I want to tell you about a conversation that stopped me.

In June 2026, Dean Radin — Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, researcher of consciousness for over fifty years, and author of The Science of Magic: How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality — sat down with Joe Rogan for nearly three hours. Within eighteen days, that conversation drew close to a million views. Including the clips rippling outward across the internet, the reach climbed into the multiple millions.

I am not surprised it went that far that fast.

What Dean Radin has spent a lifetime saying in the careful, measured language of peer-reviewed science is something the Lakota, the Nakota, the Dakota — and every Indigenous tradition I have ever encountered — have been saying in the language of ceremony, story, and song since before written language existed.

We are not separate. Mind and matter are woven together. Intention shapes outcome. The knowing that arrives before the knowing has a name, is real, is measurable, and is as old as the first grandmother who pressed her ear to the earth and listened.

What the laboratory is finally catching up to, the lodge never forgot.

Watch the full conversation here before or after reading — it is worth every minute of three hours.

One of the threads in Radin's conversation that landed most deeply for me was his answer to a simple question: is this capacity for expanded knowing something emerging in us now — or something we once had and lost?

His answer was atrophy.

He explained that evolution shaped human attention toward the immediate and the local. The tiger in front of you. The weather today. The child right here. A mind that drifted too far into the "there and then" — picking up information from distances no ordinary sense could reach — was a mind that got eaten. So that capacity was naturally quieted in most people over millennia.

But not in everyone.

Certain people in every tribe kept that channel open. Their attention lived somewhere else — sometimes uncomfortably so — and the tribe recognized this as a gift worth protecting. The tribe fed them, sheltered them, made room for the way their minds worked, because what they brought back from that other place of knowing mattered enormously. They knew where the food would be next week. They knew which path held danger. They knew things before those things had happened.

We called them medicine people. We called them dreamers. We called them shamans.

And as recently as the last century, in this very country, they were gathered up and placed in mental institutions — separated from their communities, their medicines, their purpose — because what they carried was declared the work of the enemy of God. The gift that had sustained entire nations for thousands of years was pathologized, criminalized, and when possible, eliminated.

Radin's research found a genetic fingerprint of exactly that elimination — not only here, but across Europe. Centuries of systematically hunting down healers, intuitives, and "witches" left a measurable trace in the human genome. The populations most exposed to that hunting carry a specific genetic mutation that appears to suppress this sensitivity. The longer the exposure, the stronger the signature.

When I heard that, I did not need a moment to understand it. I have lived near the evidence my whole life.

Nine miles from where I sit writing this is a place called Mato Tipila. You may know it by its colonial name — Devils Tower, America's first national monument, designated in 1906. The name was chosen deliberately, to denigrate the resonance that Indigenous peoples had recognized and gathered within for thousands of years.

Mato means bear. Tipila means home. Home of the Healing Bear, the resonance of healing.

For eons before that renaming, this was one of the most sacred healing sites on the continent. Nations that were enemies to one another — peoples who met on the battlefield in every other season — came here and laid down their weapons. They made alliances here. They prayed together here for world peace, beneath the resonant vibration of that extraordinary stone column rising 1,267 feet from the earth.

This gathering place was guaranteed to remain under our care in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, signed in good faith by my great-grandfather Chief John Grass. Within decades, that promise was broken. The site was confiscated and renamed — not carelessly, but with full intention — and the healing resonance that had drawn warring nations into peace was rebranded as something sinister.

The stone is still there. The resonance has not left. And on Summer Solstice 2028, if the circle holds, people from every nation will gather there again — not because anyone organized a conference, but because something older than any of our disagreements is calling them home.

That gathering is what I am building toward. That is what this platform, this library, this community of Life-honoring Resonance Walkers is in preparation for. And the work Dean Radin has done in a laboratory in Petaluma, California connects — more directly than it might first appear — to why that gathering matters and what it can do.

Radin's career has taken him from Bell Laboratories to the classified Stargate program — the U.S. government's remote viewing research initiative — to Princeton, to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where he has spent the last twenty-five years. What he has accumulated across those decades is not anecdote. It is replicated, peer-reviewed, rigorously controlled experimental evidence for things that most of the scientific establishment still prefers not to look at directly.

