Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

My guest today is Dr. Mel Borins  who is a Family Physician in private practice, and is on active staff at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, Canada. He is a Fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.
For over two decades, he has been active and instrumental in training Physicians in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Counseling and Psychotherapy, Stress Management and Communications.
Dr. Mel Borins is the author of Go Away Just for the Health of It,  An Apple a Day: A Holistic Health Primer and A Doctor’s Guide to Alternative Medicine: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why.  He has written extensively on stress management, psychotherapy, acupuncture, traditional healing, herbs and complementary medicine. 

What is complementary medicine? Dr. Borins says that complementary medicine is really alternative medicine, medicine that's not mainstream in terms of medical training. When he went through medical school, he did his elective in hypnosis. So that was his first exposure to something different than what he learned in medical school. Subsequently, he  attended a weekend workshop in Gestalt therapy given by George Rosner, after seeing many videos of watching Fritz Perls. 
And then Mel got involved in personal Gestalt work but also in a training group that that met once a week for three hours for about six years. This started the whole interest in psychotherapy and counseling and the impact that the emotions and the mind have on the physical body. 
After completing his medical training, Mel and wife went on a world trip for about nine and a half months. They traveled to all kinds of different countries around the world. As a result he was exposed to different kinds of healing by local healers, spiritual healers and herbalists. Mel began to see that there were other approaches in addition to modern medicine. When he got back to Toronto, he did some training in acupuncture, took some courses in spinal manipulation.
We talk about the uses for acupuncture. There's some scientific research that says that it's useful for headaches, it's useful for osteoarthritis of the knee. It's useful for tennis elbow, it's useful for neck pain, it's useful for nausea and vomiting. So there is some scientific randomly assigned double blind controlled trials that show that acupuncture is actually better than sham or placebo in treating some of these conditions. 
Music has been a big part of Mel’s life. He has done music videos, DVDs and recorded 200 songs, any of them humorous. Mel kindly sang one for us about gratitude.
What does being human mean to you, I asked.
Being human means to connect to other human beings through the heart, through the Spirit, through love. And being human, I think is the ability to connect and be connected to other human beings.

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My guest today is Dr. David Peters, Professor Emeritus, Westminster Centre for Resilience, College of Liberal Arts and Science University of Westminster, London. He has co-authored or edited five books about complementary therapies including The Encyclopaedia of Complementary Medicine in 1997, followed by The complete Guide to Integrated Medicine in 2000, Understanding the placebo response in complementary medicine and Integrating Complementary Therapies: a practical guide for primary care both in 2001 and in 2007, New Medicine.  
David started his medical career  as a musculo-skeletal physician and gradually branched out to include osteopathy and acupuncture working with the relaxation response, yoga and meditation. A particular clinical interest of his is in dysregulatory syndromes where pain and/or fatigue often overlap, and in the autonomic imbalance and breathing pattern disorders seen so frequently associated with them.
There is a pandemic of chronic diseases that is decimating the world. Diseases like obesity, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, heart disease and, of course, cancer. What has gone wrong? Many things; industrialization spewing toxins into the air, water and food, consumerism, “hunting for unreachable goals”, large discrepancies in income. For example, there are many neighborhoods in large cities where the average life expectancy is 60 years, while a few miles further, it is 80.
David takes groups of doctors suffering of burnouts camping into the woods for a day or two. Works like magic. For this and much more, listen or watch the full interview.

As a follow up, my next guest will be  Dr. Mel Borins, author of Go Away Just for the Health of It,  An Apple a Day: A Holistic Health Primer and A Doctor’s Guide to Alternative Medicine: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why. He has written extensively on stress management, psychotherapy, acupuncture, traditional healing, herbs and complementary medicine. Hope you can join me.

