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Jeffrey Mishlove: Remote Viewing & Testing the Paranormal
September 7, 2023
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What does it mean to be human? Why are we here at all in the first place? Why is there a universe? You will never answer those questions from within a logical scientific framework. The answers come to us from mythology. The right brain works in images where we get messages in our dreams.
Jeffrey Mishlove's journey began in 1968, sparked by a powerful dream. Despite academic taboos, he earned a doctorate in parapsychology. So did Susan Blackmore, by the way. Jeffrey's theories, like Arthur Young's reflexive universe theory, proposed as a hierarchical structure of evolution, suggesting untapped human growth. Now, how does Jeffrey reconcile that with evolutionary understanding? We explore that. In studying consciousness, he adopts some active observer approach, attempting to integrate scientific objectivity,
with an experiential understanding. So it's not science per se, and it's not meditative per se. One discussion involves a psychic predicting UFO sightings, including a widely witnessed event. How can such claims be objectively verified? Again, we explore that. On the personal development side, Jeffrey emphasizes the importance of what he calls a strong ego prior to spiritual growth, warning against prematurely sacrificing ego, which can lead to being stuck in a state of quote unquote false enlightenment.
This podcast had several editing challenges on both the audio and the video front, particularly with mine as we just didn't have it. I don't know if you've seen the podcast of myself being interviewed by Ryan Graves on the merged podcast, but what he did was he resurrected with AI the episode, at least with the audio side. We had to cobble something together in a similar manner and it'd be a shame to not release it. What you're witnessing is akin to a classified episode that's finally being uploaded.
My name is Kurt Jaimungal and this podcast is called Theories of Everything where we explore theories of everything from a physics perspective primarily, though I'm dipping my toes more and more, so to speak, into consciousness studies and attempting to decipher the hard problem of consciousness as well as what role does consciousness have on either engendering or supervening on the laws of physics. Enjoy this hitherto unreleased podcast with Jeffrey Mishlove, the creator of New Thinking Allowed. Link in the description to that.
All right, Jeffrey Mishlove, welcome to the Theories of Everything podcast. Could you kindly unwind your journey into the realm of parapsychology? As I've been reflecting on it, I realized that probably my first introduction to this world of the paranormal and the esoteric began in 1968, even a few years before I had some
powerful dreams that really changed my life. But the stage was set in 1968 when I was a graduate student attending summer school at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. And I remember I was sitting in the cafeteria one afternoon and a man walked up to me, handed me a flyer, and I looked at the flyer. It said Spiritual Science.
a lecture on spiritual science, and at that moment I felt like a current of electricity running up and down my spine. I'd never seen those two words juxtaposed like that, spiritual science. And it turned out the lecture was about the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner,
and the movement he had founded called Anthroposophy. So I attended the lecture, I got to meet people in the Anthroposophy community, and as a result of that, I went back for my senior year in Madison at the University of Wisconsin and I elected to
write a senior thesis on the psychology of religious mysticism. And really I went into it as a skeptic. I thought there must be some psychopathologies associated with people who think that they're having mystical experiences. Freud had already
described this as kind of a return to an infantile state of consciousness and people who thought they saw ghosts. So I write it up that way. But the more I researched it, the more I came to realize that mystics were some of the most important people in our culture. And in fact, I got in touch with the work of Abraham Maslow, a psychologist who wrote the book
covered a psychology of being in which he had interviewed some of the most important people in our culture in his era, people like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and he found that they all report what are called peak experiences that were central to their lives. And also he added these peak experiences are indistinguishable from mystical experiences. So
With that understanding, I could no longer feel comfortable debunking the paranormal and the esoteric. But then I went on to graduate school in criminology at Berkeley. And it was some four years later in 1972 that my great uncle Harry
visited me. That's the best way I can describe it. He visited me in a dream, literally at the moment of his death. And that dream was so powerful that I woke up from the dream and I was just crying tears of joy and singing a very sacred song from my religious background and
I wrote a poem. I said, How's old Harry? I had a dream about him. My mother called me as soon as she got my letter. She said, how did you know Uncle Harry just died? That really shook me up and made me realize something's going on here that I don't understand. And I asked for an object of Uncle Harry, something he had owned so I could think of him and remember him. I was sent
a little book, and I was told this was Uncle Harry's favorite book. It was a book written in Yiddish, a very obscure language that European Jews spoke. It's kind of written in the Hebrew script, but the language is more like German. And I had to get it translated. I realized after having it translated for me that it was
called the Tales of the Baal Shem Tov, who is the founder of the Jewish Hasidic movement in the 18th century. It was a very powerful mystical movement within Judaism. And it was then that I came to realize that my great uncle Harry had been a mystic. I'd always known that he was a very religious man, a pious person, an Orthodox
Jew, but now I was introduced to the mystical side of Judaism. And as a result of that contact, I felt that I had to change my trajectory, my career trajectory. I had to move away from criminology. At the time I was doing volunteer work at San Quentin prison, working with
murderers and rapists and the psychiatric unit doing group therapy with them. And I made a decision as a result of the dream with Uncle Harry that I was going to switch. Somehow I would find a way to see the positive side of human deviance rather than the negative, that I would be studying
intuition, creativity, mysticism, psychic phenomena, the esoteric and occult. And I didn't, of course, have any idea as to how this could be done. There weren't any programs of this sort at the University of California, which is a large major university. So I anguished about this for months, trying to figure out what am I going to do? And one day,
in, I recall correctly, it was probably November, probably about six months after the Uncle Harry dream, when I had another dream. And not only did I have another dream, but I knew in advance that I was going to have a dream that evening. I just, it was a knowing, an intuition. And I knew that the answer to all my searching was going to come to me in a dream that evening.
So I was ready for it, you might say, after months of anguish. And I did have a dream. I woke up, I was exhilarated. I knew I had found the answer in the dream, but I didn't know what it meant. In the dream, I was visiting friends in Berkeley, people I knew well, knocked on the door of their apartment and married student housing. No answer.
And in the dream, I found a key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room where I found, right in the middle of the living room floor, a magazine in the dream called I, E-Y-E. And I'm paging through the magazine. And then I woke up with this feeling like that's it. I have the answer. But of course, I had no clue. So I acted out the dream.
I put on my tennis shoes, ran five miles across town, came to this apartment, knocked on the door as I had dreamt, no answer. And in fact, I knew that they kept the key under the doormat. So I picked up the key, entered the apartment, walked into the living room and there, smack dab in the middle of the living room floor, just as I had dreamt.
This is an example, I suppose, of a dream distortion. It wasn't called the eye. It was called Focus. And it was the magazine of listener-sponsored radio and television in the San Francisco Bay area, KQED. And I'm paging through the magazine when it dawned on me for the first time in my life.
that I could pursue my interests if I got involved in the nonprofit, non-commercial segment of the media. So, because I lived in Berkeley, I went over to the Pacifica radio station there, which is also nonprofit, KPFA, and said, I'd like to volunteer. And at that point, I had already earned my
my master's degree in criminology, but they said, here, sit down at this desk. And when you hear the doorbell ring, push this button so people can get in the front door. And I gladly did that. At the same time, I learned how to produce a radio program. I produced a program called, you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic. Cause I knew a lot of psychic friends in Berkeley and I
interviewed them. The program director liked it so much, he said, we have a regular slot for you every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. We want you to host a program called The Mind's Year. So within a few weeks of this dream, I found myself sitting
across a table from world-class experts in all the areas that interested me the most. People on book tours passing through San Francisco came by that radio station with a very powerful signal and I would be interviewing them with 10,000 people listening in. So that gave me the confidence to go back to the university
where I was still a graduate student in criminology and switch over taking advantage of a very obscure program they had, the individual interdoctoral major program where if you want to do a dissertation, if you're already a graduate student in good standing, which I was,
And you want to work in a field where no department will sponsor you, but you can find three faculty members from different departments who will each sponsor you. You can create your own unique degree program. So that would have been 1973 by then I entered that program and stayed in it until I graduated with a doctoral degree in parapsychology in
Today, 43 years later, I'm not aware of any other example of an accredited university issuing a doctoral diploma that says parapsychology on it. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I always have to point out there are truly hundreds of people who have done dissertations, doctoral level dissertations on parapsychological topics. They've just done it within
departments that were willing to sponsor them, typically their degrees were in psychology or philosophy or education, something like that. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?
Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Rankings based on root metrics, root score report dated 1H2025. Your results may vary. Must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. Bill must be in the same name as the person who gave you the deal. Additional terms apply. Why did you choose an academic approach to studying the paranormal and how can one apply the scientific method in this field? I could have
pursued it as a hobby, which I suppose I had up until that point. But I was very serious. I wanted to get to what had actually happened when I had this powerful dream of my great uncle visiting me. It's the most powerful dream I've ever had in my life, and I'm 76 years old. So
You know, if you have one dream like that in your lifetime, it can change you dramatically. And it was so profound. I felt that it was worth devoting the rest of my life to studying it. And I guess you would have to say I'm an intellectual person. I've always enjoyed knowledge.
and I've always felt very comfortable in a university environment even though universities in general have not welcomed studies in this field. I mean that's why 43 years later no other degrees in parapsychology have ever been awarded. There is a taboo against it within academia and to be honest I had to fight very hard the closer I got to
Completing my doctoral program at Berkeley, the more obstacles were thrown at me and I had to, you know, overcome each and every obstacle. And then even after I received my degree, the organized groups of people who call themselves skeptics, but are really scoffers in my view, tried to pressure the university to revoke the degree, nearly succeeded. One dean put it to me very
universities do not offer degrees in parapsychology, period. So they tried to undo it and I had to fight a legal battle which I prevailed in and then another legal battle because I had been libeled after they
failed to get the degree revoked. An article appeared in Psychology Today magazine claiming that maybe the degree hadn't really been awarded at all, but if it had been awarded, it certainly wasn't deserved. And I fought a libel battle at that point, six years of legal wrangling, which ended favorably.
for me. So my passion has been the intellect. My approach has been intellectual. I think that you can approach the paranormal in many different ways. Some people are more heart-centered, I suppose you could say. And I think that's all very important. But for me, understanding what's going on intellectually has been at the heart of my quest.
Of course, being on non-commercial radio where I started and now YouTube where I have a channel and before that on national television, public television around the country, it's always been my desire to share what I've learned intellectually with the public at large.
Whose insights have been particular in shaping your understanding of parapsychology? That's a very difficult question to answer. Who is the most impactful guest? Because when I do the interviews, it's very much about being in the here and now, being fully focused and present with whomever I'm with.
Each time I'm with somebody, they are the most important person. But if I look back, I would say that starting in the very early work that I did, there were people who became very important mentors for me, who were also guests on the early programs that I did. One such person was Arthur M. Young.
a really crucial person in my development. He's the founder of what was then called the Institute for the Study of Consciousness. He was a cosmologist, the author of many books, the reflexive universe, the geometry of meaning, the Bell Notes. He was also, when I say the Bell Notes, that was about his work with Bell aircraft because Arthur Young was the inventor
of the Bell helicopter, the very first commercially licensed helicopter. After he invented the helicopter, he felt that he had earned the right to delve into philosophy. He felt that in his era, all of philosophy had failed to really anticipate and grapple with
the rise of science and technology in the 20th century and that if you really wanted to be a philosopher worth your salt, you first had to demonstrate that you could master a difficult technological problem. And so he set out and when he graduated from Princeton in 1926, as I recall, he set out to
find a problem that he could solve. He went to the Patent Office in Washington D.C. and he discovered there had been 200 attempts to build or to design an aircraft that could hover in midair. And he realized it hadn't been accomplished yet. He would work to try and accomplish it. So between 1926 and the first
Bell aircraft model 47 in 1947. He worked for nearly 20 years on the helicopter problem only to prove that he would then be worthy to be a philosopher. And at that point he got into cosmology. He was deeply interested in psychic phenomenon and astrology. He had the means to travel the world and examine
every interesting example in his era of psychic functioning and created a journal, the Journal for the Study of Consciousness, and opened up this institute in Berkeley where he invited me and my good friend Saul Paul Sirag to move in and become his direct students. So at the same time that I entered my parapsychology program,
I had this remarkable gentleman as a mentor, a person of vast knowledge and who had developed what you are promoting, a theory of everything. Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe is a theory that encompasses all of the sciences and mythology and our deep knowledge of esoteric functioning and
Paranormality and addresses what you could call first principles in philosophy, which are the most difficult of all to address. So he was a very wonderful man and a great influence on me. Another very important early influence person who I interviewed was Gene Houston, the psychologist who had founded a mystery school.
something that was a modern version of the ancient teachings of the illucinian mysteries. And again, this was an effort to educate people about the world's great spiritual traditions. And Jean had an exquisite sense of humor. Her father was a professional humorist who
wrote for people like Sid Caesar and many of the great comics in the early years of television. So Jean had a fabulous ability to invoke a theatrical presence. She actually based a lot of her work on the theatrical techniques of Stanislavski, the idea of
an actor embodying the character that they become in the theater. And that was her approach into the paranormal. And it was incredibly profound and exhilarating at the same time. I give you one example. When I attended Jean Houston's Mystery School on one occasion, she was giving a lecture on the Hebrew Kabbalah.
based on the writings of the early 20th century Kabbalist, Carlos Suarez, who had written a book called The Cipher of Genesis. And she was explaining to the group, using Kabbalistic principles, how it was that God created the world. In Hebrew,
The sentence is, which translated means, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Kabbalistic idea is if you go through the Hebrew words letter by letter and understand the meaning of each letter, because each letter is also a word and has a meaning, that you will understand
process by which the universe was created. And as she was lecturing, I felt like I got it. I understood at a deeper level this impulse of God to create a universe. And I thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
Actually, it struck me as nothing could be more hilarious than God creating the universe. And I was literally rolling on the floor laughing and tears are coming down my eyes. And Jean Houston noticed this and she came up to me and winked and said, oh, you're having an epiphany. She understood that she had an enormous
gift and still does, she's a great teacher still alive working today, an enormous gift to engender moments of spiritual awakening in the people with whom she works. She understood it, I think, as a psychological process, that there were psychological techniques available to all of us to awaken a deeper sense. She used to say, for example,
that the human organism is incredibly exquisite. It's like a Stradivarius violin. But most people only learn to play it as if it were a plastic fiddle. But you could learn. You could learn to work with your organism to achieve something more like a concert violin. And so that had just an enormous impact
What's the Reflexive Model of the Universe? Arthur Young's model of the reflexive universe starts with the idea of spirit descending into matter and it goes through four stages as it descends into matter.
You could say it starts out at the level of the photon, which in his view was pure spirit, pure light. And God said, let there be light in the beginning, so to speak. And then from the photon, we get particles, typically positrons, electrons and protons. So you have positive and negative charge that comes next. And he saw that as being
equivalent to the development of emotion attraction and repulsion that emotions come and then you get after you have particles like that you get atoms atoms for him represented form form intellect so emotion comes before intellect and then intellect evolves with the very first atoms
And of course from atoms we get molecules and molecules, the most important molecules would be DNA and RNA, the molecules of life itself. Now that's a turning point because at that point with the development of DNA, RNA molecules, consciousness is already embedded in matter.
But then matter itself evolves. You get the single-celled organisms, you get plants, you get animals, you get the human kingdom. So there's a turning point, the descent of spirit into matter, and then the ascent of spirit from matter back to spirit. And it's the evolution then of the human being towards what you might think of as a spiritually evolved being.
his system is very complex and it incorporates you can think of it as the periodic table of the elements in chemistry but applied to everything the periodic table of everything and in that periodic table he would say the modern human being stands in relationship to who we become our potential as a fully realized human would be equivalent
And you can see it all laid out in these charts of his, to where a clam stands in relationship to the animal kingdom. In other words, if a human being, as an animal, if we represent the epitome of what an animal can become, then we are like clams as far as the possibilities for being human, that there's so much growth
How should we conceptualize consciousness within this model? Arthur Young had a view that would be consistent with the idea that he called the great chain of being, which does represent a hierarchy that you have
animals being more evolved than plants, for example, because they have the quality of mobility that plants don't have, and humans more evolved than animals, and some humans more evolved than other humans. So it was very hierarchical in that sense, and I will say that I had another mentor
Dean Brown. I had the great pleasure of introducing them at one time, Arthur Young and Dean Brown. Dean was a physicist. He had worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and he also became a good friend and a mentor, a great student of the world's religious traditions. He published a book of his translations of the Upanishads, for example,
And he differed with Arthur Young on this idea of hierarchy. He said that there's no reason to think animals are more evolved than plants. It could be the other way around. After all, the plants get the animals to do their work for them, such as distributing their seeds and so on. It might be that plants are a higher life form.
than animals, which gave me an appreciation for the fact that you can often see things for every supposed truth that you might come upon. There could be an equal and opposite truth looking in the other direction. It's a particularly valuable
lesson, I think, when it comes to the world of politics, where people get very, very locked into particular ways of looking at the world. So I've often found for myself, at least, it's very useful to have a flexible mind, a way of seeing things from both perspectives. I sometimes tell myself, you want to be the lawn and the lawnmower.
at the same time. It's good to understand both the ups and the downs of life. What is archetypal synchronistic resonance? It was, I believe in 2007 that I published an article co-authored with Brendan Engen. It was published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and called archetypal synchronistic resonance.
This story begins many, many years before that. I guess I would take it back to my early years in television, in the original Thinking Allowed public television series. I interviewed Marty Rossman, a medical doctor in Mill Valley, California, who was a specialist in hypnosis.
He was going to introduce me to the idea of getting in touch with your inner healing advisor. So we recorded this. The whole thing is on video where Marty Rossman is hypnotizing me and he's saying, and now your inner healing advisor will appear. And in my mind, I saw a man approaching me wearing a toga and I thought to myself,
I'd like to improve my public speaking abilities. So I'd like this inner healing advisor to be Demosthenes, the great Greek orator who could help me with my speaking abilities. And as this individual approached me in my mind, and I'm expecting now to have a conversation with Demosthenes, he said to me, I'm not Demosthenes.
I said, well, who are you? He said, I'm Seneca. I didn't know much about Seneca. It's a name you hear, you know, some ancient person, a poet, a playwright, a philosopher. I knew very little about Seneca, but I asked him in this hypnotic experience, well, now that you're here and you're Seneca, you're my healing advisor, what would you like me to do? And he said,
study my life, which was, that was odd. I woke up, I came out of the trance. It's all on video. I had this silly grin on my face because it felt so real. And I explained what had happened. And I began studying the life of this ancient Roman statesman, philosopher, playwright. And I
realized after studying two things. First of all, he was one of the most interesting people I'd ever encountered in history. He literally ran the Roman Empire for five years. He was the tutor to Nero when Nero was still a youngster. And as Nero's tutor, tutor to the emperor, he ran the empire. And it was known as the Silver Age of Rome, one of the best periods in Roman history.
But he also wrote plays and he wrote a great deal of philosophy. He was one of the leading stoic philosophers. And at the end of his life, he got implicated as being part of a conspiracy to murder Nero. Now, he wasn't really part of the conspiracy, but apparently the conspirators wanted to install him as the emperor once they
did away with Nero because he had such a reputation and Nero learned about all of this and quashed the conspiracy and sent a centurion to order Seneca to take his life. Seneca is at a dinner party at the time and the centurion comes in with orders from the emperor, you have to take your life and
Seneca looks at him and says, can I at least make out my last will and testament? The centurion says, no, no time for that. You have to take your own life and do it now. So Seneca turned to his guests at the dinner party and he said, I bequeath to you my life. Study my life. Those were his last words. And I had such a
shot of realization when it occurred to me that his very last words were the ones that I heard him speak in this hypnotic experience, so he became a very important influence in my life. Well, years later, Brendan Engen, who I didn't know, who became the co-author with me of this paper, said he had had a psychic reading from a channeler named Kevin Ryerson,
Kevin happened to have been my friend and knew all about the Seneca story. And he said, Kevin told him that I had been Seneca in a past lifetime and that he had been Seneca's writing partner, I think, named Lucretius. Seneca wrote many letters to Lucretius that were letters of advice and have been published and
He said to me, well, maybe we knew each other in a past life. And I wrote back and said, no, I don't think so. I don't believe I was Seneca. Seneca is a hero to me. But I did think that it could be an example of synchronicity, that there's some synchronistic connection. And the reason I say that in particular is because the day I got the email from Brendan Engen, I was traveling
I was actually going to Spain at the time to visit Córdova in Spain, which is the city where Seneca was born, where there's a big statue of Seneca. And I thought that's synchronistic, that he approached me at the very moment I'm traveling to the birthplace of Seneca. So we interacted
for quite a while, and it turned out many different synchronicities began happening between myself and Brendan that seemed to support this idea of somehow a synchronistic connection with a historical person. It didn't mean that we were those people in our past lives, but that there was a resonance that expressed itself through synchronicities
On one occasion, for example, Brendan Engen went to visit a bookstore and a book literally fell off the bookshelf and hit him on the head. And he picked it up and he saw on the, it was a book called The Looking Glass God. But when he opened the book up, he saw my name in it. It had been my book. I had sold it apparently to this bookstore and it fell on his head. And so he and I
agreed at that point, we would co-author a paper that this was in effect a new theory of the paranormal. It was particularly relevant for people who felt they had a past life connection with important historical figures, that it might be another way of looking at at least some cases of reincarnation. And because I still don't think
I was Seneca in a past life, although I will say this because I look to see what would confirm that would be if I actually had memories of being Seneca. And I've searched my memory for that and tried to see, do I have any memories of having been in ancient Rome like that? And only one brief moment lasted less than one second.
I felt that I was in Nero's palace with Seneca. So that's the most meager possibility of a past life, although it felt very real for one second. But the idea of synchronistic resonance is that we do have connections with other people that express themselves synchronistically. Jane Houston
When I described what had happened to her, to me, with Seneca, she said she had a similar connection with the ancient Greek philosopher Proclus. When she was even a child, she'd hear in her head a little voice that would say, Hocus Pocus, where is Proclus? And Proclus, who was a great neoplatonic philosopher
The last of the great neoplatonic philosophers has become an important psychic influence in her life in the same way. And occasionally I run into other people who feel deeply touched by a historical figure where there are many different synchronistic events that seem to reinforce the connection. So that's what we call archetypal synchronistic resonance.
Could you delve into your personal encounters with psychic phenomenon and what convinced you about the possibility of reincarnation? Well, as a matter of fact, I did an interview back in the days I was doing radio interviews for Wisdom Radio. I was approached by a medical doctor in San Francisco named Walter Semkew, and he had just published a book about astrology, a very clever book, and I'd interviewed him about astrology and
He noticed when he was visiting me that I happened to, and I still own the URL very early in the days of the internet, I claimed the URL for WilliamJames.com. William James being the founder of American psychology, a great pioneer in the field of parapsychology, or as it was known in his day, psychical research. And William James
I really respected him, which is why I acquired that website. And Walter Semke, when he learned of it, said, well, maybe you were William James in a past lifetime. And I thought about it and I said, I don't think so. Once again, like Seneca, he's my hero. I wouldn't have been him. I wish I could have been, but if I had been William James in a past lifetime,
imagined I'd be much more accomplished in this lifetime. He said to me, well, here's what he was learning. He hadn't yet published his book, Return of the Revolutionaries, which was research. He was engaged at the time. He felt he could identify
the past lives of different people. And in his book, Return of the Revolutionaries, he felt he could identify people alive today who had been in a past lifetime, some of the founding fathers of the American nation. And so he believed I might have been William James. And he said the way you could determine that, in his opinion,
was to look at the people who are the close people today in your life, the closest ones, and see if they match up with people who were known to be close to the past life person, to William James. He said, if you've got a number of people who are close to you, who are similar in personality traits and in physical features to people who were known to be close to William James, that would be
a way of identifying it because, in his view, people reincarnate in cohorts. If you're part of a group of people who were very important and influential, that that cohort would reincarnate together lifetime after lifetime. That's what he was observing, he thought, with the founders of the American Republic.
I did that. I picked a list of about 10 people I knew very well, and I did feel that you could kind of match them up. This is very imprecise. This is not scientific. It's more artistic and intuitive, but I came up with 10 people who seemed to match up, people who were my mentors and my family members and good friends who seemed to be
that you could equate each one of them with somebody who was known to have been close to William James. So I wouldn't regard that as conclusive by any means, but I found it to be interesting. I've not accepted that I was William James in a past lifetime. Once again, because I don't have any of those memories. And I did submit to past life regression.
One of the people I had interviewed, Charles Tremont, a medical doctor, was doing hypnotic past life regressions. He tried to take me back over and over to a past life as William James. A few little bits of potentially interesting information that I've never been able to verify came out, such as the idea that he was called Billion.
as a child, instead of William. But the interesting thing, I suppose, was on every session, at some point, I would have to come out of hypnosis because I was getting a stomach ache, of all things. I'm not prone to that. But William James was. And, of course, I knew that about William James. I read his history.
In spite of all of these clues, I never accepted, and I still don't accept, that I was William James in a past life. But I did give Walter permission in his book, Return of the Revolutionaries, to write up his hypothesis that I was, as long as he pointed out that I personally don't accept it, which he did. And he added that, of course, William James wouldn't have accepted it either.
He took my non-acceptance as further evidence that I was William James in a past lifetime. All I can say is I think it's another example of some kind of synchronistic resonance that in some ways I do feel like I'm following in the footsteps of William James, but it's very important
to distinguish between hardcore scientific evidence and things that you arrive at intuitively that are maybe important, very meaningful to you, but are not established as facts. And one way to look at it scientifically would be let's take the case of Madame Curie and her husband Pierre and Marie Curie.
They were great scientists, Nobel laureates, who discovered radium and really initiated the whole line of research into radioactivity, which is crucial to our modern understanding of science. At the same time, both of the curies were engaged in psychical research. They attended seances. They were involved in mediumship.
They studied the great medium of the early 20th century, Eusapia Palladino, and Pierre Curie, for his part, was convinced. He said, I saw the table levitate and slowly float around the room during one of these sciences. It was very meaningful to him. But Marie Curie put it this way. She said, until we can reproduce it in the laboratory, it is not science.
In your series In Presence, which I'll link in the description, you mentioned fragmented reincarnation. So what is that? Please expand.
