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Gregory Eckel has spent the last 20 years developing and refining his unique approach to chronic neurological conditions. In addition to his experience in clinical practice using a combination of Naturopathic and Chinese Medicine, he has a deep personal connection with chronic neurological disease since his wife Sarieah passed of... Read More
Helané Wahbeh is the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University, and president of the Parapsychological Association. Dr. Wahbeh is clinically trained as a naturopathic physician and research trained with a Master of... Read More
- Growing evidence that our consciousness is nonlocal
- We all have the capacity to tap into nonlocal aspects of consciousness, including healing
- The Noetic Signature is each individual’s unique expression of how they access nonlocal consciousness
- One of the 12 characteristics of the Noetic Signature is healing
- Dr. Wahbeh will review the state of science on energy medicine and positive intention for healing.
Related Topics
Biofield, Consciousness, Data, Energy, Energy Medicine, Healing, Meaning, Meditation, Neuroscience, Quality Of Life, Research, Science, Trauma, WellbeingGreg Eckel, ND, LAc
Welcome back everybody. Dr. Greg Eckel, your host of the Bioenergetics Summit. Our topic today is the Noetic signature, our individual expression of non-local consciousness. And we are speaking with Helané Wahbeh. She’s the director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and adjunct professor assistant professor in the department of neurology at Oregon Health and Science University and president of the Parapsychological Association. Dr. Wahbeh is clinically trained as naturopathic physician and research trained with a master’s in clinical research and two post-doctoral research fellowships. So super educated. She’s also published on and spoken internationally about her studies on complimentary and alternative medicine, mind body medicine, extended human capacities, post traumatic stress disorder and their relationships to psych physiology, health and healing. Additionally, she is especially known for her research around the Noetic approach to channeling, Dr. Wahbeh welcome aboard.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be here with you today.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
I am so excited for this conversation with you. We went to medical school together, so it’s such a pleasure to have you here and for you to take the time to help educate our listeners and viewers. What is this concept of non-local consciousness?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
That is a wonderful question. When people hear the word consciousness, there’s so many different things that come to mind. So if you look at it from a neuroscience perspective, it’s basically about our sense of awareness of self, whether awake or asleep and of course, there’s lots of anesthesiology studies that look at our consciousness in terms of if we’re passed out asleep or if we’re awake and going about our daily lives, what we call that is little C consciousness. What I’m really curious about is what we call big C consciousness or non-local consciousness, which extends beyond our physical brain. So those same neuroscientists that associate consciousness with whether we’re awake or not believe that consciousness is a product of the neurons of our brain, that it’s dependent on our physical brain and it can’t go beyond it and that when our brain dies, basically that’s it, our consciousness goes away. So non-local consciousness is this experience. And we have growing evidence that this is true, that our consciousness can actually expand beyond our physical brain and even beyond time and space, that we have this interconnected consciousness that goes beyond our personal selves.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
So you’re saying there is some research to support this. Maybe you can enlighten us on that.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Yes, there are multiple bodies of literature that have evaluated aspects of non-local consciousness in the laboratory and have also observed it in daily life. I’ll just give you a few examples. One is mind to mind impression. Some people might have heard of the term telepathy, being able to get a mental impression from someone else. So if our consciousness was housed only in our brain, that would be completely impossible, right? There’s no way that I could sit here and have a mental impression and have you pick up on it. But in fact, there have been rigorous studies in multiple labs around the world that have tested this and have shown that people can in fact, get mental impressions from other people and that the distance that they are away from each other, essentially doesn’t matter, that you can get a mental impression from someone down the road as easily as you could perhaps get it from someone across the world. So there have been things called meta analyses that have been done.
