WEBVTT

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[Music]

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

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My name is Rick Archer.

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Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening

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people.

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Some of you have probably heard me say that hundreds of times, as well as the following,

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which is that if you haven't heard me say that hundreds of times and this is new to

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you and you'd like to check out previous ones, this being interview number 700 today,

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go to bathgap.com and look under the past interviews menu where you'll find all the

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previous ones categorized in various ways.

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I say that because it's easier to categorize them and provide various search tools on the

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website than it is to do so on the YouTube channel.

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So you can find things on the YouTube channel, but on the website you'll have all kinds of

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search tools, including a new thing which is relatively new, which is an AI chatbot

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into which I have uploaded over 50,000 files.

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Not only the backgap interviews, but transcripts of other videos that people I've interviewed

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have made and all kinds of relevant stuff, books they've written, and it's really

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shaping up to be a powerful tool. So check that out. There's a menu for it on

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dotgap.com. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative

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listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help

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support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page that

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explains alternatives to PayPal. And if you'd like to help in some way, we have a

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team of volunteers doing various things, proofreading transcripts of interviews, so just get in

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touch if you'd like to help.

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My guest today is Bob Davis, PhD.

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Bob received his doctorate in the sensory neurosciences from Ohio State University and served as a

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professor for the State University of New York for over 30 years, where he conducted

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research in the behavioral and neurosensory sciences, taught and held many high-level

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administrative roles.

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He published his research in over 60 articles in scholarly journals and presented numerous

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lectures worldwide, which included invited lectures at Harvard, Cambridge, and Peking

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University.

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He was also awarded numerous grants by the National Science Foundation and the National

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Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to conduct research in sensory neuroscience.

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Following his retirement, Bob published several articles in the Journal of Scientific Exploration

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and Edge Science, and presented lectures at national and international conferences on

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consciousness, spirituality, transformative experiences, and UAPs, Unidentified Aerial

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Phenomenon.

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Bob has also published three highly popular books, each of which was inspired by experiences

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he had, The UFO Phenomenon, Should I Believe?, Life After Death, An Analysis of the Evidence,

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Unseen Forces, the integration of science, reality, and you. More recently, he's

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turned his recent book, Unseen Forces, into a planned documentary entitled The

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Consciousness Connection with Emmy Award winner Dave Beatty of Dreamtime

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Entertainment. And I'll be linking to Bob's website and also the website for

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his film from his page on ThatGap. So welcome Bob. Well it's a pleasure to be

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with you Rick. Good to have you here. We're going to talk about a number of

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of topics. Let me just review some of the things we're going to be talking about. We're going

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to be talking about your personal experiences, such as UFO and shared death experience and

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Kundalini experience, each which led you to write a book, as I mentioned. We're going

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to talk about what an extraordinary human experience is and why the need for a paradigm shift and

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scientific understanding is critical. We're going to talk about the rationale for your

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current book on extraordinary human experiences and that film that I mentioned, The Consciousness

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connection and we're going to talk about discussion of types and evidence to support the validity

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of extraordinary human experiences, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, end-of-life

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phenomena, ESP, UFOs, autistic savants, etc., and also spiritual emergencies.

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And one of my favorite topics, we're going to talk about the need to integrate the science

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of the subjective with the science of the physical to better understand the nature of

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reality and other things.

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So perhaps we should start with your experiences.

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You were kind of a nuts and bolts guy, as I gather, in your academic career and your life,

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but then you began to have experiences which precipitated your interest in these kinds

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of things.

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Yeah, indeed, Rick.

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You know, from the very beginning, you're taught to stay away from the brainstem because

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that affects consciousness.

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more or less academically primed to be a materialist and follow that scientific paradigm, the scientific

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methodology, which I did for decades.

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But after happily retiring, I believe it was 2014 or so, I began to have some extraordinary

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experiences.

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Why, I'm not sure, but the first one...

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Were you meditating or taking drugs?

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Not at all.

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No, I do meditate daily, but they came rather spontaneously in different ways.

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The first one was an encounter with the UFO.

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My wife and I visited Sedona, Arizona quite frequently, and one night I just look up and

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I see an orange orb.

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It was about half a mile away, 50 feet up, completely symmetrical.

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And as I'm observing it in stunned silence, I guess, a second one emanates from behind

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it or from within it, and they both say they're stationary.