Let's ask ourselves the question, what happens when we die? The Egyptian view is very interesting. For thousands of years, the Egyptian culture was very stable, and the central focus of that culture was the afterlife. One of the great documents that has come out of that culture is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which goes into very great
lengths to describe the journey of the soul after death. And of course the enormous economic activity in ancient Egypt had to do with embalming and building pyramids and so on. The Greeks thought the Egyptians were far too focused on the afterlife and death. But one of their ideas of the Egyptians is that
The soul is not a single entity. The Egyptians had ten different words for different aspects of the soul, and the idea is that they might have different destinies. It's possible
at least to consider that when you die, some part of you might be reincarnated as one person and another part of you might break away and be reincarnated as part of a different person. You can look at biological organisms in which this sort of thing happens, colonies of cells, for example, that divide up. A cell can divide up into many other cells.
And reincarnation might work that way. I can't say it's conclusive, but it's certainly worth speculating on. We have very good scientific evidence at this point. I regard it as scientific, even though you can't yet reproduce it in the laboratory, but clear empirical observations. Let me put it that way. We're not at the point of reproducing
reincarnation in the laboratory, but we have many good qualified observations that young children, for example, report memories of past lives. So it is good reason to think that some people at least reincarnate in the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies. They have a database of some 2700 individuals who were
young children, and almost as soon as they can begin to talk, they describe their past lives. So we might say we've got evidence of the 27, I think it's 1700, what are regarded as solved cases, which means that the information provided by these young children was sufficient for researchers or family members to actually locate
and identify the person who the child is talking about that they say they were in a past lifetime. So you might say we got empirical evidence that 1700 individuals have reincarnated. It doesn't mean everybody will reincarnate or that here's the thing, part of you might reincarnate and another part of you might move a higher brain in the afterlife, which according to
the accounts of, we get through mediumship and other channeling and other resources, people who have been dead sometimes for decades come back and start describing what it's like, the different stages they go through. So to my way of thinking, it's entirely possible that an individual, a great soul like a William James might
be divided up and might express itself in multiple people. And in fact, there are accounts after William James died, there are numerous accounts coming from mediums and channelers of people who feel they're in touch with William James. So if you take them all seriously, and I'm not sure that we should,
is I haven't studied them in detail to get a sense of their authenticity. I think it's a possibility that it works that way. Other people would disagree with me. They would say that the idea of the self, a unitary self that goes from past life to past life, that's the way it works. And all I can say is at this point, we don't have enough data to know.
what it's like. I expect when I look at the many, many different accounts of the afterlife, I expect that there are more possibilities than we can even imagine. From your cases, have you identified any uniform processes that occur after death? Yeah, there are many patterns that can be observed
from the accounts that we have. I mean, 1700 solved cases is actually a fairly large number. I can tell you, for example, that most of those cases involve males. And most of those cases involve a violent death of the previous person, which I think is more likely
who occur if you were a male in a previous life. You're more likely to have had a violent death than if you were a female. And also it does seem as if the sex is the same in 90% of the past lives and about 10% people apparently change sex, which has led some researchers to speculate that cases of
homosexuality, cases of trans, like what we call today trans, people who feel that they are born in a body which doesn't represent how they feel in terms of their gender, but those cases may be people who recently transitioned from one gender to another. So there's some interesting
theorizing along those lines. Those are some of the main things we know, but we can also say that the personalities do seem to be similar from lifetime to lifetime. The traditional religious idea of karma that if you're a bad person in one lifetime, you're going to be punished for it in the next lifetime.
That doesn't seem to be supported by the empirical evidence that we have right now, but it does seem to be the case that the tendencies that you had in a previous lifetime, both your desires, your interests, your personality, your occupational tendencies, those seem to carry forth. It's what the Hindus would call samskaras,
Can you please elaborate on the differences in reincarnation studies between Eastern and Western cultures? I remember a discussion about those in Southeast Asia where the belief in reincarnation is widespread.
That is, they tend to come back quicker. Is that correct? It is correct that the cases of reincarnation that come from Asia and the bulk of cases do come from Asia in countries where reincarnation is accepted. The interim period between lives is shorter on average. It could be on average maybe just a matter of months between the death
of one individual and the birth of the next life. And in the Occident and Western cultures, it could be years. So there is a real difference, but there's a limited number of cases. And one of the most famous cases in the Western literature is the James Leininger case where
He remembered, had a vivid memory of having died in World War II and then was reborn decades later. So, you know, because there's a small number of cases and one or two cases like that with decades in between, it really makes the average of the Western cases much longer. I don't know that we have enough data
yet to draw a firm conclusion about it, but from the data we do have, it certainly appears as if there's a distinction between the oriental and the accidental cases. How does your belief about what may happen after death relate to what actually happens? I know you surmise that we can affect what occurs after death via our beliefs. How do we know if any of this is true?
Yes, Professor Jeffrey Kreipel, a wonderful philosopher and chair of the religious studies department at Rice University, has made this point exactly that the afterlife is dependent upon how we think about it and how our cultures seem to think about it. The way I view it is that there's a very thin boundary between our physical existence and the afterlife.
You might say the way I did some very interesting interviews with Stephanie Stevens, a Jungian psychologist who explained from the Jungian point of view, the afterlife is part of the collective unconscious that we experience, that
We're so close to it. For example, my dream of Uncle Harry, many, many people report visitations from deceased friends and relatives in their dreams. The boundary is that thin. And she notes Jung himself, when he describes a dream, he'll often say, this deceased person visited me in a dream, very specifically, rather than saying I had a dream about such and such.
a person. It wasn't just a dream image. Jung seemed to be very clear that he could distinguish between visitations from the deceased versus a dream of the deceased. So that seems to be the boundary between everyday consciousness and the afterlife.
very very thin boundary and Carl Jung in particular developed the technique of active imagination as a way to explore the boundary at some point as you're imagining what it might be like you move from the realm of imagination into what the philosopher Henri Corbin called the realm of the imaginal. The imaginal realm is very subtle
It's not physical, but it is very real. It would be like when Seneca appeared to me in my hypnotic experience and said, study my life. I only learned from studying his life that there was something very real. Those were his last words. So
Anri Korban, for example, became a Sufi, part of Islamic mysticism, and he was very interested in studying the Sufi philosophy of illumination as developed by the 12th century mystic Sur of Ardi.
And he felt that he had entered into an imaginary world in which superiority came to him, taught him directly the teachings of illumination. So that would be an example where imagination leads to something that is more real than mere fantasy. Have you formed an idea of what you call a universal cosmological structure? What might that look like?
You know, it's very subtle, it's shifting, it doesn't stay the same from moment to moment. But I think it's fair to say if I were to try and map it out schematically, we have the physical world. We know, or we believe actually, that the physical world is real. I think most people would agree to that, that what we experience through our senses is real.
At least most of the time, it's physical, like you can knock on wood and have a sense of its hardness and physicality. And then we have this realm of pure imagination, you know, Walt Disney and pirates and fairies and cartoons and fantasy. There's no doubt.
whatsoever, that human beings can have a very active fantasy life. And what I'm suggesting is that there's a third realm. It's somewhere in between fantasy and physicality. It's as real ontologically speaking. Ontologically means the philosophy of what is real. Ontologically real, but it's not physical. Of course, there are many things
like that, that are ontologically real and not physical. Plato described that as the realm of forms, for example, the perfect circle. It will never be physical, but it's a real mathematical construct. Mathematicians by and large are Platonists,
in this sense. But you can build on that. You can say in addition to physical forms in the Platonic realm there are archetypes, there are entities, there may be ancestors, there may be spirits that are also very real autonomous non-physical entities that exist. This is what
Basically the religion of spiritualism is based on the idea that the spirits of the dead or maybe even archetypal entities or deities are very real. They are not just products of our imagination. And of course this will always be very controversial because as Marie Curie said, until you can reproduce it in the laboratory it's not scientific. But from a philosophical
point of view. I think it has a lot of merit. Have you ever met Robert Monroe and recognized by the way for his infamous out-of-body experiences? I did have the opportunity to interview Robert Monroe back in my days at KPFA radio. He's one of the first people as a matter of fact to came across and visited me in the studio there and
You got to say his work and out-of-body experiences has to some extent been replicated in the laboratory. Bob Monroe worked with Charlie Tartt, who was one of my dissertation advisors at Berkeley. And they set up experiments in which Monroe would be asked to leave his body in a room where there was a shelf near the ceiling.
that had been placed. So an object that was on the shelf couldn't be viewed from where Monroe was lying down on a bed. But if he could leave his body, float up to the ceiling and look above the shelf, he could see what was on the shelf and he was asked to report on it. And he was able to successfully report on it. Other more sophisticated studies on out-of-body experiences were conducted
by Carlos Osis at the American Society for Psychical Research back in the 1970s. He worked with an out-of-body experiencer named Alex Tanis, and they developed a device which was very interesting. It projected images optically
But in order to know what those images were, you had to be positioned in a certain location near the device, otherwise you couldn't see it. And once again, Alec Tanis was able to describe the target. Now, does that mean they actually left their body, that they traveled in what esoteric people would call the astral body or the etheric body to a location
excuse me, to a location in physical space or were they simply using remote viewing or clairvoyance? That's kind of the conundrum because we have very good laboratory evidence that clairvoyance exists, remote viewing exists. A person sitting calmly in a chair can access information
anywhere in time and space, and they don't need to leave their body to do it. So that creates a big complication, not only for out-of-body research, but for all the research involving the afterlife and survival after death. Could it be the case that
People reporting contact with spirits and information like a spirit comes through a medium and they describe all kinds of details about their life when they were alive that were unknown to anybody in the room at the time and only through extensive research
could be validated. There are a lot of examples of this, but does that mean that it was really that person, their spirit coming through the afterlife, or was it simply a case of the medium using their clairvoyance to access what you could call the Akashic records or what William James called the cosmic reservoir of all knowledge and come up with that information?
Many people in parapsychology today argue that that's the way it works, that we know living people have psychic abilities and because of that it's very hard to prove scientifically that such a thing as post-mortem consciousness is real. Now in my case I don't have any question about it and the reason is because
My experience, my dream visitation with my uncle Harry was so powerful, so profound, so far removed from normal consciousness that I was just crying tears of joy that for me there's no doubt. But if you haven't had such an experience, it would be very natural to doubt.
Do Eastern traditions or religions offer something different about understanding post-death? One of the reasons that I produce so many videos on the New Thinking Allowed channel, almost a new video every day, is that I feel we are the inheritors of the esoteric cultures that were developed
all over the world. It's no longer the case that just because, for example, I was born into a Jewish family that I would only be pursuing the Jewish traditions of mists in the afterlife and so on. We are the inheritors of all traditions, whether it's Zoroastrian or Hindu or Shamanic or Christian or Jewish or
Islamic. I believe that we are all global citizens, and my goal is to share with the audience that I have on the New Thinking Allowed channel all of these cultures, because I feel that if you want to have a
of the various nuances and windows into this extraordinarily vast world of the human psyche. You need to understand them all. And, of course, that's a never-ending process. But I've gained enormously from practicing yoga, from studying meditation, from being aware of the teachings of Zoroaster or
understanding the use plant medicines, understanding, of course, many different modern scientific approaches, biofeedback, or, as Robert Monroe developed, the hemisync notion of the binaural beat effect and how that affects consciousness. It's incumbent upon anyone who is a serious, I would call them psychonaut, an explorer of the inner depths to have
a certain level of familiarity with the great world traditions involving consciousness. Are the implications of parapsychological tests like the afterlife or higher conscious abilities irreconcilable with the scientific worldview? And if not, can you even claim to scientifically study them then? How do you bridge these? Well, imagine you're going to see a movie. When you enter into the theater,
You buy your ticket and you walk into the theater, you sit down, you know that you're about to watch a work of fiction. But what you do at that point is what scholars call a willing suspension of disbelief. While you're in the movie, you let go of that awareness that this is a work of fiction. You accept it as real. You enter into the story and
People, well, when I was a student in criminology, which is a branch of sociology, there is a form of research there called participant observer research. If you want to understand, you know, what it's like to be a criminal, you can hang out with criminals and you can become part of their culture. And so you will willingly suspend
your disbelief in that lifestyle. You will willingly suspend the idea that you're actually a criminology graduate student so that you can enter into their world. But then later on, you can step back
and examine it from what might be thought of as a more objective way. In other words, you can have both. You can have scientific objectivity and you can also maintain the openness to enter in fully to the subject that you're studying. It's hard to do both of those at the same time. I don't advise doing them at the same time, but you can
In the course of your investigation, you will have moments when you step back and moments when you really enter into that worldview. I did a lengthy study, a 10-year field study with a man called Ted Owens. I've written a book about him called The PK Man, and when I'm working with him, naturally you want to enter into his world.
You don't want to be constantly saying, no, this can't be, that can't be. What about this? What about that? The goal is to understand him as fully as possible and then later on to step back and try to be more objective about it. Could you explain what macro psychokinesis is and if there's any substantive evidence supporting it?
macro psychokinesis is one of the most controversial areas within parapsychology and even long-time parapsychologists have a very difficult time with it. It seems as if it's okay if people can influence the fall of dice, for example, in a way that's slightly significantly significant, but to
For example, when Uri Geller was going around touching spoons or causing them to bend without even touching them at all, parapsychologists were horrified. And the reason they were horrified is because, first of all, if they were to document this, nobody would believe them. They would be regarded as crazy. And second of all, and probably even more
If you can bend a spoon, does that mean you can stop somebody's heart? Or as a cartoon I saw once, there are a couple of pilots in an airplane and they're saying, I don't know what you spending spoons is. And then you see the airplane kind of bending in half. The ethical implications of extraordinary parapsychological abilities are frightening.
And I don't think there's a way to get rid of that. If somebody has the power of macro psychokinesis, can they hack someone and cause them to die? As is a tradition around the world and shamanic cultures and cultures that have a history of sorcery. And there was an anthropologist named Ronald Rose, for example, who wrote a study of
a technique known as the pointing of the bones, which was a method used in certain cultures in the Caribbean to heck someone to the point where they die. And at that time anthropologists had developed a theory that the reason people die after they've been hexed is because first of all, they know they've been hexed and that triggers a stress response.
on their part, and they die from the stress of knowing that they've been hexed. And Raoul Rose accepted that theory. It was standard. It's consistent with materialistic worldview. But then he encountered cases in his own work as an anthropologist in which the people who were being hexed didn't know they were being hexed. In fact, they were in another country, far away from the
Caribbean culture where the hexing took place and yet they died nevertheless. So one way to think of that is it could be telepathic. There's a theory about healing that is that it's just a telepathic suggestion. I give you the telepathic suggestion that you will be healed and then you use that to activate your own innate healing abilities.
Similarly with hexing, you get a telepathic message that you're being hexed, and that triggers the stress response that causes you to die. So there's a fine line between macro psychokinesis, you could say, and telepathy. It's hard to know where to exactly draw the lines. Now, in the case of Ted Owens, he specialized
in large scale phenomena. He performed many demonstrations during his lifetime of involving things like heat waves in the middle of winter, cold waves in the middle of summer, moving hurricanes around, tornadoes, volcanoes, earthquakes, large scale power blackouts.
It's very difficult to research these things because they're often described in kind of vague terms. If I say a heat wave in the middle of winter, that could mean many different things. Nevertheless, over and over and over again, I have it by files over, I think, well over 150 examples of such demonstrations, and it seems over and over and over again
Roughly two-thirds of the time depending on how you want to count because there's a lot of gray areas in there things seem to work out as he said they would sometimes very precisely On one occasion he called me up on Christmas Eve 1985 I'll never forget this because he has his big booming voice and he called me on the phone and said Jeffrey
This is the most important phone call you will ever receive." And he said, it's up to you now. You have to inform the United States government not to launch the next space shuttle, because if they do, my UFOs, he felt that he was in contact with
aliens in a UFO. He said, those UFOs are going to knock it right out of the sky. I, of course, had no influence with the U.S. government. I have never had a relationship with the U.S. government other than being designated as a conscientious objector on one occasion. And I suppose getting Social Security. But I have no voice.
there and i didn't think even if i had a voice anyone would care what i had to say so i ignored him and then when the challenger space shuttle exploded about a month later i was shaken to my bones and the question is was that an example of macro psychokinesis i can't say i mean he claimed he was in telepathic contact with aliens and they did it uh
So maybe it was precognition, and of course the official reports talk about the... ...to be explained completely by negligence on the part of the NASA authorities who let that space shuttle launch in the first place. We'll never know. But the reason I bring up this example is because it was very precise.
It was, there was no question he was referring to the challenger. And he was very clear that if that shuttle were launched, it would be knocked out of the sky. So there's no denying the precision of what he said in that instance, whether it was macro psychokinesis
or precognition, I can't say. And that's one of the reason that parapsychologists use the word psi, psi, but it's refers to the Greek letter psi as a nomenclature that refers to all kinds of parapsychological events, whether it's
telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, or psychokinesis is because philosophically they're very hard to distinguish one from the other. And the example of the Challenger space shuttle illustrates that very well. So there are people in parapsychology, like Ed May,
very prominent parapsychologist who received government funding for many, many years to explore remote viewing. He maintains that it can all boil down to precognition, that there never has to be an example of psychokinesis. And there are others, like Stephen Browdy, the former editor of the
Journal of Scientific Exploration, who are more inclined to think that psychokinesis and macro psychokinesis is very real. In his instance, as a young man, he witnessed table levitations, tables in his presence rising up. He couldn't even pull them down. They seem to be rising up of their own accord. And he could think of how do you explain that in terms of precognition?
It's got to be macro psychokinesis, and it's been going on for centuries. There are documented cases like that going back to at least the 1800s, I think much earlier, in fact. But because they're relatively rare and so unusual,
Most people are afraid to report it. They say, if I tell people that I witnessed this table levitating by itself, they'll think I'm crazy. So one of the major reasons that people are afraid of even talking about their psychic experiences is exactly that, that people will think I'm crazy. And macro psychokinesis is right at the top of the list of
the taboo topics for that reason. Did Ted Owens give you any indication as to when at least he claimed his ability started? Ted Owens came from a family in which psychic functioning was taken for granted. His grandmother was and his grandfather was a dowser. The grandmother was something of a medium. It often is the case that this sort of thing runs in family. So he had native talent.
I don't think there's any question of that. But at the same time, he felt that he had been visited by aliens. He felt that they had actually encountered him on a strange occasion when he was driving in the middle of the desert, as I recall, in Texas, and found himself surrounded by tarantula spiders. And then there was missing time
and he felt that they'd actually operated on his brain in a way to enhance his psychic abilities. He also felt that they had been working with him since childhood so that he had in his early life many different occupations. Very strange things. He was a bullwhip artist in a circus sideshow. He had a knife throwing act. He was a high speed typist. He worked as
an idea man for a railroad. He was a jazz drummer at one time and he felt that they guided him into all of these professions so that his mind was sufficiently flexible that he could work with their
system of telepathic communication, which was involved symbols and he could send symbols and receive symbols from them and he would understand what they meant and he knew how to craft symbols to send to them so that they would do things that he asked them to do. That's the way he viewed it. It's very interesting because on the occasion that I first met Ted Owens, which was a conference in London,
sponsored by the Parascience Foundation at the University of London in 1976. There was another speaker at the conference, another person who was known for macro psychokinesis. Her name was Suzanne Padfield. She was the wife of a well-known physicist named Ted Baston, and she had worked for over a decade in what was known at the time as the Laboratory of Paraphysicists.
they had set up experiments with light beams to see if she could bend a beam of light with her mind. Now that would be another example of macro psychokinesis at a subtle level. And they claimed that they had many examples of her bending a beam of light. And at the same meeting where Ted Owens introduced himself to me, she stood up and she said, you know, I used to think,
that it was spirits I was working with who performed these activities like poltergeists. But gradually I came to realize that I was using the idea of spirits as psychic support figures because if they were doing it then I didn't have to take any responsibility.
So that freed me up from feeling guilty or feeling self-important or anything. I could simply say, well, they did it. I had nothing to do with it. She said, but I realized over time that actually it was my gokinesis and I could do it. I didn't need to credit the invisible spirits. I could take responsibility for it myself. And she felt this was the case with other psychics.
as well, like Ted Owens, who credited it's all the space intelligences. Although the way he put it was that I have some ability, but they do the big, the heavy lifting comes from them. It changed over time. I was never sure when I worked with him what to make of it, except for the fact that he claimed he could produce UFO sightings and did so on many occasions.
So including one instance in which, again, this could be precognition, he called me up one day, we're doing a project to see if you could produce UFOs. And he said, there's one coming. He said, I can feel it. He says, this is going to be one of the biggest UFO sightings ever. It will be seen by hundreds of people.
it will be photographed. And he said, the photograph is going to be published in the front page of one of your local papers in the San Francisco Bay area. Well, five days later, that's exactly what happened. The, uh, siting took place on a college campus. It was being, uh, there was an event being sponsored by the art department, the Sonoma state college.
as it was called at that time. It's now Sonoma State University and the art department had an artist who named Stephen Polesky who flew an airplane, a little airplane with smoke trailing out the back and he made designs in the sky and that was his art form. And so the art department is out there, hundreds of students with their cameras
Stephen Polesky is in the air making designs when right in his airspace a UFO appears and he sees it and reports on it and people on the ground see it and photograph it and what do you know the photograph was published on the front page of the Berkeley Gazette so and not only that it was videotaped and the videotape was broadcast on
So I'd have to say that's very unusual that something like that would happen. I don't know of any other instance offhand in which a major city newspaper published a UFO picture on the front page, but it happened five days after Ted Owens told me it's about to happen.
Am I accurate in inferring that you recently undertook a test to assess if you're still receiving post-death communications from Ted? Yes. On December 12th, to be precise, last year, 2022, I got a message from one of the viewers of the New Thinking Allowed channel in Germany, and he told me while he was meditating, a figure appeared. He's a deep meditator.
He's already half hour into his meditation and he sees this figure and doesn't know what to make of it. And gradually he could see it's a human being. And because he was familiar with my video channel, he recognized the figure is Ted Owens.
And Ted Owens told him, I have a message I want you to give to Jeffrey. And he said he sat and he meditated on that for months because he was afraid because he thought it could be a fantasy. But after several months of examining himself, he determined for himself, it was no fantasy. It was real. And he reached out to me and passed on the message. And so
The message is, Jeffrey Ted Owens knows that you might want to reach out to him. I didn't have any thoughts of that until I got the message. But you can do so in meditation. And I thought, well, all right, I'll see if I can, in meditation, contact Ted Owens. He had been dead 35 years by that time. He died in 1987. And one day,
In fact, to be precise, on December 28th, 2022, I felt that I had contacted Ted Owens in meditation. I felt that we had had a conversation. I felt that he had agreed to perform a demonstration or to ask the space intelligences to perform a demonstration. And at the time, I was very concerned for the people of Ukraine.
I was aware of the fact that news reports said that the invading Russians were now destroying the Ukrainian infrastructure, their power system, so they wouldn't have heat in the winter that was coming. And I asked Ted Owens to use his abilities, which I knew he had a history of creating hot spells in the middle of winter, to create a hot spell
so that the Ukrainian people wouldn't suffer and that we would run a test for 90 days from December 28th up until about the 28th of March, which is roughly a month ago. And I am now analyzing the data to see whether there was a statistically significant heat spell in Ukraine
I can say this for what it's worth that only a few days after I announced, which I did on the New Thinking Allowed channel that very day, I announced it on December 28th that we're going to run this trial. By January 1st, there was an unbelievable heat spell all over Europe. Thousands of temperature records were broken in one day.
The problem is, in my recollection of the conversation with Ted Owens, I didn't say all over Europe, I said Ukraine. And so it's, I can't say even if, you know, that heat spell did occur, whether it's really related to the conversation I believe I had with Ted Owens. So probably in another several weeks, we'll
have analyzed the data and I'll be able to say for sure whether or not the weather in Ukraine was statistically warmer over the winter. Right now, I just don't know. I mean, client to think probably was warmer, but not necessarily statistically significant. So, but until we've completed running all the numbers, I don't know for sure.
Given that Ted's predictions weren't consistent, what does that say to you? What you're looking at is the question of imprecision. And yes, in real life, when you're doing a study research of the paranormal, there very often is imprecision. For example, if you're doing an astrology reading or an I Ching reading, trying to determine, is this reading accurate for me? Well, the readings are usually very, very general.
And it's very, very hard to determine with any kind of scientific precision whether or not they're accurate. So it gives a lot of room for the true believers to say, you know, it's a perfect description of me because they don't have to specify. He said this date and this time and exactly this event and the temperature change will be such and such. So in real life, we often
assume that an imprecise event means a certain thing for us. Whereas in the scientific laboratory, you can't operate that way. You have to be very, very precise. If you're doing a psychokinesis experiment, you've got everything specified in advance what the targets are, what statistical tests you're going to use, what outcome will satisfy your experiment,
and what outcome would be a disconfirmation of your hypothesis in real life field studies. It doesn't work that way at all. So an interesting question to ask yourself is, do we really learn more from experiments than we do from field studies? And that I'm not sure. The reason I say that is because the early work in
What was called psychical research in the 19th century was largely field study research and they approached it with the discipline
that a police detective would have in doing police work. You try to get corroboration testimony from other witnesses. You try to see if there are any documents that will support the hypothesis. You look for confirmations where you can find them, and you draw conclusions based on
your analysis of the data, not so different than the way a literary critic might analyze a novel and say, what is the meaning to be found in this novel? And we have great works that were published in that era. For example, F.W.H. Myers in 1903 posthumously published his great book, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death.
and it runs for hundreds of pages and two volumes and is a masterful analysis of the human psyche and how there's a spectrum of events from normal human consciousness to the most extreme forms of psychokinesis and precognition that point towards the survival of human consciousness.
of evidence. So the experimental work in parapsychology largely began in the 1930s with J. B. Rhine at Duke University doing card-guessing experiments. They were very precise. They were capable of statistical analysis. Conditions are well controlled. At this point, over a thousand
of these experiments have been published. The results are very clear statistically that there's a weak effect that is consistent, but it doesn't work 100% of the time. And now, have we learned any more from the experiments than we already knew from the field studies? I'm inclined to think no. I'm inclined to think that the basic facts
were well understood, the way the phenomena function could be well understood through field studies. But what the experiments gave us was not a better understanding, but really a confirmation of what we already knew to be the case from the field studies. We can now say they've been verified through experiments.
