161: What We Really Need To Be Healthy in 2026 with Russell Bishop

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“Knowledge is always present, but I may not be present with the knowledge,” says Russell Bishop, renowned personal development leader and founder of Insight Seminars, joining the Quantum Biology Collective Podcast to explore the nature of awareness, consciousness, and the power of choice in shaping our reality. Drawing from a lifetime of guiding transformational experiences—including his own journey through adversity, spiritual awakening, and decades at the intersection of personal healing and consciousness research—Russell Bishop lays out a radical but deceptively simple truth: the answers, experiences, and peace we seek are already present; our challenge is learning to tune in.

In a riveting and deeply personal exchange with Meredith Oke, Russell Bishop delves into how we can shift from chasing external symbols—like money, status, or even health—to consciously cultivating the experience and inner states we truly desire. He reveals why most transformation is really “awakening to something that’s always been present,” and shares both practical tools and paradigm-shifting insights that will challenge your ideas about agency, victimhood, healing, and the science of consciousness itself.

Tune in to the Quantum Biology Collective Podcast to hear more about why true change is not about adding something new, but remembering and reconnecting with our innate capacity for loving, awareness, and transcendence—plus the latest research at the frontiers of quantum biology and spiritual science. Discover how to author your experience, unlock intuitive knowing, and become present with the knowledge that’s been within you all along.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Stop chasing symbols—focus on the quality of experience you truly desire. Ask yourself what feeling you’re really after, and choose to create it now.
2. Practice conscious awareness. Shift out of autopilot by regularly asking yourself, “What am I experiencing? Do I want more or less of this?”
3. Release attachment to circumstance. Author your day by choosing how you respond in every moment; your experience isn’t defined by your situation.
4. Build community with those who uplift you. Surround yourself with people who hold loving, conscious intentions and support your awakening.
5. Open to intuitive knowing—ask your heart, your gut, your deeper self what’s next on your path. Let inspiration and inner guidance lead your health journey.

Memorable Quotes

"I began to see the difference between some people who experience their circumstance as their identity, rather than seeing it as just the condition. I realized I can author the quality of my experience independent of what's going on around me."

"Awakening is not about transformation, fixing something that's wrong. All I have to do is awaken to something that's always been present—becoming more of who I already am."

"The soul is present whether we want to call it a soul or not, and it doesn't care what we name it. Something...

Episode Transcript

(06:23):
Russell Bishop, welcome to the QVC podcast.
Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to what comes forward today.
So am I. And thank you so much for that beautiful
invocation that you opened our interaction with.
I think it really set the tone for opening up

(06:43):
a space for the two of us and anyone who cares to
join us to. To go on their own personal journey.
So I'm just going to start somewhere fun because I was
listening to an interview with you, and my daughter was in the room,
and I didn't know she was paying attention. And all of a sudden she's 11.
All of a sudden she said, you know, mom, that man's

(07:05):
really right. Sometimes it is really simple, but it's not
so easy.
Well, that's good. And she said. And
then she went on to say, you know, like, being the
seeker, when you're playing what's the
game they play at Hogwarts? Anyway, she's like, it's very simple. All you

(07:29):
have to do is catch the snitch. But it's not easy.
It's not easy, mom, to catch that snitch.
So let's just open it up there. Because I think,
you know, I think a lot of the time most people listening are on some
sort of journey, whether it's a personal health journey or a journey of owning their

(07:49):
own business related to health. And I think
sometimes we forget. We're like, oh, it's so simple. Why aren't I doing it
better? Or we make it complicated when it actually is simple
and you've had so much experience with human nature.
Help us out.

(08:10):
Yeah, it might be helpful if I give a little thumbnail about
some of my background, because that informs and
has for a very long time the work that I do.
I was raised in a Presbyterian family. We had
four ministers in the family, and I. So I was at

(08:30):
church a lot, but I always had
a sort of a conflicting experience.
On the one hand, I loved it. On the other hand, I hated it.
And later I was able to identify what I loved was
actually the music, because the music.
In my spiritual practice, we think of two principal connections

(08:53):
into spirit, light and
sound. And of course, music is sound, and. And almost
everybody can relate to music of one kind or another. And
for me, it. I. I just opened and I. I kind of soared with
the music. But when they started doing all their
talk and, you know, blame and all that kind of stuff, I said,

(09:16):
well, maybe not so much. So
I didn't have the conscious awareness at the time. But
that connection into spirit is what I was Experiencing.
So also because. Because we have a little bit of a
health focus in here. I had 14 surgeries by the
time I was 14. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it was kind of

(09:39):
interesting. You know, some of them were accidents. I went through
two windshields when I was a little kid, you know, way before seat belts were
around. And, you know,
I. I guess the one way to say that is they had to keep knocking
me out. So I was gonna say
a lot of. It's a lot of anesthesia in a short

(10:03):
period of time on a little body and a little consciousness
back then. When they used ether. Oh. Which is
like, I thought, oh, my God, they're trying to kill me again.
So in any case,
my father wound up dying of leukemia when he was 42. I

(10:24):
was. Had just turned 19 and
a bunch of circumstances not worth going into right now. But it
bankrupted the family. And I wound up. I had an
old beater of a car, which I lived in for a while. And
that was actually grace in
many ways, because as challenging as it was, I mean, I had

(10:47):
literally $6 to my name. I
never felt like I was in trouble.
I just felt like, okay, so that's how this is right now. And it
was truly experience of being in the now, in
the moment. And that began to
open up the. The distinct awareness for

(11:09):
me that there's a difference between my experience and my ex.
Circumstance. And
I can author the quality of my
experience independent of
what's going on circumstantially. And I
began to see the difference between some people experience their circumstance

(11:32):
as their experience of who they are as
opposed to the condition. There's no gap. There's no choice.
Yeah, exactly. So
about. In 1968, a guy named
Fritz Perls, who was considered the creator of

(11:53):
Gestalt Therapy, wrote a book called Gestalt Therapy
verbatim, which I read. And
he used to be a psychoanalyst who
did traditional psychoanalysis. So three sessions a week for seven years. He
said all of my patients after seven years had well analyzed problems,

(12:16):
and now they just had stacks of reasons why they should have the problem.
But he said, he discovered that what he said, simple awareness can be
curative. So he changed the therapy did
with people to basically asking questions. And
so what are you experiencing? Well, where did that come from? Well, what choices
can you make? What choices did you make? And all of the notion of. He

(12:38):
said, responsibility is the ability to respond. So
he's helping people notice how they chose responses and
how that then created the quality of their experience.
Now I was 20 at the time
when I read that book. And that put me on
a path of saying, I want to work with people in that

(13:01):
regard. And when I applied to
graduate school, I wrote on the
application, give you a window into my arrogance at the
time, which may or may not have been diminished much. I said, I'm willing to
let you have me, a student as I. As long as I don't have to
take any of your courses.