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We face a challenge of understanding information. Because information is considered as something that is written in a book, in a message in a newspaper, it's not understood as something that two bacteria can exchange. And then there is the social challenge, because we think typically of an individual,  an individual human, but not about the distributed cognition in a social setting, both for humans, but also for smaller organisms like cells. So, the idea of cognition on the basic level of the smallest living organism, which is the cell has been very difficult for many people to accept and to understand that everything starts on the level of cell. And some people would say that even parts of the cell have some cognitive properties.

There is much  controversy in cognitive science, between people who consider cognition only as symbol manipulation and language, human language, and the people who claim that we have to take into account how much of processes that  underlie cognition are done within the body and the environment. So it's embodied embedded, an active combination. It's not hanging in a vacuum. It's, it's, it's connected with the world. And we were very much interested to get this discussion between colleagues who believe in different views, to get them together and to get this discussion showing where the positions are, and is their common ground and how we go further.

Presently, Prof. Dodik-Crnkovic work focuses on intelligent computation and cognition as very important processes found in nature that we can use to inspire new technologies.

"Being human to me means the privilege of sharing the past and present, and anticipating the future with other humans. Of course, most importantly to be able to share feelings, and thoughts and be in the world with the closest people like family and friends."

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My guest today is Apab’yan Tew, speaker, herbalist doctor, bones therapist, auxiliary midwife, writer, researcher, musician and ceremonial dancer and singer currently practicing in the highlands of Central Mexico, Chiapas and Guatemala. He is the author of The Birth of a Universe: The Maya science of Pregnancy.
Apab’yan spent 19 years becoming a spiritual guide with one female and one male teacher learning his craft experientially. This education was exhaustive, arduous and offered only to certain individuals chosen from within an indigenous community. His two teachers were very different. About his woman teacher he says, “for her I was above all an assistant, for him his spiritual son.”
We discuss some of the foundational ideas of the Mayan way of seeing the world. Two of these, I find myself in total alignment with: Everything is connected and Everything belongs to a system. The third, Everything has life not only what we call human or biological but also what is not visible as well as the solids without apparent movement. Apab’yan 
explains that everything also has a way of thinking and a form of communication or dialogue. If I understood him correctly, everything has consciousness.
The Maya actually have three calendars. The first is the sacred calendar, or Tzolk'in, which lasts 260 days and then starts over again, just as our 365-day calendar refreshes once it hits Dec. 31. This calendar is important for scheduling religious ceremonies and predicting the personality of a child.
The second calendar is the Haab', or secular calendar, which lasts 365 days but does not account for the extra quarter-day it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun. 
The final calendar is the Long Count Calendar in which each b'ak'tun is 144,000 days long, or a little less than 400 years. To the ancient Maya, 13 b'ak'tuns represented a full cycle of creation. The Maya had several rarely used units that were even larger than b'ak'tuns, giving them the capacity to count millions of years into the future.
 In the Maya highlands of Guatemala, parents come to visit a guide or shaman traditionally a few days after their baby was born. The guide would provide, a reading based on the sacred calendar. 
 What day was your child born?  is the first question and from the answer the calculation is done. Of course there are many other questions about conception, pregnancy and birth quite similar to what a good obstetrician, midwife or doula would ask in the West.
I gave Apab’yan my birth date and in a few minutes he told me I was "8 Monkey" and then proceeded to explain what that implied in terms of my character and personality. Since it was all pretty positive, I would say he was right on.
My next guest  will be Dr. Gordana Dodig, Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Interaction Design at  Mälardalen University, Sweden, She will discuss with me cognition as a driver of evolution and evolution as a driver of cognition in living organisms, cells as information-processing agents and many other related subjects. I hope you will join me.