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And as they immediately appeared, in a sense, they quickly disappeared.

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So you think of all the possibilities, certainly more geothermal, atmospheric, of course, you

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go through that whole list, and obviously there's no answers.

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But that's more than spurred my curiosity.

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In fact, I was always interested in UFOs because I grew up in the 60s.

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And it's hard not to be, I guess, fascinated with the science fiction of the time.

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So I wrote the first book, UFO Phenomenon, should I believe more as an intro book and

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as a means for me to better understand the phenomenon.

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You know Mark Gober?

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Yeah.

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He wrote a book on that.

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He writes books on all kinds of things.

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He seems to be able to write them in a weekend.

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The guy is like a maniac.

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He gets going on a book.

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I interviewed him about a year ago on this topic also, as well as Ray Hernandez, whom

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you know.

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I worked together on the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Research Foundation for a few years.

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We don't communicate, I don't know where he is anymore, but he's contributed much.

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I think Ray's down in Florida someplace, he was when I interviewed him.

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No, he moved to South America.

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And maybe we'll get to that when we focus more on the UAP issue.

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But my second, call it extraordinary human experience, for lack of a better term, occurred

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while I was sleeping.

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And I had this extraordinary, call it empathic, shared death experience, some people refer

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to it as a shared death experience that my good friend Raymond Moody called, where I

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had the sensation, realer than real, of suffocating.

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It was the worst feeling I've ever had.

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I was truly dying.

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Of course, it woke me up.

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But I was given a message that my colleague in the lab had died, my dear friend Ann.

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I didn't think much of it, obviously writing it off to nothing more than a hypnagogic result,

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a dreamlike, illusionary aspect of the brain.

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I walk into the lab, I see the sulking faces and I knew right away she had passed, unexpectedly.

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That moved me.

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I could not dismiss that.

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I had to delve into that issue further and I wrote the book, Life After Death, an analysis

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of the evidence, much more from an academic perspective rather than a public.

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Before that I was a 50/50, is your life after death, yes or no, flip a coin.

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Following my research into the matter, I guess I've become more 51/49 in belief of it.

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Yeah, I'm like 99 to 1 myself.

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Nothing conclusive.

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Then my third experience occurred after I gave a paper in Byron Bay, Australia.

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I was invited to have some wine with some people who attended and I did.

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One of the people who were there, Dr. Marie Batchelor, retired obstetrician, just said,

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"Why don't we sit in a circle and have a healing session?"

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So she started to do that.

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her eyes, relaxed, and she began to talk about releasing your attachments, getting rid of

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engrams, cleaning out DNA, etc.

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Well, not so much it was the words as to maybe directing energy of some type.

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I don't know how to explain it, but I began to cough and feel beautiful.

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I felt wonderful, energetic, but I couldn't stop coughing.

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Could not.

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20 minutes I coughed, realizing I was pestering those in attendance, but I couldn't stop.

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That combined with the feeling of bliss forced me to ask her, "Hey, tomorrow afternoon, if

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you can, be here, let's do this one-on-one."

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We did.

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She did the same thing, and I had a full-blown Kundalini awakening.

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Which means what exactly?

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What did you experience?

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It was an energetic effect and initially the autonomic nervous system wanted to overdrive

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and I essentially looked like the child.

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Was her name Reagan in the Exorcist?

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Right.

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You had this spinning on its axis.

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It could if it wasn't restricted by the fibers and musculature in the neck region, right?

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Right.

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So you're thrashing about?

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about head and chest region involuntarily, uncontrollably, while I looked like I'm suffering,

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I'm feeling ecstasy, bliss.

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You weren't afraid that you were having some kind of epileptic seizure or something because

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the bliss was convincing enough that something good was happening?

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It was a mixed reaction.

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Obviously I was confused because I felt external to my body because I wasn't in control of

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my body.

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was doing its gyrations, head spinning, heavy breathing, asymmetric reactions, autonomic

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impulses that I could not control, resulting in ugly looking physiological sensations, I

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should say, or appearances.

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To one who was observing me, they would think I'm in the process of dying or suffering.

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Right.

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Little.

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But I was a changed person from then on.

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How did your life change?

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Good question.

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I became a tree hugger.

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I felt connected with the universe.

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I can't put that into words, it was certainly ineffable.

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I felt bliss.

