Jeff Carreira: Hello there, Shelli. To get started, let me just first say that I really loved your book, Tantric Psychophysics: A Structural Map of Altered States and the Dynamics of Consciousness. I really enjoy encountering people who've been so dedicated to the path for as long as you have. There aren't that many of those individuals. I loved the story in the book about you and your initial experiences with yoga, and your early encounters with John Lilly and other ideas that have seemingly snowballed throughout your life.

And now with Tantric Psychophysics, it feels like you're pulling a lifetime of exploration into a comprehensive and coherent exploration of higher states of consciousness, and the practices that can give us access to those. You're looking through a variety of different traditions and teachers and methods, and I just find it very exciting. So, first of all, I just wanted to congratulate you on the completion of the book.

Shelli Renée Joye: Well, thank you. You said that very well, actually.

Jeff Carreira: So I have a lot of things I'd like to talk to you about, but I want to start by asking if you have heard of the podcast called The Telepathy Tapes?

Shelli Renée Joye: No, I haven't.

Jeff Carreira: It's very fascinating, and it highlights overwhelming amounts of evidence that autistic children show telepathic capacities.

Shelli Renée Joye: Oh, wow.

Jeff Carreira: In this podcast the host, Ky Dickens, discusses a very convincing body of evidence that would be difficult to deny. So that inspired this issue of our magazine on hidden human capacities. Are you familiar with Jeffrey Kripal, professor at Rice University?

Shelli Renée Joye: Yes, I went to Rice University, actually.

Jeff Carreira: Oh, you did? I spoke with Jeffrey for this issue as well, and he helped frame my thinking. He said that if you are a researcher like him, the first thing you realize about paranormal phenomena or mystical experiences is there is no need for more evidence. The evidence that proves these things are real is overwhelming. He said what we need is a theoretical framework that will help us understand it all. I feel like he's doing that work, and I feel like that's what you're doing with Tantric Psychophysics. You're creating a framework, an understanding of reality and of consciousness that can help take ideas from Patanjali's yoga sutras, the Tibetan Buddhist tantras, and the Western traditions of occult phenomena to show how it's all emerging out of an understandable reality.

I would love for you to speak initially about how you see yourself creating a theoretical framework for helping human beings understand non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Shelli Renée Joye: When I studied electrical engineering, it was pattern recognition that really turned me on. Trying to understand patterns and how human beings recognize patterns. And then when I got more into focusing on consciousness I realized there was no information on consciousness itself in Western science, or very little, because material sciences mostly focused on space, time and the material world. But serendipitously I discovered there was a lot of information in Asian philosophies and religions and traditions, and Western mysticism too. I started looking for and finding patterns, and it's like using what we call overlays in engineering, where you lay transparent blueprints on top of underlying blueprints called overlays in order to see what’s going on in the overall plan. So in my methodology used to explore and understand patterns in consciousness itself, try to overlay conceptual systems onto another, sometimes in very disparate subjects. And quite often you can see patterns emerge where there's congruence. Whenever there's a congruent pattern, that rings a bell for me to focus on this newly perceived pattern and to hold on to that as part of my data, using it to discern other patterns that are similar.

I think I've been very fortunate in studying science and mysticism in order to acquire the tools with which to search for similarities, to try to corroborate the accounts of mystics, saints, psychonauts, and my own experiences, to corroborate them with what we think we know to be facts in Western science.

So that's been my path for the last 40 years or so. And then about 10 years ago, I started trying to articulate a map, a sort of a geometry of consciousness, to help people who are trying to explore the so-called hidden dimensions of consciousness. You really need a map if you're exploring something new. And I think us humans are just beginning to take seriously the fact that there are other dimensions to consciousness, other dimensions to space and time. There's a growing number of people trained in science that are starting to come together to try to integrate the two in a more technical way. They are trying to squeeze more understanding out of the experiences of people who explore consciousness to draw a map, so that people can make shortcuts to what I call colonizing the noosphere, or the psychosphere.