In light of the aerial school incident in Zimbabwe where school children reported a UFO landing and warning about humanity's destructive technology, what's your perspective on this cautionary message? The warnings concerning technology and concerning pollution of the planet are very real and you find them across many cultures. I've done a series of now 40 interviews with James Tunney
He is the author of such books as tech, bondage, slavery of the human spirit.
is turning people into robots, so to speak, that we are losing touch with our innate capacities. I described earlier with Eugene Houston's metaphor, the human organism is being like a Stradivarius violin and we only learn to play it like a plastic fiddle. And I'm afraid to say that cell phones and television and
electronic technology, the world in which we're embedded, and I feel very much a part of that world. It's given us a great deal, but it also takes something away from people. It takes away a sense of soulfulness, a sense of there's something larger to us than simply being a successful entrepreneur or
You know, many people who are engaged in the world of science and technology have the attitude that he who dies with the most toys wins, that it's all about material possessions and material acquisition that
We lose something of ourselves, and the modern world as a whole has been defined this way over and over again by different people. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, wrote in the book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. People credit Nietzsche with saying that God is dead,
But what I think he really meant is everybody thinks God is dead. God is no longer a living presence in the life of people. Even religious people, so-called religious people, seem to be more concerned with suppressing trans children than in, for example, cultivating their own spirit.
It's a very serious problem in our culture. Imagine, for example, means to me having earned a doctoral diploma in parapsychology over 40 years ago and being really aware of the very extensive history, thousands of experiments and field studies going back
Well over 150 years and all of this information is pushed to the fringes and almost never talked about inside of our educational institutions, even inside of our churches, inside of our scientific establishments. This knowledge is considered taboo and at the same time an understanding of who we are as individuals is being lost. The knowledge of the afterlife
For example, is knowledge of who we are. It's knowledge of our own psyche and people instead begin to think of themselves as cogs in a great machine.
You know, let's keep the economy going. Let's get a successful job. And I know people are disenchanted. I hear young people saying, why should I spend four years getting a college degree only to be able to work in a job that I'm going to hate for the rest of my life? It makes people feel like their own dignity is
has to be sacrificed in order to earn a living. That's what our culture is like right now. And so the fact that you hear over and over and over again from different sources, even now coming from extraterrestrials supposedly landing in flying saucers, that we're not paying enough attention to our own inner nature, is not surprising.
What are some of the difficulties that parapsychology and perhaps even the scientific method has to overcome? You know, we could talk a long time about this subject. My mentor, Arthur, who we've spoken earlier, felt that we have to go beyond science. Science itself is incapable of addressing
Why was the universe created in the first place is not a question that science can answer. And in order to begin to get a handle on first principles, it sometimes becomes necessary to develop a mindset which is more like the way the right brain works.
The right brain works in images. The right brain is where we get messages in our dreams. And the psychiatrist Eric Frohn wrote a book called The Forgotten Language, which is the language of dreams. This would be the language of the most primitive people.
Because they all had dreams, and in most primitive times, they didn't really make such a clear distinction between waking reality and sleeping reality. The Australian Aghanis would merge from the dream time. That is the original language that people spoke and understood.
and it's the language of animistic cultures everywhere today. It kind of makes no sense whatsoever from a strict scientific perspective, and yet we see that if you follow strict scientific protocols, yeah, they're amazing accomplishments. You can build atomic bombs at the same time,
You can build giant computers, but at the same time you can build spaceships, but at the same time you're polluting the planet. And worse than that, we find that, let's take the behavioral sciences. There is a crisis today in behavioral science and I think many other sciences as well, probably biological sciences. It's a crisis of replicability. Many
experiments that were considered models, that were considered paradigms of good experiments and have been followed for years and years in different fields are now not being replicated. And so in the field of behavioral sciences, people are wondering what are the limits of the scientific method? Are we running up against
an uncertainty principle, which is well known in physics, that there's only so much that science can tell us about subatomic particles. If you want to measure their position, you're not going to be able to measure their momentum. If you try to measure their momentum, you won't be able to measure their position. Are there limits like that to our understanding of knowledge itself?
The same question was addressed by Einstein's colleague at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the great logician whose name is on the tip of my tongue right now. I'm sorry, it's not coming to me, but it'll probably help. I'll blurt it out in a few minutes or I could look it up.
who came up with a similar principle to the indeterminacy principle in physics. It's the idea that no system of knowledge is ever capable of explaining itself. No system of logic, no system of mathematics can ever explain itself. You always have to go to a metastance, a larger system.
in order to explain any system. And what we find, I think, when extraterrestrial communications seem to be pointing towards the absurd, you could say that they're pointing towards a meta system, a system that is beyond science itself, beyond logic itself. My mentor, Arthur Young, used to call it
Dirty thinking, actually. And it's where sometimes it takes a paradox, it takes a joke, it requires humor or poetry or something just to get you out of the box that you're imprisoned, the logical box
that imprisons us, that we all seem to walk around in a prison of our own thoughts. Typically, they're telling us what is possible and what is impossible. And there are many people today who have recently in fact published articles that all the data of parapsychology, the thousands of
Articles published scientific studies. They say we don't have to pay attention to them at all because we know it's impossible and impossible things can't happen. Therefore, why bother to even look at the research and
The way to get out of that is to break free from the logical constraints that are holding you down about what is and what is not possible. That certainly is true in the realm of the human being. What does it mean to be human? Why are we here at all in the first place? Why is there a universe? You will never answer those questions from within a logical scientific framework.
The answers come to us from mythology. They come to us from what Arthur Young used to call the realm of mythos. That's why, for example, he was interested in astrology. If you ask yourself the fundamental question of mysticism, mystics say all is one. We are one with everything. That's the basis of every
mystical tradition ultimately, and yet we find ourselves as individuals. How do I as a skin encapsulated ego, someone who exists inside this body, how do I relate to the idea that I am also one with the whole universe? Well, that relationship occurs through what Arthur described, he called it the realm of mythos, and that is
You find that in astrology, you find that in every mythological system. Those are the stories that we tell ourselves that connect us to a larger universe, and ultimately they tend to be stories that are completely irrational from a scientific perspective, which is why, once again, I developed the
theory with Brendan Engen of archetypal synchronistic resonance. It's as if the universe does speak to us. The universe is conscious. It speaks to us in riddles. It speaks to us in synchronicities. And so to have a sensitivity to that is a way of acknowledging your connection to the absolute.
How do Christianity, Buddhism, and Vedantic thought relate? Are they in disagreement? Are they in harmony? We talk about Indra as a good example of a God who was very much in the same vein as the God of Jews and the God of Christians. Yahweh and Indra are similar. They wield thunderbolts. They are the king of all of the heavenly host or the other
devas are the other gods and they are of course the the god of a particular people in the earliest days and in ancient india indra was the main god the god of all gods the king of the gods and in the vedic tradition which are the earliest scriptures from india this indra is the most frequently mentioned of all the deities
And yet today, if you go to India, you won't find any temples to Indra. Indra has become a very diminished figure, and it happened at around the time that the philosophers who developed the Upanishads came about, which took a period that lasted for many centuries, the development of the Upanishads. But what
The great philosophers of the Indian subcontinent developed was an idea that there are philosophical principles expressed by new deities, by Brahma, for example, who represented the whole universe, by Vishnu and by Shiva. These were no longer the gods like Indra. Indra was a god like Zeus or Thor as well.
And there's a story in the Upanishads and the ancient scriptures in which Indra conquers the evil dragon Vritra. Vritra is like a reptilian beast and he's out to destroy the human race.
And he's very, very powerful. In fact, he swallows Indra. And Indra is only freed because the other devas help him escape from inside the belly of Ritra. And then he uses his thunder and he slays Ritra. And now he's the king of the gods. They all celebrate his victory over this evil demon.
In order to satisfy his need for glory, Indra builds a magnificent palace on top of Mount Meru, the home of the gods, and Vishvakarma is the builder of the palace, and it's completed, and he shows it to Indra, and Indra is walking through this amazing palace, and he says, not enough. He wants more. His glory is such he needs bigger
palaces and greater palaces and Vishvakarma has to keep working, making the palace more and more magnificent for him. And finally, Vishvakarma is worn out from all of this building. It's like Indra will never be satisfied. There will never be a palace great enough for Indra.
So he appeals to Brahma, the universal principle, and it's the principle of Brahman in India, in the Upanishads. Brahman is the essence of reality, and it's a great principle, and he appeals to that. And Brahman
asked to appeal to Vishnu. Vishnu is such a great deity. Vishnu has many different avatars who appear in physical form and represent him. And Vishnu sends one of his avatars down to Mount Meru in the form of a beautiful little child. And Indra sees this little child outside of his magnificent palace.
And he's so excited. The child is so charming and so beautiful that Indra comes to him and says, let me show around this palace. And the child is being shown around. Indra is showing, isn't this marvelous? And the child says to him, oh, this is the most beautiful palace that any Indra has ever built. Indra says, what? Any Indra? I'm Indra.
What do you mean any Indra? When the little child points towards a column of ants that are marching in through the door of the palace and he says to Indra, well, you see these ants, says every one of them was once an Indra. And that represented a turning point for the theology of ancient India. They move beyond the kind of
pantheon of gods. The ancient Vedic pantheon is very similar to the Greek pantheon, to the Norse pantheon. And in the early days of the Hebrew religion, Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, was regarded before us as our god, our cult god, but he's more powerful than your god. And eventually that emerged to a theology of, oh, there is only one god.
That happened gradually over time, and so the theological sophistication of different cultures evolved over time, is what I'm saying. So that if you study the evolution of these theologies, you begin to see that they do converge, that there is a sense in which the mystical teachings of
Every culture are pointing to the same reality. It's known in modern thought as the perennial philosophy. But you don't find it necessarily in the exoteric teachings. The teachings that I learned in my early religious training describe a different kind of deity than one finds in the writings of the great mystics.
Those teachings are kept often hidden from people. For example, in the Jewish culture, there is a mystical teaching of Kabbalah, but you have to be 40 years old before you're ready to even begin to study it.
It's felt like it's dangerous if you get into it at an earlier period. And I think the same is true with the teachings of the great mystics of other cultures. Probably in the teachings of Buddha, for example,
are more direct in that sense Buddha was a mystic but even in Buddhism you start out with the Four Noble Truths and then later on you learn in Buddhism well you can the Four Noble Truths are not the end all and be all in fact everything we've got you up until now isn't really true the real truth of the Diamond Sutra for example can't be expressed in words it's not a simple teaching
It's a teacher that you only can experience directly in your heart. It can never be transmitted through words or through words alone. There are other teachings that go beyond words, that go beyond philosophy. So you have in Buddhism what's known as the prajnaparamita, which means the wisdom of going beyond. It's the same
Word para parameter is the same root word para as in parapsychology, which means beyond psychology. You need to go further. Do the so-called gods of the occult fit into the perennialist idea? They do, but the perennial wisdom is not usually taught at the beginning stages of people.
And I guess here's the reason why. As you grow up, young children have, I think, a natural sense of mysticism. They come from the great beyond, and then they're embodied, which is why I think some young children talk about their past lives.
right away, they can remember them. They can remember the state between lives, but those are rare and often occasioned by a violent death earlier on. But the goal of a young child is to learn how to function in the physical world, learn how to tie your shoes, learn how to make your bed, learn how to get along with your peers, for example, and that becomes
Almost of ultimate importance for young people is being recognized and accepted by their friends, learning how to have friends, learning how to accomplish things in the physical world. And in so doing that, they lose touch with the perennial wisdom that was their natural state when they were born.
As I mentioned earlier, Freud described that as a state of infantile regression to the womb. It could also be thought of as a state of mystical oneness. But as you're growing up in life, you want to put that aside. It doesn't help you as a young child learning how to get better in sports and do well in school and have friends to remember that you're one with everything. That gets lost.
you reach a point typically, in my case, I think around the age of 21 or so, you become an adult. And at that point, I think people often, at least many people of my generation, certainly, probably with the help of drugs, begin to open up to these inner realities and begin to develop
a more comprehensive understanding of the perennial philosophy. Not that it was ever taught to me. I had to reach out for it and find it. But if you do reach out, as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
And so there are many, many ways in which people can become acquainted with this very rich and substantial tradition. And today there's even a branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology that deals with it. So it's available in that form to some young people, but I should say the American
psychological association refused to recognize transpersonal psychology as being a legitimate discipline in and of itself. So like parapsychology, it's also taboo. So I guess the point I'm saying is that it would be wonderful if we had a culture in which the perennial wisdom was available
from childhood to people, but that's not the culture in which we live right now. That's one of the reasons that people are warning us about the direction our whole culture is moving into. We're becoming more and more like machines and less and less like spiritual beings. Hopefully we can reverse
What do you think of Wolfgang Smith's assertion that these two realms are antithetical? So that is the Christian and Vedantic thought are antipodal. This idea of sort of sacrificing your ego on the altar of spirituality, or the idea of let go of all desires. The ego is the problem was often discussed in
the days in which I lived with Arthur Young at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, and he was opposed to that idea because the way he put it, and now you're talking to a very accomplished human being, a man who felt that he wasn't even worthy of becoming a philosopher until he had already invented the helicopter, he said
It's not a good idea to sacrifice your ego on the altar of spirituality until you have developed an ego worthy of being sacrificed.
He would say that for young people who, you know, become devotees of a guru and they give up their ego and they are devout followers of whatever path they have chosen, they have become like children in a way and they have given up their sovereignty. They have turned it over to some spirit tester in exchange for the hope of achieving enlightenment and he
felt that that was a mistake, that people need to cultivate themselves, and when they're ready they will have opportunities to open up more to the spiritual world, but to do it as a substitute for the cultivation of why we're here on this planet, which in his view was to develop mastery over the physical plane,
then he felt it was a mistake and that you don't get enlightened that way. You enter into a state that you might mistake for enlightenment. Arthur Young advocated gaining control over the physical before earning the right to philosophize. Can you elaborate on what led him to this? I'm not sure that I am entirely prepared to defend Arthur Young's
position in that regard. I find it very inspirational. At the same time, I think that people learn so many distinctions between human beings that I would be very hesitant to try and prescribe a
a pattern that everybody must follow, that everybody should be like Arthur Young and come up with a new invention. That's something that he decided for himself. And I can't say that it made him an enlightened person. It made him a very valuable mentor for me. But as I recall,
He was a great soul. There's no doubt about it. I remember when Arthur Young died, a double rainbow appeared in the sky, or a double halo appeared in the sky on the day he died over Berkeley. It was so extraordinary. It was photographed and it appeared in the newspaper and my friends
who are more traditional would say that that was a sign that a great soul had passed. And I think he was a great soul, but enlightened is a very different state and it means different things to different people. In Arthur Young's case, I'm under the impression that he was not indifferent about dying. He didn't want to die as he got older. He was in the 80s when he'd think he was 90.
when he died in 1995, but I always thought maybe he was even a little bit afraid of death. Toward the very end, he was searching desperately for some sort of miracle cure that could prolong his life even more. And it seems to me that a good sign of enlightenment would be a willingness to face death, or as the Buddha would say, an indifference to whether you're dead or alive.
So there are many degrees and many kinds of enlightenment and I don't want to necessarily judge some person who at a young age without having accomplished anything of importance in the physical world, like inventing the helicopter, if they choose to follow
a guru and devote their lives to that guru, it's not up to me to judge that person. But I would say for myself, I find Arthur Young's advice very worthwhile and very meaningful, and I don't think it's inconsistent throughout your life to want to learn and develop and grow, and at the same time to be aware of the
traps of the ego. I'm certain beyond all doubt that if you want to grow spiritually, you definitely don't want to fall into ego traps. Those are the things that most prevent a person from entering into a state of greater enlightenment.
But that can be done. You can enhance the ego and you can at the same time grow spiritually. And here's how I envision it for myself. It's how I tell it to people. And that's to love yourself unconditionally. And by that I mean love your spiritual self, your higher self.
unconditionally unconditionally means no matter what you do no matter what you say no matter what you think no matter what you feel and no matter what anybody else says things does or feels with regard to you because you can recognize there's a part of your being at the deepest core that is a spiritual essence that is infinite and is
That's the part of us that is one with everything. And if we can just recognize that and love ourselves unconditionally because of it, we can continue to move through life, to grow, to learn, to progress and to cultivate ourselves without getting caught in ego traps. Because to the best of my knowledge, ego traps emerge when we don't love ourselves.
When we hate ourselves or dislike ourselves at some level, but we don't want to admit it. So therefore we need to feel important in some way or other. And it's that need that causes us to separate ourselves from the oneness, which is at the very core of our being. Did Arthur achieve his spiritual states through accomplishments as opposed to love or faith?
Well, I think for some people it can be accomplishment. I don't think it has to be for everyone. It could be just being a good son, a good father, a good friend.
to the people you know, that could be enough. If you love yourself unconditionally, no matter what, whether or not you accomplish anything, that gives you the opportunity to get in touch with what might be your unique purpose, your unique destiny in life. And being in touch with that is a source of such bliss, such joy, it's hard to express. I feel very fortunate that
I followed my dreams as a young man and got in touch with my destiny, which was to be a communicator and to do it through television and now through the internet and to have conversations like the one I'm having with you right now. That's the essence of my purpose. So it's the most natural thing in the world for me to do. But it's going to be different for every person. We're all
According to a story in the Talmud, we're surrounded by innumerable demons, a fact too frightening for us to accept.
What does this say about fear? Well, I can tell you this. I have never read that statement on the air. I'm not even familiar with it. Here's what I'm familiar with when it comes to Talmudic legends. And that is that for each human being, there is an angel. And that angel walks in front of us everywhere we go and says, behold, here comes the image of God.
So you can view their way. I'm not saying that we are free from temptations. I would even go so far as to agree with Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic, who was a big influence in my life, that each and every one of our thoughts is itself a spiritual entity. And that when we have a negative thought,
thought that might say, oh, I'm really stupid or something to that effect. That is a demonic entity trying to gain control over us by making us hate ourselves, by making us feel guilty about ourselves. And so my practice is when I have such a thought, I say to myself, cancel that thought. I'm alert.
I'd like to switch gears just a bit. What are some of the common limitations to psi ability?
For instance, when I interviewed Thomas Campbell, he said, I can't demonstrate it for you now because who knows we could be cheating and people wouldn't believe it anyway, which I found to be extremely disappointing. We're talking about our blocks to psychic functioning and the most basic finding of parapsychology research is known as the sheep goat effect.
and very simple as sheep are regarded as individuals who believe that they can do it. They're put into an experiment where they're asked to guess what card is going to come up or guess what a target at a remote location is about. People who believe that they can do it do better in those tests and people who believe that this is something they certainly cannot do
So, that would be one of the first major blocks.
If you begin to at least acknowledge there's a possibility that you can do this, you're already a step ahead. The other thing that the research itself suggests, and this is quite consistent with the ancient yoga sutras, is that when you can relax and quiet your mind, you're going to be a better polypathic and clairvoyant
receiver of information. Conversely, it also seems to be the case that if you're in a state of extreme emotion, for example, if you're in an emotional crisis, maybe you've had an accident, maybe you're dying, then you tend to be more of a telepathic transmitter.
So that's an interesting observation that's been made. There are many other blocks to psychic functioning. People are afraid of parapsychology, afraid of psi for different reasons. One big reason is if you've been raised in a fundamentalist religious tradition, you might believe that any kind of psychic functioning is demonic.
and you're afraid of it for that reason. You begin to have psychic insights. Technically, parents get afraid when their children show a lot of psychic precociousness. They don't like it, and they tell their children to stop doing it, for example. There are many cases like that. And here's another very unusual finding with regard to
People who report lots of spontaneous psychic experiences, a very high percentage of them, also early childhood trauma. They come from abusive families, for example. And what seems to be the case in those instances, when you're a young child and you're being traumatized, you retreat from the world.
You find safety in an inner world, in a world of your own imagination, for example, with invisible friends, for example, or just retreating into your own shell. Well, when you do that, as I discussed earlier with you, you enter into the realm of the imagination, and the imagination is a doorway into what we call the imaginal, which is a psychic realm. You may find yourself
first finding comfort from imaginary friends and the next thing it might be an actual spiritual entity, hopefully not a demonic entity. Now, other blocks also are related to things like stress, having high stress levels
and sometimes precipitates psychic functioning. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, if you're all stressed out, your mind is noisy. It's hard to quiet your mind. And so people who are good meditators, people who are good at self-hypnosis, people who understand principles of relaxation, like the Jacob Sonian relaxation principles,
are all or basic stress management principles are all better at psychic functioning. And another thing the research tells us is that people who are artistically inclined artists and musicians, people who use the right brain more. I'm saying the right brain, but I'm touching the left side of my head. People who are activating the right brain
seem to be more open to psychic functioning. Well, they perform better in simple experimental laboratory tests, and it's probably because they're more open to the intuitive side of life, to the irrational side of life. People who are very mechanical, very materialistic engineers, for example, if you were to do a
Test comparing engineers versus artists and musicians. I would predict that the artists and musicians will do more Show more psychic functioning in the laboratory. The engineers are likely to show psi missing but there's another element to this and it has to do with self-confidence in general if you are a highly successful professional
Chances are you're going to do well in psychic functioning because you're already using your intuition to be a successful person in life. So a study was done, for example, with business executives. Business executives were divided into two groups, those whose companies were profitable and those whose companies were losing money. And they were given tests, computerized tests of pre-computed
the computer chose a target and the person was asked to identify the target in advance. The executives from the successful businesses scored positively and the executives whose businesses were losing money showed sigh missing in that test. So I think to the extent that people learn how naturally to incorporate intuition into their lives,
is a reflection of how well they will do when when they're tested in the laboratory. Well, there's always
stuff that we're going to miss. We haven't talked about diet. There are people who believe that a vegetarian diet, for example, promotes psychic functioning, that if you eat too much meat, you have filled all these animal hormones, particularly the hormones that are in their body as they're being killed, which would be hormones associated with the emotions of fear and aggression.
and that that interferes with psychic functioning. I don't know if it's true because it hasn't yet really been studied carefully in the laboratory, but there's a lot of folklore to suggest that sort of thing. On the other hand, just because a person thinks of themselves as highly psychic doesn't mean that they're going to perform well in a laboratory.
There are many people who are professional psychics who have a long track record of doing what they do, the way they do it, the way they want to do it. If you put such an individual in the laboratory where they're asked to perform a task that was designed by the researchers and is not necessarily compatible with
normal way of working, they may not do well at all, which I think occasionally leads researchers to become cynical about people who proclaim to be psychic. And of course, I also have to be very clear, there are all kinds of ways in which we can delude ourselves about, are we really psychic or not? For example, if Ted Owens says to me, I'm going to create warmer weather
in Ukraine, and then what we discover is, oh, there was warmer weather in Germany, there was warmer weather in France, there was warmer weather in the Netherlands, there was warmer weather in Belarusia. Therefore, I must have done it. It's very easy to fall into those kinds of patterns to take what was basically a miss and call it a near hit and say, yeah, that shows that I'm psychic.
You see a lot of that people who are reaching to find ways to identify themselves as psychic. Every researcher in parapsychology has been approached by someone who says, I'm psychic. You got to test me. I'm really great. And it turns out that maybe they've diluted themselves in one way or another. So I think the lesson there is that the human potential for greatness
is balanced by a human potential for folly. And when you move into this field, you need to be aware of both of those potentials so that you can avoid the folly and follow the path that leads to whatever greatness is for you. It's peculiar and even convenient. Some would say that paranormal phenomenon everywhere evade captures such as on Skinwalker Ranch. So how do you interpret this?
Well, I will say this, there are occasions such as the skinwalker experience where there were all kinds of phenomena that somehow occurred and made sure that the researchers knew that they occurred and yet avoided capture on camera. But there are many, many other instances in which people do photograph orbs and photograph UFOs and other kinds of
Since you began your journey, especially with New Thinking Allowed, your YouTube channel, which is linked in the description, what lessons or discussions are there that were difficult for you to accept?
I suppose I never appreciated throughout my life, whenever I chose to follow my own passion, the extent to which there would be people definitely opposed to me going in that direction. And I mean, it began, for example, as an undergraduate, when I decided to join various student protests and
discovered that, oh, you're about to be punished because you took part in a protest. And when I went into parapsychology, I imagined why everybody should applaud this young person moving into an exciting new field and coming up with new discoveries. And then I realized, oh no, there's a significant percentage of the population
who are definitely opposed, who feel that this has no place in the university and went to great lengths to try and in effect destroy my academic career. And I can tell you that I now appreciate that virtually everybody in parapsychology, with maybe one or two exceptions, I know of one or two exceptions where they've never encountered
any negativity of this sort. But most people have encountered that sort of negativity. People, I don't want to say violently, I've never encountered any violence, but short of violence, people have gone to great lengths to try and suppress the findings of parapsychology and to suppress individuals working
in the field of parapsychology. I didn't realize how serious it was, but now I know. For example, J.B. Rhyne, who founded Modern American Parapsychology in the 1930s at Duke University, sought psychiatric help in order for him to deal with the stress he was facing from critics who accused him of all sorts of fraud and
Well, fraud basically being, you know, one of the very worst accusations you can ever throw at a scientist. So, Ryan not only had to face people accusing him of fraud, he had to face, on occasion, people who were working for him who were engaged in actual fraud. And he did that in the most open, honest, forthright manner you could.
dismissed those people and he published the fact that they had been caught engaging in fraud and that none of their previous research could therefore be relied upon. He was very explicit in the rare instances in which that happened. But the truth is that whatever field you're in, you're going to have to encounter the human nature. And human nature is extraordinarily vast and
and complex and it definitely has a dark side. Is there a collective Freudian impulse that shrouds the truth, presuming we are all interconnected and what about in the opposite direction? Is there an impulse for us to want to believe that we're all connected, perhaps even more so than we are? You know, I've often thought of it that way. Freud made a point of saying that
We don't want to know what's in our own mind. The whole notion of the Freudian subconscious is based on the idea that we have many impulses, particularly erotic impulses and aggressive impulses that are not socially acceptable. He explained this very clearly in his book
civilization and its discontents. We made a trade-off. We become civilized. We have all the benefits of civilization, but it means we have to suppress and deny certain aspects of our own nature. And that becomes the Freudian unconscious. And then Jung took it a step further and he said, yeah, we don't want to know about our spiritual nature either. So the Jungian collective unconscious is filled with
Aspects of our own spirituality that we don't want to know about and so the very idea that Another person could read your mind that could know the things about you that you don't even want to acknowledge about yourself That's very frightening that's very intimidating to people and as a culture if we were to allow
Human beings on this planet to develop their full psychic potentials if, for example, all young children who showed psychic promises children were given the same support and encourage that would have an applicability or mathematical ability or artistic ability
in our culture so that we develop the culture full of psychic individuals. How would that threaten people who don't want to be in such a culture because they don't want to be seen by everyone, that they want to keep their privacy, they want to be able to hide from people with regard to their aggressive thoughts, their sexual thoughts that are not permissible, or even behaviors.