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I didn't want to confront a psychiatrist for fear that I would be labeled as psychotic

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because when there's a spiritual emergency, you have anxiety because you can't explain

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it and I think there's a physiological reaction at some level given what happened to you,

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which I can't explain, but that alone I think is a basis for anxiety, let alone the other

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layer of emotion.

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Why am I observing the universe in a different way?

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Why do I feel the sense of interconnectedness?

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Why do I want to hug trees?

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Why do I want to talk now about spirituality?

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Why do I feel closer to people?

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Why do I want to disengage from those who I sense negative emotions from, like I never

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have before?

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I'm different.

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beliefs, my attitude, I didn't fear death like I did, but I picked up Graf and Graf,

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their book on the...

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Stanislaw Graf, yeah.

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Stanislaw Graf.

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He's been on that.

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It hit home.

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It fit me to absolute, symptomatically, in terms of the aftermath and after effects.

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I was full in a spiritual emergency, having kriyas thereafter.

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when I meditated or talked about spirituality with people, my upper lip would automatically

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vibrate and I tried to suppress it for fear of embarrassment.

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But interestingly, when I meditated for about a year or so afterwards, when I got into deep

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meditation, I heard music, I heard spiritual bells.

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>> STEVE: Interesting.

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That's definitely a Kundalini symptom.

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>> WALTER: Always one of them.

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Again, I didn't have all of them, but that's one that is noted.

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But the most beautiful, I hate to use the term heavenly, but that's appropriate.

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And I mentioned this to Bruce Grayson when we spoke, I interviewed Bruce at the International

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Association for Near-Death Studies as part of our film.

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I mentioned it to him because he did write a paper on Kundalini and NDEs looking at the

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similarities between the two.

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And there are some, not completely, but there are, among all of these extraordinary human

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experiences.

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And he said he doted that same information from others who've had not only near-death,

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but kundalini awakenings, not all.

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And he said the most similar music to that may be found in new music that's produced

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electronically.

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And I listened to some of that, and I can see why he says that.

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>> Jeff: Well, you know, I think you did the right thing when you had this Kundalini awakening,

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which was you started to try to learn about it and read things and talk to people and

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stuff because some people, it happens to them, and they're all alone and they don't know

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what the heck is happening.

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They run to the doctor, they get put on some drug to suppress it, and they might go on

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for years thinking there's something wrong with them.

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I bet you there are people in psychiatric institutions who had this and didn't run into

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anybody who knew what was going on.

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So that's one reason I think it's good for us to talk about these things publicly in shows

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like this so that if people have something like this, they don't freak out.

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They realize something good is happening and perhaps there are certain measures they need

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to take to make sure that they integrate and stabilize because it can be destabilizing.

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But anyway, it's not a bad thing.

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It's not a bad thing, but it comes with major risks along those lines.

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And people are institutionalized, dumbed down with inappropriate medications.

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The last thing you want to hear when you're going through a spiritual emergency is that

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you have some symptoms of psychosis, which can be easily misdiagnosed because there are

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comorbidities between psychosis and spiritual awakenings.

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But clear distinctions to any psychiatrist counselor who's well-versed in Kundalini,

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how many are.

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And that's a major problem because there aren't many that are aware of it.

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And it is in the DSM that Lukoff wrote about Kundalini awakenings, yet it's often ignored

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or not addressed sufficiently enough within the healthcare system for those people to

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recognize and make that clear distinction between the two.

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And it's easy to do so if you know what Kundalini is and you wouldn't put them on these kinds

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of medications and misdiagnose and mistreat.

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aside, there's been studies done, Wollekot, Marjorie Wollekot, the neuroscience...

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She's been on that, yep. Yeah, we interviewed her. Almost everybody you

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mentioned has been on that, Kev. Well, we have all these people in the film, because the

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point is, Rick, and you mentioned it earlier, wake people up, hate to use that

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expression, but there is a need for the paradigm shift, because people are not

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aware of these kinds of experiences, the implications of it, and materialism

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certainly isn't going to provide us any answers to any of this anytime soon.