I think it's really important right now that people understand the structure of consciousness, because I think that's a key to a lot of the problems right now. Carl Jung, near the end of his life, started talking now and then about psychoids as entities of consciousness. And these entities are not necessarily within the human being. They're in various dimensions of existence. And they use human beings, as Donald Hoffman would say, as a way of perceiving in space and time, and creating things and gathering information. Jung would call some of these “archetypes” at the higher end of the scale of psychoids, and some of them on the other end of the scale he would call “instincts.” But all of these psychoids can affect people, and there are really large scale psychoids built upon lower levels of consciousness. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called them noospheres. There's a misnomer that he thought there was one noosphere and one biosphere. The noosphere, according to him, is a collection of collective consciousnesses. He was focused on the human noosphere. But as far as I can see, there's a noosphere for every type of plant or animal or entity. Some writers have started to call it a psychosphere instead of a noosphere.

So these psychospheres are collective consciousnesses. Jung wrote a lot about the collective unconscious. Well, the collective unconscious is only unconscious to us, our normal consciousness. Normally we're not aware of the collective unconscious. They're really collective consciousnesses, and some of them are group consciousnesses. I had a good friend at the Institute of Integral Studies who wrote a book about group consciousness. He noticed how a class, after a few sections, started developing its own personality. And collectors are psychic collectives. I would say that life and consciousness are synonyms. That life is not only restricted to biological entities, but being a panpsychist, I see life and consciousness everywhere. Everything has some innate consciousness.

In my new book I've been focusing on agential realism and agential consciousness. The philosophy of Karen Barad, and the newer one of Donald Hoffman, where consciousness builds upon smaller, smaller fragments of consciousness to build larger consciousnesses. Like the cell in your liver, there's millions of cells in the liver, and each one has its own little consciousness. But they collectively build up like a pyramid structure to a top consciousness, which gives the liver a certain self-identity; much In the same way, we humans have a sense of identity at the top of our pyramid of billions of cells and tinier psychoids, a single psychoid at the top of the pyramid that we regard as “I”. But according to mystics in many traditions, there is only one real, whole consciousness in the universe or the metaverse. David Bohm talked about it by dividing the universe into the orders of space and time, and what he called the implicate order. But it's not really a duality, because his idea was that in the implicate order are all of the many dimensions outside of space and time.

And so they're not restrained by time and space, and they all have an aspect of consciousness and Jung's psychoidial elements. So all of these things build from the very bottom up. And in spacetime we have plenums of agential realism. Hoffman calls them conscious agents, but they're very similar to the plenum of monads by Descartes and Leibniz, who both thought that the universe is packed full of the smallest entity, which they called monads. And Alfred North Whitehead, who was a mathematician turned philosopher of consciousness, talked about a plenum of what he called actual entities. Many quantum physicists talk about a plenum of strings, which Jung would call them a plenum of cycloids. These are the very smallest elements of consciousness, down at the Planck length. The Planck length is the smallest length possible in space, below which space and time have no meaning. I've written about “holospheres,” described by Bohm’s theory as the tiniest possible things in spacetime, and I think they're the same entities that Whitehead describes as “actual entities.”

You could think of holospheres (or actual entities) as “pixels of consciousness.” They are the most basic element of consciousness that seep through into space and time. These pixels of consciousness build upon one another in a pyramidical-like structure, forming higher and higher levels of collective consciousness. They coalesce by the gizzilions (my term for an unimaginable number) to form atomic structures (quantum particles), and keep building to eventually form molecules. And the molecules become cells, the cells become organs like the liver, and then a collection of organs become parts of the body. The consciousness builds upto our sense of “I”. But the sense of “I” is really a little diffraction of a larger whole that thinks of itself as being a separate “I”.