(13:26):
This audience will appreciate the wisdom of that. Actually,
yeah, it was. Was really kind of interesting because the
chairman said, before we throw you out on your ear, what are you
talking? And I said, well, you're going to want me to write a null
hypothesis for a thesis. He said, yeah, and you're going to
want me to prove it at the O5 or 01 level of significance, meaning

(13:49):
at.05 only five times out of 100 or oh, one, only one times
out of 100, could this have shown up by chance? He said, yes.
I said, so if we go through these bookshelves
lined with the theses that have been done heretofore,
will we not find this one with proof that this one
has the opposite proof, and so they can't

(14:12):
both be true, can they? And he kind of went, never thought
of that. So what you really don't want
here. And there's again, the brashness of the time. You're not really
interested in what's true. You're just interested what we can put together within
some kind of statistical summary.
Well, what do you propose? He said, well, rather than having a theory or a

(14:34):
null hypothesis, what I want to do is I just want to bring
different people into the campus who can work with groups of
students for over the course of a year or maybe two, and
simply chronicle what changes take place
without a theory about what changes should take place or
which modality is more effective than the other. So

(14:57):
that became my thesis. And he did say, well, you're going to have to take
three of our courses. All
right, all right, we'll take three. I surrender. Okay, fine. But
that then put me on this whole path of
beginning to understand that knowledge is always
present, but I may not be present with the

(15:18):
knowledge. Oh, that's quite
profound, Russell. Yeah, well, I. I didn't have the
language for that until much later.
In fact, someone once said, peace is present, Russell. You just may not be present
with the peace. And that's when a bunch of dominoes clicked
together. Oh, that's what that's about. And so

(15:42):
I wound up doing a lot of Work in the gestalt world,
in various kinds of encounter groups and gestalt therapy
and national training labs and sensitivity training and, you know, on and
on and on, because I was, I was just enthralled with
what that process of self discovery was.
So shortening this story by quite a bit.

(16:05):
By the 70s, I was running a personal development
course called Mind Dynamics, which it's something I had
personally experienced and found it amazing how much
change people made in a couple of days. And in 1978,
in concert with my spiritual teacher, whom I wrote a letter
saying, hey, you know, I'm sure the people are doing well spiritually in this group,

(16:27):
but boy, they can't handle the real world very well.
And he called me and I didn't expect the rubber meets the
road boom. Exactly. So
he said, what did you have in mind? I said, well, I can design a
training program, an experiential seminar that would help
people translate what they are learning spiritually into

(16:50):
how they make choices in the real world and how they create the experience of
life. We spoke at length,
we got together in person and he said, well, let's try it. And
so in January of 78, Insight Seminars was birthed
in Santa Monica, California. I thought it was going to be a
once in a while kind of thing, but

(17:14):
strictly by word of mouth, it wound up as a knife
501C3A not for profit. It wound up in 43 countries around the
world. And wow. It was all built on
this notion of awareness. Right. And
so the. And this I think will be really important for those
listening here. We subtitled the program we didn't really have.

(17:36):
Later on we had an insight 1, 2, 3 and a whole bunch of stuff
sort of using an educational model. But
we call insight the awakening heart.
Not mind, body or emotions, but heart.
And using heart as the center of the soul, sort
of trying to make us something spiritual, physical.

(17:59):
But also the principle of awakening was huge.
And so I would say to people, this is going to be two really stupid
questions. The first one is obvious. If you are
awakening, what were you before?
Asleep. Huh. Well, here's the question. No one ever asks.
If you were asleep, what were you before that?

(18:21):
Awake. Ah,
so all this focus on transformation and
change is assuming that something is amiss
and it has to be changed into something else. But what if
it really is? All I have to do is awaken to something that's always been
present. Now let me tie that back to

(18:44):
church. The word religion comes from the Latin
root word ligare, which means to Connect or bind together.
And the prefix re means again, so truly
what religion means is to reconnect, which begs the question
of reconnect to what? And so
insight, the awakening heart, becoming more of who you already are.

(19:07):
And without being preachy to anyone. We never said
you're a soul, you're a spirit. Just people would come into
that awareness in their own way
and their own language. So I like to say God never named itself,
so have at it. I don't care what we. We call this,
but let's find it. And the core essence of it will be loving.

(19:30):
So that's sort of the background to what's informed my
work over these many years. That's so beautiful.
That you've made Russell. And I'm really struck. I'm thinking back
to how you explained what you wanted to do to
the head of the department at graduate school,

(19:54):
and it was to observe people without
an expectation. Something along those lines. Right. Like you
wanted to take away the expectation of having them fit into your
hypothesis or not, and just allow them to
do what they are, do what they need to do. Which strikes me

(20:14):
as an incredibly loving approach
where, because I think so many of us often feel,
even if it's not articulated, although a lot of the times it is articulated,
that we, you know, we're kind of
continuously gauging if we're meeting the expectation

(20:35):
of somebody or something, whether it's to
feel better physically or show up or. So
to have the intuition or the knowledge to create a
space where people were just free to have their own
experience. Like, that's. It seems quite profound.

(20:55):
Yeah, it certainly turned out to be that way. I had no
idea what it was really going to lead to. But,
boy, brain cells fade. This is gray hair.
And I was told gray hair is gray matter leaking out. So.