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Yeah. So where we go to make the changes along all these lines and to the

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scientific community, medical community, that not only are Kundalini Awakenings

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real and you probably have millions of people running around on Quiz Street

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trying to figure out what's going on, running into books for answers, where do

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they get them? They're from healthcare practitioners, psychologists by and large, and there are some

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certainly that are aware of it, but good luck finding them who you can trust to confide

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about it. Marjorie Wolokai, again, did a study with scientists, over 60 of them, who had

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Kundalini experiences, who talk about their illuminating light that they perceived while

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they're having it. Many of the sensations that I experienced, many of them who

00:16:54.100 --> 00:16:59.340
changed careers and perspectives on life, we know about these transformative

00:16:59.340 --> 00:17:04.740
aspects to all of this. And James talked about a space and Maslow talked about

00:17:04.740 --> 00:17:09.860
all of this back then. And where is it? You know, it's largely ignored.

00:17:09.860 --> 00:17:15.460
Experienced by many millions and yet we're in this materialistic mindset not

00:17:15.460 --> 00:17:18.740
doing anything to really address it.

00:17:18.740 --> 00:17:19.740
There's progress though.

00:17:19.740 --> 00:17:23.620
I mean, if we compare what's happening now with the 50s, for instance, now that we have

00:17:23.620 --> 00:17:27.180
the internet and there are thousands of videos about the kinds of things you and I are talking

00:17:27.180 --> 00:17:29.960
about, it's kind of unstoppable.

00:17:29.960 --> 00:17:32.980
It could be that 30, 40 years ago, someone was institutionalized.

00:17:32.980 --> 00:17:36.540
If they had this experience, now they get on YouTube and they find a thing and they

00:17:36.540 --> 00:17:37.660
think, "Oh, something good is happening."

00:17:37.660 --> 00:17:40.540
They find somebody who knows what they're talking about, they get help.

00:17:40.540 --> 00:17:42.380
So I think we're making progress.

00:17:42.380 --> 00:17:44.260
Yes, we are.

00:17:44.260 --> 00:17:48.940
the social media standpoint, word is certainly spreading, no question about it.

00:17:48.940 --> 00:17:55.300
I wish scientists and again medical practitioners would also learn more about it and adopt it

00:17:55.300 --> 00:18:01.740
more importantly in their practices to the point where we do have more of a paradigm shift.

00:18:01.740 --> 00:18:07.500
Jeff Kriple addressed it in his book talking about 40 scientists who flipped from various

00:18:07.500 --> 00:18:12.460
types of extraordinary experiences, shifting careers and then some because of it.

00:18:12.460 --> 00:18:18.380
Now how do you explain, talk about paradigm shift and this is a basis for my current book

00:18:18.380 --> 00:18:26.660
and the film, to inform, educate, provide hope to the public that these theories, these experiences

00:18:26.660 --> 00:18:34.800
exist, are real, are valid, these scientists help support that anecdotal evidence and unfortunately

00:18:34.800 --> 00:18:41.820
materialism only adopts quantitative data and ignores largely the anecdotal information

00:18:41.820 --> 00:18:48.780
where a lot of the valid information does exist that supports this kind of extraordinary experiences,

00:18:48.780 --> 00:18:54.340
which vary considerably from near-death, to out-of-body, to you name it, to interactions

00:18:54.340 --> 00:19:02.420
with other beings, alternate realms, synchronicities, end-of-life phenomena, and all those manifestations,

00:19:02.420 --> 00:19:09.300
and much more, including again ESP, which indeed is valid, and that alone should cause

00:19:09.300 --> 00:19:16.020
a paradigm shift. Convince science of that, it's impossible. I forget who it was, it was

00:19:16.020 --> 00:19:21.260
a German physicist, one of Einstein's contemporaries, who said, "Science advances one funeral at

00:19:21.260 --> 00:19:26.020
a time." Sometimes people just can't change, and the old ones have to die off, and the

00:19:26.020 --> 00:19:30.980
new ones come along, and they're able to think in a new way. Yeah, and people forget that

00:19:30.980 --> 00:19:36.660
Einstein had a lot more to contribute than his famous equation, equals mc squared, when

00:19:36.660 --> 00:19:42.100
he talked a great deal about spirituality and many of our former Nobel Prize laureates talked

00:19:42.100 --> 00:19:46.620
about consciousness and ESP as being valid theoretically.

00:19:46.620 --> 00:19:53.100
You know, if we look at the collective evidence of all of these experiences that people have,

00:19:53.100 --> 00:19:59.780
I think it's very difficult to ignore the fact that medicine and psychiatry cannot come

00:19:59.780 --> 00:20:06.780
close to the beneficial effects that many of these experience induce in people who have

00:20:06.780 --> 00:20:14.740
them overnight, when again medicine cannot make any progress using the traditional standard

00:20:14.740 --> 00:20:16.540
techniques.