I think I'd tell you already at the time I interviewed, or it wasn't an interview, it was an occasion on which Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, spoke at the Berkeley campus. It was a time when he had just published an article in Time magazine debunking the claims of Uri Geller that had also been reported in Nature.
at that time, the early research with Geller and Arthur Clark didn't want any part of it. He didn't believe it could be real. And so he spoke on the Berkeley campus. And after his talk, I raised my hand and said, Mr. Clark, do you believe in ESP? And his answer was so revealing. He said, no, I do not believe in ESP because I don't want anybody to read my mind.
And think of it, it seems absurd, of course, you know, just because you disbelieve doesn't mean someone can't read your mind. But at a cultural level, there's something to that. You can suppress people's psychic abilities by creating a culture in which it's considered unreal, in which people are punished for even thinking about it, and in which there's no
support or very limited support or encouragement for people who show talent. So if nobody believes that it's really possible, then fewer and fewer people are going to cultivate that ability and you're at less risk that some talented psychic is going to come along and discover your hidden secrets. It seems that most spiritual paths require going through some dark night. Why is that? I would agree with you that
we avoid confronting our own dark side, and yet in spiritual traditions, the tradition, the Western accidental tradition of initiation, which the Austrian mystic Rudolf Seiner wrote about, he said when you become initiated into a spiritual tradition, there's always the guardian of the threshold that you have to
encounter. And the guardian of the threshold can be the most ugly, evil-looking being that you've ever known in your life. Another example of this is the phrase, there are demons guarding every temple. And you'll see this even in the great cathedrals. There are gargoyles all around the great cathedrals that are demonic.
looking. And in Asia, it's very explicit, big demonic statues in front of the Buddhist temples. They are considered servants of the Buddha, but they scare away the uninitiated, the people who aren't ready. You have to ultimately confront your own darkness, your own shadow, your own demon, so to speak.
It's very explicit, for example, in the 12-step program, people who are overcoming addictions, where they say you have to take a hard, uncompromising look at yourself, and then you have to begin to make amends for all the things that you've done as a result of that. And people see the 12-step program as a very authentic spiritual path.
And of course, they're forced into it because, you know, they've hit bottom, so to speak, because of their addictions. And now they're working to overcome their addictions and using the power of the spirit to overcome addictions. And there's a lot of research suggesting that this is an approach that works.
Even in the Bible, angels are often depicted as alarming and horrifying. Terrence McKenna mentioned that we're so estranged that we don't recognize our inner selves when we encounter them. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, Terrence made a beautiful comment that we are so alienated from ourselves that when we see who we are in our own depths, we think it's an extraterrestrial. How should we distinguish between the monad, the spirit and the soul?
Well, words like spirit, soul, monad, psyche, in Hebrew, the nephesh, the breath, or nouma in Greek, are all context dependent. They're dependent on how they're being used by a person who intends to use them.
The word monad, for example, was largely popularized in the writings of the 18th century philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz. Or was he 17th century? I'm not even sure at this point. But one of the things Arthur Young, my mentor, made a big point of distinguishing between
is the notion of the difference between the spirit and the soul. And I find that a very useful distinction that's often glossed over. People talk about the soul as if, for example, it's infinite. They talk about the soul as if it's eternal. You have an eternal soul. Well, I think of the spirit as being that infinite eternal part of us. And I think it's the
depth within each of us. And the irony is, well, it's not so ironical to the ancient Hindus who understood that the Atman, that was their word for the essence of the individual, they said the Atman is the same as Brahman. The essence of who you are is the same as the essence of the whole universe. And I like that idea.
But that is a reference to what I would call the spirit. And Arthur Young meant that very precisely as spirit, which he equated with light itself. And light, if you know anything about
Einstein's theory of relativity, you know that a beam of light can travel the length of the universe. And while we're sitting on Earth and watching it, it might take 13 billion years to go or longer to go from one end of the universe to the other. But if you are on a beam of light and you have a wristwatch, time can stand still.
So from the perspective of the beam of light, you can travel the whole universe in no time at all, instantly, from your point of view. It's one of the paradoxes of time itself. But the point I'm trying to make here is that there is this part of us that's infinite and eternal. Now, is that the same part of us that goes from lifetime to lifetime in reincarnation?
that progresses, I'm not so sure. I think that it's very likely that the soul might last a long time. It might last for thousands of lifetimes, but at some point in the evolution of the soul, we merge to become ultimately where we came from, ultimately from our source, which is one with everything.
And we may discover that everything we're one with is completely outside of time and space, that our notion of time and space, as it seems to us while we're here in the body, is what the Hindus call Maya. It's something of an illusion. It's not what we think it is. But ultimately, we have that within us, and we have
something else within us which is very long-lasting, which goes well beyond the length of an individual lifetime. And I would call it the soul. It's our passions, our desires, what moves us, and what moves us from lifetime to lifetime. But at some point we let go of that completely and become just one with pure spirit. So that's how I see it.
What are the main organizations currently studying parapsychology? Well, the main organization of parapsychology is the Parapsychological Association. It is an affiliate organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was originally founded in, I think, the 1950s by J.D. Rhymes.
and his colleagues at Duke University. It became formally affiliated with the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. It's got about 400 members. So that's the major scientific body, but there are others. There is the Society for Scientific Exploration.
It publishes a journal of scientific exploration, and it was founded, if I remember correctly, I think in the 1970s, by researchers who were studying the paranormal. Parapsychologists are very explicit. They want to study extrasensory perception and psychosis, basically, some the question of life after death.
But there are other areas of the paranormal, UFOs, cryptozoology, the study of, for example, Bigfoot and other beings that seem to pass back and forth between different dimensions, the study of orbs, the study of angels, demons. Those are all areas that could be submitted to scientific inquiry.
Time travel might be yet another. And so the Society for Scientific Exploration was formed as a way of including all of these fringe areas of science under one umbrella. And it's a very useful organization. There's also, in England in particular, although it's an international organization, the Society for Psychical Research.
The SPR was founded in 1882 and really initiated the scientific study of the paranormal. It's been publishing journals and proceedings ever since. So in that organization alone, we have 140 plus years of research data, a very valuable organization, a very important organization. Of course, all of these organizations operate in concert.
with each other. There's a lot of overlap. Sometimes they hold conventions together. There is also the International Association for Remote Viewing, which is now IRVA, International Remote Viewing Association, is mostly for practitioners of remote viewing, but also researchers
In addition, there's the International Association for Near Death Studies. Once again, mostly experiencers, people who have had the near death experience, but also researchers are involved. In addition, there are several organizations devoted to the study of consciousness itself, and many of them started out with the idea that
Well, we're basically neurology. If you want to study consciousness, you study the brain and the nervous system. But more and more they've come to realize you can't exclude the paranormal. It just comes up too often over and over again. So many of the organizations devoted to the scientific study of consciousness are now also including parapsychology researchers in
Do you believe the government is still conducting remote viewing research? To me it's not strange because they investigate almost anything that may pay off so I don't see it as an endorsement personally. What are your views?
Well, we know that the government has now launched some new official programs to look into UFOs, or what they are calling UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, which could include orbs, which could include angels, for all I know, or even ghosts. So there is some funding coming through for that and
There was recently the OSAP program that was run by the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation that looked into all of that. I think OSAP is no longer in existence. Bigelow has now established the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, but that's not receiving, to my knowledge, any government funding.
We do know that the government funded remote viewing programs at SRI International and later on at SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation. So for 20 years, that funding occurred at a low level, maybe a million dollars a year, which is not a lot in scientific funding. Supposedly that stopped.
long ago, basically, I think 1996 or so. And we don't hear about any more government funding of parapsychology since then. Now, in my opinion, the government would be very smart if they wanted to continue to fund such programs to do what
secretly because the programs are still so controversial that funding them publicly would just generate all sorts of noise and media attention that would not be beneficial to the actual research. So I hope that there is a secret program within not just our government, but other governments as well. I have no knowledge that that is happening. However,
What's pretty clear to me is that all across the spectrum of governments and military organizations, there are individuals, often highly placed individuals, who have a personal interest and who have certain amount of latitude in their organizations that they can pursue quietly.
those interests because they might develop into something useful. So I think that there probably, I would guess there are a thousand people like that embedded in different government and scientific organizations around the world who are pursuing this at a personal level. However, to move beyond the personal level, to get an actual budget,
Are you planning to continue your research with the Bigelow Institute? Have they reached out to you?
think the Bigelow Institute. One thing you can say about it, it is potentially very well funded. It potentially has a real future. We're certainly thinking in terms of long term research projects, but I can't be more specific than that. Are you familiar with Linda Moulton Howe's work? I'm aware of her work. I don't know her personally,
And I would like to know more about her personal work, actually. I think that she's an example of how far an individual can go to explore a topic which was about as bizarre as anything that anybody has ever looked at. And she's come up to my knowledge with with a lot of data about it, but not any really hard conclusions.
Yes, so I think I'm an example as well in terms of what an individual can do without a great deal of outside funding. In fact, the whole New Thinking Allowed channel, what we're doing today, publishing a magazine, a weekly newsletter, a book series, and putting up many videos every week, it's all volunteer effort.
enabling this. We don't have a large budget of any sort. So I'm a strong believer in what individuals can do on their own and what volunteers can do without big budgets. In fact, sometimes having a big budget gets in the way of accomplishing. Of course, not always. Sometimes you can't do things without a big budget, but it's amazing how much you can do just by people who are
dedicated and are willing to devote their lives to this work. I had no idea that your channel is run entirely by volunteers. That's commendable, man. Absolutely. That's all that we do at New Thinking Loud. Let me put it this way. It's 95% all volunteer effort. I hope to be able to pay people occasionally when
We had a book about to be published called Is There Life After Death? And so we'll be having royalty income coming in that will be distributed amongst the volunteers who have worked to make that book possible. You know, the volunteers hopefully will be getting something back for all the time and effort they've put in. They're working like professionals, but they're doing it because they love what they do.
And, uh, that's, that's the way great things get done in my mind. What's a peak in Darien experience? Yes. Uh, the idea of a peak in Darien comes from a poem written, uh, I don't know, years or more ago by John Peake episode took place in, uh,
The early days of the great explorers, Cortes, I think could be what, 15th, 16th century, when he discovered Panama. Darien is a province in the country of Panama. And when Cortes and his men arrived at that province, they saw a mountain. So they climbed the mountain. When they got to the top of the mountain, what did they see? To their surprise, but the Pacific Ocean.
They had no idea it was even there. So a peak enderian experience has come to mean when you are unexpectedly surprised by something you didn't believe would be there. And in particular, it refers to deathbed visions in which typically people who are dying experience their loved ones waiting to greet them in the afterlife.
very commonly reported but on occasion they report wait there's my cousin John why is he there to greet me he's not dead but then it turns out to be the case that cousin John actually had died unbeknownst to the person who was having the vision so there are many examples of this where people have they're having visions related to
the afterlife because they're dying or they've had a near-death experience and they've been in the afterlife and they come back and they say, huh, this person was in my near-death experience, but they're not dead. I wonder how they got there. And then we learned, oh, they were dead. So those experiences are very important because they help us to overcome the skeptical critique that, well, a person who
is dying would expect to see their relatives and friends coming to greet them. That's sort of cultural. So it doesn't count as evidence or as survival, but if they see someone they didn't expect or they didn't know would be dead, but who they we later learned really was dead, that would count as a little piece of evidence
pointing towards the existence of a very ontologically real afterlife. How are you planning for the channel to continue, man? And how are you personally preparing for death, Jeff? Well, my basic rule of thumb is to be here and now. Ram Dass put it beautifully in his book, Be Here Now. We have a series on the
New Thinking Allowed Channel, a series of my monologues. They're called In Presence, which is my way of saying here and now. So I'm not really concerned a lot about the future. I'm really much more concerned with the present, about what we're already doing. We're already publishing a weekly newsletter, a quarterly magazine, many interviews a week, including monologues that I do where they're really dialogues with myself
these days, and we have a book series as well. The first volume is about to be published. You can order advance copies now on Amazon. Is There Life After Death? The first volume in the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues series. So I'm just attending to those things and taking it as a here and now
experience being with you in the here and now, for example. If I can do that, well, that'll be enough for me. Could you share a few book recommendations? A really good book that I encourage people to read who feel they're on the path is one written by the Austrian mystic, Rudolf Steiner, called Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
I think that's a very good book for people. I encourage people to make it a point to read hundreds of books. We offer a book recommendation every week in our newsletter and I'm hopeful that we are reaching out to a community of people who don't want to say that their knowledge of esoteric and paramoral matters is limited to one book, but they're willing to read hundreds.
I imagine that the human race as a species that we are capable of
expanding our psychic capacities. You see people occasionally, the Ted Owens and the Uri Gellers and the Ingo Swans and many other highly talented psychic people in the world. I see them as exemplars of what could be the masses of people. And I can imagine a time
In the distant future, I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime, where young people everywhere who exhibit some level of interest and talent in this field will be encouraged. We could have a psychic Olympics the way we have an Olympics for other endeavors.
I think it would be a good thing overall, but it will require a different kind of humanity, a humanity where all people are willing to acknowledge the spiritual side of life, a humanity in which people don't see themselves as they often do today as nothing more than a machine made out of meat.
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people.
You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, et cetera, it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well.
Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms, just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from rewatching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms?
iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting Patreon.com slash Kurt Jymungle and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " What does it mean to be human? Why are we here at all in the first place? Why is there a universe? You will never answer those questions from within a logical scientific framework. The answers come to us from mythology. The right brain works in images where we get messages in our dreams."
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"text": " Jeffrey Mishlove's journey began in 1968, sparked by a powerful dream. Despite academic taboos, he earned a doctorate in parapsychology. So did Susan Blackmore, by the way. Jeffrey's theories, like Arthur Young's reflexive universe theory, proposed as a hierarchical structure of evolution, suggesting untapped human growth. Now, how does Jeffrey reconcile that with evolutionary understanding? We explore that. In studying consciousness, he adopts some active observer approach, attempting to integrate scientific objectivity,"
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"text": " with an experiential understanding. So it's not science per se, and it's not meditative per se. One discussion involves a psychic predicting UFO sightings, including a widely witnessed event. How can such claims be objectively verified? Again, we explore that. On the personal development side, Jeffrey emphasizes the importance of what he calls a strong ego prior to spiritual growth, warning against prematurely sacrificing ego, which can lead to being stuck in a state of quote unquote false enlightenment."
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"text": " This podcast had several editing challenges on both the audio and the video front, particularly with mine as we just didn't have it. I don't know if you've seen the podcast of myself being interviewed by Ryan Graves on the merged podcast, but what he did was he resurrected with AI the episode, at least with the audio side. We had to cobble something together in a similar manner and it'd be a shame to not release it. What you're witnessing is akin to a classified episode that's finally being uploaded."
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"text": " My name is Kurt Jaimungal and this podcast is called Theories of Everything where we explore theories of everything from a physics perspective primarily, though I'm dipping my toes more and more, so to speak, into consciousness studies and attempting to decipher the hard problem of consciousness as well as what role does consciousness have on either engendering or supervening on the laws of physics. Enjoy this hitherto unreleased podcast with Jeffrey Mishlove, the creator of New Thinking Allowed. Link in the description to that."
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"text": " All right, Jeffrey Mishlove, welcome to the Theories of Everything podcast. Could you kindly unwind your journey into the realm of parapsychology? As I've been reflecting on it, I realized that probably my first introduction to this world of the paranormal and the esoteric began in 1968, even a few years before I had some"
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"text": " powerful dreams that really changed my life. But the stage was set in 1968 when I was a graduate student attending summer school at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. And I remember I was sitting in the cafeteria one afternoon and a man walked up to me, handed me a flyer, and I looked at the flyer. It said Spiritual Science."
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"text": " a lecture on spiritual science, and at that moment I felt like a current of electricity running up and down my spine. I'd never seen those two words juxtaposed like that, spiritual science. And it turned out the lecture was about the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner,"
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"text": " and the movement he had founded called Anthroposophy. So I attended the lecture, I got to meet people in the Anthroposophy community, and as a result of that, I went back for my senior year in Madison at the University of Wisconsin and I elected to"
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"text": " write a senior thesis on the psychology of religious mysticism. And really I went into it as a skeptic. I thought there must be some psychopathologies associated with people who think that they're having mystical experiences. Freud had already"
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"text": " described this as kind of a return to an infantile state of consciousness and people who thought they saw ghosts. So I write it up that way. But the more I researched it, the more I came to realize that mystics were some of the most important people in our culture. And in fact, I got in touch with the work of Abraham Maslow, a psychologist who wrote the book"
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"text": " covered a psychology of being in which he had interviewed some of the most important people in our culture in his era, people like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and he found that they all report what are called peak experiences that were central to their lives. And also he added these peak experiences are indistinguishable from mystical experiences. So"
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"text": " With that understanding, I could no longer feel comfortable debunking the paranormal and the esoteric. But then I went on to graduate school in criminology at Berkeley. And it was some four years later in 1972 that my great uncle Harry"
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"text": " visited me. That's the best way I can describe it. He visited me in a dream, literally at the moment of his death. And that dream was so powerful that I woke up from the dream and I was just crying tears of joy and singing a very sacred song from my religious background and"
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"text": " I wrote a poem. I said, How's old Harry? I had a dream about him. My mother called me as soon as she got my letter. She said, how did you know Uncle Harry just died? That really shook me up and made me realize something's going on here that I don't understand. And I asked for an object of Uncle Harry, something he had owned so I could think of him and remember him. I was sent"
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"text": " a little book, and I was told this was Uncle Harry's favorite book. It was a book written in Yiddish, a very obscure language that European Jews spoke. It's kind of written in the Hebrew script, but the language is more like German. And I had to get it translated. I realized after having it translated for me that it was"
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"text": " called the Tales of the Baal Shem Tov, who is the founder of the Jewish Hasidic movement in the 18th century. It was a very powerful mystical movement within Judaism. And it was then that I came to realize that my great uncle Harry had been a mystic. I'd always known that he was a very religious man, a pious person, an Orthodox"
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"text": " Jew, but now I was introduced to the mystical side of Judaism. And as a result of that contact, I felt that I had to change my trajectory, my career trajectory. I had to move away from criminology. At the time I was doing volunteer work at San Quentin prison, working with"
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"text": " murderers and rapists and the psychiatric unit doing group therapy with them. And I made a decision as a result of the dream with Uncle Harry that I was going to switch. Somehow I would find a way to see the positive side of human deviance rather than the negative, that I would be studying"
},
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"text": " intuition, creativity, mysticism, psychic phenomena, the esoteric and occult. And I didn't, of course, have any idea as to how this could be done. There weren't any programs of this sort at the University of California, which is a large major university. So I anguished about this for months, trying to figure out what am I going to do? And one day,"
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"text": " in, I recall correctly, it was probably November, probably about six months after the Uncle Harry dream, when I had another dream. And not only did I have another dream, but I knew in advance that I was going to have a dream that evening. I just, it was a knowing, an intuition. And I knew that the answer to all my searching was going to come to me in a dream that evening."
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"text": " So I was ready for it, you might say, after months of anguish. And I did have a dream. I woke up, I was exhilarated. I knew I had found the answer in the dream, but I didn't know what it meant. In the dream, I was visiting friends in Berkeley, people I knew well, knocked on the door of their apartment and married student housing. No answer."
},
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"text": " And in the dream, I found a key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room where I found, right in the middle of the living room floor, a magazine in the dream called I, E-Y-E. And I'm paging through the magazine. And then I woke up with this feeling like that's it. I have the answer. But of course, I had no clue. So I acted out the dream."
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"text": " I put on my tennis shoes, ran five miles across town, came to this apartment, knocked on the door as I had dreamt, no answer. And in fact, I knew that they kept the key under the doormat. So I picked up the key, entered the apartment, walked into the living room and there, smack dab in the middle of the living room floor, just as I had dreamt."
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"text": " This is an example, I suppose, of a dream distortion. It wasn't called the eye. It was called Focus. And it was the magazine of listener-sponsored radio and television in the San Francisco Bay area, KQED. And I'm paging through the magazine when it dawned on me for the first time in my life."
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"text": " that I could pursue my interests if I got involved in the nonprofit, non-commercial segment of the media. So, because I lived in Berkeley, I went over to the Pacifica radio station there, which is also nonprofit, KPFA, and said, I'd like to volunteer. And at that point, I had already earned my"
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"start_time": 707.602,
"text": " my master's degree in criminology, but they said, here, sit down at this desk. And when you hear the doorbell ring, push this button so people can get in the front door. And I gladly did that. At the same time, I learned how to produce a radio program. I produced a program called, you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic. Cause I knew a lot of psychic friends in Berkeley and I"
},
{
"end_time": 759.445,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 736.698,
"text": " interviewed them. The program director liked it so much, he said, we have a regular slot for you every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. We want you to host a program called The Mind's Year. So within a few weeks of this dream, I found myself sitting"
},
{
"end_time": 787.534,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 759.906,
"text": " across a table from world-class experts in all the areas that interested me the most. People on book tours passing through San Francisco came by that radio station with a very powerful signal and I would be interviewing them with 10,000 people listening in. So that gave me the confidence to go back to the university"
},
{
"end_time": 811.92,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 788.012,
"text": " where I was still a graduate student in criminology and switch over taking advantage of a very obscure program they had, the individual interdoctoral major program where if you want to do a dissertation, if you're already a graduate student in good standing, which I was,"
},
{
"end_time": 839.906,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 812.671,
"text": " And you want to work in a field where no department will sponsor you, but you can find three faculty members from different departments who will each sponsor you. You can create your own unique degree program. So that would have been 1973 by then I entered that program and stayed in it until I graduated with a doctoral degree in parapsychology in"
},
{
"end_time": 872.534,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 843.524,
"text": " Today, 43 years later, I'm not aware of any other example of an accredited university issuing a doctoral diploma that says parapsychology on it. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I always have to point out there are truly hundreds of people who have done dissertations, doctoral level dissertations on parapsychological topics. They've just done it within"
},
{
"end_time": 894.991,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 872.944,
"text": " departments that were willing to sponsor them, typically their degrees were in psychology or philosophy or education, something like that. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 922.807,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 895.503,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Rankings based on root metrics, root score report dated 1H2025. Your results may vary. Must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. Bill must be in the same name as the person who gave you the deal. Additional terms apply. Why did you choose an academic approach to studying the paranormal and how can one apply the scientific method in this field? I could have"
},
{
"end_time": 947.278,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 923.097,
"text": " pursued it as a hobby, which I suppose I had up until that point. But I was very serious. I wanted to get to what had actually happened when I had this powerful dream of my great uncle visiting me. It's the most powerful dream I've ever had in my life, and I'm 76 years old. So"
},
{
"end_time": 971.954,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 947.841,
"text": " You know, if you have one dream like that in your lifetime, it can change you dramatically. And it was so profound. I felt that it was worth devoting the rest of my life to studying it. And I guess you would have to say I'm an intellectual person. I've always enjoyed knowledge."
},
{
"end_time": 1000.964,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 972.295,
"text": " and I've always felt very comfortable in a university environment even though universities in general have not welcomed studies in this field. I mean that's why 43 years later no other degrees in parapsychology have ever been awarded. There is a taboo against it within academia and to be honest I had to fight very hard the closer I got to"
},
{
"end_time": 1030.35,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1001.459,
"text": " Completing my doctoral program at Berkeley, the more obstacles were thrown at me and I had to, you know, overcome each and every obstacle. And then even after I received my degree, the organized groups of people who call themselves skeptics, but are really scoffers in my view, tried to pressure the university to revoke the degree, nearly succeeded. One dean put it to me very"
},
{
"end_time": 1051.357,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1032.278,
"text": " universities do not offer degrees in parapsychology, period. So they tried to undo it and I had to fight a legal battle which I prevailed in and then another legal battle because I had been libeled after they"
},
{
"end_time": 1075.606,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1051.681,
"text": " failed to get the degree revoked. An article appeared in Psychology Today magazine claiming that maybe the degree hadn't really been awarded at all, but if it had been awarded, it certainly wasn't deserved. And I fought a libel battle at that point, six years of legal wrangling, which ended favorably."
},
{
"end_time": 1106.067,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1076.169,
"text": " for me. So my passion has been the intellect. My approach has been intellectual. I think that you can approach the paranormal in many different ways. Some people are more heart-centered, I suppose you could say. And I think that's all very important. But for me, understanding what's going on intellectually has been at the heart of my quest."
},
{
"end_time": 1131.732,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1106.596,
"text": " Of course, being on non-commercial radio where I started and now YouTube where I have a channel and before that on national television, public television around the country, it's always been my desire to share what I've learned intellectually with the public at large."
},
{
"end_time": 1156.817,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1132.483,
"text": " Whose insights have been particular in shaping your understanding of parapsychology? That's a very difficult question to answer. Who is the most impactful guest? Because when I do the interviews, it's very much about being in the here and now, being fully focused and present with whomever I'm with."
},
{
"end_time": 1184.531,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1157.073,
"text": " Each time I'm with somebody, they are the most important person. But if I look back, I would say that starting in the very early work that I did, there were people who became very important mentors for me, who were also guests on the early programs that I did. One such person was Arthur M. Young."