(21:17):
Boy, how could I forget his name? A longshore philosopher.
Longshoreman and a philosopher. Oh, Eric Hoffer.
Exactly. Hoffer. How can I. We. My husband and
I are reading his book right now, so I. I heard you reference him in.
In one of the interviews I listened to. Yes, exactly. And so
the way I paraphrased that was you can never get enough of what you don't

(21:39):
really want.
And so that's profound.
Yes, because we're locked into
seeking things. Absolutely.
And sort of the.
The myth that people tend

(22:01):
to lead is that if I only get enough of X,
then I'll be happy, or then I'll be full, or
then I'll have peace. And so in sort of the
Western world, it's well, let's just put off all that stuff
because we have to go acquire. But as soon as we've
acquired, you know, whether it's a house, there could be a bigger house or

(22:23):
car, a better car, a certain amount of money. And so in
insight, well, we would. On a big
easel pad, two columns. The
left column was labeled symbols and the right column was
labeled experience. And we say, so what? In
symbols, we just say, those are the things

(22:45):
that people pursue a lot of in life. What are they? And so
people would make their list and we put it up and it always goes things
like money, house, job, car. And some people would say
relationship. So it's kind of like, you know, the trophy,
family, whatever. And we say, so let's take money. Because most people
think they want more money. What's the positive experience that you

(23:05):
associate with having enough money? If I had enough money, then I
could experience. And some people would say, travel. I said, no,
no, that's what you could do. So it's not about buying
more stuff. What would the inner experience be if you had enough money? And people
say, well, eventually, security, peace, peace of mind,
you know, fulfillment, freedom. So in other words, what we're after is

(23:28):
peace and loving and caring, but we're pursuing this other thing
and there's no direct relationship because there's people with tons of money and they're
not very secure. And people with tons of money. There are people with
no money and they're secure and da, da, da, da, da. So let's take all
those definitions out, and if you can focus on the right hand
side column of the quality of experience, then the question is,

(23:50):
what experience are you looking for? How could you produce it?
And then that awakens people to go, oh, oh my God. You mean
my experience is my choice? What a possibility.
So big stuff. It is big. And so
in your experience, what happens when people choose

(24:11):
to live from there? So instead of saying, okay, I have to wait until
I have the money, I think I'm supposed to have to feel peaceful and
free. I can just feel like that right
now. And then what do you see happen
when, like, do people. Are they able to make that choice? And
then what happens? Well, there's.

(24:39):
Oh, boy. What happens when people
make that conscious choice to.
Well, we call it what if we said this isn't anything
to believe? None of this just play the what if
game. What if it is true that if you focus on

(25:00):
experience, life will change
for the better? What if it is true that the consequences I'm experience
come from the choices I make, not the victimhood.
Because Fritz Pearl's really mad at a burant distinction
between victim and accountable. And we'd ask, so,
you know, if. Let's just take a look at anything in your life.

(25:24):
If it's been positive, were you the victim of something out there?
Very few people play victim to positive, but if it's negative, yeah, they go
victim. So we said, well, let's. Let's try take a look at
how are my circumstances a function of my choices? And then
even regardless of circumstance. So Viktor Frankl comes to mind.

(25:45):
How do you discover that freedom is a choice
while in a Nazi internment camp? I mean,
wow, talk about consciousness. So if people play what if,
Then what usually becomes interesting,
the amount of money or the job I have become less important,
but easier to have. Right. Because I'm not

(26:08):
attached to the thing, because I've already produced the experience inwardly.
Right. Qualitatively and quantitatively different.
So I move toward
the symbols or the signals of what I
want more easily when I'm coming

(26:30):
from the experiential state that I wanted in the
first place as the result of those things. Absolutely. And
from a Buddhist perspective, when you're in that space, you approach life without
attachment, Right? And it's attachment that
usually creates our pain and our suffering and also
blocks us from achieving that which we might

(26:53):
otherwise achieve, which it also
can be interpreted as we might otherwise experience.
So we used to ask people these questions all the time that said, so
have you ever been at peace? Well, yeah.
Well, when you're at peace, did you ever say, wow, I'm at peace?

(27:14):
No, because you're too busy being at peace.
But when you left the peace is when you noticed you were at peace.
And so the question becomes, what did you have to focus on to leave the
peace? If you're in a loving
relationship with someone, you know, husband, wife, boyfriend,
girlfriend, son, daughter, whatever,

(27:38):
what did you have to focus on to leave the loving you had for that
person? And that's like a
bombshell in people's brains to go, oh, my God, yeah, as
soon as I focus on this, that shows up.
Now it's a thing you're focused on

(27:59):
leading you towards the positive experience you want or the negative experience
you want. Now the
critics of the world go, oh, just more of that
positive thinking psychobabble crap.
I go, well, no, not really. When I was editorial director at
Huffington Post for a while, I wrote a series of articles every Monday.

(28:21):
And one I put up was called why Positive Thinking Just
Doesn't Work. Now, the
Huffington Post pioneered the thing of having real live
community and comments. And so people
would throw up on some of my articles every month, and then I
copy some of their comment and put it in the next month. I go, well,

(28:42):
there's a great way to sort of miss the point without,
without being condemning just to say. So let's, let's see what,
what's missing here. And it's understandable it could be missing because
of the programming we've all gone through, so on and so forth. So
this was the, the peak of frustration. And when I write these articles or
when I write my books, same thing. I sit down in front of the

(29:05):
computer, front of my little keyboard, and I go, father, Mother, God, show
me what to be written today in ways I can understand and with the clarity
to put it down. And I don't have notes, it just comes through and
I write it. So that title showed up that
morning, why Positive Thinking Just Doesn't Work. And what I said in
the article was, of course, positive thinking doesn't work.

(29:26):
Positive action works. But how do you take a positive action
without a positive thought? And so what positive thinking really
means, do you have a positive focus? So I
have a good friend who
used to be a cable car gripman in San Francisco, and he was riding
to the cable car barn one day in the 60s on his motorcycle

(29:49):
when a laundry van ran the stoplight. His
gas tank exploded. It burned his face off, burned his fingers down
to not as. No, no finger nub was longer
than my little pinky fingernail. So just
mention that. Several years of
surgeries. When he finally was recovered,

(30:11):
he became the mayor of a small town in Colorado,
and he was a pilot at the time.
So he was taking off to go to the annual Mayor's conference
in D.C. when the plane crashed, and he wound up
paralyzed. And so here's a guy
paralyzed looks grotesque. No, I mean,

(30:33):
he can still pick things up, but with these little nubs.
And he writes a book, it's not what happens to you, it's what you do
about it. And he said,
before I was paralyzed, there were 10,000 things I could do. Now there's
9,000. Should I cry about the thousand I lost or celebrate the nine I
have? And so the epitome of what

(30:55):
you do with a positive focus, no one's saying, oh, it's fantastic.
I'm paralyzed and my face is burned off. No, that's the
circumstance. Now what do I do with it? So back to how do I
author my experience? His name is Mitchell,
and He has a website called wmitchell.com and people
can watch some incredible videos of this guy. Wow.