00:20:16.540 --> 00:20:18.700
And that's true for NDEs.

00:20:18.700 --> 00:20:25.020
People have them and they're changed dramatically overnight to where their psychological problems

00:20:25.020 --> 00:20:27.980
prior to their NDE vanished.

00:20:27.980 --> 00:20:28.980
And that's a fact.

00:20:28.980 --> 00:20:36.180
I've had many psychiatrists tell me this, Bruce Greyson has, Raymond Moody has, etc.

00:20:36.180 --> 00:20:40.460
But you don't get that information unless you talk to these people like you have throughout

00:20:40.460 --> 00:20:42.940
these years or read their books certainly.

00:20:42.940 --> 00:20:48.700
You're not going to get it at the corner drugstore or your friendly scientist or medical physician

00:20:48.700 --> 00:20:51.260
that you see routinely.

00:20:51.260 --> 00:20:58.260
And that alone, that immediate change in people's perspective for the good is ignored and it's

00:20:58.260 --> 00:21:04.140
anecdotal evidence, measure it. Can't do it. You can't measure qualia and use it as a basis

00:21:04.140 --> 00:21:12.420
for brain consciousness distinction. And because you can't, we're stuck in a materialist mindset.

00:21:12.420 --> 00:21:17.100
Materialism is not going to provide us an answer to that. You have to go, I guess, maybe

00:21:17.100 --> 00:21:21.300
to idealism, certainly some form of in-between, a dualistic model.

00:21:21.300 --> 00:21:26.460
Well, you know, this whole paradigm shift idea, you've probably read the book by Thomas Kuhn,

00:21:26.460 --> 00:21:32.940
structure of scientific revolutions, and he talks about how paradigm shifts happen, which is that

00:21:32.940 --> 00:21:38.620
anomalies accumulate, meaning evidence that contradicts the established paradigm, to the

00:21:38.620 --> 00:21:43.580
point where finally the dam breaks, you know, finally the established paradigm can't hold anymore

00:21:43.580 --> 00:21:47.980
against the mass of anomalies that have accumulated, and then a shift takes place.

00:21:47.980 --> 00:21:52.620
And it's good that you can't just overturn a paradigm on day one, because everything would

00:21:52.620 --> 00:21:57.760
would be unstable, we wouldn't have any solid footing in our scientific understanding.

00:21:57.760 --> 00:22:03.760
And so there is a tendency to resist paradigm shift, especially by the people who are embedded

00:22:03.760 --> 00:22:08.100
or invested in a particular paradigm, but eventually it gives way.

00:22:08.100 --> 00:22:11.080
It's inexorable, you know, once enough evidence accumulates.

00:22:11.080 --> 00:22:16.200
And I think a lot of evidence has been accumulating, and these days tons of people are studying

00:22:16.200 --> 00:22:17.200
this kind of thing.

00:22:17.200 --> 00:22:21.260
I mean, psychedelics, I mean, look what's happening at Johns Hopkins and NYU and some of these

00:22:21.260 --> 00:22:26.300
other places, Robin Carhart Harris over in the UK, they're doing all this work with psilocybin,

00:22:26.300 --> 00:22:32.760
and like you said, with NDEs, very often there will be a huge change in worldview after one

00:22:32.760 --> 00:22:34.000
of these experiences.

00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:39.600
People who are diehard atheists all of a sudden believe in some kind of deity or divine presence,

00:22:39.600 --> 00:22:44.680
and that kind of stuff is becoming more and more mainstream, and it's helping people so

00:22:44.680 --> 00:22:50.120
much with alcoholism or PTSD or end-of-life fears and things like that.