It's really not separate, though. It's just a diffraction of the one “I,” Jung's big “Self” (called in various traditions God, or Brahma, or Yahweh or Jehovah or Ahura Mazda, etc.) I remember the first time I took LSD, there was a woman with us. She was talking and frequently using the word “I”. And I kept having this strange feeling that it was “I” that she was talking about, or through, perhaps. We both got tangled up about which one of us was the “I” we were referencing. Afterwards, I realized we all have what we think is a separate “I”. But that “I” is really the single I of the universe. We’re in Samsara thinking that we are separate individuals, or seem to be. Often it's counterproductive and sad to believe so strongly that we're separate, when in reality we are that one single “I” that is diffracted, the way white light diffracts into a rainbow. But it’s precisely because we're separate that we can see things and create things, and I think it has something to do with the enjoyment of the one “I”. I think the one universal “I”, which some people call God or Brahman, is really enjoying itself by having so much diversity. The one “I” is me. That's why the Rastafarians often use the phrase “I and I” as in “I and I went to the beach the other day.”

It's almost like that “I” is channel surfing. All of the billions of consciousnesses – the animals, the people, throughout their galaxies, perhaps. It's pretty mind boggling. Whenever I really start thinking about it, my mind just comes to a stop, and I feel very content and peaceful and happy that I'm part of it all. Those feelings, very real feelings, often occurs during periods of meditation and/or various contemplative practices, even during physical exercises, and of course during the ingestion of entheogenic substances like ayahuasca or psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, etc. Even if I'm going through a little period of suffering from whatever – you know, some pain somewhere, or the loss of a friend, or all the sadness in the world, and the violence, and these things that can really get you down. But beyond all that, there's a sense of being part of it all, and feeling very welcome to be part of existence.

My latest book, The Metaverse of Consciousness: Mapping the Multiple Dimensions of Reality, has a lot to do with agential realism. Karen Barad has a PhD in quantum mechanics, and she was the first to write about agential realism. She says there are no real objects, and there's no perceiver and perceived. There's only relationships. And they are agents that are relating to each other. It's a feedback thing between everything, to some extent. So in my new book I'm encouraging people to learn how to meditate in order to try to colonize the larger noospheres, if you will.

Maybe that's a bad word, so let’s say to build up the psychoid of progressive, enlightened, joyful, loving reality. Because there's a sort of a cosmic war going on. Maybe you don't want to call it a war, but within nature you see survival of the fittest. And it seems like the great God (the Self, ‘I”) wants to jumble everything all up to make different interesting scenarios. The way a stew tastes even better as more ingredients are skillfully stirred in together. And right now there are different groups that are growing, some of them very dark and negative. You know, I like to say it's above my pay grade to know why my great Self would want to cause suffering. But maybe that's part of existence. Clearly, you can't have light without dark, and you can't have real joy without sadness. So everything is sort of complementary and changeable. People ask, how do we stop the world from sliding into darkness and negativity? And I would answer, it's spiritual, psychedelic, contemplative practices to influence and build and civilize the higher noospheres. To influence contemporary reality requires more people expanding their collective consciousness beyond the human brain, with its normally isolated memories and thought processes.

The basic teaching of yoga, Patanjali, of even Western Christianity, is to go into the silence and let the mind slow down and shift into a the quiet state, the Silence, so that suddenly there dawns the light of awareness of the connectivity that knits it all in a multi-dimensional matrix of consciousness. When you're really making progress in meditation, you can feel it, you are able to reach out beyond yourself, whether it's outside of yourself, or within yourself, or connecting to normally alien dimensions that have no relation to inside and outside (since they are spacetime dimensions). You sense immediately that you are touching and joining in, tuning in, to a wider spectrum of sensation. You suddenly feel the peace and power and confidence of knowing that you are connected as a wider being, instead of a lesser feeling of isolation. It is comforting. But if people remain feeling isolated and separate it can become very unhealthy for individuals and societies. And in order to grow, you have to be able to connect to psychoids beyond yourself, whether they're human psychoids, friends, lovers, or some of these higher psychoids, like the archetypes, for instance, that Jung talks about.