(31:18):
Yeah. That is a really powerful message to come
from someone who experienced not once but twice.
Yeah, huge. Just amazing. So to what
would you attribute a person's ability
to do that? To live the way Mitchell is living?

(31:41):
Is it. I mean, your most recent book is Soul Talk. Is.
Does Mitchell. Is Mitchell more soul
powered than someone who lives in victimhood?
What. What are your
observations slash thoughts? Yeah, that's great, because
we've chatted about that a few times.

(32:04):
Not telling any school tales out of school. But he doesn't have a
spiritual focus that he would call spiritual
because I think he would think more things in religious,
you know, traditional religious terminology. But
the. The soul is present, whether we want to call it

(32:25):
a soul or not. And it doesn't care what we call it because it didn't
name itself either.
So I think.
Something is inside each of us again that
wants to awaken. And when we

(32:45):
awaken, that's when this power of choice
becomes more evident. Now, when a person, as a person
awakens, it's not like asleep awake done.
No, no, it's awakening. It's an ongoing process.
So as I awaken to my next level of
consciousness, I can look back and see all the

(33:09):
crumbs on that path that I never noticed along
the way. Oh, wow. Yeah, I did that back then.
Well, if I did that back then, what could I do now? So what's
the choice in front of me right now that wants
me to awaken to so that I can make the next step in
expanding my life? And, you know,

(33:31):
we can get into all the. The neuroscience behind all that.
There's a lot of theory about what's there and what's my.
And what's in my genetic coding and my DNA and all that kind of good
stuff. But yet people can learn,
even if they don't come cold, sort of naturally predisposed
to this. But if I preach at them, you

(33:55):
can make a choice and you can do this and da, da, da, da, da.
It's just like, oh, get away. But if I simply ask, what are you
experiencing? Do you like that? If so, well,
great. How would you have even more of it? You don't like it? What could
you do to change it? And if we just keep persisting in
what could you. How could you people slowly take

(34:17):
the blinders off and start to see? And once a
person has begun the process of seeing and
actualizing what they see, it becomes
something that has its own momentum that we can build on.
But it really helps like crazy to be in a community.
And I don't mean I live in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a place,

(34:41):
but not necessarily a community. The community of the people
that I hang with who have a like focus.
Because if I'm surrounded by people with a like focus and if
one of us starts to slip, there's consciousness
around us to help support us. Now most
people these days are choosing communities that

(35:03):
are not all that uplifting, especially when we start
looking at the political world. And that
becomes a perfect example of, well, what does you have to focus on in the
news today in order to ruin your day?
And if you didn't open the news that day, would your day have been different?
So asking people that kind of stuff, that

(35:26):
thing, well now that starts to open some
doors or windows to other parts of the universe which
are really interesting, which is about the power of thought.
So I like to remind people that the universe. Just go back

(35:47):
to school. What they tell us the universe is made of it's energy. Can you
create energy? No. You can generate it, but you can't
create it. Can you destroy energy? No. What can you
do with it? Well, you can change its form.
Well, what's that mean? So I'll ask people
something. Maybe your listeners here would be interested in just

(36:09):
matching along the way. Anybody listening to the BBC radio
right now? Like dumb question for
you. Are you listening to the BBC right now? Meredith? No. Is
BBC in the room right now? No. Yes it
is. That's the trick.
Because what is BBC radio? It's a

(36:32):
frequency upon which rides information.
So at 9 o' clock the show is X and at 10 o' clock the
show is Y. But it's always the same frequency being broadcast.
Now if you had a radio in your room, you could
attune to the BBC. That's why I say is the BBC in the
room? Yeah. The difference

(36:54):
is for those kind of frequencies we need an external
device called a radio. What if I'm the radio?
What if I'm the tv? You ever have pictures come into your mind? You. You
wonder where they came from? Yes, great question.
Yes. Or a person. And then the next day they call

(37:15):
all of that. But see, since the.
You know, I don't recall the article. I
read it about four or five years ago, somewhere
up in one of the Harvard northeast teaching
hospitals or universities, someone
discovered a device that can

(37:39):
detect your thought without any
physical contact to your body. So we know
we can put probes all over your head. And then we can watch what happens,
which part of the brain, and yada, yada, yada. Well, this thing
sits outside the body, and it can detect your thoughts. It can't tell
you what you're thinking. It can just detect the changes in thought,

(38:02):
which is one of the first beginnings to say, hey, wait. This is
an energetic process, just like the
BBC radio is an energetic process. Just like
light is an energy, when you run it through a prism, you see
colors that were always there, just not visible. So if
we begin to play with it, you go, well, so

(38:25):
what is thought then? What is a being? What is aliveness? What is
energy? And that's the kind of stuff that becomes very
interesting. So during COVID I did a lot of free
coaching and counseling, most particularly for families
because their kids were getting stressed.

(38:47):
And, well, now, how much do you and your partner spend
stressing over Covid and the change in the
economy? And you talk about it with your kids?
No, but are they picking it up anyway? Yes,
because stress is just another frequency or another.

(39:08):
Maybe like a content writing on the frequency of who you are,
and the kid picks up who you are, and then they pick up that content
called stress. Now, most parents will
relate to the notion of having a young baby. The
baby is just fine. And someone walks into the room and the
baby gets all distressed. That person leaves, they calm down.

(39:30):
Or the inverse baby's all stressed. Certain person walks in, they calm
down. Well, why? And maybe it's
the quality of energy that that person is holding,
and one's easy to flow with, and the other is in conflict.
So how do we monitor that? So if I begin to think of
myself as the radio receiver, so I can pick

(39:54):
up. My teacher used to say, you're not responsible for the thoughts that
come into your head, only the ones you hold on to,
because thoughts are all over the place. But what if, besides being the receiver,
we're also the transmitter? So now
what energies am I transmitting into the universe, whether it's with my
wife or my family or whether it's out to the broader universe?