},
{
"end_time": 1215.196,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1186.101,
"text": " a really crucial person in my development. He's the founder of what was then called the Institute for the Study of Consciousness. He was a cosmologist, the author of many books, the reflexive universe, the geometry of meaning, the Bell Notes. He was also, when I say the Bell Notes, that was about his work with Bell aircraft because Arthur Young was the inventor"
},
{
"end_time": 1238.473,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1215.572,
"text": " of the Bell helicopter, the very first commercially licensed helicopter. After he invented the helicopter, he felt that he had earned the right to delve into philosophy. He felt that in his era, all of philosophy had failed to really anticipate and grapple with"
},
{
"end_time": 1265.128,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1238.746,
"text": " the rise of science and technology in the 20th century and that if you really wanted to be a philosopher worth your salt, you first had to demonstrate that you could master a difficult technological problem. And so he set out and when he graduated from Princeton in 1926, as I recall, he set out to"
},
{
"end_time": 1291.527,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1265.52,
"text": " find a problem that he could solve. He went to the Patent Office in Washington D.C. and he discovered there had been 200 attempts to build or to design an aircraft that could hover in midair. And he realized it hadn't been accomplished yet. He would work to try and accomplish it. So between 1926 and the first"
},
{
"end_time": 1318.695,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1291.869,
"text": " Bell aircraft model 47 in 1947. He worked for nearly 20 years on the helicopter problem only to prove that he would then be worthy to be a philosopher. And at that point he got into cosmology. He was deeply interested in psychic phenomenon and astrology. He had the means to travel the world and examine"
},
{
"end_time": 1346.613,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1318.899,
"text": " every interesting example in his era of psychic functioning and created a journal, the Journal for the Study of Consciousness, and opened up this institute in Berkeley where he invited me and my good friend Saul Paul Sirag to move in and become his direct students. So at the same time that I entered my parapsychology program,"
},
{
"end_time": 1372.91,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1346.886,
"text": " I had this remarkable gentleman as a mentor, a person of vast knowledge and who had developed what you are promoting, a theory of everything. Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe is a theory that encompasses all of the sciences and mythology and our deep knowledge of esoteric functioning and"
},
{
"end_time": 1402.363,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1373.234,
"text": " Paranormality and addresses what you could call first principles in philosophy, which are the most difficult of all to address. So he was a very wonderful man and a great influence on me. Another very important early influence person who I interviewed was Gene Houston, the psychologist who had founded a mystery school."
},
{
"end_time": 1429.684,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1403.029,
"text": " something that was a modern version of the ancient teachings of the illucinian mysteries. And again, this was an effort to educate people about the world's great spiritual traditions. And Jean had an exquisite sense of humor. Her father was a professional humorist who"
},
{
"end_time": 1457.841,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1429.906,
"text": " wrote for people like Sid Caesar and many of the great comics in the early years of television. So Jean had a fabulous ability to invoke a theatrical presence. She actually based a lot of her work on the theatrical techniques of Stanislavski, the idea of"
},
{
"end_time": 1487.722,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1458.234,
"text": " an actor embodying the character that they become in the theater. And that was her approach into the paranormal. And it was incredibly profound and exhilarating at the same time. I give you one example. When I attended Jean Houston's Mystery School on one occasion, she was giving a lecture on the Hebrew Kabbalah."
},
{
"end_time": 1513.456,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1488.302,
"text": " based on the writings of the early 20th century Kabbalist, Carlos Suarez, who had written a book called The Cipher of Genesis. And she was explaining to the group, using Kabbalistic principles, how it was that God created the world. In Hebrew,"
},
{
"end_time": 1540.879,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1513.763,
"text": " The sentence is, which translated means, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Kabbalistic idea is if you go through the Hebrew words letter by letter and understand the meaning of each letter, because each letter is also a word and has a meaning, that you will understand"
},
{
"end_time": 1561.084,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1542.654,
"text": " process by which the universe was created. And as she was lecturing, I felt like I got it. I understood at a deeper level this impulse of God to create a universe. And I thought it was the funniest thing in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 1590.247,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1561.698,
"text": " Actually, it struck me as nothing could be more hilarious than God creating the universe. And I was literally rolling on the floor laughing and tears are coming down my eyes. And Jean Houston noticed this and she came up to me and winked and said, oh, you're having an epiphany. She understood that she had an enormous"
},
{
"end_time": 1619.855,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1590.538,
"text": " gift and still does, she's a great teacher still alive working today, an enormous gift to engender moments of spiritual awakening in the people with whom she works. She understood it, I think, as a psychological process, that there were psychological techniques available to all of us to awaken a deeper sense. She used to say, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 1649.65,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1620.845,
"text": " that the human organism is incredibly exquisite. It's like a Stradivarius violin. But most people only learn to play it as if it were a plastic fiddle. But you could learn. You could learn to work with your organism to achieve something more like a concert violin. And so that had just an enormous impact"
},
{
"end_time": 1679.872,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1649.991,
"text": " What's the Reflexive Model of the Universe? Arthur Young's model of the reflexive universe starts with the idea of spirit descending into matter and it goes through four stages as it descends into matter."
},
{
"end_time": 1710.026,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1680.111,
"text": " You could say it starts out at the level of the photon, which in his view was pure spirit, pure light. And God said, let there be light in the beginning, so to speak. And then from the photon, we get particles, typically positrons, electrons and protons. So you have positive and negative charge that comes next. And he saw that as being"
},
{
"end_time": 1733.797,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1711.101,
"text": " equivalent to the development of emotion attraction and repulsion that emotions come and then you get after you have particles like that you get atoms atoms for him represented form form intellect so emotion comes before intellect and then intellect evolves with the very first atoms"
},
{
"end_time": 1757.995,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1734.258,
"text": " And of course from atoms we get molecules and molecules, the most important molecules would be DNA and RNA, the molecules of life itself. Now that's a turning point because at that point with the development of DNA, RNA molecules, consciousness is already embedded in matter."
},
{
"end_time": 1789.087,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1759.138,
"text": " But then matter itself evolves. You get the single-celled organisms, you get plants, you get animals, you get the human kingdom. So there's a turning point, the descent of spirit into matter, and then the ascent of spirit from matter back to spirit. And it's the evolution then of the human being towards what you might think of as a spiritually evolved being."
},
{
"end_time": 1819.053,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1789.548,
"text": " his system is very complex and it incorporates you can think of it as the periodic table of the elements in chemistry but applied to everything the periodic table of everything and in that periodic table he would say the modern human being stands in relationship to who we become our potential as a fully realized human would be equivalent"
},
{
"end_time": 1849.07,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1819.599,
"text": " And you can see it all laid out in these charts of his, to where a clam stands in relationship to the animal kingdom. In other words, if a human being, as an animal, if we represent the epitome of what an animal can become, then we are like clams as far as the possibilities for being human, that there's so much growth"
},
{
"end_time": 1871.681,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1849.377,
"text": " How should we conceptualize consciousness within this model? Arthur Young had a view that would be consistent with the idea that he called the great chain of being, which does represent a hierarchy that you have"
},
{
"end_time": 1896.647,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1872.346,
"text": " animals being more evolved than plants, for example, because they have the quality of mobility that plants don't have, and humans more evolved than animals, and some humans more evolved than other humans. So it was very hierarchical in that sense, and I will say that I had another mentor"
},
{
"end_time": 1925.162,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1896.852,
"text": " Dean Brown. I had the great pleasure of introducing them at one time, Arthur Young and Dean Brown. Dean was a physicist. He had worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and he also became a good friend and a mentor, a great student of the world's religious traditions. He published a book of his translations of the Upanishads, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 1951.049,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1925.503,
"text": " And he differed with Arthur Young on this idea of hierarchy. He said that there's no reason to think animals are more evolved than plants. It could be the other way around. After all, the plants get the animals to do their work for them, such as distributing their seeds and so on. It might be that plants are a higher life form."
},
{
"end_time": 1970.964,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1951.288,
"text": " than animals, which gave me an appreciation for the fact that you can often see things for every supposed truth that you might come upon. There could be an equal and opposite truth looking in the other direction. It's a particularly valuable"
},
{
"end_time": 1999.155,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1971.152,
"text": " lesson, I think, when it comes to the world of politics, where people get very, very locked into particular ways of looking at the world. So I've often found for myself, at least, it's very useful to have a flexible mind, a way of seeing things from both perspectives. I sometimes tell myself, you want to be the lawn and the lawnmower."
},
{
"end_time": 2029.735,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1999.804,
"text": " at the same time. It's good to understand both the ups and the downs of life. What is archetypal synchronistic resonance? It was, I believe in 2007 that I published an article co-authored with Brendan Engen. It was published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and called archetypal synchronistic resonance."
},
{
"end_time": 2056.186,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2030.418,
"text": " This story begins many, many years before that. I guess I would take it back to my early years in television, in the original Thinking Allowed public television series. I interviewed Marty Rossman, a medical doctor in Mill Valley, California, who was a specialist in hypnosis."
},
{
"end_time": 2086.988,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2057.295,
"text": " He was going to introduce me to the idea of getting in touch with your inner healing advisor. So we recorded this. The whole thing is on video where Marty Rossman is hypnotizing me and he's saying, and now your inner healing advisor will appear. And in my mind, I saw a man approaching me wearing a toga and I thought to myself,"
},
{
"end_time": 2116.305,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2087.227,
"text": " I'd like to improve my public speaking abilities. So I'd like this inner healing advisor to be Demosthenes, the great Greek orator who could help me with my speaking abilities. And as this individual approached me in my mind, and I'm expecting now to have a conversation with Demosthenes, he said to me, I'm not Demosthenes."
},
{
"end_time": 2145.862,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2116.578,
"text": " I said, well, who are you? He said, I'm Seneca. I didn't know much about Seneca. It's a name you hear, you know, some ancient person, a poet, a playwright, a philosopher. I knew very little about Seneca, but I asked him in this hypnotic experience, well, now that you're here and you're Seneca, you're my healing advisor, what would you like me to do? And he said,"
},
{
"end_time": 2174.258,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2146.374,
"text": " study my life, which was, that was odd. I woke up, I came out of the trance. It's all on video. I had this silly grin on my face because it felt so real. And I explained what had happened. And I began studying the life of this ancient Roman statesman, philosopher, playwright. And I"
},
{
"end_time": 2204.394,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2174.497,
"text": " realized after studying two things. First of all, he was one of the most interesting people I'd ever encountered in history. He literally ran the Roman Empire for five years. He was the tutor to Nero when Nero was still a youngster. And as Nero's tutor, tutor to the emperor, he ran the empire. And it was known as the Silver Age of Rome, one of the best periods in Roman history."
},
{
"end_time": 2234.462,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2204.753,
"text": " But he also wrote plays and he wrote a great deal of philosophy. He was one of the leading stoic philosophers. And at the end of his life, he got implicated as being part of a conspiracy to murder Nero. Now, he wasn't really part of the conspiracy, but apparently the conspirators wanted to install him as the emperor once they"
},
{
"end_time": 2261.783,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2234.65,
"text": " did away with Nero because he had such a reputation and Nero learned about all of this and quashed the conspiracy and sent a centurion to order Seneca to take his life. Seneca is at a dinner party at the time and the centurion comes in with orders from the emperor, you have to take your life and"
},
{
"end_time": 2288.626,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2262.637,
"text": " Seneca looks at him and says, can I at least make out my last will and testament? The centurion says, no, no time for that. You have to take your own life and do it now. So Seneca turned to his guests at the dinner party and he said, I bequeath to you my life. Study my life. Those were his last words. And I had such a"
},
{
"end_time": 2319.343,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2289.514,
"text": " shot of realization when it occurred to me that his very last words were the ones that I heard him speak in this hypnotic experience, so he became a very important influence in my life. Well, years later, Brendan Engen, who I didn't know, who became the co-author with me of this paper, said he had had a psychic reading from a channeler named Kevin Ryerson,"
},
{
"end_time": 2348.575,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2320.026,
"text": " Kevin happened to have been my friend and knew all about the Seneca story. And he said, Kevin told him that I had been Seneca in a past lifetime and that he had been Seneca's writing partner, I think, named Lucretius. Seneca wrote many letters to Lucretius that were letters of advice and have been published and"
},
{
"end_time": 2378.746,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2350.077,
"text": " He said to me, well, maybe we knew each other in a past life. And I wrote back and said, no, I don't think so. I don't believe I was Seneca. Seneca is a hero to me. But I did think that it could be an example of synchronicity, that there's some synchronistic connection. And the reason I say that in particular is because the day I got the email from Brendan Engen, I was traveling"
},
{
"end_time": 2402.773,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2378.951,
"text": " I was actually going to Spain at the time to visit Córdova in Spain, which is the city where Seneca was born, where there's a big statue of Seneca. And I thought that's synchronistic, that he approached me at the very moment I'm traveling to the birthplace of Seneca. So we interacted"
},
{
"end_time": 2429.821,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2403.131,
"text": " for quite a while, and it turned out many different synchronicities began happening between myself and Brendan that seemed to support this idea of somehow a synchronistic connection with a historical person. It didn't mean that we were those people in our past lives, but that there was a resonance that expressed itself through synchronicities"
},
{
"end_time": 2459.07,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2430.572,
"text": " On one occasion, for example, Brendan Engen went to visit a bookstore and a book literally fell off the bookshelf and hit him on the head. And he picked it up and he saw on the, it was a book called The Looking Glass God. But when he opened the book up, he saw my name in it. It had been my book. I had sold it apparently to this bookstore and it fell on his head. And so he and I"
},
{
"end_time": 2487.756,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2460.213,
"text": " agreed at that point, we would co-author a paper that this was in effect a new theory of the paranormal. It was particularly relevant for people who felt they had a past life connection with important historical figures, that it might be another way of looking at at least some cases of reincarnation. And because I still don't think"
},
{
"end_time": 2516.834,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2488.763,
"text": " I was Seneca in a past life, although I will say this because I look to see what would confirm that would be if I actually had memories of being Seneca. And I've searched my memory for that and tried to see, do I have any memories of having been in ancient Rome like that? And only one brief moment lasted less than one second."
},
{
"end_time": 2547.671,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2518.677,
"text": " I felt that I was in Nero's palace with Seneca. So that's the most meager possibility of a past life, although it felt very real for one second. But the idea of synchronistic resonance is that we do have connections with other people that express themselves synchronistically. Jane Houston"
},
{
"end_time": 2574.189,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2547.978,
"text": " When I described what had happened to her, to me, with Seneca, she said she had a similar connection with the ancient Greek philosopher Proclus. When she was even a child, she'd hear in her head a little voice that would say, Hocus Pocus, where is Proclus? And Proclus, who was a great neoplatonic philosopher"
},
{
"end_time": 2603.353,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2574.957,
"text": " The last of the great neoplatonic philosophers has become an important psychic influence in her life in the same way. And occasionally I run into other people who feel deeply touched by a historical figure where there are many different synchronistic events that seem to reinforce the connection. So that's what we call archetypal synchronistic resonance."
},
{
"end_time": 2633.797,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2604.172,
"text": " Could you delve into your personal encounters with psychic phenomenon and what convinced you about the possibility of reincarnation? Well, as a matter of fact, I did an interview back in the days I was doing radio interviews for Wisdom Radio. I was approached by a medical doctor in San Francisco named Walter Semkew, and he had just published a book about astrology, a very clever book, and I'd interviewed him about astrology and"
},
{
"end_time": 2663.968,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2634.48,
"text": " He noticed when he was visiting me that I happened to, and I still own the URL very early in the days of the internet, I claimed the URL for WilliamJames.com. William James being the founder of American psychology, a great pioneer in the field of parapsychology, or as it was known in his day, psychical research. And William James"
},
{
"end_time": 2693.848,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2666.015,
"text": " I really respected him, which is why I acquired that website. And Walter Semke, when he learned of it, said, well, maybe you were William James in a past lifetime. And I thought about it and I said, I don't think so. Once again, like Seneca, he's my hero. I wouldn't have been him. I wish I could have been, but if I had been William James in a past lifetime,"
},
{
"end_time": 2712.927,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2694.036,
"text": " imagined I'd be much more accomplished in this lifetime. He said to me, well, here's what he was learning. He hadn't yet published his book, Return of the Revolutionaries, which was research. He was engaged at the time. He felt he could identify"
},
{
"end_time": 2739.753,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2714.087,
"text": " the past lives of different people. And in his book, Return of the Revolutionaries, he felt he could identify people alive today who had been in a past lifetime, some of the founding fathers of the American nation. And so he believed I might have been William James. And he said the way you could determine that, in his opinion,"
},
{
"end_time": 2769.718,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2740.299,
"text": " was to look at the people who are the close people today in your life, the closest ones, and see if they match up with people who were known to be close to the past life person, to William James. He said, if you've got a number of people who are close to you, who are similar in personality traits and in physical features to people who were known to be close to William James, that would be"
},
{
"end_time": 2795.947,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2770.009,
"text": " a way of identifying it because, in his view, people reincarnate in cohorts. If you're part of a group of people who were very important and influential, that that cohort would reincarnate together lifetime after lifetime. That's what he was observing, he thought, with the founders of the American Republic."
},
{
"end_time": 2825.333,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2796.886,
"text": " I did that. I picked a list of about 10 people I knew very well, and I did feel that you could kind of match them up. This is very imprecise. This is not scientific. It's more artistic and intuitive, but I came up with 10 people who seemed to match up, people who were my mentors and my family members and good friends who seemed to be"
},
{
"end_time": 2854.258,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2825.742,
"text": " that you could equate each one of them with somebody who was known to have been close to William James. So I wouldn't regard that as conclusive by any means, but I found it to be interesting. I've not accepted that I was William James in a past lifetime. Once again, because I don't have any of those memories. And I did submit to past life regression."
},
{
"end_time": 2883.848,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2855.35,
"text": " One of the people I had interviewed, Charles Tremont, a medical doctor, was doing hypnotic past life regressions. He tried to take me back over and over to a past life as William James. A few little bits of potentially interesting information that I've never been able to verify came out, such as the idea that he was called Billion."
},
{
"end_time": 2913.985,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2884.258,
"text": " as a child, instead of William. But the interesting thing, I suppose, was on every session, at some point, I would have to come out of hypnosis because I was getting a stomach ache, of all things. I'm not prone to that. But William James was. And, of course, I knew that about William James. I read his history."
},
{
"end_time": 2944.36,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2914.445,
"text": " In spite of all of these clues, I never accepted, and I still don't accept, that I was William James in a past life. But I did give Walter permission in his book, Return of the Revolutionaries, to write up his hypothesis that I was, as long as he pointed out that I personally don't accept it, which he did. And he added that, of course, William James wouldn't have accepted it either."
},
{
"end_time": 2971.783,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2944.974,
"text": " He took my non-acceptance as further evidence that I was William James in a past lifetime. All I can say is I think it's another example of some kind of synchronistic resonance that in some ways I do feel like I'm following in the footsteps of William James, but it's very important"
},
{
"end_time": 3002.807,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2972.927,
"text": " to distinguish between hardcore scientific evidence and things that you arrive at intuitively that are maybe important, very meaningful to you, but are not established as facts. And one way to look at it scientifically would be let's take the case of Madame Curie and her husband Pierre and Marie Curie."
},
{
"end_time": 3030.811,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 3002.995,
"text": " They were great scientists, Nobel laureates, who discovered radium and really initiated the whole line of research into radioactivity, which is crucial to our modern understanding of science. At the same time, both of the curies were engaged in psychical research. They attended seances. They were involved in mediumship."
},
{
"end_time": 3060.623,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3031.152,
"text": " They studied the great medium of the early 20th century, Eusapia Palladino, and Pierre Curie, for his part, was convinced. He said, I saw the table levitate and slowly float around the room during one of these sciences. It was very meaningful to him. But Marie Curie put it this way. She said, until we can reproduce it in the laboratory, it is not science."
},
{
"end_time": 3091.374,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3061.374,
"text": " In your series In Presence, which I'll link in the description, you mentioned fragmented reincarnation. So what is that? Please expand."
},
{
"end_time": 3121.237,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3092.022,
"text": " Let's ask ourselves the question, what happens when we die? The Egyptian view is very interesting. For thousands of years, the Egyptian culture was very stable, and the central focus of that culture was the afterlife. One of the great documents that has come out of that culture is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which goes into very great"
},
{
"end_time": 3149.889,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3121.476,
"text": " lengths to describe the journey of the soul after death. And of course the enormous economic activity in ancient Egypt had to do with embalming and building pyramids and so on. The Greeks thought the Egyptians were far too focused on the afterlife and death. But one of their ideas of the Egyptians is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3165.077,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3150.418,
"text": " The soul is not a single entity. The Egyptians had ten different words for different aspects of the soul, and the idea is that they might have different destinies. It's possible"
},
{
"end_time": 3195.435,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3165.913,
"text": " at least to consider that when you die, some part of you might be reincarnated as one person and another part of you might break away and be reincarnated as part of a different person. You can look at biological organisms in which this sort of thing happens, colonies of cells, for example, that divide up. A cell can divide up into many other cells."
},
{
"end_time": 3224.224,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3195.708,
"text": " And reincarnation might work that way. I can't say it's conclusive, but it's certainly worth speculating on. We have very good scientific evidence at this point. I regard it as scientific, even though you can't yet reproduce it in the laboratory, but clear empirical observations. Let me put it that way. We're not at the point of reproducing"
},
{
"end_time": 3254.684,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3224.753,
"text": " reincarnation in the laboratory, but we have many good qualified observations that young children, for example, report memories of past lives. So it is good reason to think that some people at least reincarnate in the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies. They have a database of some 2700 individuals who were"
},
{
"end_time": 3281.937,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3255.333,
"text": " young children, and almost as soon as they can begin to talk, they describe their past lives. So we might say we've got evidence of the 27, I think it's 1700, what are regarded as solved cases, which means that the information provided by these young children was sufficient for researchers or family members to actually locate"
},
{
"end_time": 3312.108,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3282.312,
"text": " and identify the person who the child is talking about that they say they were in a past lifetime. So you might say we got empirical evidence that 1700 individuals have reincarnated. It doesn't mean everybody will reincarnate or that here's the thing, part of you might reincarnate and another part of you might move a higher brain in the afterlife, which according to"
},
{
"end_time": 3341.391,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3312.363,
"text": " the accounts of, we get through mediumship and other channeling and other resources, people who have been dead sometimes for decades come back and start describing what it's like, the different stages they go through. So to my way of thinking, it's entirely possible that an individual, a great soul like a William James might"
},
{
"end_time": 3367.278,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3342.415,
"text": " be divided up and might express itself in multiple people. And in fact, there are accounts after William James died, there are numerous accounts coming from mediums and channelers of people who feel they're in touch with William James. So if you take them all seriously, and I'm not sure that we should,"
},
{
"end_time": 3397.807,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3367.841,
"text": " is I haven't studied them in detail to get a sense of their authenticity. I think it's a possibility that it works that way. Other people would disagree with me. They would say that the idea of the self, a unitary self that goes from past life to past life, that's the way it works. And all I can say is at this point, we don't have enough data to know."
},
{
"end_time": 3424.599,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3398.285,
"text": " what it's like. I expect when I look at the many, many different accounts of the afterlife, I expect that there are more possibilities than we can even imagine. From your cases, have you identified any uniform processes that occur after death? Yeah, there are many patterns that can be observed"
},
{
"end_time": 3450.811,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3425.06,
"text": " from the accounts that we have. I mean, 1700 solved cases is actually a fairly large number. I can tell you, for example, that most of those cases involve males. And most of those cases involve a violent death of the previous person, which I think is more likely"
},
{
"end_time": 3478.592,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3451.101,
"text": " who occur if you were a male in a previous life. You're more likely to have had a violent death than if you were a female. And also it does seem as if the sex is the same in 90% of the past lives and about 10% people apparently change sex, which has led some researchers to speculate that cases of"
},
{
"end_time": 3506.817,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3479.343,
"text": " homosexuality, cases of trans, like what we call today trans, people who feel that they are born in a body which doesn't represent how they feel in terms of their gender, but those cases may be people who recently transitioned from one gender to another. So there's some interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 3534.957,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3507.056,
"text": " theorizing along those lines. Those are some of the main things we know, but we can also say that the personalities do seem to be similar from lifetime to lifetime. The traditional religious idea of karma that if you're a bad person in one lifetime, you're going to be punished for it in the next lifetime."
},
{
"end_time": 3563.097,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3535.418,
"text": " That doesn't seem to be supported by the empirical evidence that we have right now, but it does seem to be the case that the tendencies that you had in a previous lifetime, both your desires, your interests, your personality, your occupational tendencies, those seem to carry forth. It's what the Hindus would call samskaras,"
},
{
"end_time": 3593.797,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3563.916,
"text": " Can you please elaborate on the differences in reincarnation studies between Eastern and Western cultures? I remember a discussion about those in Southeast Asia where the belief in reincarnation is widespread."
},
{
"end_time": 3623.456,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3594.087,
"text": " That is, they tend to come back quicker. Is that correct? It is correct that the cases of reincarnation that come from Asia and the bulk of cases do come from Asia in countries where reincarnation is accepted. The interim period between lives is shorter on average. It could be on average maybe just a matter of months between the death"
},
{
"end_time": 3651.715,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3623.865,
"text": " of one individual and the birth of the next life. And in the Occident and Western cultures, it could be years. So there is a real difference, but there's a limited number of cases. And one of the most famous cases in the Western literature is the James Leininger case where"
},
{
"end_time": 3679.445,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3652.398,
"text": " He remembered, had a vivid memory of having died in World War II and then was reborn decades later. So, you know, because there's a small number of cases and one or two cases like that with decades in between, it really makes the average of the Western cases much longer. I don't know that we have enough data"
},
{
"end_time": 3706.186,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3679.718,
"text": " yet to draw a firm conclusion about it, but from the data we do have, it certainly appears as if there's a distinction between the oriental and the accidental cases. How does your belief about what may happen after death relate to what actually happens? I know you surmise that we can affect what occurs after death via our beliefs. How do we know if any of this is true?"
},
{
"end_time": 3736.544,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3706.852,
"text": " Yes, Professor Jeffrey Kreipel, a wonderful philosopher and chair of the religious studies department at Rice University, has made this point exactly that the afterlife is dependent upon how we think about it and how our cultures seem to think about it. The way I view it is that there's a very thin boundary between our physical existence and the afterlife."
},
{
"end_time": 3757.108,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3736.937,
"text": " You might say the way I did some very interesting interviews with Stephanie Stevens, a Jungian psychologist who explained from the Jungian point of view, the afterlife is part of the collective unconscious that we experience, that"
},
{
"end_time": 3787.039,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3757.295,
"text": " We're so close to it. For example, my dream of Uncle Harry, many, many people report visitations from deceased friends and relatives in their dreams. The boundary is that thin. And she notes Jung himself, when he describes a dream, he'll often say, this deceased person visited me in a dream, very specifically, rather than saying I had a dream about such and such."
