The Biofield with Dr Peter Nelson


Dr Peter L Nelson is a psychologist and social scientist who has 50+ years experience in personal and business coaching, transpersonal counseling, psychological assessment and research into behavior and consciousness.

As a scientist, he studied the psychophysiology and the psycho-phenomenology of attention, perception and consciousness. His ongoing research continues his earlier explorations of how people experience and understand reality—whether seen through the visions of mystics or the daily perceptions of ordinary people.

He has published original research on perception and, including articles that show a connection between cannabis use and aspects of personality, attention and transpersonal knowing.

He is an expert on the nature of direct attention, and has demonstrated that the results of expanded awareness are increased perception, which can help in both personal life and professions such as therapy.

Dr Peter Nelson interview Part 1 • Personal context

  • Science teenage geek, grants on brain research 1959
  • Start of computing
  • Psychophysiology. Haight Ashbury
  • What are we doing with consciousness. Deploying attention
  • First meeting of consciousness studies. ‘The hard problem’, not interested.
  • Phenomenological basis of our knowing: the how of consciousness
  • Walk into a room, pay attention to what you dont normally notice
  • Assumptions about people
  • Fundamental attribution error
  • Bottom up processors
  • Perceptual experiences in India
  • People projecting their own realities
  • True skeptic
  • Ontological neutralism
  • Experiences on Audsley LSD 1960’s
  • Intuitive knowledge

Dr Peter Nelson interview Part 2  • The rustle in the bush - a question of perception

  • Living with open questions
  • Learning to deploy attention, without psychedelics
  • People see what they want to see
  • Learn to use attention differently to see who they are
  • Teach people how to do it
  • Coaching how to change how they deploy awarenes
  • People basically paranoid
  • Rustle in the brush
  • Paranoid tilt - completing the story
  • They think they are intuitive, but just fast thinking
  • If dont know how to use attention, just filling in the gaps
  • Written off phenomenological abstractions
  • Phenomenogical reduction simplistic
  • Tell me something about myself I dont know
  • Declare philosophy dead
  • Who are you, before look at you
  • Anyone could open that door
  • You dont know how to do it, talking is not it
  • To deepen perception more is necessary

Dr Peter Nelson interview Part 3  • The biofield

  • Biofield
  • Examples
  • Friend thinking about suicide, leaves a field after image
  • Perceive footprints, markers
  • Appointment with cardiologist cancelled
  • Know they are deeply unhappy
  • Not super natural
  • Not a theist not athiest not agnostic, respond to what is as it is
  • People build ego selves on this
  • Differentiate own projections, Plato’s cave
  • Witnessed Perls
  • Listen to the background sounds
  • Notice the inbetween, the reach Epoche
  • Hypnogogic, but more difficult
  • Everything seems more three dimensional
  • Emergent ground

Dr Peter Nelson interview Part 4  • They rang your bell

  • Stan Grof turbulence
  • Dreamwork, get the dream, as a picture, left out the table, in the dream with her
  • The problem with ‘intuition’
  • Like seeing a chair in the room
  • Feelings in your body, self referencing
  • Mistaking feelings about it for who that person is
  • Have to say what dont know, just perception
  • They want to be entertained
  • TV entertainment show in Sweden
  • Deploy attention to get to their field from an object
  • His younger brother going insane
  • North German TV, he was going through divorce
  • Paying attention, intended direction of intentionality
  • Attempt to draw people in
  • Women perceive me as rescuer
  • Some males want to dominate, dont get swept up
  • Interviewing surgeons
  • Why am I always getting into this mess
  • They rang your bell, top down programming, they are looking for something
  • I see what you are looking for, and it never works

Dr Peter Nelson interview Part 5 • People dont like ambiguity

  • Personality disorders, hard to get them to question it
  • People dont want to change
  • See the drive and what its trying to create
  • Overweight woman cure
  • Worlding and worldview
  • People dont like ambiguity, attached to their ideas
  • A theory of the real, obstacle to noticing something else
  • Jungian rigid worldview, constantly reality testing worldview
  • Willingness to deal with fear, ruthlessness to examine own story
  • Skeptics would be skeptical about themslelves
  • William James empirical thinker

Dr Peter Nelson interview Part 6 • The first black psychoanalyst and the unconscious

  • Own existential psychoanalysis
  • Some is inferential
  • What to do more than solving problems in therapy
  • First black psychoanalyst
  • What does the unconscious mean
  • You’ve been talking to my sister…
  • I am going to say what I perceive
  • I dont want to do therapy - help them solve a problem
  • Applying to therapy - building a picture, but missing information streams
  • Top down bottomup
  • Limitations of therapy
  • Coach, get someone functioning to the best of their attention, to my level
  • Psychological healing is a slow progress
  • EMDR about shifting attention
  • I like to perceive, and map out my perceptions
  • The problems with closure
  • Coming to rest, not finishing, about self management
  • Thats my bitch about closure