what I mentioned before is that recognizing that we are not isolated, independent things with no connection to anything else. We're part of an ecosystem. And if you think about it oh, wait a minute, you're telling me that I am connected to the person next to me in some way. That's crazy. Well, how am I connected to a tree? How am I connected to the earth? Back up, for a moment you say well, I, jeff, emma, whoever, right, wait a minute, who's the I here? Because, kind of, over 90% of what makes up you are bacteria, fungi. Oh, no, like you're a collective, make no mistake about it. For every one cell that's officially a human cell, you've got 10 others that are something else, right? So what is it that's you? You are this. You are a collective every bit as much as we species are collective, connected to everything else, right? So why would we think that we're in any way disconnected? We're part of that larger system and the experiences that people have in terms of synchronicities and centipede which I mentioned and get into in a moment in that context makes perfect sense.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 24:02

Now, the idea of centipede absolutely is a very central piece for me. It's something that I found myself wondering about many, many years ago and, honestly, it really struck me in the context of how I met my wife from a relational perspective. We met in college and I know and I'm not proud of the fact that in college I was not particularly looking for a steady relationship. I was young you can generalize me later, whatever but I just wanted to date lots of people. I was not seeing anyone I was looking to.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 24:41

I was interested in this girl who eventually became my wife and, for reasons that I could not possibly explain, I said you know, it would be a very interesting experiment. I am going to tell this person everything that I'm thinking, which, as somebody who is primarily interested in dating lots of people, is really dumb, right? Because what that meant was like if I saw some other girl and I was interested, I would tell her right, if I was angry at her, I would tell her this goes in the face of everything that young men were taught at the time. Like you, don't do that, that's insane.

Emma: 25:22

Why would you do that?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 25:23

You know. But if you think about it, like, what could you possibly do? That would be more helpful to building a solid relationship than being completely open and honest. And so I did that, and for years I would look back and go why? Why did I make that decision? I know what I was like in college. That was not a decision. I and I, of course-.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 25:47

You didn't follow who I was, I would never have done that Right. Why did I do that? Why did I not try to date this other person? Why didn't I do this? Why, then? Why now, both, and. But then when you, when you look at the consequences that happened, right where my life went as a result of that, which was this amazing thing, the only way that it makes any sense is that this endpoint that I am very pleased with could only have come about from making that totally inexplicable decision at that time, and it makes you wonder, like, what was the motivation for doing that and where did that motivation come from?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 26:31

Now, I had a conversation about 10 years ago with a guy, ulysses De Corpo, who was the author of the of a book called Centropy, the Spirit of Love, and I had to read the book, and what he describes in that book is that the the same equations of physics that tell you that energy and information should flow forward in time. Those equations have another solution to them. People never paid attention to it, but there's another set of of solutions in which energy and information are flowing backwards through time. In a nutshell, the same way that we live a life that's driven by causes, we do the things that we do because of what happened in the past. We are also living a life of purpose. We're pulled forward in time. We're influenced forward in time every bit as much as we're influenced from the past, and this idea that there's really two complements the past push in physics is called entropy it's a term that gets a lot more airplay and the corresponding one is called centropy. It's us being driven forward, and it is an incredibly important principle because it explains things that entropy really fails to, because, for example, entropy, which says that we should go naturally from ordered to disordered states, has a hard time explaining why it is that we evolved from amoebas, because it really shouldn't go any other way. We're not supposed to go into more complex organisms. We should be going into less complex organisms, but we don't, obviously, and so when I became familiar with this way of talking about it, it was really an eye-opening experience for me to recognize that why did I make those actions, make those decisions in college? Well, where did that influence come from? From my future? This was where I was headed. Now we can talk. I won't go into it further because it leads to a lot of questions about well, all right, when did you do this? What's the nature of time and all that? That's another conversation we're going into, but, yeah, that's another podcast, but it's. They're fascinating topics.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 28:45