},
{
"end_time": 3808.882,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3787.227,
"text": " a person. It wasn't just a dream image. Jung seemed to be very clear that he could distinguish between visitations from the deceased versus a dream of the deceased. So that seems to be the boundary between everyday consciousness and the afterlife."
},
{
"end_time": 3838.66,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3809.07,
"text": " very very thin boundary and Carl Jung in particular developed the technique of active imagination as a way to explore the boundary at some point as you're imagining what it might be like you move from the realm of imagination into what the philosopher Henri Corbin called the realm of the imaginal. The imaginal realm is very subtle"
},
{
"end_time": 3860.674,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3838.865,
"text": " It's not physical, but it is very real. It would be like when Seneca appeared to me in my hypnotic experience and said, study my life. I only learned from studying his life that there was something very real. Those were his last words. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3879.821,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3861.766,
"text": " Anri Korban, for example, became a Sufi, part of Islamic mysticism, and he was very interested in studying the Sufi philosophy of illumination as developed by the 12th century mystic Sur of Ardi."
},
{
"end_time": 3909.36,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3879.821,
"text": " And he felt that he had entered into an imaginary world in which superiority came to him, taught him directly the teachings of illumination. So that would be an example where imagination leads to something that is more real than mere fantasy. Have you formed an idea of what you call a universal cosmological structure? What might that look like?"
},
{
"end_time": 3939.701,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3909.957,
"text": " You know, it's very subtle, it's shifting, it doesn't stay the same from moment to moment. But I think it's fair to say if I were to try and map it out schematically, we have the physical world. We know, or we believe actually, that the physical world is real. I think most people would agree to that, that what we experience through our senses is real."
},
{
"end_time": 3966.834,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3940.367,
"text": " At least most of the time, it's physical, like you can knock on wood and have a sense of its hardness and physicality. And then we have this realm of pure imagination, you know, Walt Disney and pirates and fairies and cartoons and fantasy. There's no doubt."
},
{
"end_time": 3996.237,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3967.09,
"text": " whatsoever, that human beings can have a very active fantasy life. And what I'm suggesting is that there's a third realm. It's somewhere in between fantasy and physicality. It's as real ontologically speaking. Ontologically means the philosophy of what is real. Ontologically real, but it's not physical. Of course, there are many things"
},
{
"end_time": 4017.619,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3996.544,
"text": " like that, that are ontologically real and not physical. Plato described that as the realm of forms, for example, the perfect circle. It will never be physical, but it's a real mathematical construct. Mathematicians by and large are Platonists,"
},
{
"end_time": 4044.241,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 4017.875,
"text": " in this sense. But you can build on that. You can say in addition to physical forms in the Platonic realm there are archetypes, there are entities, there may be ancestors, there may be spirits that are also very real autonomous non-physical entities that exist. This is what"
},
{
"end_time": 4074.377,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 4045.196,
"text": " Basically the religion of spiritualism is based on the idea that the spirits of the dead or maybe even archetypal entities or deities are very real. They are not just products of our imagination. And of course this will always be very controversial because as Marie Curie said, until you can reproduce it in the laboratory it's not scientific. But from a philosophical"
},
{
"end_time": 4100.572,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4074.923,
"text": " point of view. I think it has a lot of merit. Have you ever met Robert Monroe and recognized by the way for his infamous out-of-body experiences? I did have the opportunity to interview Robert Monroe back in my days at KPFA radio. He's one of the first people as a matter of fact to came across and visited me in the studio there and"
},
{
"end_time": 4129.224,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4100.998,
"text": " You got to say his work and out-of-body experiences has to some extent been replicated in the laboratory. Bob Monroe worked with Charlie Tartt, who was one of my dissertation advisors at Berkeley. And they set up experiments in which Monroe would be asked to leave his body in a room where there was a shelf near the ceiling."
},
{
"end_time": 4159.138,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4129.718,
"text": " that had been placed. So an object that was on the shelf couldn't be viewed from where Monroe was lying down on a bed. But if he could leave his body, float up to the ceiling and look above the shelf, he could see what was on the shelf and he was asked to report on it. And he was able to successfully report on it. Other more sophisticated studies on out-of-body experiences were conducted"
},
{
"end_time": 4181.203,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4159.753,
"text": " by Carlos Osis at the American Society for Psychical Research back in the 1970s. He worked with an out-of-body experiencer named Alex Tanis, and they developed a device which was very interesting. It projected images optically"
},
{
"end_time": 4211.613,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4181.698,
"text": " But in order to know what those images were, you had to be positioned in a certain location near the device, otherwise you couldn't see it. And once again, Alec Tanis was able to describe the target. Now, does that mean they actually left their body, that they traveled in what esoteric people would call the astral body or the etheric body to a location"
},
{
"end_time": 4240.64,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4212.381,
"text": " excuse me, to a location in physical space or were they simply using remote viewing or clairvoyance? That's kind of the conundrum because we have very good laboratory evidence that clairvoyance exists, remote viewing exists. A person sitting calmly in a chair can access information"
},
{
"end_time": 4264.275,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4240.896,
"text": " anywhere in time and space, and they don't need to leave their body to do it. So that creates a big complication, not only for out-of-body research, but for all the research involving the afterlife and survival after death. Could it be the case that"
},
{
"end_time": 4282.039,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4265.333,
"text": " People reporting contact with spirits and information like a spirit comes through a medium and they describe all kinds of details about their life when they were alive that were unknown to anybody in the room at the time and only through extensive research"
},
{
"end_time": 4311.169,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4282.398,
"text": " could be validated. There are a lot of examples of this, but does that mean that it was really that person, their spirit coming through the afterlife, or was it simply a case of the medium using their clairvoyance to access what you could call the Akashic records or what William James called the cosmic reservoir of all knowledge and come up with that information?"
},
{
"end_time": 4340.52,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4311.51,
"text": " Many people in parapsychology today argue that that's the way it works, that we know living people have psychic abilities and because of that it's very hard to prove scientifically that such a thing as post-mortem consciousness is real. Now in my case I don't have any question about it and the reason is because"
},
{
"end_time": 4365.52,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4340.794,
"text": " My experience, my dream visitation with my uncle Harry was so powerful, so profound, so far removed from normal consciousness that I was just crying tears of joy that for me there's no doubt. But if you haven't had such an experience, it would be very natural to doubt."
},
{
"end_time": 4388.814,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4366.681,
"text": " Do Eastern traditions or religions offer something different about understanding post-death? One of the reasons that I produce so many videos on the New Thinking Allowed channel, almost a new video every day, is that I feel we are the inheritors of the esoteric cultures that were developed"
},
{
"end_time": 4419.172,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4389.224,
"text": " all over the world. It's no longer the case that just because, for example, I was born into a Jewish family that I would only be pursuing the Jewish traditions of mists in the afterlife and so on. We are the inheritors of all traditions, whether it's Zoroastrian or Hindu or Shamanic or Christian or Jewish or"
},
{
"end_time": 4440.452,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4419.343,
"text": " Islamic. I believe that we are all global citizens, and my goal is to share with the audience that I have on the New Thinking Allowed channel all of these cultures, because I feel that if you want to have a"
},
{
"end_time": 4470.606,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4441.084,
"text": " of the various nuances and windows into this extraordinarily vast world of the human psyche. You need to understand them all. And, of course, that's a never-ending process. But I've gained enormously from practicing yoga, from studying meditation, from being aware of the teachings of Zoroaster or"
},
{
"end_time": 4499.07,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4470.896,
"text": " understanding the use plant medicines, understanding, of course, many different modern scientific approaches, biofeedback, or, as Robert Monroe developed, the hemisync notion of the binaural beat effect and how that affects consciousness. It's incumbent upon anyone who is a serious, I would call them psychonaut, an explorer of the inner depths to have"
},
{
"end_time": 4529.189,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4499.531,
"text": " a certain level of familiarity with the great world traditions involving consciousness. Are the implications of parapsychological tests like the afterlife or higher conscious abilities irreconcilable with the scientific worldview? And if not, can you even claim to scientifically study them then? How do you bridge these? Well, imagine you're going to see a movie. When you enter into the theater,"
},
{
"end_time": 4558.268,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4529.667,
"text": " You buy your ticket and you walk into the theater, you sit down, you know that you're about to watch a work of fiction. But what you do at that point is what scholars call a willing suspension of disbelief. While you're in the movie, you let go of that awareness that this is a work of fiction. You accept it as real. You enter into the story and"
},
{
"end_time": 4586.613,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4558.746,
"text": " People, well, when I was a student in criminology, which is a branch of sociology, there is a form of research there called participant observer research. If you want to understand, you know, what it's like to be a criminal, you can hang out with criminals and you can become part of their culture. And so you will willingly suspend"
},
{
"end_time": 4602.005,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4587.09,
"text": " your disbelief in that lifestyle. You will willingly suspend the idea that you're actually a criminology graduate student so that you can enter into their world. But then later on, you can step back"
},
{
"end_time": 4631.357,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4602.5,
"text": " and examine it from what might be thought of as a more objective way. In other words, you can have both. You can have scientific objectivity and you can also maintain the openness to enter in fully to the subject that you're studying. It's hard to do both of those at the same time. I don't advise doing them at the same time, but you can"
},
{
"end_time": 4657.363,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4631.971,
"text": " In the course of your investigation, you will have moments when you step back and moments when you really enter into that worldview. I did a lengthy study, a 10-year field study with a man called Ted Owens. I've written a book about him called The PK Man, and when I'm working with him, naturally you want to enter into his world."
},
{
"end_time": 4682.005,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4657.619,
"text": " You don't want to be constantly saying, no, this can't be, that can't be. What about this? What about that? The goal is to understand him as fully as possible and then later on to step back and try to be more objective about it. Could you explain what macro psychokinesis is and if there's any substantive evidence supporting it?"
},
{
"end_time": 4711.647,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4682.688,
"text": " macro psychokinesis is one of the most controversial areas within parapsychology and even long-time parapsychologists have a very difficult time with it. It seems as if it's okay if people can influence the fall of dice, for example, in a way that's slightly significantly significant, but to"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.009,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4711.886,
"text": " For example, when Uri Geller was going around touching spoons or causing them to bend without even touching them at all, parapsychologists were horrified. And the reason they were horrified is because, first of all, if they were to document this, nobody would believe them. They would be regarded as crazy. And second of all, and probably even more"
},
{
"end_time": 4770.845,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4743.251,
"text": " If you can bend a spoon, does that mean you can stop somebody's heart? Or as a cartoon I saw once, there are a couple of pilots in an airplane and they're saying, I don't know what you spending spoons is. And then you see the airplane kind of bending in half. The ethical implications of extraordinary parapsychological abilities are frightening."
},
{
"end_time": 4798.456,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4771.22,
"text": " And I don't think there's a way to get rid of that. If somebody has the power of macro psychokinesis, can they hack someone and cause them to die? As is a tradition around the world and shamanic cultures and cultures that have a history of sorcery. And there was an anthropologist named Ronald Rose, for example, who wrote a study of"
},
{
"end_time": 4827.858,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4798.695,
"text": " a technique known as the pointing of the bones, which was a method used in certain cultures in the Caribbean to heck someone to the point where they die. And at that time anthropologists had developed a theory that the reason people die after they've been hexed is because first of all, they know they've been hexed and that triggers a stress response."
},
{
"end_time": 4857.312,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4828.251,
"text": " on their part, and they die from the stress of knowing that they've been hexed. And Raoul Rose accepted that theory. It was standard. It's consistent with materialistic worldview. But then he encountered cases in his own work as an anthropologist in which the people who were being hexed didn't know they were being hexed. In fact, they were in another country, far away from the"
},
{
"end_time": 4886.425,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4857.517,
"text": " Caribbean culture where the hexing took place and yet they died nevertheless. So one way to think of that is it could be telepathic. There's a theory about healing that is that it's just a telepathic suggestion. I give you the telepathic suggestion that you will be healed and then you use that to activate your own innate healing abilities."
},
{
"end_time": 4915.145,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4887.363,
"text": " Similarly with hexing, you get a telepathic message that you're being hexed, and that triggers the stress response that causes you to die. So there's a fine line between macro psychokinesis, you could say, and telepathy. It's hard to know where to exactly draw the lines. Now, in the case of Ted Owens, he specialized"
},
{
"end_time": 4942.995,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4915.418,
"text": " in large scale phenomena. He performed many demonstrations during his lifetime of involving things like heat waves in the middle of winter, cold waves in the middle of summer, moving hurricanes around, tornadoes, volcanoes, earthquakes, large scale power blackouts."
},
{
"end_time": 4973.251,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4943.677,
"text": " It's very difficult to research these things because they're often described in kind of vague terms. If I say a heat wave in the middle of winter, that could mean many different things. Nevertheless, over and over and over again, I have it by files over, I think, well over 150 examples of such demonstrations, and it seems over and over and over again"
},
{
"end_time": 5003.422,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4973.66,
"text": " Roughly two-thirds of the time depending on how you want to count because there's a lot of gray areas in there things seem to work out as he said they would sometimes very precisely On one occasion he called me up on Christmas Eve 1985 I'll never forget this because he has his big booming voice and he called me on the phone and said Jeffrey"
},
{
"end_time": 5028.37,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 5004.036,
"text": " This is the most important phone call you will ever receive.\" And he said, it's up to you now. You have to inform the United States government not to launch the next space shuttle, because if they do, my UFOs, he felt that he was in contact with"
},
{
"end_time": 5056.578,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5028.814,
"text": " aliens in a UFO. He said, those UFOs are going to knock it right out of the sky. I, of course, had no influence with the U.S. government. I have never had a relationship with the U.S. government other than being designated as a conscientious objector on one occasion. And I suppose getting Social Security. But I have no voice."
},
{
"end_time": 5085.401,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5056.903,
"text": " there and i didn't think even if i had a voice anyone would care what i had to say so i ignored him and then when the challenger space shuttle exploded about a month later i was shaken to my bones and the question is was that an example of macro psychokinesis i can't say i mean he claimed he was in telepathic contact with aliens and they did it uh"
},
{
"end_time": 5111.254,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5085.862,
"text": " So maybe it was precognition, and of course the official reports talk about the... ...to be explained completely by negligence on the part of the NASA authorities who let that space shuttle launch in the first place. We'll never know. But the reason I bring up this example is because it was very precise."
},
{
"end_time": 5133.746,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5111.817,
"text": " It was, there was no question he was referring to the challenger. And he was very clear that if that shuttle were launched, it would be knocked out of the sky. So there's no denying the precision of what he said in that instance, whether it was macro psychokinesis"
},
{
"end_time": 5154.002,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5133.916,
"text": " or precognition, I can't say. And that's one of the reason that parapsychologists use the word psi, psi, but it's refers to the Greek letter psi as a nomenclature that refers to all kinds of parapsychological events, whether it's"
},
{
"end_time": 5177.073,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5154.65,
"text": " telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, or psychokinesis is because philosophically they're very hard to distinguish one from the other. And the example of the Challenger space shuttle illustrates that very well. So there are people in parapsychology, like Ed May,"
},
{
"end_time": 5200.572,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5177.517,
"text": " very prominent parapsychologist who received government funding for many, many years to explore remote viewing. He maintains that it can all boil down to precognition, that there never has to be an example of psychokinesis. And there are others, like Stephen Browdy, the former editor of the"
},
{
"end_time": 5227.005,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5200.845,
"text": " Journal of Scientific Exploration, who are more inclined to think that psychokinesis and macro psychokinesis is very real. In his instance, as a young man, he witnessed table levitations, tables in his presence rising up. He couldn't even pull them down. They seem to be rising up of their own accord. And he could think of how do you explain that in terms of precognition?"
},
{
"end_time": 5247.892,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5227.568,
"text": " It's got to be macro psychokinesis, and it's been going on for centuries. There are documented cases like that going back to at least the 1800s, I think much earlier, in fact. But because they're relatively rare and so unusual,"
},
{
"end_time": 5276.323,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5248.268,
"text": " Most people are afraid to report it. They say, if I tell people that I witnessed this table levitating by itself, they'll think I'm crazy. So one of the major reasons that people are afraid of even talking about their psychic experiences is exactly that, that people will think I'm crazy. And macro psychokinesis is right at the top of the list of"
},
{
"end_time": 5306.527,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5276.527,
"text": " the taboo topics for that reason. Did Ted Owens give you any indication as to when at least he claimed his ability started? Ted Owens came from a family in which psychic functioning was taken for granted. His grandmother was and his grandfather was a dowser. The grandmother was something of a medium. It often is the case that this sort of thing runs in family. So he had native talent."
},
{
"end_time": 5336.459,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5307.807,
"text": " I don't think there's any question of that. But at the same time, he felt that he had been visited by aliens. He felt that they had actually encountered him on a strange occasion when he was driving in the middle of the desert, as I recall, in Texas, and found himself surrounded by tarantula spiders. And then there was missing time"
},
{
"end_time": 5365.265,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5336.664,
"text": " and he felt that they'd actually operated on his brain in a way to enhance his psychic abilities. He also felt that they had been working with him since childhood so that he had in his early life many different occupations. Very strange things. He was a bullwhip artist in a circus sideshow. He had a knife throwing act. He was a high speed typist. He worked as"
},
{
"end_time": 5382.278,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5365.452,
"text": " an idea man for a railroad. He was a jazz drummer at one time and he felt that they guided him into all of these professions so that his mind was sufficiently flexible that he could work with their"
},
{
"end_time": 5412.892,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5383.046,
"text": " system of telepathic communication, which was involved symbols and he could send symbols and receive symbols from them and he would understand what they meant and he knew how to craft symbols to send to them so that they would do things that he asked them to do. That's the way he viewed it. It's very interesting because on the occasion that I first met Ted Owens, which was a conference in London,"
},
{
"end_time": 5443.114,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5413.148,
"text": " sponsored by the Parascience Foundation at the University of London in 1976. There was another speaker at the conference, another person who was known for macro psychokinesis. Her name was Suzanne Padfield. She was the wife of a well-known physicist named Ted Baston, and she had worked for over a decade in what was known at the time as the Laboratory of Paraphysicists."
},
{
"end_time": 5471.544,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5443.916,
"text": " they had set up experiments with light beams to see if she could bend a beam of light with her mind. Now that would be another example of macro psychokinesis at a subtle level. And they claimed that they had many examples of her bending a beam of light. And at the same meeting where Ted Owens introduced himself to me, she stood up and she said, you know, I used to think,"
},
{
"end_time": 5493.08,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5472.346,
"text": " that it was spirits I was working with who performed these activities like poltergeists. But gradually I came to realize that I was using the idea of spirits as psychic support figures because if they were doing it then I didn't have to take any responsibility."
},
{
"end_time": 5522.739,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5493.473,
"text": " So that freed me up from feeling guilty or feeling self-important or anything. I could simply say, well, they did it. I had nothing to do with it. She said, but I realized over time that actually it was my gokinesis and I could do it. I didn't need to credit the invisible spirits. I could take responsibility for it myself. And she felt this was the case with other psychics."
},
{
"end_time": 5552.739,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5523.08,
"text": " as well, like Ted Owens, who credited it's all the space intelligences. Although the way he put it was that I have some ability, but they do the big, the heavy lifting comes from them. It changed over time. I was never sure when I worked with him what to make of it, except for the fact that he claimed he could produce UFO sightings and did so on many occasions."
},
{
"end_time": 5576.869,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5552.995,
"text": " So including one instance in which, again, this could be precognition, he called me up one day, we're doing a project to see if you could produce UFOs. And he said, there's one coming. He said, I can feel it. He says, this is going to be one of the biggest UFO sightings ever. It will be seen by hundreds of people."
},
{
"end_time": 5603.643,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5577.227,
"text": " it will be photographed. And he said, the photograph is going to be published in the front page of one of your local papers in the San Francisco Bay area. Well, five days later, that's exactly what happened. The, uh, siting took place on a college campus. It was being, uh, there was an event being sponsored by the art department, the Sonoma state college."
},
{
"end_time": 5627.961,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5604.087,
"text": " as it was called at that time. It's now Sonoma State University and the art department had an artist who named Stephen Polesky who flew an airplane, a little airplane with smoke trailing out the back and he made designs in the sky and that was his art form. And so the art department is out there, hundreds of students with their cameras"
},
{
"end_time": 5655.794,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5628.575,
"text": " Stephen Polesky is in the air making designs when right in his airspace a UFO appears and he sees it and reports on it and people on the ground see it and photograph it and what do you know the photograph was published on the front page of the Berkeley Gazette so and not only that it was videotaped and the videotape was broadcast on"
},
{
"end_time": 5682.961,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5659.036,
"text": " So I'd have to say that's very unusual that something like that would happen. I don't know of any other instance offhand in which a major city newspaper published a UFO picture on the front page, but it happened five days after Ted Owens told me it's about to happen."
},
{
"end_time": 5713.404,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5683.916,
"text": " Am I accurate in inferring that you recently undertook a test to assess if you're still receiving post-death communications from Ted? Yes. On December 12th, to be precise, last year, 2022, I got a message from one of the viewers of the New Thinking Allowed channel in Germany, and he told me while he was meditating, a figure appeared. He's a deep meditator."
},
{
"end_time": 5732.415,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5713.814,
"text": " He's already half hour into his meditation and he sees this figure and doesn't know what to make of it. And gradually he could see it's a human being. And because he was familiar with my video channel, he recognized the figure is Ted Owens."
},
{
"end_time": 5761.817,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5732.705,
"text": " And Ted Owens told him, I have a message I want you to give to Jeffrey. And he said he sat and he meditated on that for months because he was afraid because he thought it could be a fantasy. But after several months of examining himself, he determined for himself, it was no fantasy. It was real. And he reached out to me and passed on the message. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 5791.084,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5762.466,
"text": " The message is, Jeffrey Ted Owens knows that you might want to reach out to him. I didn't have any thoughts of that until I got the message. But you can do so in meditation. And I thought, well, all right, I'll see if I can, in meditation, contact Ted Owens. He had been dead 35 years by that time. He died in 1987. And one day,"
},
{
"end_time": 5821.51,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5792.619,
"text": " In fact, to be precise, on December 28th, 2022, I felt that I had contacted Ted Owens in meditation. I felt that we had had a conversation. I felt that he had agreed to perform a demonstration or to ask the space intelligences to perform a demonstration. And at the time, I was very concerned for the people of Ukraine."
},
{
"end_time": 5849.701,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5821.988,
"text": " I was aware of the fact that news reports said that the invading Russians were now destroying the Ukrainian infrastructure, their power system, so they wouldn't have heat in the winter that was coming. And I asked Ted Owens to use his abilities, which I knew he had a history of creating hot spells in the middle of winter, to create a hot spell"
},
{
"end_time": 5877.415,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5850.094,
"text": " so that the Ukrainian people wouldn't suffer and that we would run a test for 90 days from December 28th up until about the 28th of March, which is roughly a month ago. And I am now analyzing the data to see whether there was a statistically significant heat spell in Ukraine"
},
{
"end_time": 5906.391,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5879.428,
"text": " I can say this for what it's worth that only a few days after I announced, which I did on the New Thinking Allowed channel that very day, I announced it on December 28th that we're going to run this trial. By January 1st, there was an unbelievable heat spell all over Europe. Thousands of temperature records were broken in one day."
},
{
"end_time": 5935.282,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5906.988,
"text": " The problem is, in my recollection of the conversation with Ted Owens, I didn't say all over Europe, I said Ukraine. And so it's, I can't say even if, you know, that heat spell did occur, whether it's really related to the conversation I believe I had with Ted Owens. So probably in another several weeks, we'll"
},
{
"end_time": 5961.425,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5935.538,
"text": " have analyzed the data and I'll be able to say for sure whether or not the weather in Ukraine was statistically warmer over the winter. Right now, I just don't know. I mean, client to think probably was warmer, but not necessarily statistically significant. So, but until we've completed running all the numbers, I don't know for sure."
},
{
"end_time": 5991.476,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5962.159,
"text": " Given that Ted's predictions weren't consistent, what does that say to you? What you're looking at is the question of imprecision. And yes, in real life, when you're doing a study research of the paranormal, there very often is imprecision. For example, if you're doing an astrology reading or an I Ching reading, trying to determine, is this reading accurate for me? Well, the readings are usually very, very general."
},
{
"end_time": 6021.544,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5991.766,
"text": " And it's very, very hard to determine with any kind of scientific precision whether or not they're accurate. So it gives a lot of room for the true believers to say, you know, it's a perfect description of me because they don't have to specify. He said this date and this time and exactly this event and the temperature change will be such and such. So in real life, we often"
},
{
"end_time": 6051.288,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6022.534,
"text": " assume that an imprecise event means a certain thing for us. Whereas in the scientific laboratory, you can't operate that way. You have to be very, very precise. If you're doing a psychokinesis experiment, you've got everything specified in advance what the targets are, what statistical tests you're going to use, what outcome will satisfy your experiment,"
},
{
"end_time": 6078.814,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6051.476,
"text": " and what outcome would be a disconfirmation of your hypothesis in real life field studies. It doesn't work that way at all. So an interesting question to ask yourself is, do we really learn more from experiments than we do from field studies? And that I'm not sure. The reason I say that is because the early work in"
},
{
"end_time": 6089.65,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6079.377,
"text": " What was called psychical research in the 19th century was largely field study research and they approached it with the discipline"
},
{
"end_time": 6113.08,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6089.974,
"text": " that a police detective would have in doing police work. You try to get corroboration testimony from other witnesses. You try to see if there are any documents that will support the hypothesis. You look for confirmations where you can find them, and you draw conclusions based on"
},
{
"end_time": 6142.568,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6113.882,
"text": " your analysis of the data, not so different than the way a literary critic might analyze a novel and say, what is the meaning to be found in this novel? And we have great works that were published in that era. For example, F.W.H. Myers in 1903 posthumously published his great book, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death."
},
{
"end_time": 6170.538,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6143.183,
"text": " and it runs for hundreds of pages and two volumes and is a masterful analysis of the human psyche and how there's a spectrum of events from normal human consciousness to the most extreme forms of psychokinesis and precognition that point towards the survival of human consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 6196.783,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6173.422,
"text": " of evidence. So the experimental work in parapsychology largely began in the 1930s with J. B. Rhine at Duke University doing card-guessing experiments. They were very precise. They were capable of statistical analysis. Conditions are well controlled. At this point, over a thousand"
},
{
"end_time": 6225.486,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6197.125,
"text": " of these experiments have been published. The results are very clear statistically that there's a weak effect that is consistent, but it doesn't work 100% of the time. And now, have we learned any more from the experiments than we already knew from the field studies? I'm inclined to think no. I'm inclined to think that the basic facts"
},
{
"end_time": 6248.456,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6226.049,
"text": " were well understood, the way the phenomena function could be well understood through field studies. But what the experiments gave us was not a better understanding, but really a confirmation of what we already knew to be the case from the field studies. We can now say they've been verified through experiments."