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My guest today is Dr. Dean Radin - Following a career in classical violin, Dean went on to earn an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amhurst, a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After his graduation, Dean conducted research at Princeton and University of Edinburgh and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Presently, Dean is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell 50 years ago after the Apollo-14 mission.
Dean is the best-selling Author of four books: 
The conscious universe : the scientific truth of psychic phenomena, (2009).
Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, (2013),  reissued as The Noetic Universe, (2011)
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (2006)  
Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe,  (2018) 
Dean is also a musician.
I enquired as to the meaning of noetic. Dean explained that in its simplest form, it means deep intuition. And intuition is knowing without knowing how. But you know it with a deep conviction, that it is correct. You don't know how you know that or you don't even know where the conviction came from. But when you check, it turns out that you're correct based on some externally verifiable event or knowledge.
We spoke of Practical Magic, as something  science has been studying unwittingly in the form of psychic phenomena. According to this view consciousness is primary in the universe. This provides a worldview, where suddenly the mind is the most powerful thing that there is, in which case the mind is primary over physics, not constrained by notions of space, or time, or distance. Then Dean proceeds to delineate how the magical traditions fall into three different practices.
We discuss mediums and spirits, haunted houses and what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Maybe there's memory everywhere.
At one point in his life, Dean joined a secret government program that was looking explicitly at psychic phenomena. The US government was interested in it, for two reasons. One was that there had been reports primarily out of Russia and China, that they had secret programs going on using these kinds of psychic abilities. And we needed to know whether it was a threat.. But the other half of it was, they had also found people who were very good at clairvoyance, and they were using it for espionage. This and much more you will find in the podcast.

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Rabbi Jonathan Duker  grew up near Philadelphia, attended Yehivat Reishit Yerushalayim in the Old City of Jerusalem, earned his BA and MA from Yeshiva University, was ordained as rabbi by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York. In 2004 he emigrated to Israel and subsequently received a degree in Education from Herzog College. He currently serves as an Israel Studies Educator at the Alexander Muss High School in Israel, Rabbinic Guide for Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire, and volunteers for the Jewish Marriage department for the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization. Rabbi Duker lives in Beit Shemesh with his wife Susan and their 4 children. He the author of The Spirits Behind the Law: The Talmudic Scholars (2007, Urim Publications) as well as other Talmud based writing. 
We started our dialogue by familiarizing us with the terms Talmud and Midrash since in the introduction to his book, Jon states that the scholars of the Talmud and Midrash had an immeasurable impact on Judaism.  Jon provides a detailed description of the work that went into writing a biography of the 15 scholars he chose for his book. The Talmud is 2,000 pages long and written in Arameic. It contains a hodgepodge of commentaries on observance, hygiene, legal issues, marriage and even jokes. There are discussions of discussions of discussions. There is no punctuation and often no reference as to who is being quoted. So, his book represents a Herculien achievement.
Rabbi Akiba, originally a simple shepherd, attended school with his son and became one of the foremost Rabbis of antiquity. As an outsider coming to it late in the game, he had something to contribute that the establishment could not.
We also learn that a lot of Jewish ideas spread to much of the world through the teachings of Jesus and Mohamed.
Talking about the different way men and women approach the study of Talmud. Jon tells me that there has been a sociological study done recently about women's Talmud study. The finding was that when men are reading the text together, and they're difficult texts, so you have to really parse out the words, they tend to be more competitive with one another, while women, when they're studying together tend to be more collaborative. Jon’s own experience supports these findings.
Jon also teaches Jewish history to students visiting Israel students from outside of Israel. It's a combination of classroom learning, and on site learning. They visit  all sorts of archaeological sites and historical sites, and teach them about the story of the Jewish people. A component of this program is to take certain groups to Poland as there was a lot of Jewish life in Poland, before ghettoes, concentration and extermination camps. I ask him, “How do you keep your face in a benevolent God after Auschwitz?” Hear his most illuminating answer.

My next guest will  be Dr. Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell 50 years ago after the Apollo-14 mission. We shall explore with him consciousness, “presentiment” and psychic espionage and related subjects.