Jeff Carreira: I love that you brought this conversation back to something in my own spiritual life and spiritual work, and that is about colonizing these higher dimensions. In the podcast The Telepathy Tapes, one of the things that I found most fascinating is that evidently autistic children from around the world all talk about meeting together at a place they call ‘The Hill', which is a space and consciousness which they have access to. And there's very remarkable evidence that there is a real connection going on there, an exchange of information. And then in my own work, I am very inspired to create a variation of what you're talking about, in terms of colonizing. There are individuals and groups of individuals I work with who have an intention to meet and establish a life in a higher space and consciousness.

And I don't exactly know what that means, I just know we want to do it. Nietzsche talked about meeting in blessed islands, and that's been an inspiration to me – that I want to establish a blessed island. At least one, maybe more than one. But at least one in higher consciousness where I and others can go to, and live. So I would love to hear more about your thinking around what it means to colonize these higher spaces or higher dimensions of consciousness.

Shelli Renée Joye: I'll bring a little bit of science into it, because I don't think it's enough to just explain experiences without some grounding in science, at least to show the scientifically minded people that there's some credibility to these ideas. And in terms of telepathy, I think it's extremely feasible. I was an electrical engineer, and also a ham radio enthusiast. And about 10 years ago, ham radio operators started doing something new called QRP. Q means electromagnetic radio broadcast power and RP stands for “Reduced Power.” So QRP means trying to communicate at as low power as possible and still be able to communicate, to transmit information signals and to receive the return information signals that make communication possible. In other words, QRP experiments with using really low electromagnetic radio wave levels of power. So amateur radio experimenters started developing little radios that transmitted and received as low as 5 watts of power. And the only way they could do it was hooking them up to computers, and having the computer encode a message and transmit it. To my thrill and astonishment, from my mountain home in Northern California I was able to communicate with a scientific base radio operator in Antarctica using just 5 watts of power! It really blew my mind. That's almost half the planet away.

Five watts is what a typical flashlight puts out. And what the flashlight's putting out is electromagnetic energy, electromagnetic waves in the region of visible light. But our hearts also put out 5 watts of power. Our hearts constantly generate 5 watts of power, which most people, even doctors, sort of dismiss as heat. Well, what is heat? Heat is really infrared energy. If you go to McDonald's and you want warm french fries, you can see the infrared light bulbs, keeping them warm. The heart is putting out 5 watts of electromagnetic energy, and if radio amateurs can communicate across the globe with 5 watts, why is it not feasible for human beings to do that through what we call telepathy? That's just a word we use for the phenomena, but the bio-electromagnetics of it seems to be very clear, each human broadcasts 100 watts of infrared radio waves continuously (a bit less when asleep), and the heart continuously puts out 5 watts.

Now consider that each one of us right now, wherever we are, are experiencing every single frequency of radio wave broadcast in the world simultaneously passing through us, at every moment. Very, very, very small signals, but there they are. They are real. Even if they’re inconsequential. it still means a signal is there, an we all know that electromagnetic signals can carry information since our entire technology works using electromagnetic radio waves of many different frequency ranges.

So it is clear that we may be able to communicate very directly, human to human, in a way that's really no different than the way we use radio waves. We jiggle the radio waves to match our vocal frequencies, and an antenna receives it far away. That could be a person's heart, and then we re-convert it to audio signals. But even in your mind, you don't need to have audible signals. Right now, for example, if I want to hear Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I can just stop my thinking and I can suddenly hear the opening chords! You can actually even learn to adjust the volume in your “phantom music” in your head because it’s all based on electromagnetic wave frequencies and the power of those waves radiating through space.