(40:17):
And what's the amplification effect when a bunch of us start holding the same
thought pattern and then other people pick it up and now we're in
this kind of thing, which is the predominant pattern today.
But I think what's coming onto the planet is a time for greater
awakening into loving as the,

(40:37):
I guess, preferred way, but perhaps the only way
for true life.
Yes. I think we're. It feels to me like
we're being shown that and that
Right now, I feel, it seems to me that a lot of the work

(41:01):
we have to do is to disconnect ourselves
from whatever would like to
be in charge of that frequency and those thought frequencies. You
know, I'm thinking of the media and particularly the news,
where their. Their business model is to have us in a certain

(41:21):
state of fear all of the time. And what I'm
hearing you say is that it's up. You know, the.
This soul connection is calling us to choose
always.
Always.

(41:42):
And I feel like we are
choosing collectively towards the love.
And I also feel like each time we make a big leap or
even a small leap, the fear
ratchets up and the
headlines become more intense. This

(42:04):
feeling of being enveloped by a manipulation
every time you open the computer becomes more
intense. But I also feel like then we up level again and
choose. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of us like
making a different choice.

(42:24):
Well, my wife has a sort of
a metaphor for how she sees what's going on.
She does a lot of work with consciousness and
judgments that people hold inside and get locked into their
bodies. And then how do you do forgiveness? Not forgiveness
of the other, but forgiveness of self. And it's really

(42:47):
powerful work. But she. She says the image he has is
like from a planetary consciousness level.
We're in a birthing process. So as
a male, I can only relate to birthing from a
theoretic point of view, but from a woman who's gone through it,

(43:08):
incredibly messy, painful experience that
results in joy most of the time.
And so she says she kind of sees that as a
conscious birthing out of the planet of a new day of
loving. But it has to go through all that painful,

(43:28):
perhaps even stressful process.
Right? Yes. That feels. Yeah, that feels like an apt
metaphor. And the contractions and then the release
and we move forward a little bit. Yeah.
So you mentioned a few minutes ago about opening
doors into some cosmic.

(43:52):
Let's call it cosmic science. I know you've
been involved in some organizations that are really on the cutting edge of looking at
consciousness and where we're headed
from that perspective. What are you
seeing. Happening?
Yeah, it's a really interesting thing that's going on

(44:15):
right now because it's a. I've
come at this from. There's so many angles to come in on this. So I'm
going to come in it from a. Odd one. First,
the world of science
can pretty much get stuck on itself. Yes.

(44:37):
And yet there's a. There's no such thing as the world of science.
There's a thing we call science, of which
there are many practitioners. But one of the issues that
science has dealt with for a very long time is the lack of
reproducibility. So
just like I told my chairman of the department, well, this

(45:00):
thing proved that when this one proved that. And they're different, they're in
conflict, direct conflict. So how's that
if it's real? So
what? A lot of scientists, there's a. I think it's called
the center for Open Science, something like that,
they're really working to provide a very sound set

(45:22):
of protocols that start with. Before you even form
your hypothesis. And there's a
whole litany of steps that
they would like to see people go through, regardless of what area they're
looking into. I don't care whether it's vitamins or how do you
operate on a liver, whatever it is,

(45:45):
that will make it more likely that a true
finding can be reproduced. And the reproducibility
issue is, you know, people can run an experiment, Somebody else
runs the exact same experiment with the same protocol and get a different result.
So what's that about, you know? Well, some of it is about
maybe the. The actual protocols were, were not

(46:08):
identical. So they're trying to eliminate one of those
variables. Now, we all know this thing called the observer phenomena.
So maybe the issue is that it's. It's not
what's happening, apparently, but it's the impact
that the observer has because, remember, it's thought and energy
that then disrupts something. So

(46:32):
way back, I went to school at University of
California at Davis, and Charlie Tart was a professor
there who's one of the early people looking into
various paranormal phenomena. And I got
to work with them, and we did some very interesting experiments and all the things
about, you know, remote viewing. And then we looked at

(46:53):
energetic transfer between plants. Like you could hook up
a plant to
gsr. I guess it was a galvanomic spins response
meter. If you took a cutting from the plant and grew
it in another room, you could take a pair of
scissors and threaten the plant in room B. And the mother

(47:15):
plant in room A would have a. A
measurable spike take place. And those are
some early things we were looking at. What's the nature of energy and how does
it communicate? And if it communicates from a plant to a
plant, what's that about?
So that's still the big question. What's that about? So there's a lot

(47:37):
of work going on, and it's.
Oh, let's see, what would be a good.
I don't Know what the right metaphor is? It's an
amazingly conflicted world because there's people out there

(47:58):
who are doing their best to study
and observe. Remember, key word
observe. What truth might be
about any of these things, whether it's remote viewing or absent healing or
just the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, any of this kind of
stuff. And then there's, there are those out

(48:21):
there who want to become famous because of it, and those
who want to then generate, how many grants can they get and how much
money? And one of
the, I'm not going to be naming any names here for
obvious reasons, but there's some pretty big names out there that
seem to be engaging

(48:43):
in something called P hacking. Have you heard that term?
No. P for probability.
So you set up your null hypothesis. You, you say if
this happens, it's, then it's less than, it's a P
of O1, you know, less than one time out of a hundred.
So they don't get the result they wanted. So then they start

(49:06):
running the data to see how it can be manipulated so they can
hack the P. And now all of a sudden the study gets
produced and nobody can begin to reproduce it
because it didn't actually happen. So now you got
the problem of the people who are trying to do something and they don't get
what they thought, then they scratch their head and go, hmm, so I wonder what

(49:28):
it is. And those who go, I didn't get what I want, how can I
make it look like I did? And so that creates
conflict in the world of the scientific community.
So there's a number of folks out there looking
to do really high quality works
because they all know, we all know

(49:50):
intuitively that this thing about it's all energy is real,
but we don't have the tools. I keep telling the folks that I
work with what would happen if you
ask Spirit this question.
What do we need that we don't have? And the

(50:12):
parallel question, what do we have that we don't need? So what's in the
way? And well, why would you ask Spirit? Well, because spirit is
the source of all energy.
So maybe if we could go into that consciousness, we could precipitate
down the next step or the next thing that we
need in order to move these things along. Now,

(50:36):
I don't know if I.
Thought I had one in here. Well,
I don't. You will recognize
this. Yes, we have. This is a high tech science tool.
Paperclip. Yeah. Okay. And.