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My guest today is Prof Dave Pruett, former NASA researcher; award-winning computational scientist; emeritus professor of applied mathematics at James Madison University (JMU); the originator of "From Black Elk to Black Holes", a Templeton-award-winning Honors seminar at JMU; and the author of Reason and Wonder: A Copernican Revolution in Science and Spirit (Praeger 2012, paperback 2016). Reason and Wonder, synthesizes modern scientific insights with ancient spiritual wisdom. 
Prof. Ptuett says he learned a lot from the work of French paleontologist-priest Teilhard de Chardin who held that biological evolution is not directionless. It tends toward greater biological complexity with concomitantly higher consciousness. 
This gave rise to the twin theories of cosmogenesis and complexity-consciousness. Dave also found Jung’s radical theories of the unconscious, synchronicity, and individuation influenced his own theories.
In the present, scientific discoveries, particularly those of Quantum Mechanics, are now beginning to resonate with and reinforce ancient wisdom, wisdom that has been imbedded in indigenous mythologies for millennia. It’s incumbent upon those who have already transitioned to a more sustainable “myth of meaning” to find ways to encourage others along the path.
We talked about mysticism. Teilhard and Jung were mystics. One definition of a “mystic,” paraphrased from theologian Matthew Fox (1991), states simply: A mystic is one who is in awe of the universe.
It’s quite extraordinary that Black Elk and Einstein were contemporaries, even more so that their profoundly different backgrounds and education would lead them to similar views of the universe. The “web of life”—which connects all beings, living and “non-living”—figures prominently in Native American mythology. So too, from Einstein’s general theory of relatively, we learn that the geometry of spacetime is not Euclidean like a sheet of graph paper; it’s warped by the presence of massive objects like stars. The warping of spacetime is dynamic, varying in time. In the great cosmic dance, matter tells spacetime how to warp, and spacetime tells matter how to move. In this dance, the motions of stars or the interactions of black holes send gravitational waves rippling throughout the spacetime web. In both worldviews, the universe is a great interconnected web.

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My guest today is Father Laurence Freeman OSB, a Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Monte Olivetto Maggiore in Italy.  Fr Laurence was educated by the Benedictines and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He is the Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) an inclusive contemplative  community based in Bonnevaux. 
Fr Laurence is a prolific author. His books include: Light within, the Selfless Self, Your Daily Practice, Jesus: the Teacher Within, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, Web of Silence and Good Work: Meditation for Personal and Organizational Transformation. He has collaborated with the Dalai Lama on many dialogues and on the ground breaking book The Good Heart. In addition to his work for the contemplative renewal of Christianity he leads dialogues and peace initiatives, seeing meditation as opening the common ground of all humanity.
To Fr Laurence meditation is central because it is foundational, because it is a daily practice for him. He recommends that people meditate twice a day, morning and evening, which has a transformative effect upon our sense of time and, and our way of living. At his center they meditate four times a day. Many people, when they I first began, feel that they don't have time to meditate. But  the time that you give to the meditation comes back. And one has to be patient.
And the interesting discovery is that when we enter solitude, for example, in the time of meditation, and we leave images and conversations with ourselves behind then we find ourselves more and more deeply in this solitude. And the curious and wonderful discovery is  that accepting your uniqueness is also the means to much deeper and richer sense of relationship to others. Solitude is the cure for loneliness. Loneliness is a failed solitude. It's the failure or the inability to really be oneself and accept oneself in one's uniqueness.
God does not allow evil to happen. But God is in the suffering of those who are subjected to that evil. God is omnipresent. God is around a being and God is presence. There is this very challenging and almost terrible saying of Jesus. He says, God is like the sun that shines on good and bad or on the ungrateful and the wicked.
God is being and God is your being. In the silence, in the stillness of meditation, you are being with God, God is being with you, but not in a way that you can psychologize. 
My guest next week will be Dr Jessica Eccles MB, ChB, Dip(French), MA, MSc, MRCPsych, PhD, PGCert HE, Clinical Senior Lecturer and MQ Arthritis Research UK Fellow. We shall talk about philosophy of mind and brain-body interactions and the relationship between joint hypermobility, autonomic dysfunction and psychiatric symptoms