And that’s where you collate all the various studies done on this topic and they demonstrate positive, significant findings about this aspect of telepathy. So I know that was a lot, I wanna give you one more example, which I think people find really fascinating and that’s called remote viewing, and that’s where someone can get mental impressions about a distant location and in fact, the military, the US military had a research program on this for decades, where they trained soldiers to be psychic spies. And they did over 500 various psychic missions, if you will, where they were tapping into remote sites in Russia or other countries, and had verifiable information that these soldiers were able to pick up. Remote viewing has been tested in the lab repeatedly. It’s also been used to find missing persons, archeological sites, and even predict the stock market and sporting event outcomes.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Wow. When people talk about subjects like this, there’s this moniker that gets put on it as woohoo. But then you share, there is a lot of research and data to support. No, this is, there’s real science happening around these topics. And it’s almost like I know for our listeners and viewers in the Bioenergetics Summit, everybody’s really excited about this topic, but in the general population, it’s kinda like we can’t even comprehend, like, these are actually what we’re capable of as humans, which is so exciting.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
It is, it’s so exciting and it is sad, but I really think it’s shifting. I think it’s shifting quite a bit. And there’s a couple reasons why there are still taboos about these topics. One is that our current paradigm materialism tells us that our consciousness is a product of our brain. So all of these non-local consciousness phenomenons, they just completely dismiss it out of hand because they say, “That’s just impossible.” No matter how much data you show the person they say, “Well, it’s just impossible, so I’m not even gonna look at it.” So thankfully the science is building. So people who are at least open are becoming more willing to see the actual data that’s there. People have been studying this formally for over 150 years.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
I think the other piece is around trauma because historically humans have tortured, killed, ostracized people who have these intuitive capacities in a major way. And so I think there’s some historical ancestral residue of feeling like if I step out in an empowered way with these abilities that I personally feel and studying that all people have the capacity for this intuitive wisdom, the Noetic acknowledge. If I step out in that way, people are gonna think I have a mental illness. They’re gonna lose my job because it is not so accepted. But I will say I’ve been at the Institute of Noetic Sciences for almost seven years now. And from that beginning of time to now, I’ve seen a huge shift in the level of openness, even this summit for people to have these conversations in a wonderful and transparent way and see how we can use these capacities to support us in our daily lives, support our health, our families, and ultimately the world.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Love it, well, so let’s launch into then what is the Noetic signature?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Yes, so I just mentioned, I have this hypothesis that everybody has the capacity to access this information and energy from beyond time and space. Everyone can do that, whether it’s a gut hunch or telling the future or telepathy or some of these other experiences, but that the way it shows up for that person is unique to them and that’s what I call the Noetic signature. So I personally, I get goosebumps. I really feel things in my body when I have a decision that needs to be made, one side will feel like really expanded. I might get goosebumps. I might feel these sensations in my body and the other decision might be really contracted. And for me, that’s how I can discern which path I wanna take. Other people might see visuals, other people might hear wisdom or guidance. Each of us has our own unique way that is stronger than others in terms of tapping into this inner wisdom.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
The Noetic signature. I love that. So uniquely individualized and throughout one of the senses and you know what, I love that working hypothesis. I totally agree with you. I feel like we haven’t been trained or educated about how potent and powerful these vessels are that we walk around in here.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
So how does the Noetic signature then relate to healing?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Great question. So we went through this very systematic research program to develop a inventory about the Noetic signature that allows people to explore their unique expression of this Noetic characteristics. And we ended up with 12 different characteristics that explained most of people’s variation around the Noetic signature. One of the major characteristics is healing. People who are able to, whether it’s directing intention or energy or however you wanna describe it to actually support other people’s health or to support their own health. So that is one category of the Noetic signature that from what we’ve seen so far, some people are stronger in than others.
And that moves into a whole body of research that myself and IONS has been involved in for decades about the biofield about energy medicine, we just finished Reiki, master energy medicine study, and our participating in multiple collaborations around being able to visualize the biofield and what’s happening in these energy medicine sessions. So back to your original question, I think some people naturally have an affinity towards healing as part of their Noetic signature, and that you can also train to nurture that capacity within yourself as well. On a even more general level, we know that when people tap into their Noetic signature and this process of non-local consciousness, what I call channeling that their wellbeing improves, their quality of life improves, they have increased meaning in their lives and that it is essentially good for you to practice tapping into this Noetic wisdom, your own inner internal intuition.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Are there some quicker paths to do that for folks?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Well, you know, can just practice five minutes a day. It doesn’t take that much to introduce this in your life. The first step it’s interesting believing that you can do this and that it exists is one of the strongest predictors of doing well on laboratory studies and actually having these experiences in your daily life, just believing, believing that these phenomena exist and that you can experience them. The second is meditation. Having some practice that allows you to have a still and quiet mind and an internally focused time in your day. So I invite people to set an intention that they would like to explore their Noetic signature, and even if it’s spending five minutes a day to go within and start, simply ask a simple yes or no question, and then feel into anything that comes to you, whether it’s a sensation or a color or a sound or memory. And with that daily five minute a day practice, the aspect of your Noetic signature will just unfold. And you’ll start to realize what kind of shows up for you and how you can see those wisdom nuggets, and that increases your confidence to do it even more.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Oh, love it. Thank you for that tip, that’s great. Well, let’s go back to end of the research because you are really on the cutting edge here. You mentioned the energy medicine and biofield of people being able to, you’re measuring the biofield. Are there specific devices? Is that an individual that’s visualizing it? How does that work?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Great question. Huge question. So, as far as we know right now, there’s so many devices that say they’re measuring some aspect of the biofield, but as far as I know, those have not been vetted and validated in a rigorous way. Right now we are in a multi organization collaboration to use multiple different devices to collect during healing sessions. And the intention is to look at if those individual devices can notice differences in different emotion states during different energy medicine sessions, and or if combining all those data streams together gives us a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening in the biofield. This may be too techy, but our contribution is with something called a quantum noise generator array. So these quantum noise generators generate random noise.