},
{
"end_time": 6277.978,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6249.377,
"text": " In light of the aerial school incident in Zimbabwe where school children reported a UFO landing and warning about humanity's destructive technology, what's your perspective on this cautionary message? The warnings concerning technology and concerning pollution of the planet are very real and you find them across many cultures. I've done a series of now 40 interviews with James Tunney"
},
{
"end_time": 6285.384,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6278.336,
"text": " He is the author of such books as tech, bondage, slavery of the human spirit."
},
{
"end_time": 6314.514,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6287.637,
"text": " is turning people into robots, so to speak, that we are losing touch with our innate capacities. I described earlier with Eugene Houston's metaphor, the human organism is being like a Stradivarius violin and we only learn to play it like a plastic fiddle. And I'm afraid to say that cell phones and television and"
},
{
"end_time": 6341.118,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6314.821,
"text": " electronic technology, the world in which we're embedded, and I feel very much a part of that world. It's given us a great deal, but it also takes something away from people. It takes away a sense of soulfulness, a sense of there's something larger to us than simply being a successful entrepreneur or"
},
{
"end_time": 6358.49,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6341.715,
"text": " You know, many people who are engaged in the world of science and technology have the attitude that he who dies with the most toys wins, that it's all about material possessions and material acquisition that"
},
{
"end_time": 6384.65,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6360.333,
"text": " We lose something of ourselves, and the modern world as a whole has been defined this way over and over again by different people. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, wrote in the book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. People credit Nietzsche with saying that God is dead,"
},
{
"end_time": 6412.176,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6385.947,
"text": " But what I think he really meant is everybody thinks God is dead. God is no longer a living presence in the life of people. Even religious people, so-called religious people, seem to be more concerned with suppressing trans children than in, for example, cultivating their own spirit."
},
{
"end_time": 6436.374,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6413.302,
"text": " It's a very serious problem in our culture. Imagine, for example, means to me having earned a doctoral diploma in parapsychology over 40 years ago and being really aware of the very extensive history, thousands of experiments and field studies going back"
},
{
"end_time": 6466.34,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6436.63,
"text": " Well over 150 years and all of this information is pushed to the fringes and almost never talked about inside of our educational institutions, even inside of our churches, inside of our scientific establishments. This knowledge is considered taboo and at the same time an understanding of who we are as individuals is being lost. The knowledge of the afterlife"
},
{
"end_time": 6479.462,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6466.63,
"text": " For example, is knowledge of who we are. It's knowledge of our own psyche and people instead begin to think of themselves as cogs in a great machine."
},
{
"end_time": 6507.892,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6480.077,
"text": " You know, let's keep the economy going. Let's get a successful job. And I know people are disenchanted. I hear young people saying, why should I spend four years getting a college degree only to be able to work in a job that I'm going to hate for the rest of my life? It makes people feel like their own dignity is"
},
{
"end_time": 6534.275,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6508.251,
"text": " has to be sacrificed in order to earn a living. That's what our culture is like right now. And so the fact that you hear over and over and over again from different sources, even now coming from extraterrestrials supposedly landing in flying saucers, that we're not paying enough attention to our own inner nature, is not surprising."
},
{
"end_time": 6560.111,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6535.384,
"text": " What are some of the difficulties that parapsychology and perhaps even the scientific method has to overcome? You know, we could talk a long time about this subject. My mentor, Arthur, who we've spoken earlier, felt that we have to go beyond science. Science itself is incapable of addressing"
},
{
"end_time": 6587.961,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6562.346,
"text": " Why was the universe created in the first place is not a question that science can answer. And in order to begin to get a handle on first principles, it sometimes becomes necessary to develop a mindset which is more like the way the right brain works."
},
{
"end_time": 6609.923,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6588.507,
"text": " The right brain works in images. The right brain is where we get messages in our dreams. And the psychiatrist Eric Frohn wrote a book called The Forgotten Language, which is the language of dreams. This would be the language of the most primitive people."
},
{
"end_time": 6633.097,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6611.067,
"text": " Because they all had dreams, and in most primitive times, they didn't really make such a clear distinction between waking reality and sleeping reality. The Australian Aghanis would merge from the dream time. That is the original language that people spoke and understood."
},
{
"end_time": 6656.118,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6633.729,
"text": " and it's the language of animistic cultures everywhere today. It kind of makes no sense whatsoever from a strict scientific perspective, and yet we see that if you follow strict scientific protocols, yeah, they're amazing accomplishments. You can build atomic bombs at the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 6684.531,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6657.022,
"text": " You can build giant computers, but at the same time you can build spaceships, but at the same time you're polluting the planet. And worse than that, we find that, let's take the behavioral sciences. There is a crisis today in behavioral science and I think many other sciences as well, probably biological sciences. It's a crisis of replicability. Many"
},
{
"end_time": 6711.783,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6685.418,
"text": " experiments that were considered models, that were considered paradigms of good experiments and have been followed for years and years in different fields are now not being replicated. And so in the field of behavioral sciences, people are wondering what are the limits of the scientific method? Are we running up against"
},
{
"end_time": 6740.828,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6712.005,
"text": " an uncertainty principle, which is well known in physics, that there's only so much that science can tell us about subatomic particles. If you want to measure their position, you're not going to be able to measure their momentum. If you try to measure their momentum, you won't be able to measure their position. Are there limits like that to our understanding of knowledge itself?"
},
{
"end_time": 6769.548,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6741.101,
"text": " The same question was addressed by Einstein's colleague at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the great logician whose name is on the tip of my tongue right now. I'm sorry, it's not coming to me, but it'll probably help. I'll blurt it out in a few minutes or I could look it up."
},
{
"end_time": 6801.493,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6771.63,
"text": " who came up with a similar principle to the indeterminacy principle in physics. It's the idea that no system of knowledge is ever capable of explaining itself. No system of logic, no system of mathematics can ever explain itself. You always have to go to a metastance, a larger system."
},
{
"end_time": 6831.169,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6801.681,
"text": " in order to explain any system. And what we find, I think, when extraterrestrial communications seem to be pointing towards the absurd, you could say that they're pointing towards a meta system, a system that is beyond science itself, beyond logic itself. My mentor, Arthur Young, used to call it"
},
{
"end_time": 6850.35,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6831.561,
"text": " Dirty thinking, actually. And it's where sometimes it takes a paradox, it takes a joke, it requires humor or poetry or something just to get you out of the box that you're imprisoned, the logical box"
},
{
"end_time": 6875.128,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6850.589,
"text": " that imprisons us, that we all seem to walk around in a prison of our own thoughts. Typically, they're telling us what is possible and what is impossible. And there are many people today who have recently in fact published articles that all the data of parapsychology, the thousands of"
},
{
"end_time": 6892.5,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6875.469,
"text": " Articles published scientific studies. They say we don't have to pay attention to them at all because we know it's impossible and impossible things can't happen. Therefore, why bother to even look at the research and"
},
{
"end_time": 6922.978,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6894.548,
"text": " The way to get out of that is to break free from the logical constraints that are holding you down about what is and what is not possible. That certainly is true in the realm of the human being. What does it mean to be human? Why are we here at all in the first place? Why is there a universe? You will never answer those questions from within a logical scientific framework."
},
{
"end_time": 6951.766,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6923.387,
"text": " The answers come to us from mythology. They come to us from what Arthur Young used to call the realm of mythos. That's why, for example, he was interested in astrology. If you ask yourself the fundamental question of mysticism, mystics say all is one. We are one with everything. That's the basis of every"
},
{
"end_time": 6981.817,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6951.937,
"text": " mystical tradition ultimately, and yet we find ourselves as individuals. How do I as a skin encapsulated ego, someone who exists inside this body, how do I relate to the idea that I am also one with the whole universe? Well, that relationship occurs through what Arthur described, he called it the realm of mythos, and that is"
},
{
"end_time": 7002.295,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6981.988,
"text": " You find that in astrology, you find that in every mythological system. Those are the stories that we tell ourselves that connect us to a larger universe, and ultimately they tend to be stories that are completely irrational from a scientific perspective, which is why, once again, I developed the"
},
{
"end_time": 7026.749,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7002.568,
"text": " theory with Brendan Engen of archetypal synchronistic resonance. It's as if the universe does speak to us. The universe is conscious. It speaks to us in riddles. It speaks to us in synchronicities. And so to have a sensitivity to that is a way of acknowledging your connection to the absolute."
},
{
"end_time": 7055.93,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7027.978,
"text": " How do Christianity, Buddhism, and Vedantic thought relate? Are they in disagreement? Are they in harmony? We talk about Indra as a good example of a God who was very much in the same vein as the God of Jews and the God of Christians. Yahweh and Indra are similar. They wield thunderbolts. They are the king of all of the heavenly host or the other"
},
{
"end_time": 7084.087,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7056.357,
"text": " devas are the other gods and they are of course the the god of a particular people in the earliest days and in ancient india indra was the main god the god of all gods the king of the gods and in the vedic tradition which are the earliest scriptures from india this indra is the most frequently mentioned of all the deities"
},
{
"end_time": 7111.476,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7084.974,
"text": " And yet today, if you go to India, you won't find any temples to Indra. Indra has become a very diminished figure, and it happened at around the time that the philosophers who developed the Upanishads came about, which took a period that lasted for many centuries, the development of the Upanishads. But what"
},
{
"end_time": 7141.937,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7112.329,
"text": " The great philosophers of the Indian subcontinent developed was an idea that there are philosophical principles expressed by new deities, by Brahma, for example, who represented the whole universe, by Vishnu and by Shiva. These were no longer the gods like Indra. Indra was a god like Zeus or Thor as well."
},
{
"end_time": 7166.971,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7143.166,
"text": " And there's a story in the Upanishads and the ancient scriptures in which Indra conquers the evil dragon Vritra. Vritra is like a reptilian beast and he's out to destroy the human race."
},
{
"end_time": 7193.2,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7167.346,
"text": " And he's very, very powerful. In fact, he swallows Indra. And Indra is only freed because the other devas help him escape from inside the belly of Ritra. And then he uses his thunder and he slays Ritra. And now he's the king of the gods. They all celebrate his victory over this evil demon."
},
{
"end_time": 7223.046,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7193.899,
"text": " In order to satisfy his need for glory, Indra builds a magnificent palace on top of Mount Meru, the home of the gods, and Vishvakarma is the builder of the palace, and it's completed, and he shows it to Indra, and Indra is walking through this amazing palace, and he says, not enough. He wants more. His glory is such he needs bigger"
},
{
"end_time": 7245.691,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7223.302,
"text": " palaces and greater palaces and Vishvakarma has to keep working, making the palace more and more magnificent for him. And finally, Vishvakarma is worn out from all of this building. It's like Indra will never be satisfied. There will never be a palace great enough for Indra."
},
{
"end_time": 7268.166,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7247.432,
"text": " So he appeals to Brahma, the universal principle, and it's the principle of Brahman in India, in the Upanishads. Brahman is the essence of reality, and it's a great principle, and he appeals to that. And Brahman"
},
{
"end_time": 7294.48,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7268.387,
"text": " asked to appeal to Vishnu. Vishnu is such a great deity. Vishnu has many different avatars who appear in physical form and represent him. And Vishnu sends one of his avatars down to Mount Meru in the form of a beautiful little child. And Indra sees this little child outside of his magnificent palace."
},
{
"end_time": 7323.558,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7295.06,
"text": " And he's so excited. The child is so charming and so beautiful that Indra comes to him and says, let me show around this palace. And the child is being shown around. Indra is showing, isn't this marvelous? And the child says to him, oh, this is the most beautiful palace that any Indra has ever built. Indra says, what? Any Indra? I'm Indra."
},
{
"end_time": 7350.862,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7323.814,
"text": " What do you mean any Indra? When the little child points towards a column of ants that are marching in through the door of the palace and he says to Indra, well, you see these ants, says every one of them was once an Indra. And that represented a turning point for the theology of ancient India. They move beyond the kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 7379.36,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7351.049,
"text": " pantheon of gods. The ancient Vedic pantheon is very similar to the Greek pantheon, to the Norse pantheon. And in the early days of the Hebrew religion, Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, was regarded before us as our god, our cult god, but he's more powerful than your god. And eventually that emerged to a theology of, oh, there is only one god."
},
{
"end_time": 7407.005,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7379.667,
"text": " That happened gradually over time, and so the theological sophistication of different cultures evolved over time, is what I'm saying. So that if you study the evolution of these theologies, you begin to see that they do converge, that there is a sense in which the mystical teachings of"
},
{
"end_time": 7436.544,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7407.346,
"text": " Every culture are pointing to the same reality. It's known in modern thought as the perennial philosophy. But you don't find it necessarily in the exoteric teachings. The teachings that I learned in my early religious training describe a different kind of deity than one finds in the writings of the great mystics."
},
{
"end_time": 7454.957,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7437.261,
"text": " Those teachings are kept often hidden from people. For example, in the Jewish culture, there is a mystical teaching of Kabbalah, but you have to be 40 years old before you're ready to even begin to study it."
},
{
"end_time": 7474.445,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7455.811,
"text": " It's felt like it's dangerous if you get into it at an earlier period. And I think the same is true with the teachings of the great mystics of other cultures. Probably in the teachings of Buddha, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 7501.288,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7474.872,
"text": " are more direct in that sense Buddha was a mystic but even in Buddhism you start out with the Four Noble Truths and then later on you learn in Buddhism well you can the Four Noble Truths are not the end all and be all in fact everything we've got you up until now isn't really true the real truth of the Diamond Sutra for example can't be expressed in words it's not a simple teaching"
},
{
"end_time": 7530.52,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7501.886,
"text": " It's a teacher that you only can experience directly in your heart. It can never be transmitted through words or through words alone. There are other teachings that go beyond words, that go beyond philosophy. So you have in Buddhism what's known as the prajnaparamita, which means the wisdom of going beyond. It's the same"
},
{
"end_time": 7559.411,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7530.708,
"text": " Word para parameter is the same root word para as in parapsychology, which means beyond psychology. You need to go further. Do the so-called gods of the occult fit into the perennialist idea? They do, but the perennial wisdom is not usually taught at the beginning stages of people."
},
{
"end_time": 7584.735,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7560.401,
"text": " And I guess here's the reason why. As you grow up, young children have, I think, a natural sense of mysticism. They come from the great beyond, and then they're embodied, which is why I think some young children talk about their past lives."
},
{
"end_time": 7611.561,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7584.957,
"text": " right away, they can remember them. They can remember the state between lives, but those are rare and often occasioned by a violent death earlier on. But the goal of a young child is to learn how to function in the physical world, learn how to tie your shoes, learn how to make your bed, learn how to get along with your peers, for example, and that becomes"
},
{
"end_time": 7635.162,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7611.766,
"text": " Almost of ultimate importance for young people is being recognized and accepted by their friends, learning how to have friends, learning how to accomplish things in the physical world. And in so doing that, they lose touch with the perennial wisdom that was their natural state when they were born."
},
{
"end_time": 7666.032,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7636.357,
"text": " As I mentioned earlier, Freud described that as a state of infantile regression to the womb. It could also be thought of as a state of mystical oneness. But as you're growing up in life, you want to put that aside. It doesn't help you as a young child learning how to get better in sports and do well in school and have friends to remember that you're one with everything. That gets lost."
},
{
"end_time": 7695.555,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7666.323,
"text": " you reach a point typically, in my case, I think around the age of 21 or so, you become an adult. And at that point, I think people often, at least many people of my generation, certainly, probably with the help of drugs, begin to open up to these inner realities and begin to develop"
},
{
"end_time": 7714.889,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7695.794,
"text": " a more comprehensive understanding of the perennial philosophy. Not that it was ever taught to me. I had to reach out for it and find it. But if you do reach out, as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears."
},
{
"end_time": 7738.541,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7715.265,
"text": " And so there are many, many ways in which people can become acquainted with this very rich and substantial tradition. And today there's even a branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology that deals with it. So it's available in that form to some young people, but I should say the American"
},
{
"end_time": 7768.319,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7739.155,
"text": " psychological association refused to recognize transpersonal psychology as being a legitimate discipline in and of itself. So like parapsychology, it's also taboo. So I guess the point I'm saying is that it would be wonderful if we had a culture in which the perennial wisdom was available"
},
{
"end_time": 7790.213,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7768.49,
"text": " from childhood to people, but that's not the culture in which we live right now. That's one of the reasons that people are warning us about the direction our whole culture is moving into. We're becoming more and more like machines and less and less like spiritual beings. Hopefully we can reverse"
},
{
"end_time": 7818.029,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7791.51,
"text": " What do you think of Wolfgang Smith's assertion that these two realms are antithetical? So that is the Christian and Vedantic thought are antipodal. This idea of sort of sacrificing your ego on the altar of spirituality, or the idea of let go of all desires. The ego is the problem was often discussed in"
},
{
"end_time": 7843.848,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7818.353,
"text": " the days in which I lived with Arthur Young at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, and he was opposed to that idea because the way he put it, and now you're talking to a very accomplished human being, a man who felt that he wasn't even worthy of becoming a philosopher until he had already invented the helicopter, he said"
},
{
"end_time": 7857.944,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7844.889,
"text": " It's not a good idea to sacrifice your ego on the altar of spirituality until you have developed an ego worthy of being sacrificed."
},
{
"end_time": 7887.312,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7858.558,
"text": " He would say that for young people who, you know, become devotees of a guru and they give up their ego and they are devout followers of whatever path they have chosen, they have become like children in a way and they have given up their sovereignty. They have turned it over to some spirit tester in exchange for the hope of achieving enlightenment and he"
},
{
"end_time": 7914.787,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7887.722,
"text": " felt that that was a mistake, that people need to cultivate themselves, and when they're ready they will have opportunities to open up more to the spiritual world, but to do it as a substitute for the cultivation of why we're here on this planet, which in his view was to develop mastery over the physical plane,"
},
{
"end_time": 7943.865,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7917.142,
"text": " then he felt it was a mistake and that you don't get enlightened that way. You enter into a state that you might mistake for enlightenment. Arthur Young advocated gaining control over the physical before earning the right to philosophize. Can you elaborate on what led him to this? I'm not sure that I am entirely prepared to defend Arthur Young's"
},
{
"end_time": 7963.49,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7944.36,
"text": " position in that regard. I find it very inspirational. At the same time, I think that people learn so many distinctions between human beings that I would be very hesitant to try and prescribe a"
},
{
"end_time": 7990.043,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7963.865,
"text": " a pattern that everybody must follow, that everybody should be like Arthur Young and come up with a new invention. That's something that he decided for himself. And I can't say that it made him an enlightened person. It made him a very valuable mentor for me. But as I recall,"
},
{
"end_time": 8013.422,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7990.265,
"text": " He was a great soul. There's no doubt about it. I remember when Arthur Young died, a double rainbow appeared in the sky, or a double halo appeared in the sky on the day he died over Berkeley. It was so extraordinary. It was photographed and it appeared in the newspaper and my friends"
},
{
"end_time": 8043.66,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 8013.677,
"text": " who are more traditional would say that that was a sign that a great soul had passed. And I think he was a great soul, but enlightened is a very different state and it means different things to different people. In Arthur Young's case, I'm under the impression that he was not indifferent about dying. He didn't want to die as he got older. He was in the 80s when he'd think he was 90."
},
{
"end_time": 8074.019,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 8044.121,
"text": " when he died in 1995, but I always thought maybe he was even a little bit afraid of death. Toward the very end, he was searching desperately for some sort of miracle cure that could prolong his life even more. And it seems to me that a good sign of enlightenment would be a willingness to face death, or as the Buddha would say, an indifference to whether you're dead or alive."
},
{
"end_time": 8100.503,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 8075.213,
"text": " So there are many degrees and many kinds of enlightenment and I don't want to necessarily judge some person who at a young age without having accomplished anything of importance in the physical world, like inventing the helicopter, if they choose to follow"
},
{
"end_time": 8130.486,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8100.708,
"text": " a guru and devote their lives to that guru, it's not up to me to judge that person. But I would say for myself, I find Arthur Young's advice very worthwhile and very meaningful, and I don't think it's inconsistent throughout your life to want to learn and develop and grow, and at the same time to be aware of the"
},
{
"end_time": 8156.92,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8131.22,
"text": " traps of the ego. I'm certain beyond all doubt that if you want to grow spiritually, you definitely don't want to fall into ego traps. Those are the things that most prevent a person from entering into a state of greater enlightenment."
},
{
"end_time": 8183.814,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8158.285,
"text": " But that can be done. You can enhance the ego and you can at the same time grow spiritually. And here's how I envision it for myself. It's how I tell it to people. And that's to love yourself unconditionally. And by that I mean love your spiritual self, your higher self."
},
{
"end_time": 8212.585,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8184.206,
"text": " unconditionally unconditionally means no matter what you do no matter what you say no matter what you think no matter what you feel and no matter what anybody else says things does or feels with regard to you because you can recognize there's a part of your being at the deepest core that is a spiritual essence that is infinite and is"
},
{
"end_time": 8239.616,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8212.824,
"text": " That's the part of us that is one with everything. And if we can just recognize that and love ourselves unconditionally because of it, we can continue to move through life, to grow, to learn, to progress and to cultivate ourselves without getting caught in ego traps. Because to the best of my knowledge, ego traps emerge when we don't love ourselves."
},
{
"end_time": 8268.404,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8239.889,
"text": " When we hate ourselves or dislike ourselves at some level, but we don't want to admit it. So therefore we need to feel important in some way or other. And it's that need that causes us to separate ourselves from the oneness, which is at the very core of our being. Did Arthur achieve his spiritual states through accomplishments as opposed to love or faith?"
},
{
"end_time": 8281.578,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8269.241,
"text": " Well, I think for some people it can be accomplishment. I don't think it has to be for everyone. It could be just being a good son, a good father, a good friend."
},
{
"end_time": 8311.459,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8282.278,
"text": " to the people you know, that could be enough. If you love yourself unconditionally, no matter what, whether or not you accomplish anything, that gives you the opportunity to get in touch with what might be your unique purpose, your unique destiny in life. And being in touch with that is a source of such bliss, such joy, it's hard to express. I feel very fortunate that"
},
{
"end_time": 8340.128,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8311.954,
"text": " I followed my dreams as a young man and got in touch with my destiny, which was to be a communicator and to do it through television and now through the internet and to have conversations like the one I'm having with you right now. That's the essence of my purpose. So it's the most natural thing in the world for me to do. But it's going to be different for every person. We're all"
},
{
"end_time": 8370.538,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8340.691,
"text": " According to a story in the Talmud, we're surrounded by innumerable demons, a fact too frightening for us to accept."
},
{
"end_time": 8399.121,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8370.93,
"text": " What does this say about fear? Well, I can tell you this. I have never read that statement on the air. I'm not even familiar with it. Here's what I'm familiar with when it comes to Talmudic legends. And that is that for each human being, there is an angel. And that angel walks in front of us everywhere we go and says, behold, here comes the image of God."
},
{
"end_time": 8428.439,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8400.964,
"text": " So you can view their way. I'm not saying that we are free from temptations. I would even go so far as to agree with Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic, who was a big influence in my life, that each and every one of our thoughts is itself a spiritual entity. And that when we have a negative thought,"
},
{
"end_time": 8453.677,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8428.882,
"text": " thought that might say, oh, I'm really stupid or something to that effect. That is a demonic entity trying to gain control over us by making us hate ourselves, by making us feel guilty about ourselves. And so my practice is when I have such a thought, I say to myself, cancel that thought. I'm alert."
},
{
"end_time": 8477.073,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8453.882,
"text": " I'd like to switch gears just a bit. What are some of the common limitations to psi ability?"
},
{
"end_time": 8501.101,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8477.415,
"text": " For instance, when I interviewed Thomas Campbell, he said, I can't demonstrate it for you now because who knows we could be cheating and people wouldn't believe it anyway, which I found to be extremely disappointing. We're talking about our blocks to psychic functioning and the most basic finding of parapsychology research is known as the sheep goat effect."
},
{
"end_time": 8531.323,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8501.613,
"text": " and very simple as sheep are regarded as individuals who believe that they can do it. They're put into an experiment where they're asked to guess what card is going to come up or guess what a target at a remote location is about. People who believe that they can do it do better in those tests and people who believe that this is something they certainly cannot do"
},
{
"end_time": 8561.613,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8531.613,
"text": " So, that would be one of the first major blocks."
},
{
"end_time": 8591.032,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8563.097,
"text": " If you begin to at least acknowledge there's a possibility that you can do this, you're already a step ahead. The other thing that the research itself suggests, and this is quite consistent with the ancient yoga sutras, is that when you can relax and quiet your mind, you're going to be a better polypathic and clairvoyant"
},
{
"end_time": 8617.244,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8592.193,
"text": " receiver of information. Conversely, it also seems to be the case that if you're in a state of extreme emotion, for example, if you're in an emotional crisis, maybe you've had an accident, maybe you're dying, then you tend to be more of a telepathic transmitter."
},
{
"end_time": 8646.8,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8619.48,
"text": " So that's an interesting observation that's been made. There are many other blocks to psychic functioning. People are afraid of parapsychology, afraid of psi for different reasons. One big reason is if you've been raised in a fundamentalist religious tradition, you might believe that any kind of psychic functioning is demonic."
},
{
"end_time": 8673.319,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8647.363,
"text": " and you're afraid of it for that reason. You begin to have psychic insights. Technically, parents get afraid when their children show a lot of psychic precociousness. They don't like it, and they tell their children to stop doing it, for example. There are many cases like that. And here's another very unusual finding with regard to"
},
{
"end_time": 8701.63,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8673.626,
"text": " People who report lots of spontaneous psychic experiences, a very high percentage of them, also early childhood trauma. They come from abusive families, for example. And what seems to be the case in those instances, when you're a young child and you're being traumatized, you retreat from the world."