So within our brain we can create sounds that are not externally audible. We can perceive them, but they're no longer sound waves in space, outside of us. So I think I agree with Jeffrey Kripal. It's no longer something that needs to be proven, but it’s a phenomena that needs to be cultivated and explored and developed more and more. We are evolving a collective consciousness, coming together in an organized way and creating a higher level of consciousness. Is consciousness evolving? Yes, and I am quite sure AI systems are also evolving into new forms of consciousness. An AI system of silicon and other crystals and fiber optic glass and cooper hosts electromagnetic energy that's vibrating and full of information. How could it not be developing an awareness of itself? After all, we are thinking meat, basically! Why not thinking silicon? But to accept such an idea of course, you would have to be a panpsychist like me. Panpsychists believe everything down to the smallest particle has an innate awareness of itself.

I think the biggest problem we’re facing right in our world now is the rapidly growing fascist or authoritarian psychoids. I don't know why these entities are trying to destroy the current ecology on the planet by ignoring global warming and science. Perhaps goes back to the archetypal idea of the war in heaven between the angels of light and the angels of darkness. We can’t really judge these things (perhaps after our limiting bodies die, we’ll know more!). Likely it is just part of the pattern of needing to have opposites in order to have anything in between. Shadow and light, pain and pleasure, ignorance and brilliance. All of these seeming dualities create spectrums of great richness. If we didn't have these things, likely there'd be nothing at all. Then where would our big Self be able to channel-surf?

Or maybe there was nothing at all for a long long long time before the big Self had the urge to create space and time dimensions as a sort of playhouse for creative expression and experience love of beauty and sharpness of pain. You know, right now I'm looking out at the beautiful Italian countryside and what is that? Where does that pleasure come from? Why does it feel so good to look at nature, to look at great art, hear great music? Because it's worth it. It’s worth all the pain and suffering of humanity in order to have the pleasure and the beauty and the amazing emotions that humans can have. I think right now as individuals all we can do is the best we can, but also try to cultivate a connection to the larger psychological collective that really exists. And I would say the mechanism of telepathy is something that links all of our hearts. The hearts of loving people are probably resonating right now around the globe at the speed of light, and creating a higher consciousness psychoid, a noosphere, or multiple noospheric psychoids – the planet I am sure has it’s own level of self, the big Kahuna noosphere that is actually a living entity that's composed of many, many, many humans, just the way an individual human is composed of many, many, many cells.

People shouldn't give up and despair. But they should meditate, I think. I think it’s so great that some artists and scientists are beginning to use their resources to encourage meditation. For example, the film director David Lynch has put millions into teaching school age children to mediate. I doubt if many people have heard of it, but the foundation he set up is called “The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.” By just being quiet for a while and sensing, sensing the reality of your existence within this whole integrated network. If you realize that you're part of it all, I think a lot of anxiety vanishes and drops away.

Jeff Carreira: That's beautiful. I want to bring this part of our conversation to a close by saying I'm hearing something in what you've been sharing with me that expands on what I read in your book Tantric Psychophysics. I agree with you that “colonizing” is a bad word. I usually use the word “occupy”, and talk to people about the possibility of occupying or residing in higher consciousness together. What I’m hearing from you is there's a need for us to go beyond the meat mind, as you put it, which we can do through various tantric practices that you lay out in your book. Why? So that we can gain access to higher dimensions of consciousness. But that's not the end of what's needed, because we also need to gather in these higher places. This is something that I've felt strongly about for a long time. It's not just about individuals gaining access, it's about many of us gaining access and then actually connecting there, meeting there, and occupying and residing in these higher places.

What I'm hearing you say is that an evolutionary movement will create a next dimension of consciousness, a next level of consciousness. And I find that to be both astute and thrilling and incredibly hopeful, because something beyond what we can imagine may come about from that kind of higher dimensional gathering.