(50:56):
I haven't done it a long time, but I would use the larger size
paperclip. I take a piece of thread about
24 inches long, tie it to one end, and then have a person
just dangle it like a pendulum while balancing their elbow. Okay, now
I want you to visualize the paperclip swinging back and forth, left to
right, and pretty soon it's going, and then north, south, then

(51:19):
in a circle. Now visualize it changing. And almost everybody
can do that. And I was doing this for a group of
MDs up at,
I forget Mass Eye and Ear, Mass General, one of those
Boston area leading hospital groups.

(51:39):
They were primarily neuroscientists and
endocrinologists. And those are two groups who really
know that thought changes what happens in the body.
So this thing is going like this, and there's one neuroscientist in the back. This
is back like around 1980. 81 just goes, this is
all. And I said, oh, interesting. What

(52:01):
do you mean? He says, you want me to think that my mind is
making the paperclip move? I said, that's interesting. Did I say that? He said,
no, but this is still. I said, why? Well,
what's happening is that I'm making little micro movements with
my hand or fingers. And because of the length of the string, it's amplified
and it looks bigger down here, but it's all because of movement up here.

(52:23):
I said, well, that's really interesting. And so you think it's,
huh? He goes, yes. I said, so let me ask you this.
In order for that paper gut to move, even if it's just micro movements up
here, did you have to engage a neuromuscular pathway for that to happen?
Yeah. Well, did you know which neuromuscular pathway

(52:43):
you engaged? No. Did you know how
you engaged it? No.
And yet it was engaged. And
he kind of sat there dumbfounded. And I said, so what if
the real key is how you hold the focus and
inside your body already knows how to make that happen? And it

(53:07):
sure is a little movement up here. Not disputing that.
But the question is, did you have to know the
particulars or was the result enough
to allow the particulars to take place? He still was scratching
his head. And I said, so you deal with people
who are paraplegic? Yeah. He

(53:30):
said, so what's the problem? Is it neuromuscular?
I mean, muscular, skeletal? No, it's neuromuscular. What's that mean? Well, below
the level of entry, no information is getting out.
So, I mean, this is like 80, 81, 82 somewhere. And I just said,
well, what if you could take some little titanium wires and stick it into the
motor control center of the brain and hardwire it down to their muscles. Could you,

(53:53):
could they think about their arm moving and get the signal out there and have
it move because it was hardwired. Well, guess
what? That's what's happening today in the world
of prosthesis
as well as people are. I mean, there's, there's images you can see on
the Internet of a guy who's paralyzed picking up his baby

(54:16):
by thinking about it. So we're only.
This is like the dark ages of what we're learning about. What's the
nature of energy and thought and how do you
both work with it as it is and harness it for whatever might
be. So sometimes these things
start out there in the world of that's impossible and

(54:39):
become every day sooner or later.
Yes. And that's such a good example with the paperclip
because. Yeah, it was our thought.
Our thought imaged the result and the.
Without our conscious intervention on the,

(55:02):
on the how we just got the result. Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting that that kind of thinking has been known in the
world of sport for a very long time. Yeah.
You know, high end athletes, whether or gymnasts or skiers or
golfers or whatever, visualize
the outcome and their body knows how to

(55:26):
produce it. But when you get outside of the world of sport, people go,
yeah, well that worked over there, but that won't work over here. Oh,
okay. Henry Ford famously said it does not. Whether you believe, whether
you can or you cannot, you're probably right. Right.
So. So you're engaged and connected to some,

(55:47):
you know, to some people, some scientists who are
very curious and engaged in these
types, in this type of research. So
where's it headed? And if you could, you know, and what are
your hypotheses? Even if they haven't, we haven't don't have the

(56:07):
mechanisms to, to show it.
Well, it's
as I mentioned before, you know, these energies and the
simple ones are things like light. You shine a beacon
beam of light through a prism and you see all the colors that are resonant
within it. But even that's not true.

(56:29):
We see the colors that our eyes are capable of perceiving.
And yet animals can perceive colors outside what we can perceive.
And the same thing is with sound. You know, we can hear within a
certain range. You know, men hear a certain range, women hear a certain range.
They're not the same. And then bring a dog around or

(56:50):
a cat or anything else and there's all kinds of sounds that we
don't. So because we don't notice it, we think it doesn't exist.
So the basic theory here is there's a whole lot to be discovered around
what exists that we do not yet know how to present perceive.
And then if we can learn it,

(57:12):
you know, there's,
let's see, where do we go with this?
One area of research that's going on is about telepathy
and this whole thing about, well, can you hold a thought, can it be
detected by another person? And then you have this whole thing about,

(57:33):
oh, can you influence an electron flow with thought?
It's sort of a classic experiment which then
produces some baffling results. But it's only
baffling because we don't have a framework to understand it yet. So
I think the main thing that's going on right now is the understanding
is that we only understand a tiny bit.

(57:57):
And yet the things we know just enough
to either shut us down going, well, why bother? Or
enough to awaken us and enliven us and go, oh my God,
what's really possible here? So it's all around what's really possible
and beyond possible. See,
in this world, when you get into the scientific community

(58:21):
and conventions and meetings, they talk about
paranormal, abnormal things like that. And I
go, so we're starting with a thought assumption
that it's not normal, right?
So if you already know the observer effect and you, you, you come
in going, it's, this is not normal. Do you expect to find

(58:43):
it? No, we expect not to find it, except rarely.
But what if it's entirely normal?
Just like the little baby who can sense who just walked in the room and
then later we have to train it out of them. Stop being so sensitive.
Oh, okay, I'll shut off. Sensitive

(59:03):
doesn't mean sensitive isn't there now it just shows up in another
way that shows up as a internalized
self judgment or it
internalizes as resentment which eventually bubbles out
in terms of anger. But all it was was I sensed something,
but I didn't know enough about what I was sensing to

(59:26):
either work with it, change it, or get out of
it. So there's a, I mean the, the
implications for everyday life are huge.
Yes. And it's like the way that you're
describing the limitations that we put on
science or that the scientific community puts on

(59:49):
itself are mirrored in the
limitations that we put on our, on our own energies.
I'm sort of hearing is where we, we may have
these expanded capacities if we did Ask Spirit what was
needed instead of trying to figure out how to iterate the

(01:00:09):
machine that we have to the machine that we could to the next version of
it. If we did, ask Spirit, what would that open up in
terms of our capacity? Well,
there's no way to validate what I'm about to tell you anymore
because he's dead. But George
Washington Carver may be a name that, you know, he was a black