But I think that when you look at that, if I were to wrap that up, a long time ago, science made a decision to study very objective things, and made it for very practical reasons. Having to do with reproducibility doesn't matter. But what we did is we focused on the objective and we ceased to pay attention to the subjective. And then, with great misfortune, we somehow got into our heads that that meant that the objective was the only important thing, and that was very wrong, right?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 29:18

The subjective, in fact, not only is justice important, but now in modern physics, with quantum mechanics, we're coming back to this full circle point where everything does come down to observers and awareness. It's written into quantum mechanics, which is definitely mainstream physics now. And so, when you follow this through, the idea that we are being influenced by a future purpose, well, what could a purpose mean if not something related to the world around you? Well, there it is. We are interconnected, and to me, this is exciting because it's the bridge back to uniting science and spirituality, which started as a unified pursuit and then got separated and one of the paths got left behind. So centripetal me is a way of reuniting that spirituality back into the way that we think about ourselves in the world.

Emma: 30:16

Beautiful, very nice. So I love how you kind of weave that whole theme of where the science came and how we played its role to create the world that we live in now, and by losing parts of ourselves or viewing right, it pigeonholed us into this very separate, very mechanical, very touch existence that we know and it gives us very down to earth, literally. Where then we get stuck in the mentality of then there is nothing after life, there is no. I mean, I don't know that. Everybody believes that. Obviously, right, most people actually probably believe that there is stuff, but people get hung up on just the mechanical and only what you could see, right, what you could measure and then. But what about all this objective stuff? Right, the emotions and the thoughts and the feelings and all these different things are just as valid. My experience is just as valid. My awareness, my perception of what's happening is just as valid. That is actually co-creating the reality with you, right? That gets totally lost in translation completely out the window.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 31:26

It's because we do get so hung up in the intellect of this and we stop paying attention to the other parts of us that are very real and, in fact, much more influential in the decisions we make. Most of the decisions we make are not made intellectually, even when we think they are.

Emma: 31:44

That's right. They are made emotionally. Yes, listen everybody to what he's saying.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 31:48

It's our emotions are absolutely driving what we consider to be logical conclusions.

Emma: 31:55

That's that we connect. Like I should say to people you could make any point that you want. You connect this, that's, and you make this point. You connect this data point, so you make this point. Right, same data set. You could make whatever point you want, how you choose to connect it, so we definitely influence everything. I want to comment on this whole past future thing. The way that I like to look at that is that, if we stay in awareness and in the present, that that actually encompasses there is no such thing as time really right. So then it comes to this at all. So right now is past, present and future. So, if I'm aware of that, so what you said with your girlfriend slay-ash, current wife, right, so that young version of you got in touch with the future version of you, it was all happening at the same time, right. So, yeah, it came from somewhere. Right, it was right there. It's very easy if you just access it.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 32:51

Yeah, and the more you practice, it, the easier it gets to access it.

Emma: 32:55

That's right.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 32:56

You develop that ability and those perceptions the way you develop anything else in your life right Practice and focus. So yeah, now my background is yes, I actually work at part of Johns Hopkins University and and my day job is I do data science and systems engineering kinds of things. My background I'm actually a very holistic thinker by nature. That probably comes from growing up and where I grew up. But I wanted to understand sort of how the other half lives, as you will. So when I went to college I did an engineering and when I went to graduate school was for physics. So my, my, my official credentials are in nuclear physics. I don't do much nuclear physics. I very quickly got into acoustics, which is a fascinating subject, and it went all over. Eventually got into data and information sciences and things like that. You can see there's a certain connection to consciousness there as well. But yeah so. So it's a very different world, but having that holistic thinking and that reductionistic thinking, having both tool sets, is very helpful in that.