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My guest today is Martha Jo Atkins PhD, end-of-life counselor, counselor supervisor, (LPC-S), coach, speaker and author of Signposts of Dying: What You Need to Know (2015). For almost thirty years, you Martha has worked with grieving and bereaved children and families and people at end-of-life and the ones who love them. I asked what that kind of counselling entails.
In the very early 90s, Martha  worked at a children's hospital in the intensive care unit. She worked with children who were dying and their siblings. She found that the siblings were often left out not invited in to say goodbye. And so she started to do that and enjoyed it.
Her brother died in 93 and her personal and professional lives collided. Martha learned about grief in a whole new way. She returned to university and got her master's degree. Now she is in West Virginia in private practice.  As an example of what she does she spoke of  the  person she most recently lived with and helped to navigate his last days. And it was powerful and good work.
Martha likes dropping into a family system or a friend system and helping them help the person who's dying. And this community comes around the person. People engage in their own grief processes, they help each other, they learn. In this case, there was a lot of learning about dying and what dying is and how to care for somebody. It is work that calls to her.
We discuss shamanism. Martha saw it was very magical. And through practicing it she realized how it's a support for being human, a different kind of support than sitting in a pew in a church. As a result, her practices are different,  she thinks of the spirits of the land. She used to make altars and mandalas, that would give her a sense of rootedness and and connection to the place, which feels important.
Next week  my guest will be Laurence Freeman OSB, a Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Monte Olivetto Maggiore in Italy. He is the Director of the World
Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) an inclusive contemplative
community based in Bonnevaux. Fr Laurence is a prolific author. He has collaborated with the Dalai Lama on many dialogues and on the ground breaking book The Good Heart. He was awarded the Order of Canada in recognition of his work for interfaith dialogue and the promotion of world peace.

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My guest today is Jeffrey Mishlove PhD, clinical psychologist, host of  the podcast, New Thinking Allowed, and author of an encyclopedic volume of consciousness studies, The Roots of Consciousness. Dr. Mishlove is a scientist known worldwide for his serious research on unexplained phenomena. He was recently awarded the Bigelow Institute Competition Grand Prize for his paper Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.
Jeffrey was studying criminology when at age 27 he had a “dream” about his uncle Harry that changed the direction of his life. He quit criminology and switched into para-psychology at University of California at Berkeley. Since that time, he has worked tirelessly in this field and  has become a scientist known worldwide for his serious research on unexplained phenomena.
How do you get living, viable consciousness out of dead particles. It's been a thorn in the side of neuroscientists and philosophers for probably centuries. From a discussion of this subject we move to exploring James William James theory, that the brain is the filter of consciousness instead of its source. We would be overwhelmed if we were aware of everything all at once. So, the brain really serves as a reduction valve of sorts. People who have a dysfunction of the brain, for example, in a near death experience, often report this wider cosmic consciousness or mystical visions. 
How does this filter work, physiologically speaking? Not being a neuroscientist, Jeffrey states that the whole universe is mind like, rather than physical. And so, one could say that it's not so much that the mind exists inside the brain, but that the brain exists inside the mind. And that somehow, being humans as we are, and with the sense of separation, you and I are, we live inside different skins. This membrane is not the whole story, it's only valid at one level of our being at another level the membranes open up and we have access to ultimately each other's consciousness. That is the how a medium or spiritualist is able to connect with deceased people, for example.
The consciousness realms described in near-death reports are detailed. As are the reincarnation studies by Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia, Department
of Perceptual Studies, containing a database of over 2,500 individual cases. 

Next week my guest will be will be Dr. Martha Atkins, author of Signposts of Dying: What You Need to Know. Dr. Atkins has worked with grieving and bereaved children and families at end-of-life for the past thirty years.

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