00:22:50.120 --> 00:22:55.960
There's no question about it. That alone, what we see, the evidence, based on some studies that are

00:22:55.960 --> 00:23:02.440
coming out of John Hopkins, as you mentioned, Griffiths, Timmerman, etc., David Luke, among

00:23:02.440 --> 00:23:10.040
others. And look, we've come to the chase. FDA has approved the use of ketamine in forms of severe

00:23:10.040 --> 00:23:16.840
depression. We see other clear evidence of positive outcomes from many of these psychoactive agents on

00:23:16.840 --> 00:23:23.000
severe mental conditions that have been untreatable with standard approaches. And there's more to

00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:29.320
that aspect of DMT, not only in terms of mental health aspects, but yes, you know, a paradigm

00:23:29.320 --> 00:23:35.320
shift. It's a baseline of understanding, usually applied to science, however, you know, physics,

00:23:35.320 --> 00:23:42.120
biology, to those disciplines. And we only have a shift when we get contradictory evidence of

00:23:42.120 --> 00:23:48.120
established theories. So what's it applied to? Germs, the orbit of orbits around the Sun,

00:23:48.120 --> 00:23:53.720
and quantum mechanics. I think you can make a case for even CO2 emissions as a basis for a

00:23:53.720 --> 00:23:59.960
paradigm shift now. Artificial intelligence is another case. The paranormal, however,

00:23:59.960 --> 00:24:04.840
is my case, and I'm not alone in making that case, because I think you need to understand

00:24:04.840 --> 00:24:09.880
the paranormal. I hate to use the old term, to understand the paranormal to better understand

00:24:09.880 --> 00:24:15.240
the normal. I think that's very true. I think you have to understand the paranormal in order to

00:24:15.240 --> 00:24:20.280
understand consciousness better. What's the expression, right? All you need is one white

00:24:20.280 --> 00:24:26.440
crow to disprove a theory. The theory that all crows are black. Right. Yeah, and in my mind we

00:24:26.440 --> 00:24:32.120
have a whole flock of these white crows when it comes. We can add evidence insofar as this is

00:24:32.120 --> 00:24:37.400
concerned. Yeah, I don't know where the evidence is more strong, but you take each and every one,

00:24:37.400 --> 00:24:42.520
we could talk about each and every one for quite a bit of time as you have in the past with many of

00:24:42.520 --> 00:24:49.720
your extraordinary guests. DMT, as you mentioned, is just one thing. Not only does it show these

00:24:49.720 --> 00:24:57.000
remarkable changes in symptomatology that's pathologic in nature in many cases, but you

00:24:57.000 --> 00:25:04.680
also of course see evidence of people being changed behaviorally in terms of being flipped,

00:25:04.680 --> 00:25:10.840
but also in terms of believing that even though they're wearing a suit and a tie,

00:25:10.840 --> 00:25:18.280
sitting at a beautiful desk on Fifth Avenue, based on their DMT experience two years ago,

00:25:18.280 --> 00:25:25.400
they still believe that the beings that they interacted with, or the deity that they interacted

00:25:25.400 --> 00:25:29.960
with still exists. That experience causes

00:25:29.960 --> 00:25:33.160
them to have a major impact on their

00:25:33.160 --> 00:25:36.440
belief systems and everything that flows

00:25:36.440 --> 00:25:39.680
out of that, an alternate reality.

00:25:39.680 --> 00:25:41.760
Whatever feeling they may have had at the time,

00:25:41.760 --> 00:25:44.640
which was generally positive. So we're

00:25:44.640 --> 00:25:46.720
seeing remarkable results insofar as

00:25:46.720 --> 00:25:49.440
that goes. Interactions with beings and

00:25:49.440 --> 00:25:52.320
information they contain is also quite

00:25:52.320 --> 00:25:54.040
remarkable. You know there's an

00:25:54.040 --> 00:25:57.560
organization over in the UK, you're probably familiar with it. In fact, Marjorie Wollekot

00:25:57.560 --> 00:26:02.360
is very involved. It's called the Galileo Commission, and David Lorimer heads it up.

00:26:02.360 --> 00:26:07.320
And it was so named because church authorities refused to look through Galileo's telescope

00:26:07.320 --> 00:26:12.360
to observe the moons of Jupiter because for some weird reason, Jupiter having moons would

00:26:12.360 --> 00:26:17.240
conflict with Church doctrine. I don't know why exactly, but they wouldn't look. And Dean

00:26:17.240 --> 00:26:20.680
Radin and others have had the same experience. People say, "We don't want to look at your

00:26:20.680 --> 00:26:25.800
research because it couldn't be true. So we won't look. But again, it's like it's a lost cause,

00:26:25.800 --> 00:26:31.720
because as the anomalies grow, as the research gets more voluminous and rigorous and so on,

00:26:31.720 --> 00:26:36.440
it's going to be harder and harder to stick your head in the sand and ignore it.