},
{
"end_time": 8731.135,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8702.005,
"text": " You find safety in an inner world, in a world of your own imagination, for example, with invisible friends, for example, or just retreating into your own shell. Well, when you do that, as I discussed earlier with you, you enter into the realm of the imagination, and the imagination is a doorway into what we call the imaginal, which is a psychic realm. You may find yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 8756.527,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8731.647,
"text": " first finding comfort from imaginary friends and the next thing it might be an actual spiritual entity, hopefully not a demonic entity. Now, other blocks also are related to things like stress, having high stress levels"
},
{
"end_time": 8781.834,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8756.834,
"text": " and sometimes precipitates psychic functioning. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, if you're all stressed out, your mind is noisy. It's hard to quiet your mind. And so people who are good meditators, people who are good at self-hypnosis, people who understand principles of relaxation, like the Jacob Sonian relaxation principles,"
},
{
"end_time": 8810.35,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8782.363,
"text": " are all or basic stress management principles are all better at psychic functioning. And another thing the research tells us is that people who are artistically inclined artists and musicians, people who use the right brain more. I'm saying the right brain, but I'm touching the left side of my head. People who are activating the right brain"
},
{
"end_time": 8840.742,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8812.398,
"text": " seem to be more open to psychic functioning. Well, they perform better in simple experimental laboratory tests, and it's probably because they're more open to the intuitive side of life, to the irrational side of life. People who are very mechanical, very materialistic engineers, for example, if you were to do a"
},
{
"end_time": 8870.964,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8841.254,
"text": " Test comparing engineers versus artists and musicians. I would predict that the artists and musicians will do more Show more psychic functioning in the laboratory. The engineers are likely to show psi missing but there's another element to this and it has to do with self-confidence in general if you are a highly successful professional"
},
{
"end_time": 8902.159,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8872.841,
"text": " Chances are you're going to do well in psychic functioning because you're already using your intuition to be a successful person in life. So a study was done, for example, with business executives. Business executives were divided into two groups, those whose companies were profitable and those whose companies were losing money. And they were given tests, computerized tests of pre-computed"
},
{
"end_time": 8932.466,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8904.326,
"text": " the computer chose a target and the person was asked to identify the target in advance. The executives from the successful businesses scored positively and the executives whose businesses were losing money showed sigh missing in that test. So I think to the extent that people learn how naturally to incorporate intuition into their lives,"
},
{
"end_time": 8944.718,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8932.961,
"text": " is a reflection of how well they will do when when they're tested in the laboratory. Well, there's always"
},
{
"end_time": 8972.432,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8944.974,
"text": " stuff that we're going to miss. We haven't talked about diet. There are people who believe that a vegetarian diet, for example, promotes psychic functioning, that if you eat too much meat, you have filled all these animal hormones, particularly the hormones that are in their body as they're being killed, which would be hormones associated with the emotions of fear and aggression."
},
{
"end_time": 9001.203,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8972.654,
"text": " and that that interferes with psychic functioning. I don't know if it's true because it hasn't yet really been studied carefully in the laboratory, but there's a lot of folklore to suggest that sort of thing. On the other hand, just because a person thinks of themselves as highly psychic doesn't mean that they're going to perform well in a laboratory."
},
{
"end_time": 9025.862,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 9001.681,
"text": " There are many people who are professional psychics who have a long track record of doing what they do, the way they do it, the way they want to do it. If you put such an individual in the laboratory where they're asked to perform a task that was designed by the researchers and is not necessarily compatible with"
},
{
"end_time": 9056.101,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 9026.254,
"text": " normal way of working, they may not do well at all, which I think occasionally leads researchers to become cynical about people who proclaim to be psychic. And of course, I also have to be very clear, there are all kinds of ways in which we can delude ourselves about, are we really psychic or not? For example, if Ted Owens says to me, I'm going to create warmer weather"
},
{
"end_time": 9086.135,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 9056.493,
"text": " in Ukraine, and then what we discover is, oh, there was warmer weather in Germany, there was warmer weather in France, there was warmer weather in the Netherlands, there was warmer weather in Belarusia. Therefore, I must have done it. It's very easy to fall into those kinds of patterns to take what was basically a miss and call it a near hit and say, yeah, that shows that I'm psychic."
},
{
"end_time": 9116.118,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 9086.527,
"text": " You see a lot of that people who are reaching to find ways to identify themselves as psychic. Every researcher in parapsychology has been approached by someone who says, I'm psychic. You got to test me. I'm really great. And it turns out that maybe they've diluted themselves in one way or another. So I think the lesson there is that the human potential for greatness"
},
{
"end_time": 9145.503,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9117.073,
"text": " is balanced by a human potential for folly. And when you move into this field, you need to be aware of both of those potentials so that you can avoid the folly and follow the path that leads to whatever greatness is for you. It's peculiar and even convenient. Some would say that paranormal phenomenon everywhere evade captures such as on Skinwalker Ranch. So how do you interpret this?"
},
{
"end_time": 9175.657,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9146.459,
"text": " Well, I will say this, there are occasions such as the skinwalker experience where there were all kinds of phenomena that somehow occurred and made sure that the researchers knew that they occurred and yet avoided capture on camera. But there are many, many other instances in which people do photograph orbs and photograph UFOs and other kinds of"
},
{
"end_time": 9202.551,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9175.981,
"text": " Since you began your journey, especially with New Thinking Allowed, your YouTube channel, which is linked in the description, what lessons or discussions are there that were difficult for you to accept?"
},
{
"end_time": 9231.101,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9202.91,
"text": " I suppose I never appreciated throughout my life, whenever I chose to follow my own passion, the extent to which there would be people definitely opposed to me going in that direction. And I mean, it began, for example, as an undergraduate, when I decided to join various student protests and"
},
{
"end_time": 9258.951,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9231.374,
"text": " discovered that, oh, you're about to be punished because you took part in a protest. And when I went into parapsychology, I imagined why everybody should applaud this young person moving into an exciting new field and coming up with new discoveries. And then I realized, oh no, there's a significant percentage of the population"
},
{
"end_time": 9286.271,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9259.292,
"text": " who are definitely opposed, who feel that this has no place in the university and went to great lengths to try and in effect destroy my academic career. And I can tell you that I now appreciate that virtually everybody in parapsychology, with maybe one or two exceptions, I know of one or two exceptions where they've never encountered"
},
{
"end_time": 9316.271,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9286.476,
"text": " any negativity of this sort. But most people have encountered that sort of negativity. People, I don't want to say violently, I've never encountered any violence, but short of violence, people have gone to great lengths to try and suppress the findings of parapsychology and to suppress individuals working"
},
{
"end_time": 9346.578,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9316.578,
"text": " in the field of parapsychology. I didn't realize how serious it was, but now I know. For example, J.B. Rhyne, who founded Modern American Parapsychology in the 1930s at Duke University, sought psychiatric help in order for him to deal with the stress he was facing from critics who accused him of all sorts of fraud and"
},
{
"end_time": 9375.811,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9346.817,
"text": " Well, fraud basically being, you know, one of the very worst accusations you can ever throw at a scientist. So, Ryan not only had to face people accusing him of fraud, he had to face, on occasion, people who were working for him who were engaged in actual fraud. And he did that in the most open, honest, forthright manner you could."
},
{
"end_time": 9406.101,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9376.135,
"text": " dismissed those people and he published the fact that they had been caught engaging in fraud and that none of their previous research could therefore be relied upon. He was very explicit in the rare instances in which that happened. But the truth is that whatever field you're in, you're going to have to encounter the human nature. And human nature is extraordinarily vast and"
},
{
"end_time": 9433.814,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9406.271,
"text": " and complex and it definitely has a dark side. Is there a collective Freudian impulse that shrouds the truth, presuming we are all interconnected and what about in the opposite direction? Is there an impulse for us to want to believe that we're all connected, perhaps even more so than we are? You know, I've often thought of it that way. Freud made a point of saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 9460.538,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9434.667,
"text": " We don't want to know what's in our own mind. The whole notion of the Freudian subconscious is based on the idea that we have many impulses, particularly erotic impulses and aggressive impulses that are not socially acceptable. He explained this very clearly in his book"
},
{
"end_time": 9489.258,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9460.691,
"text": " civilization and its discontents. We made a trade-off. We become civilized. We have all the benefits of civilization, but it means we have to suppress and deny certain aspects of our own nature. And that becomes the Freudian unconscious. And then Jung took it a step further and he said, yeah, we don't want to know about our spiritual nature either. So the Jungian collective unconscious is filled with"
},
{
"end_time": 9518.763,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9489.565,
"text": " Aspects of our own spirituality that we don't want to know about and so the very idea that Another person could read your mind that could know the things about you that you don't even want to acknowledge about yourself That's very frightening that's very intimidating to people and as a culture if we were to allow"
},
{
"end_time": 9541.988,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9519.428,
"text": " Human beings on this planet to develop their full psychic potentials if, for example, all young children who showed psychic promises children were given the same support and encourage that would have an applicability or mathematical ability or artistic ability"
},
{
"end_time": 9571.152,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9542.295,
"text": " in our culture so that we develop the culture full of psychic individuals. How would that threaten people who don't want to be in such a culture because they don't want to be seen by everyone, that they want to keep their privacy, they want to be able to hide from people with regard to their aggressive thoughts, their sexual thoughts that are not permissible, or even behaviors."
},
{
"end_time": 9602.125,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9572.5,
"text": " I think I'd tell you already at the time I interviewed, or it wasn't an interview, it was an occasion on which Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, spoke at the Berkeley campus. It was a time when he had just published an article in Time magazine debunking the claims of Uri Geller that had also been reported in Nature."
},
{
"end_time": 9631.323,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9602.312,
"text": " at that time, the early research with Geller and Arthur Clark didn't want any part of it. He didn't believe it could be real. And so he spoke on the Berkeley campus. And after his talk, I raised my hand and said, Mr. Clark, do you believe in ESP? And his answer was so revealing. He said, no, I do not believe in ESP because I don't want anybody to read my mind."
},
{
"end_time": 9657.142,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9632.125,
"text": " And think of it, it seems absurd, of course, you know, just because you disbelieve doesn't mean someone can't read your mind. But at a cultural level, there's something to that. You can suppress people's psychic abilities by creating a culture in which it's considered unreal, in which people are punished for even thinking about it, and in which there's no"
},
{
"end_time": 9687.142,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9657.654,
"text": " support or very limited support or encouragement for people who show talent. So if nobody believes that it's really possible, then fewer and fewer people are going to cultivate that ability and you're at less risk that some talented psychic is going to come along and discover your hidden secrets. It seems that most spiritual paths require going through some dark night. Why is that? I would agree with you that"
},
{
"end_time": 9714.155,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9687.671,
"text": " we avoid confronting our own dark side, and yet in spiritual traditions, the tradition, the Western accidental tradition of initiation, which the Austrian mystic Rudolf Seiner wrote about, he said when you become initiated into a spiritual tradition, there's always the guardian of the threshold that you have to"
},
{
"end_time": 9739.241,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9714.497,
"text": " encounter. And the guardian of the threshold can be the most ugly, evil-looking being that you've ever known in your life. Another example of this is the phrase, there are demons guarding every temple. And you'll see this even in the great cathedrals. There are gargoyles all around the great cathedrals that are demonic."
},
{
"end_time": 9763.66,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9739.991,
"text": " looking. And in Asia, it's very explicit, big demonic statues in front of the Buddhist temples. They are considered servants of the Buddha, but they scare away the uninitiated, the people who aren't ready. You have to ultimately confront your own darkness, your own shadow, your own demon, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 9791.63,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9764.548,
"text": " It's very explicit, for example, in the 12-step program, people who are overcoming addictions, where they say you have to take a hard, uncompromising look at yourself, and then you have to begin to make amends for all the things that you've done as a result of that. And people see the 12-step program as a very authentic spiritual path."
},
{
"end_time": 9815.538,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9792.961,
"text": " And of course, they're forced into it because, you know, they've hit bottom, so to speak, because of their addictions. And now they're working to overcome their addictions and using the power of the spirit to overcome addictions. And there's a lot of research suggesting that this is an approach that works."
},
{
"end_time": 9845.213,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9816.715,
"text": " Even in the Bible, angels are often depicted as alarming and horrifying. Terrence McKenna mentioned that we're so estranged that we don't recognize our inner selves when we encounter them. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, Terrence made a beautiful comment that we are so alienated from ourselves that when we see who we are in our own depths, we think it's an extraterrestrial. How should we distinguish between the monad, the spirit and the soul?"
},
{
"end_time": 9872.244,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9846.425,
"text": " Well, words like spirit, soul, monad, psyche, in Hebrew, the nephesh, the breath, or nouma in Greek, are all context dependent. They're dependent on how they're being used by a person who intends to use them."
},
{
"end_time": 9901.152,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9873.234,
"text": " The word monad, for example, was largely popularized in the writings of the 18th century philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz. Or was he 17th century? I'm not even sure at this point. But one of the things Arthur Young, my mentor, made a big point of distinguishing between"
},
{
"end_time": 9928.012,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9901.357,
"text": " is the notion of the difference between the spirit and the soul. And I find that a very useful distinction that's often glossed over. People talk about the soul as if, for example, it's infinite. They talk about the soul as if it's eternal. You have an eternal soul. Well, I think of the spirit as being that infinite eternal part of us. And I think it's the"
},
{
"end_time": 9953.865,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9928.439,
"text": " depth within each of us. And the irony is, well, it's not so ironical to the ancient Hindus who understood that the Atman, that was their word for the essence of the individual, they said the Atman is the same as Brahman. The essence of who you are is the same as the essence of the whole universe. And I like that idea."
},
{
"end_time": 9970.196,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9954.087,
"text": " But that is a reference to what I would call the spirit. And Arthur Young meant that very precisely as spirit, which he equated with light itself. And light, if you know anything about"
},
{
"end_time": 9995.572,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9970.486,
"text": " Einstein's theory of relativity, you know that a beam of light can travel the length of the universe. And while we're sitting on Earth and watching it, it might take 13 billion years to go or longer to go from one end of the universe to the other. But if you are on a beam of light and you have a wristwatch, time can stand still."
},
{
"end_time": 10023.302,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9995.896,
"text": " So from the perspective of the beam of light, you can travel the whole universe in no time at all, instantly, from your point of view. It's one of the paradoxes of time itself. But the point I'm trying to make here is that there is this part of us that's infinite and eternal. Now, is that the same part of us that goes from lifetime to lifetime in reincarnation?"
},
{
"end_time": 10050.23,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 10023.558,
"text": " that progresses, I'm not so sure. I think that it's very likely that the soul might last a long time. It might last for thousands of lifetimes, but at some point in the evolution of the soul, we merge to become ultimately where we came from, ultimately from our source, which is one with everything."
},
{
"end_time": 10077.005,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 10051.067,
"text": " And we may discover that everything we're one with is completely outside of time and space, that our notion of time and space, as it seems to us while we're here in the body, is what the Hindus call Maya. It's something of an illusion. It's not what we think it is. But ultimately, we have that within us, and we have"
},
{
"end_time": 10106.817,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 10077.21,
"text": " something else within us which is very long-lasting, which goes well beyond the length of an individual lifetime. And I would call it the soul. It's our passions, our desires, what moves us, and what moves us from lifetime to lifetime. But at some point we let go of that completely and become just one with pure spirit. So that's how I see it."
},
{
"end_time": 10134.002,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 10107.91,
"text": " What are the main organizations currently studying parapsychology? Well, the main organization of parapsychology is the Parapsychological Association. It is an affiliate organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was originally founded in, I think, the 1950s by J.D. Rhymes."
},
{
"end_time": 10160.367,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 10134.411,
"text": " and his colleagues at Duke University. It became formally affiliated with the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. It's got about 400 members. So that's the major scientific body, but there are others. There is the Society for Scientific Exploration."
},
{
"end_time": 10189.65,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 10160.708,
"text": " It publishes a journal of scientific exploration, and it was founded, if I remember correctly, I think in the 1970s, by researchers who were studying the paranormal. Parapsychologists are very explicit. They want to study extrasensory perception and psychosis, basically, some the question of life after death."
},
{
"end_time": 10217.022,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 10189.991,
"text": " But there are other areas of the paranormal, UFOs, cryptozoology, the study of, for example, Bigfoot and other beings that seem to pass back and forth between different dimensions, the study of orbs, the study of angels, demons. Those are all areas that could be submitted to scientific inquiry."
},
{
"end_time": 10246.681,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 10217.449,
"text": " Time travel might be yet another. And so the Society for Scientific Exploration was formed as a way of including all of these fringe areas of science under one umbrella. And it's a very useful organization. There's also, in England in particular, although it's an international organization, the Society for Psychical Research."
},
{
"end_time": 10276.63,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 10246.988,
"text": " The SPR was founded in 1882 and really initiated the scientific study of the paranormal. It's been publishing journals and proceedings ever since. So in that organization alone, we have 140 plus years of research data, a very valuable organization, a very important organization. Of course, all of these organizations operate in concert."
},
{
"end_time": 10301.237,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 10276.954,
"text": " with each other. There's a lot of overlap. Sometimes they hold conventions together. There is also the International Association for Remote Viewing, which is now IRVA, International Remote Viewing Association, is mostly for practitioners of remote viewing, but also researchers"
},
{
"end_time": 10330.555,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 10301.749,
"text": " In addition, there's the International Association for Near Death Studies. Once again, mostly experiencers, people who have had the near death experience, but also researchers are involved. In addition, there are several organizations devoted to the study of consciousness itself, and many of them started out with the idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 10360.708,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 10330.947,
"text": " Well, we're basically neurology. If you want to study consciousness, you study the brain and the nervous system. But more and more they've come to realize you can't exclude the paranormal. It just comes up too often over and over again. So many of the organizations devoted to the scientific study of consciousness are now also including parapsychology researchers in"
},
{
"end_time": 10376.101,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 10361.152,
"text": " Do you believe the government is still conducting remote viewing research? To me it's not strange because they investigate almost anything that may pay off so I don't see it as an endorsement personally. What are your views?"
},
{
"end_time": 10405.23,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 10376.988,
"text": " Well, we know that the government has now launched some new official programs to look into UFOs, or what they are calling UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, which could include orbs, which could include angels, for all I know, or even ghosts. So there is some funding coming through for that and"
},
{
"end_time": 10433.046,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 10405.708,
"text": " There was recently the OSAP program that was run by the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation that looked into all of that. I think OSAP is no longer in existence. Bigelow has now established the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, but that's not receiving, to my knowledge, any government funding."
},
{
"end_time": 10462.739,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 10433.456,
"text": " We do know that the government funded remote viewing programs at SRI International and later on at SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation. So for 20 years, that funding occurred at a low level, maybe a million dollars a year, which is not a lot in scientific funding. Supposedly that stopped."
},
{
"end_time": 10485.111,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 10463.114,
"text": " long ago, basically, I think 1996 or so. And we don't hear about any more government funding of parapsychology since then. Now, in my opinion, the government would be very smart if they wanted to continue to fund such programs to do what"
},
{
"end_time": 10514.445,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 10486.084,
"text": " secretly because the programs are still so controversial that funding them publicly would just generate all sorts of noise and media attention that would not be beneficial to the actual research. So I hope that there is a secret program within not just our government, but other governments as well. I have no knowledge that that is happening. However,"
},
{
"end_time": 10541.254,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 10514.684,
"text": " What's pretty clear to me is that all across the spectrum of governments and military organizations, there are individuals, often highly placed individuals, who have a personal interest and who have certain amount of latitude in their organizations that they can pursue quietly."
},
{
"end_time": 10570.009,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 10541.476,
"text": " those interests because they might develop into something useful. So I think that there probably, I would guess there are a thousand people like that embedded in different government and scientific organizations around the world who are pursuing this at a personal level. However, to move beyond the personal level, to get an actual budget,"
},
{
"end_time": 10590.794,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 10570.981,
"text": " Are you planning to continue your research with the Bigelow Institute? Have they reached out to you?"
},
{
"end_time": 10617.705,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 10591.186,
"text": " think the Bigelow Institute. One thing you can say about it, it is potentially very well funded. It potentially has a real future. We're certainly thinking in terms of long term research projects, but I can't be more specific than that. Are you familiar with Linda Moulton Howe's work? I'm aware of her work. I don't know her personally,"
},
{
"end_time": 10646.186,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 10618.097,
"text": " And I would like to know more about her personal work, actually. I think that she's an example of how far an individual can go to explore a topic which was about as bizarre as anything that anybody has ever looked at. And she's come up to my knowledge with with a lot of data about it, but not any really hard conclusions."
},
{
"end_time": 10676.067,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10647.244,
"text": " Yes, so I think I'm an example as well in terms of what an individual can do without a great deal of outside funding. In fact, the whole New Thinking Allowed channel, what we're doing today, publishing a magazine, a weekly newsletter, a book series, and putting up many videos every week, it's all volunteer effort."
},
{
"end_time": 10704.855,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 10676.152,
"text": " enabling this. We don't have a large budget of any sort. So I'm a strong believer in what individuals can do on their own and what volunteers can do without big budgets. In fact, sometimes having a big budget gets in the way of accomplishing. Of course, not always. Sometimes you can't do things without a big budget, but it's amazing how much you can do just by people who are"
},
{
"end_time": 10732.841,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 10705.077,
"text": " dedicated and are willing to devote their lives to this work. I had no idea that your channel is run entirely by volunteers. That's commendable, man. Absolutely. That's all that we do at New Thinking Loud. Let me put it this way. It's 95% all volunteer effort. I hope to be able to pay people occasionally when"
},
{
"end_time": 10760.947,
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"text": " We had a book about to be published called Is There Life After Death? And so we'll be having royalty income coming in that will be distributed amongst the volunteers who have worked to make that book possible. You know, the volunteers hopefully will be getting something back for all the time and effort they've put in. They're working like professionals, but they're doing it because they love what they do."
},
{
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"text": " And, uh, that's, that's the way great things get done in my mind. What's a peak in Darien experience? Yes. Uh, the idea of a peak in Darien comes from a poem written, uh, I don't know, years or more ago by John Peake episode took place in, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 10816.101,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 10787.142,
"text": " The early days of the great explorers, Cortes, I think could be what, 15th, 16th century, when he discovered Panama. Darien is a province in the country of Panama. And when Cortes and his men arrived at that province, they saw a mountain. So they climbed the mountain. When they got to the top of the mountain, what did they see? To their surprise, but the Pacific Ocean."
},
{
"end_time": 10844.787,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 10816.408,
"text": " They had no idea it was even there. So a peak enderian experience has come to mean when you are unexpectedly surprised by something you didn't believe would be there. And in particular, it refers to deathbed visions in which typically people who are dying experience their loved ones waiting to greet them in the afterlife."
},
{
"end_time": 10874.923,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 10844.94,
"text": " very commonly reported but on occasion they report wait there's my cousin John why is he there to greet me he's not dead but then it turns out to be the case that cousin John actually had died unbeknownst to the person who was having the vision so there are many examples of this where people have they're having visions related to"
},
{
"end_time": 10903.831,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 10875.094,
"text": " the afterlife because they're dying or they've had a near-death experience and they've been in the afterlife and they come back and they say, huh, this person was in my near-death experience, but they're not dead. I wonder how they got there. And then we learned, oh, they were dead. So those experiences are very important because they help us to overcome the skeptical critique that, well, a person who"
},
{
"end_time": 10932.295,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 10905.299,
"text": " is dying would expect to see their relatives and friends coming to greet them. That's sort of cultural. So it doesn't count as evidence or as survival, but if they see someone they didn't expect or they didn't know would be dead, but who they we later learned really was dead, that would count as a little piece of evidence"
},
{
"end_time": 10961.527,
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"text": " pointing towards the existence of a very ontologically real afterlife. How are you planning for the channel to continue, man? And how are you personally preparing for death, Jeff? Well, my basic rule of thumb is to be here and now. Ram Dass put it beautifully in his book, Be Here Now. We have a series on the"
},
{
"end_time": 10991.937,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 10962.193,
"text": " New Thinking Allowed Channel, a series of my monologues. They're called In Presence, which is my way of saying here and now. So I'm not really concerned a lot about the future. I'm really much more concerned with the present, about what we're already doing. We're already publishing a weekly newsletter, a quarterly magazine, many interviews a week, including monologues that I do where they're really dialogues with myself"
},
{
"end_time": 11020.742,
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"start_time": 10992.483,
"text": " these days, and we have a book series as well. The first volume is about to be published. You can order advance copies now on Amazon. Is There Life After Death? The first volume in the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues series. So I'm just attending to those things and taking it as a here and now"
},
{
"end_time": 11047.995,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 11021.442,
"text": " experience being with you in the here and now, for example. If I can do that, well, that'll be enough for me. Could you share a few book recommendations? A really good book that I encourage people to read who feel they're on the path is one written by the Austrian mystic, Rudolf Steiner, called Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment."
},
{
"end_time": 11077.841,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 11048.712,
"text": " I think that's a very good book for people. I encourage people to make it a point to read hundreds of books. We offer a book recommendation every week in our newsletter and I'm hopeful that we are reaching out to a community of people who don't want to say that their knowledge of esoteric and paramoral matters is limited to one book, but they're willing to read hundreds."
},
{
"end_time": 11099.906,
"index": 409,
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"text": " I imagine that the human race as a species that we are capable of"
},
{
"end_time": 11126.544,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 11100.247,
"text": " expanding our psychic capacities. You see people occasionally, the Ted Owens and the Uri Gellers and the Ingo Swans and many other highly talented psychic people in the world. I see them as exemplars of what could be the masses of people. And I can imagine a time"
},
{
"end_time": 11146.937,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 11126.817,
"text": " In the distant future, I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime, where young people everywhere who exhibit some level of interest and talent in this field will be encouraged. We could have a psychic Olympics the way we have an Olympics for other endeavors."
},
{
"end_time": 11169.821,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 11147.637,
"text": " I think it would be a good thing overall, but it will require a different kind of humanity, a humanity where all people are willing to acknowledge the spiritual side of life, a humanity in which people don't see themselves as they often do today as nothing more than a machine made out of meat."
},
{
"end_time": 11183.49,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 11171.169,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people."
},
{
"end_time": 11213.558,
"index": 414,
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"text": " You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, et cetera, it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well."
},
{
"end_time": 11234.292,
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"text": " Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms, just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from rewatching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms?"
},
{
"end_time": 11263.592,
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"start_time": 11234.292,
"text": " iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting Patreon.com slash Kurt Jymungle and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough."
}
]
}No transcript available.