Emma: 34:10

I think so, because you're able to translate the more esoteric, more spiritual, more abstract, more artistic concepts into more mathematical numbers, equations, so you could prove, you could integrate them, so both sides understand it, right. That's great, that's wonderful, it's your gift to humanity. So, jeff, tell me a little bit more, tell me the audience, this whole thing with consciousness and interconnectedness. So can you explain then, if we're not molecules, right and if we're not our nervous system and that's not where consciousness lives, then can you explain a little bit more? What is it? Where does it live? And how are we interconnected, really? Except for, like me, my body is not just my body, actually, emma and I is not just this, it's also all the microorganisms that we have at this body.

Emma: 34:59

That freaked me out when you said that. That's the first time I heard it. That was so good. But yes, a little bit more about that. And then the implication of that for partners, right. So I love that you used the we already in there and the us, that's perfect. So can you tell a little bit more? And then we could see how that our listeners could use that to impact the relationship.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 35:18

Yeah, absolutely so. You know, as I mentioned before and as you just pointed out, the idea of us as individuals right, we're kind of taught that it starts with understanding. Well, you're a physical thing and you're there I'm going to have a cat guest here who has to be encouraged to, okay. But unfortunately, in starting from that point, it lends itself to a lot of very awkward questions, and what I mean by awkward is that the questions that have sort of presumed something that isn't true and has such become very unanswerable. So you will hear, for example, people refer to the hard question of consciousness, like how does the brain generate consciousness, right? Well, you started with the assumption that the brain generates consciousness.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 36:09

And if it turns out that the brain doesn't generate consciousness, you're kind of already at a dead end. And the evidence sorry materialists, the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn't. That's not how it works. The brain isn't generating consciousness. There are lots of documented stories of people who are, who have no brain activity and yet, when they are revived from that state, can relate exactly what was happening during that time. They're still receiving information, right, if you, if you, if you let go of the idea that the brain is a generator of awareness and instead, for example, think of that the brain might be an antenna into a much broader thing, something that, rather than generates consciousness, something that helps focus into particular pieces of it. Right, so the brain may be as a way of relating, a consciousness that is not bound in time and space and allows you to filter down to those perceptions, experiences. What have you that relate to what we think of as ourselves, as our lives, as our experiences, our journey? Right? This now becomes a much more understandable process. You can explain a lot of things this way.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 37:32

How is it that some children come to their parents one day at the age of four and give them memories of what it was like to be a fighter pilot in World War Two. They couldn't possibly remember that from a physical perspective, right. But if they have, are tapping into a greater awareness of something, right, because they're not filtering down to exactly the experiences that are here and now as we describe, then it works perfectly well. And now, when you think about that and you look at this in the context of a relationship, right, what is it that's happening there? Well, instead of saying, well, I'm here, right, I occupy this space and you occupy that space, and now we are different, rather, you've got a consciousness that's not inherently bounded that way.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 38:23

But these two people who are having this experience with each other, you realize we're actually more or less the same thing. We're two different facets on the same gem. Right, we have an inherent relationship, and it is funny in this context, why, how humanity fights with it so so much when we are ninety, nine, point, nine, nine percent, the same, right, we get so hung up on the point oh, one percent differences that make me from this country and you from that country, and yet we're almost the same. We've got little uniquenesses about us, and that's fantastic, and of course, that's a different topic of why we don't celebrate those uniquenesses when that's really what we should be enjoying.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 39:07

That's right.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 39:08

Like, if everybody was identical, what would be the point?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 39:10

I want somebody who's a little different, gives me a different perspective and all that, but we are more or less part of the same overall system.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 39:19

So when you think about two people who are in a relationship, instead of looking at this and saying, well, I'm me and you're you, and I have to figure out how to appease you or work around you or anything else, it changes the, I think, the mindset that you have to say, all right, we're mostly the same, we're working at this as a partnership, right, and we're two faces of the same partnership.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 39:48

We saw problems differently, we think about things differently, but that could be a really good thing, right? Because now it means that if I'm struggling with how to understand something, I've got this other person who looks at things a little bit differently. Maybe they can offer an insight that I wasn't able to see. And that's usually, I think, where you see people describing themselves as having a healthy relationship. They're not the same as me, but I respect them, right, and the core of that respect comes from the fact that you realize we're really connected, whether we, whether we recognize it actively or not, but if we recognize it more often, then we're better able to make that connection and have that connection be a healthy thing rather than something that's self damaging.