Shelli Renée Joye: Yeah, definitely. You know, I recently read War and Peace by Tolstoy a 1200-page novel published in 1969. It’s not only an amazingly well-written work of art, but develops a philosophical/psychological view of history. Tolstoy expresses human beings so well, their emotions and interactions and thoughts. But also the overarching message of the book is that history is a living thing. He really seems to believe that, and expresses it well through these battles and wars between the Russians and Napoleon’s armies. Tolstoy believes that it is not individuals that really affect history so much as some higher collective consciousness. It's the intention of some kind of a larger force that moves nations and ignites movements. And I think that ties right into the idea that we need to occupy these larger forces right now, today, beyond our individuality. I don't think individually we can do a whole lot right now. But collectively we can develop a more positive, powerfully effective stance or attitude. I think that hope has diminished very recently, and it's a challenge to keep hope alive and increase it, to feed the evolving noospheric entity (psychoid) that is on the side of light and love and the sense that we are all one, truly the same “I” without usually being aware of it.

I think more people need the message not to dismiss prayer and meditation. Most people have been brought up in some kind of a religious tradition, and although some religious practices and liturgies can feel outdated and limited, they also have traditions that are very rich, and can be used as springboards to and part of meditation. I myself still say prayers when I sit down to meditate before I go into the silence of the other dimensions. Some of the prayers I recite intentionally are from my early Catholicism in English, and some of them are Sanskrit mantras that help to separate my thinking mind from the great beyond within other dimensions. But it doesn't matter because you're focusing on these things in order to go beyond them. They're sort of like the airlock in a spaceship. Prayers let you release your normal thoughts and memories, so your mind has something to focus on for a while that's not the latest news, or the latest disaster, or what you're going to have for dinner. You're able to say a prayer or a mantra and repeat it until you detach from all those other normal cognitive processes. And then at some point, you're able to jump out of the airlock, into the silence. I stop praying and I just listen. You listen to the silence, and you're listening to everybody else. Maybe you're listening to all those hearts that are putting out 5 watts of energy throughout your local community, and the world. Just feeling into something wider than yourself.

There's a growing number of people who belong to the scientific and medical communities who are also very interested in consciousness, life after death, and meditation. There’s a movement to find an integration between science, religion, and mysticism in order to go beyond, to lift consciousness into some kind of a new configuration. I think that’s what nature is moving toward. And if you open up to it, I think nature, the universe, comes and helps you and pulls you further into it. But you need hope, and you have to have some faith, and you need to practice.

How do you get people to practice meditation? It’s not easy. I can’t get my own family members to meditate (or read my books!). But for those of you I’m speaking to now, try to meditate for 10 minutes a day to start with. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. At first, you keep falling off, and you fall down, so at first your cognitive mind will likely judge it to be a waste of time. But if you can somehow force yourself to continue spending the 10 minutes a day for a few weeks, suddenly one night, perhaps, you will sense a distinct change in what you you are feeling, as if a new inner sense opens its eyes, or sense of touch reaches out and touches something other, in a new dimension (if you have previously experienced psychedelics it may be more familiar to you). At first these experiences will arise intermittently, not every time you meditate, but after a few weeks you can slip into meditation quite easily without a lot of struggle. And then a new goal is to be in that space of tranquility and multi-dimensionality during the day, when your eyes are open! When I go for walks, sometimes I challenge myself. I see a tree that's about a couple hundred feet away, and I say, okay, I'm going to try to walk to that tree without having anything enter my mind. Have no memories, just be totally aware. It’s a good practice to turn off your mind sometimes, because the mind can be a terrible trap, especially when people start worrying. The trick is to just drop it, and focus on something else that's more positive and unitive and healing for a while. Meditation is the key, I believe, not only to finding a source of inner release from fear and worrying, but also to healing our societies and the planet. Try it! What do you have to lose?

Jeff Carreira: That was beautifully said. I love talking with you, Shelli. Thank you so much for the interview and for your time. I really do appreciate your work and your perspectives, and I look forward to exploring more of what you've written and what you will write moving forward.