Telepathy — the transmission of knowing between minds — has been demonstrated under conditions that exclude every conventional explanation. The effects are real, consistent across independent researchers, and in some cases dramatic.

Remote viewing — the ability to accurately describe a location, object, or event using nothing but a random identifying number as a starting point — was demonstrated convincingly enough that the U.S. military invested in it for decades, used it for operational intelligence gathering, and classified the results at the highest levels of clearance.

Presentiment — the body's measurable physiological response to an emotionally significant event before that event occurs, before any ordinary sense could know it was coming — has been shown in laboratory conditions with the kind of effect sizes that make statisticians take notice.

What underlies all of it, in Radin's theoretical framing, is something he describes carefully but plainly: consciousness, whatever it ultimately is, appears to be non-local. Not contained within the individual skull. 

Not bound by the space between two people, 

or by the distance between a remote viewer and the target they have never seen.

This is the same non-locality that quantum mechanics describes in its language of entanglement — particles connected across distances, influencing one another instantaneously, with no signal passing between them. Physics has known this for nearly a century. The implications for consciousness are only now being seriously examined.

The Lakota did not need that examination. Mitakuye Oyasin — All My Relations — is not a poetic sentiment. It is a description of the actual structure of reality.

Everything is connected. The separation we experience is a perceptual habit, not a fact of existence. And healing — real healing, the kind that reaches all the way down — is what becomes possible when that habit is gently, persistently, lovingly interrupted.

One of the most practically useful things Radin says in this conversation is something that anyone who has worked with the 4 Steps will recognize immediately: none of it functions under duress.

Remote viewers with extraordinary natural gifts describe a state of simple, open receptivity — almost casual, as though they have set down the effort of trying. The moment they attempt to force the knowing, analyze it as it arrives, or perform it for an audience, it disappears. Radin himself describes a moment — bending the bowl of a spoon in a way that metallurgical analysis later confirmed required a brief, massive force his hands could not consciously generate — during which his analytical mind was so thoroughly absorbed in something else that it could not interfere with what was happening.

He is clear that he does not fully know how he did it. What he knows is that the moment he looked at it directly and rationally, it stopped.

This is not mysticism. This is a description of what every tradition that has ever worked with expanded knowing has consistently reported: the left-brain, analytical, controlling function that serves us well in ordinary life is the very thing that blocks the deeper channel. Not because there is something wrong with the analytical mind, but because it was built for a different task — maintaining stability, managing the known world, keeping the tiger from eating you.

The other knowing — the one that travels through time and space, that connects us to each other in ways no instrument yet fully measures, that arrives before the event it describes — that one requires something closer to the stillness at the center of Balance. The listening that Harmony opens. The flow that Abundance makes possible. The resting in what is real that only Peace can offer.

In other words, the 4 Steps are not preparation for this kind of knowing. 

We do not teach it. We walk into the space where it has always been waiting.

Radin closes his conversation with Rogan in a place that felt, to me, like the closest science has come to describing what the Circle the Walk of Peace Path is actually about.

He speaks of a world in which this kind of interconnected knowing becomes more widely accessible — not through technology wired into the brain, but through the recovery of capacities already present, already genetic, already quietly waiting in human beings who have kept themselves even slightly open. He speaks of what changes when enough people stop being able to pretend the separation is real. 

He pauses before answering what he would do if he developed something that gave people real, undeniable access to this kind of knowing. And his answer is the one I trust: he would pause. Because the gift without the preparation — the power without the years of ego work, the humility, the discipline — is not the gift. It is a different kind of danger.

The yogic traditions he references insist that students spend years learning to manage the self before any expanded capacity is cultivated. Not because the capacity is dangerous in itself, but because power moving through an unprepared vessel causes harm — to the vessel and to everyone in its path.

The 4 Steps are that preparation. The Circle is not a destination we arrive at unprepared. 

The gathering at Mato Tipila in 2028 is not a concert or a conference. 

It is a convergence of people who have been walking — individually, quietly, in their own lives and homes and bodies — toward a readiness that no single event can manufacture but that a single event can beautifully, powerfully, unforgettably mark.

The laboratory is finally catching up to the lodge. And the lodge, as it always has, is holding the door open.