Emma: 40:37

So, from what you're saying and from from things that I know, is it fair to say that that interconnectedness is is being part of the same system, right? So we're supposedly two individuals, but we're part of the same unit. So it's like me, you, we created us. So because we're part of the us, we're interconnected in the us or in that way. That's one way to look at it, but more scientifically, just this is something that I want people to understand beyond just, okay, yeah, so we're a couple, right, but that feels like a given, and then people take it for granted how significant that is. But if we could give it a more larger perspective, it maybe sinks in more how beautiful, what a gift that is. And so, physically and energetically, consciousness wise and universe wise, any words of wisdom around that that could help understand that interconnectedness in the system. Well, I think-.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 41:39

That's a big question.

Emma: 41:39

I'm sorry to put you in the spot.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 41:41

No, it's okay. You know there's a lot of insights we can gain in this. And looking at nature, right, because we're part of nature and so it's not surprising that we are part of that. If you're familiar with the term fractal, right, there's sort of this fractal existence. You look at a piece of it, it's got the same self-similar nature there's the word again. But that's so. Similarity is other things, right, and you can. We've discovered now in recent books that have come out of talking about how plants which we always used to say that one tree was just a tree over there, this tree, this bush, is it just a tree or bush over there they don't really communicate. Well, absolutely they do, and that's what we've discovered. There's a lot of language, a lot of communication. That's going on. It's not the language that we use in words and sounds, but actually plants do make sense. Right, it's not the same, but it's-.

Emma: 42:31

But that's interesting. I know a lot of people know that, right. So plants actually communicate and they're talking to each other.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 42:36

What oh, yeah, yeah, fantastic stuff and in fact, as a quick little aside, where people have done set up equipment to be able to measure that auditorily and be able to get those signals, and found that the you can tell a tremendous amount about the health of an ecosystem from that, because there's a distinct sound that a plant makes, for example, when it is growing in sort of a natural environment, versus the monocultural environments that we grow our plants in. And if you listen to the sounds that those plants make in a monocultural environment it's like they're screaming. It's hard to listen to.

Emma: 43:12

Wow, jeff, that's just really freaking me out, because I mean people make this point about animals where the food comes from chickens and the pigs and the cows or whatever right, and having a humane approach to food, the animal living version.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 43:30

Sure.

Emma: 43:30

But when it comes to plants, too.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 43:33

Wow, yeah, and again it's the self similarity. We know what stress and anxiety does to us physiologically, so why would we not expect that a cow that's brought up to be mistreated and what have you is gonna be releasing hormones into its own flesh? That do the, we do it, and the meat is good? Of course the cows and the chickens are gonna, and the plants and the same thing. But the idea that if we're living in sort of a, in a healthy way and respecting sort of core principles of this, it allows us to minimize that stress Stresses are there. Stress is when you're never gonna go away from stress. That's part of the system, right? Look at the patterns of relationship between those things that work in harmony, right, and that are working towards a common goal. It can be very helpful to understand how you can minimize your own stress and work more effectively in partnership rather than competition, for example. And I feel like I've lost the essence of the question that you asked me.

Emma: 44:39

No, that's okay. You still made a very good point how all of nature is, that the level of consciousness and in the bigger picture is not just okay, just the asking a couple is like it's much bigger. We're all part of a much bigger whole nature than universe. Whatever. I was looking for more like out there, but the points that you made were fantastic. We're all part of this ecological system, we're all part of this natural thing and we're all parts that we have no idea of talking to themselves, and they're being impacted and the stressors affect them just like they affect us, and we're all interconnected. We eat those plants and those animals, right, and we're part of this biology and this forest and this ocean and we're part of this life. So all of that is woven together. All the parts affect each other, just like we affect each other in relationship and being mindful of not creating additional stressors, but rather how do we manage the stresses? So we're not acting from this funky place and rather we collaborate, have more harmony than we created our relationship.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 45:44

Yeah.