And we’ve seen in other studies that when you direct your intention towards these devices, they become more ordered, which is physically impossible, but somehow our intention is shifting the randomness of these physical processes. So one of our scientists had the idea of, well, what if we have a bunch of these on an array? And we held that close to the body, say over where a chakra is believed to be, or over a part of the body that is injured compared to a part of the body that is well, is this the data from the quantum noise generators going to show shifts or differences? So that’s our contribution to this collaborative project is this quantum noise generator array to see what happens. And the preliminary analysis shows that there’s something interesting going on. So we feel excited about that and are gonna keep moving forward with it.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Oh, that is super exciting. Yeah, right, the machine shouldn’t become ordered and intentions actually seem to have some influence. That’s really exciting.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Yeah, we’ve done a whole host of research studies on that, that the audience can see on our website, under our publication pages, multiple peer-reviewed papers about how intention can influence these various targets, including these random and quantum noise generators. This is such a huge piece in terms of this research, moving forward, being able to actually visualize and have a reliable, consistent objective measure of the biofield. I mean, most people can sense it in some way, and yet we still don’t have an objective way to evaluate it. We also-
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah, keep going.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
We also did another study where we had people who believed that they could visually see the changes in a biofield, a word for that is clairvoyance or some people call it medical intuition. And so we had six of these people observing 30 minute Reiki sessions. We video taped them taking notes of what they were seeing during the session. We had them complete all these forms and found that the information that they saw was corroborated across the six different seers. So that paper is currently under peer review, but the pre-print of it is also available on our website. So you can see the exciting results of that study.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Wow, so you’re saying over the last seven years, you’re seeing greater acceptance, more discussion, and then this type of research really coming, it feels like you are publishing some really seminal works and then kind of the four minute mile, right, but nobody could ever do it and now are you seeing it just pop all over the globe with the research?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
One of the major issues, not quite yet, almost, not quite yet. One of the major issues is funding and resources. So the funding for this type of work is still catching up. So it’s harder for researchers to commit to entering the field unless they have funding that’s just coming in that allows them the latitude to do that. One research area that’s busting through lots of these barriers is the work on psychedelics for mental health and can you imagine 10, 15 years ago that we would see this huge explosion of psychedelic research and all of these things going through FDA approved, I mean, that’s totally-
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Never in my lifetime.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Wild, right?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah. Yeah.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
So I feel like that’s really paved the way. When I first started in research, mindfulness was completely taboo and now mindfulness is everywhere. I had to fight so hard to be able to teach a mindfulness class at the department of neurology. So those are cases demonstrating that these shifts are really happening and perhaps academia is gonna be the last to completely change, but the general public interest is there. Oh, you see all these documentaries on Netflix and various shows about these phenomenon. And so I really do feel it’s shifting And once the funders, besides individual donors start putting serious resources into that work, it’s really gonna explode.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Oh, lovely. What are you most excited about? What do you see coming up in the future here in this area? What are you most excited about?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
I mean, there’s so many, but if I had to pick a couple, one, I really am so excited about the Noetic signature, because I think it’s packaged in a way that’s very accessible to people and it provides a platform for exploration that can support people on a very practical level, all of our research and all the anecdotes show that when people learn how to tap into their inner wisdom, that their lives are just easier, happier, healthier, et cetera, so I’m really excited about rolling that out. And the second piece, obviously I’m trained as a clinician, so I’m very interested in how this can support healthcare and improving our medical system building on the work that we did with the Reiki masters and the clairvoyant seers, we are building a pragmatic medical intuition trial right now. So medical intuitives are gonna be partnering with general practitioners. And the research question is the information that the medical intuitive gives the physician useful? Did they change any of the tests that they would give? Did they change their diagnoses and their treatment plans for the better based on what the medical intuitive shared with them? So we’re really excited to be piloting that and hopefully getting more and more physicians involved to support the health and healing process.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Wow, that, please sign me up for that one. That really sounds phenomenal.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Right, can you imagine bringing all of your difficult cases and being able to get this alternate insight that might really help people?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
You know, we do. I actually will say this on the summit. We do that with some of our hardest cases and it is such a fascinating collaboration. And I really see that as the future of medicine in addition to light sound, but that component of that intuitive component, we were talking about that before coming on and filming of having this more of a, I call it a feminine aspect with the intuitive component coming back to the forefront, and that will serve so many people. I mean, the level of unknown disease processes is huge in the clinical realm, I mean, I’ve been at it for 22 years now and, you know, see people kind of the head scratchers of they’ve been to see all of the specialists and the experts around the globe, and then they wind up at the clinic, I said, you know, don’t wanna be the interesting patient here, but this, that sounds so amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Yeah, absolutely. And my attitude is if we’re open and willing, what do we have to lose really? You know?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Right.