(01:00:31):
botanist just after the Civil War.
I mean, he was born for that. But so He's a black
PhD botanist in, I think
Georgia, maybe it was Alabama somewhere down there. And all of these
now, now freed slaves had their land,
but the primary crop that they knew was not cotton, it was

(01:00:54):
peanuts. And so now all of a sudden,
all kinds of people are growing peanuts.
So in the world of the market, you know, capitalist forces
now supply is way more than demand. So what happens to the
price of peanuts? It crashes. So now everyone's producing all these
peanuts they can't do anything with. And

(01:01:18):
I read that George Washington Carver went out into
the field of peanuts, a field of peanuts,
sat down with the peanuts, meditated
and asked the peanuts, tell me what to do with you.
And he came up with, I think the number was 114 different uses
for peanuts. You could use it for dyes, you could make

(01:01:41):
cloth out of them, out of the shells. I mean, it goes on and on
and on. But the. He said the peanuts told him what to
do. And that radically transformed the economy for
those now newly freed slaves.
I love that. But it might be,

(01:02:01):
I mean, it could possibly be back
to where we started. That simple, maybe not easy for some of
us, but that simple is that if we're surrounded by all
this information and all this energy and we're only limited to
by the, you know, ability of our, what we think of
as our five senses, it could just be that, that all the

(01:02:24):
information, all the piece, all the everything, all the knowledge is
just sitting there waiting for us. Well, it's open
to it and it's all. What's really interesting, it's all
inside of us too, because it's all energy.
So, you know, in insight,

(01:02:45):
we created something called a heart chart. And outside
the heart we had opinions which were thinking and beliefs
and all the mental stuff. And the other side of the chart we had
the emotional content and what we feel. Well, I
feel this is true is different from it's true. And I think it's true. It's
different from it's true. But in the heart center we said that's A

(01:03:07):
center of natural knowing. And if you can learn how to access your heart. And
obviously we didn't mean the physical organization, but another
place, all kinds of information becomes available
to us, but we have to become available to it.
So everybody has what I. I
call an internal bell just to create a metaphor

(01:03:30):
for it. And people have heard the phrase, well, that rings
true. So have you ever had a conversation
with somebody and your internal bell just rings
and you just know it's true? And you ever had a conversation
and the bell goes thud, because
it ain't true? So we know that.

(01:03:53):
We know we have the ability to know, which
we shut down because then we want to run it all
through this brain. We already know that there's bundles of
neurons in the heart, just like we knew a few years before that
there's bundles of neurons in the gut. When you say, my gut told me. Yeah,
it did. You just have to learn to listen to it. Well,

(01:04:15):
I knew in my heart. Well, you did, but can you
expand that to include more and more? So
we usually just train people out of it. Oh, be logical.
Be rational. I love the word rational. Lies. To
frame it as two words, rational and lies.

(01:04:35):
So we can tell ourselves rational lies. And doesn't change what's true, it just
change our experience of it. So my
teacher, you know, he would not
say he taught meditation, he taught what he called spiritual exercises.
And he said, so, you know, if you want to get strong physically, what do
you. Do you exercise physically? Well, if you wanted to get

(01:04:58):
strong spiritually, you might want to do spiritual exercises.
So if we wanted to develop these other
abilities which are native within us. So that's the theory. It's
native within everybody. Well, then what would you do to strengthen
those? So first we have to detect them just
to understand if it's even there.

(01:05:22):
But we all know intuitively, for most of us, it is there,
unless we've really had that beaten heart out of us. But
even the most jaded person has had that sense they knew
something. They had the intuition. Well, yeah. So what would it
do to develop that? And if you look at the word intuition, it's really
incredible that I like to look at words from their original

(01:05:45):
root meaning. And the Latin
vulgate, Latin root for intuition, was intuire, which meant
to look at. Isn't that amazing?
Intuition means simply to look. And my
spiritual teacher told me years and years ago I was about to go in for
a procedure called radial keratotomy, which is they use a

(01:06:08):
scalp and put little slits like bicycle spokes around your
iris in the cornea, and it flattened the lens so you
could see. I was basically coke bottle blind at the time.
He said, so, Russell, the source of the. I mean, the
problem is now physical, meaning your eyes, but the source
isn't. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, you've been straining for

(01:06:31):
years to see things with your physical eyes that can only be seen with your
spiritual eyes.
So if we take spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, go inside,
what do I need to see? Show me that which I'm not yet.
And sometimes we've all had things show up inwardly.

(01:06:52):
So can. Can that. Is that an actual
muscle that can be trained? Yeah.
Yeah, it is. So
I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I love
that. I think so. And it's. It's.
Yeah, I love that idea of practicing. Just

(01:07:14):
practicing it. Ask. And
I, you know, a lot of my audience is on a health journey, as you
know, we all are in some capacity, I guess, and it's just
opening up to what. What's next? What. What's
next on the path, not trying to hit a specific destination.
Well, yeah, you know, years and years ago, I saw

(01:07:40):
a doctor who was.
I was there for general health interest and curiosity. But he
did a lot of work with people with cancers and whatnot. He says, you know,
people will come in and they'll see me and they'll say I was just fine.
And then all of a sudden. And he said, no, this was
at least 12 to 14 years in the making,

(01:08:03):
so. Well, yeah, so
now you have a. An issue. Like, as my eyesight
deteriorated, there was actually a physical problem with the eyes, which they could
correct, but the source wasn't.
So then the question is, well, now how do I move forward with that in
this or any other area? And something I like to do for

(01:08:25):
anybody. Imagine I've got a couple hundred
people in a room to a couple thousand people in the room, and I say,
take a hand and make a fist. The hardest, tightest
squeezing as fist you can make. How's it feel?
Not so good. Is this good hand good for anything? Well,
yeah, only a couple things. And if you look

(01:08:47):
at the top of your hand. Yeah. You can probably even see it
on the screen. You'll see that there's parts would have gone all white
where the blood is left, and there's parts that are. Now you can
be a black person, but keep squeezing for a second.
And as you keep squeezing, the blood is pooling up, and pretty soon that
hand starts to go Numb. Now, if you take the other hand and make a

(01:09:09):
hard squeezing fist, too, then pretty soon you got all kinds
of things. And this is an image of resistance only. What, am I
resisting my own self. And if a person
squeezes down inside going, I hate this, or I
resent them, or. Yeah. And you hold, ah,
which is all this stuff going on in the political, social world

(01:09:31):
right now. They're squeezing on their own cells and the blood's pooling up. They go,
no, numb inside. And the only thing they're left with is the ability to react.
Now, if you take those two hands, which we've only been squeezing for
less than a minute, count of three, I want you to
take one hand and shoot it open and the other hand open
as slowly as you possibly can. Okay? Okay.