Emma: 45:45

Very nice. I love it. That was a great point. How do we use this to create a better future, better relationships, better families? That's my focus, that's my cup of tea, but then the rest of the world, right? So what kind of? Go in there a little bit. So sustainability, a better future any thoughts?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 46:00

Yeah, it is, I think, and that's why I do it, because I believe that this is having this kind of understanding can help us make the right decisions. For myself, for example, as I start to ask these questions like well, how would I change things? I mean, it's clear that we've got some dysfunction in society. Right, the way that we focus on things maybe a bit of an understatement right, this fascination we have with violence, with getting distracted from things as opposed to invested in things lots of different pieces of this, but especially asking questions like why is it that we feel an obligation to be right, so much so that we are unwilling to entertain the possibility that we could have been wrong? Right, how does that come about? And as I dug into it and contemplated this, my conclusion is that it's because we are really brought up using shame as a control factor in what we do. Right, you're told right from the very earliest ages of what you're not supposed to do and that you're in trouble if you do these things and you don't wanna be wrong.

Emma: 47:18

And what about bad boy, bad girl? What yeah?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 47:20

exactly how do we shift that right and recognize that it's okay to be wrong. There's nothing wrong with being wrong. Right it's, in fact, that's how you grow. That's how everybody grows. Everybody is wrong about certain things and you learn about it.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 47:38

And it allows you to sort of back up, having an understanding of sort of what consciousness is and what an awareness is, and being especially self-aware, to the point that you start asking yourself why didn't I react the way that I did when somebody said that to me? Why is it so important for me to have been right in this situation, whether I was or not? Why do I care? What is it? And ask yourself if I weren't, and if I really still believed that I was right, but I was willing to accept that I might not have been, how would this have come out differently? And if it didn't matter that I was right or wrong, how would this have come out differently? And to me, the idea of consciousness being much more general, the idea that we are part of the same thing, who are you trying to be right against?

Emma: 48:32

Right, yes.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 48:34

Right, all these pieces that we've put into plays that are really not very sensible, the idea that one person is better than another person, at least a one. How would you measure that? Could anybody actually come down and say oh look, you've got a score of 12 and you've got a score of 17, and they're like no.

Emma: 48:55

Well, something's going to go much better with money, right?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 48:57

Right. And status and stuff and titles and degrees and but everybody is a unique representation, If you think instead of us as sort of these beautiful little crystals that are all floating around and going. Well, that crystal is better than this crystal. No, it's just a different crystal, right when each one is pretty. Somebody may decide one of them is prettier than the other, but someone else is going to come back, even the only one that's pretty. The other was prettier than this one 100%.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 49:26

It's an entirely subjective experience, and so the idea that we're competing against each other to be the best person is crazy. We may be better in some respects, but there's always somebody else who's better than you in some other way, at some other thing, and so trying to sort of equate two people is just silly. There's always somebody out there who's not going to like you. There's always somebody out there for whom you are not it. You are not the beautiful crystal, but that doesn't mean you're not a beautiful crystal. It doesn't mean that you aren't going to be beautiful to somebody else in whatever it is that they're looking for. It's finding the people who look at each other and go you're beautiful, and obviously, when I'm saying beautiful, I mean inside right. This is not.