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
What do we have to lose?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Really, a lot of information that were specifically on the table is what’s evolving there. Kind of in wrapping it up with you. This has been so good. I wanna return back to this non-local consciousness because that component, I wanna make sure we’re doing that due justice in this conversation because that one, I just brushed over it. But that component of okay, materialism, I think you summed it up very well. Materialism doesn’t even allow for the possibility of that to happen. And that’s really at the basis of what your research is looking, saying, this has been proven. Can we then get it to a point where we understand that as human beings, we have this capability to tap into that, maybe in your words, will you explain that a little bit more for us?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Yeah, absolutely. I will just clarify this whole word proven. I really, ’cause people say, “Oh, it’s been proven,” and it’s like, no, no, you know, we don’t ever really prove anything ultimately. There is a lot of evidence that we see that our consciousness is not stuck in our brain and that our brain is not the generator of our consciousness, growing, growing evidence from laboratories in daily life as well. It’s very, very compelling once you start digging into the literature about this. What’s fascinating and you mentioned materialism, so materialism is the dominant paradigm right now. And it’s essentially all that exists is the physical world and anything beyond the physical world doesn’t exist essentially and we’re moving into a new paradigm, the post materialistic paradigm that I think not that we wanna throw out materialism, we take, what’s good about it. It certainly explains a lot about the physical world, but it is incomplete. We take that, we build on it and we go more deeply into this concept that many, many philosophers, theorists and scientists are coming to that consciousness is fundamental. It is the grounded being upon which everything arises.
There’s multiple philosophical terms that have aspects of this idealism neutral monism. And the key, I think because I’m an experimentalist, I’m very, very practical is how do we take all of these many theories, talking about consciousness, being fundamental and actually test it and see if we can validate aspects of any of these theories? And we’re actually gonna be launching a contest at IONS for people to submit their big C consciousness theories that are testable and we’re giving a prize to the winning testable theory of this big C consciousness. Now, when people start thinking about, well, what does that mean, consciousness is fundamental? And what does that mean consciousness is all there is essentially?
It can get very esoteric and our human mind has a really hard time grasping that, like everything’s information, you know? Well, here’s my table. How do I kinda put those things together? So I think it is a challenge for many people to think about it from a philosophical, theoretical perspective, but when you apply it to the practical, it means we’re all interconnected that my intentions, my thoughts matter to me individually and to the world around me and that I have an incredible, and much more broad wealth of information, resources, energy that I have access to than my small individual self. And if I can use that to support my health, my wellbeing, that then ripples out. If I can use that to find solutions to these horrible problems our planet is facing right now, we’re in a lot of big trouble right now. If we can use that, then why not? Why not bring in that wealth of information, energy, et cetera, to support us through this extended interconnected global and universal consciousness, if you will?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Wow, here’s to the big C, huh?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
Thanks. I know it’s kind of intense. The theoretical implications of it can be quite intense, but I wrote a book called “The Science Of Channeling,” that breaks it down in very, very accessible language. So I know you had just shared, you just read it, Greg. So that’s really exciting and we can invite the listeners to do that.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Totally. And we’ll have contact information wrapped around. What I’d like to ask the last piece, which I think you’ve already shared, but what do you recommend for people to get into action around this topic?
Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR
The first step is to acknowledge for themselves that it exists and that they can be explorers trying to explore it. And like I mentioned earlier, even if it’s five minutes a day to just sit quietly and set the intention to tap into this interconnected whole, that is part of them, but also extends beyond them.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Dr. Wahbeh, thank you so much. Everybody, thanks for tuning in to the Bioenergetics Summit. We’ll see you in the next session.
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