(01:09:53):
Count of three. 1, 2,
3. How did the hand feel that
you shot? Open. Tingly. And it
had a little beat up, but it was. And now it's fine. What's
the other hand like? Going really, really slow. It feels
still really, really tight. And it's not very fluid, is it?

(01:10:16):
No. And so the question becomes,
if you find yourself stuck someplace, do you find yourself in resistance? You find
yourself in pain? Did you want to shoot it open
or just go? Until finally you just go, oh, that feels fine.
And you're not in a very useful hand position. Now, it's just a
matter of metaphor, but the question might be, if

(01:10:39):
I'm dealing with a medical issue, what
am I resisting inside?
Am I resisting some part of me? Am I resisting some part of you?
Is it a thought? What am I holding inside that's
constricting and blocking the flow? Now, if
you get it early enough, you know, like a headache. What do people

(01:11:02):
do with headaches? Pop aspirins or Advil or something?
Well, did the headache show up because it
wanted to be killed, or was it there to say, something's going
on, let's pay attention? And what's usually going on is stress.
And we squeeze down. We squeeze across here.
Blocks the constrict. It constricts the flow of blood. The capillaries don't get

(01:11:25):
enough, and then you have a headache. Now, not all
headaches are from that, but many are. So what if
you said, I just may need to go in and relax? What tension am
I holding? Is it in my tmj? Is it, you know, is it up
here? You know, what's the tension? What am I
resisting? What am I judging? And if you can find the thing you're resisting

(01:11:47):
or judging, maybe then you can go, oh, so I release
that. I forgive myself for judging.
Judging what? Well, I start out judging you,
but if the thing I've been talking about is true, we all are part of
the same divine energy. As soon as I judge you, I've judged the divine
without thinking about it. As soon as I judge the divine, guess

(01:12:09):
what? I'm connected to the divine. So now I've judged myself as well. And
I cut myself off from the divine flow. So just like you
can cut yourself off from the blood flow, you can cut yourself off from the
divine flow. Not that the divine stopped flowing. I just
cut myself off from experiencing it. So the sooner I can find where
I cut off and release, the more I can move back into

(01:12:31):
flow again, which is then part of the
awakening process. But now we have a dilemma.
I was running a program with my teacher. We were both
co facilitating and on a break. He said, russell, you seem so
frustrated. I said, yeah, they're so slow to wake up. He said,
oh, Russell, if you had a little baby and it was

(01:12:53):
asleep, would you shake it? Say, wake up, grow
faster? No, because the sleep is part of the
growth process. So with a human and consciousness.
Yeah. Bingo. Yeah. We may receive something and
we may have to sleep on it for a while, because in the
internal state that never sleeps, that's where

(01:13:15):
we have a greater openness for the spiritual
flow of education, if you will, that awakens us and then we can go,
oh, now I'm ready for the next phase. So we do
have these rhythms, just like the heart has an up and a
down, open and a close, a breath in and a breath out.
Well, let's let all that happen. And then

(01:13:37):
perhaps the most interesting part of this, in my way, thinking about it, I used
to do the work I call. I do the work. The work I used to
call transformation. And everyone likes transformation.
And I do too, at one level. But the word, if you look it up
in a dictionary, means a change in form or appearance.
Okay? So I say, well, let's pretend I had an

(01:14:00):
old, old Volkswagen, but I always wanted a Ferrari.
You can go online and you can buy a Ferrari car kit. So you get
the body and it's literally. You can literally do this. And it's
designed to go over the frame of a Volkswagen.
Now the question is, do I have a Ferrari? No. But I did
transform the Volkswagen because it changed the former

(01:14:23):
appearance. Transmutation
is the same thing. It says it's a change in form or appearance to a
higher order of energy. Well, now we're progressing
but we still just change the form or appearance, although the energetic flow
is different. So imagine you put a different grade of
gasoline or something inside of your Ferrari

(01:14:47):
Volkswagen. But the real thing we're after is transcendence.
And to transcend something means to rise above, especially over
the negative. And so how do we learn to
transcend the apparent limitations of my mind, my
emotions, what's going on in the world, so I can create the
qualitative experience that rises above and stay loving?

(01:15:11):
Nelson Mandela, you know,
all these people who've shown us what it means to be loving in the
presence of oppression so we
don't have to be oppressed in the presence of
oppression. Although from the outside it will look that way.
But can I still be free? So we can use all these as

(01:15:33):
inspirations. And inspiration. I mean, I have so many of these things. Inspiration
comes from a Latin word, inspirari, which means to be breathed by
spirit. It's not something
that happens to me from the outside. It's the
spirit breathes me and I arise in its
awakening. So.

(01:15:57):
So we'll step into that.
Into being breathed. Yeah.
Russell, thank you so much for your time today.
This has been beautiful. And
I was going to say transformative. I'll say

(01:16:20):
transcendent. That's okay. See, the challenge
is, you know, we need the words to communicate. Yeah. But
we can use it to communicate to a higher level
so I don't have to say to somebody, oh, wrong word.
Just go. Okay, so what I think what you may be meaning is the ability
to expand in the presence of this. Oh, yeah, that's good. Fine,

(01:16:43):
we'll do that. Yeah.
And that's what I mentioned at a before, but I do want to end on
it as well, is your approach of there is a real
space of allowing in your presence,
which I think from the perspective
of the observer, effect has

(01:17:06):
an extremely loving resonance
for whomever is getting observed
by you. So thank you for bringing that.
Bringing that energy to it. It's very profound and important.
Yeah. Well, lest anyone be
misinformed, I am not the model of loving

(01:17:29):
kindness. We always teach the thing we most need
to learn. Yes. No, I will
not hold you to that standard all of the time, but thank you.
You certainly are able to embody it,
which is most appreciated. Well,

(01:17:49):
thank you. Your loving essence
radiates beautifully. Thank you, Russell. Thank
you for being here.