Emma: 50:12

I like to say it's a look for every part, not everybody's for everybody Like. We're all here for a reason, we all have our own purpose, we all have our own environments, our own people and we're supposed to match up in different ways to enhance our own journey, our own experience, for our own purposes. Beautiful, it's OK. If you don't like me, go find your own people, it's all good.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 50:33

To me, the goal out of all of this is and I'm not there so I'm not claiming it but to be able to look at the people that you go. I don't want anything to do with you, you are absolutely not my kind of person and to get to a point where you can go but I can learn from you. You have something to value, and so I do it when I think of it. I don't think of it enough, because you need to always be reminded to be able to get to that point to realize that even the people that you don't like, they probably have something to offer. Yes, 100%.

Emma: 51:03

So I like to take that perspective more so when I am feeling insecure or I'm feeling like, oh, somebody might not like me, or it might have a cup of tea, that kind of thing. Well, they don't have to, they could find their own people. So that's how I use it. But I love what you're saying 100%. So, especially if we don't like somebody, it's like, oh, maybe there's something in me that I see there that I'm not owning. So there's always something going on. There's always room for learning, always room for evolving. Everything is perfect, everything is for us, everything is just amazing. So that's how I like to look at all this Lovely, any last words of wisdom.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 51:40

Be kind to yourself, it's not judgment right.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 51:44

Yeah, yeah, give yourself a break. It's the, as you were saying, you know, if you, if you look at somebody else and you go, I don't like you, it's probably because they're reflecting something about yourself that you don't like. And it's easy to then jump to that conclusion that, like, well, I must be awful because there's this thing about myself that I don't like and it's just not, it's not a good, it's not a good conclusion to draw from that. Right, there's just, we all continue to evolve in our own ways and the things that maybe we really don't like about ourselves are there to Help us get to some place that we didn't realize we needed to go. And this is why I like the idea of Centropy, because you realize that we've laid out for ourselves a certain path.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 52:27

Yeah, we can change it, but we probably were when we laid that out before we went, ever went into this form that is humanity. We probably had a reason for that, and there were, there were reasons for that you had, for having the experiences that you do. That may not be so pleasant now, but are gonna give you opportunities and growth that you wouldn't have had otherwise. So, you know, take it easy on yourself and, you know, try to grow, but don't, don't fill yourself with, with.

Emma: 52:56

In the process.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 52:57

Yeah.

Emma: 52:58

Lovely, very, very nice. So do you want to tell the audience where they could find you had to Collaborate, share space in love with you?

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 53:10

That would be, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. So our main website is ICRLorg. What we do is a variety of different things. We're starting up starting tomorrow, but this probably will not air, so it will have been some time ago something that is a weekly session for people to focus on sort of positive moments in their life and to use that as an access and integrated with art and being able to capture that in beautiful ways. But we we have monthly meetups where we have talks on fascinating topics and those are great opportunities. We do experiments.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne: 53:44

We're doing a thing in in April looking at the consciousness, what's happening in consciousness during out-of-body experiences. There's all kinds of Interesting stuff that's going on, and so I would encourage you to connect with us, get Maybe sign up for for the newsletter where we share all of this on a roughly monthly basis. The newsletter's come out to let people know what, what are new opportunities, and we're always looking for people who want to get involved. I want to support the work In any way that some people are just like, hey, I want to donate some money great, other people, I want to be involved, I want to volunteer, I want to, I want to be part of this great, that's wonderful. We're always looking to to reach out and and help people and to be helped by people. So just head over to the, to the website, and you'll see how to get in contact.

Emma: 54:35

Yes, I'm gonna definitely link that and I am gonna do one better and put the link to the registration form so they could choose what Saturday they want to come. So I have that. Well, I'll share that. So the meetings are every Saturday. Yes, so for the sushi are those those positive moments and just create some yummy energy. So I'll definitely provide that link too. So your website and that links so people could connect in any way that they like with you, or inches, shift up, shift their awareness, continue to evolve, being that love, consciousness and that interconnectedness and just create awesomeness in their life. Thank you so much for being with me today, jeff. I really appreciate your time and your wisdom and I will see you soon. Other things that we're doing and and to the audience, see you at the next one. Bye.