00:26:36.440 --> 00:26:42.600
But as you said, we make progress one funeral at a time, and it takes a good 100 years or so,

00:26:42.600 --> 00:26:47.800
indeed, before you do see a paradigm change. Maybe that'll occur more quickly.

00:26:47.800 --> 00:26:49.800
I think things are speeding up, you know?

00:26:49.800 --> 00:26:50.800
I really do.

00:26:50.800 --> 00:26:56.920
They're always saying the pace of change is increasing in this technological age exponentially.

00:26:56.920 --> 00:27:00.280
And I think that's happening with the kinds of things we're talking about, too.

00:27:00.280 --> 00:27:04.880
It took six or six years since the Wright brothers flew with Kitty Hawk to when we first landed

00:27:04.880 --> 00:27:05.880
on the moon.

00:27:05.880 --> 00:27:06.880
Yeah, isn't that amazing?

00:27:06.880 --> 00:27:08.960
I think six or six years, you know, from then.

00:27:08.960 --> 00:27:11.960
And geometric progression, who the heck knows what's next?

00:27:11.960 --> 00:27:17.280
But I think what should be next is what we're talking about, certainly among other things.

00:27:17.280 --> 00:27:24.600
But the science of the self, another unique idea, call it what you will, a deeper exploration

00:27:24.600 --> 00:27:31.520
of this nature of these experiences and consciousness, integrating this objective with the objective

00:27:31.520 --> 00:27:35.520
going beyond our conventional scientific boundaries.

00:27:35.520 --> 00:27:41.180
And I think this shift has to acknowledge that consciousness is an active participant

00:27:41.180 --> 00:27:43.600
in understanding reality.

00:27:43.600 --> 00:27:51.120
It has to go beyond the traditional views of science, reducing consciousness to biochemical

00:27:51.120 --> 00:27:55.560
processes within a hundred billion neurons within the brain.

00:27:55.560 --> 00:27:58.520
And I don't think you can do that.

00:27:58.520 --> 00:28:05.140
Neuroscientists continually try to find consciousness in the brain, and the best they can do is to

00:28:05.140 --> 00:28:09.000
categorize consciousness in terms of states of wakefulness.

00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:14.920
In terms of psychological perspectives, it's viewed as predictive processing models.

00:28:14.920 --> 00:28:20.040
In terms of Eastern philosophy, you're going to get the complete opposite, more of a certainly

00:28:20.040 --> 00:28:22.080
an idealistic model.

00:28:22.080 --> 00:28:25.720
So you don't get a consensus reality.

00:28:25.720 --> 00:28:31.080
And yeah, as more of this evidence of the paranormal accumulates, I don't know who,

00:28:31.080 --> 00:28:38.060
what and where is going to take the ball forward, but maybe the Galileo Project, maybe organizations

00:28:38.060 --> 00:28:42.860
like the Gary Nolans of the Sole Foundation who we interviewed at Stanford University

00:28:42.860 --> 00:28:44.940
about the UAP phenomenon.

00:28:44.940 --> 00:28:50.100
You know, we went to the International Association for Noetic Sciences that...

00:28:50.100 --> 00:28:51.100
IONS, right.

00:28:51.100 --> 00:28:57.660
IONS, who Dean Radin is the chief scientist of, to interview some of the scientists there.

00:28:57.660 --> 00:29:04.660
Now, that's an organization at the forefront of research in ESP and related matters.

00:29:04.660 --> 00:29:11.140
And then we went to the Ryan Center, another well-established center for this type of investigation,

00:29:11.140 --> 00:29:14.060
and interviewed John Croth, the executive director.

00:29:14.060 --> 00:29:20.180
Went to the Near-Death Studies Conference in Washington, D.C.

00:29:20.180 --> 00:29:23.420
And went to the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia.

00:29:23.420 --> 00:29:29.060
Talked to many people there, including Edmund Alexander, the neurosurgeon who has famous

00:29:29.060 --> 00:29:32.900
NDE that he popularized in his book, The Proof of Heaven.

00:29:32.900 --> 00:29:39.660
But more importantly than just capturing the information that these leading scholars in

00:29:39.660 --> 00:29:45.620
their respective fields share with us, which is extraordinarily important, is capturing

00:29:45.620 --> 00:29:50.860
the subjective information by those who have these kinds of experiences, which we mainly

00:29:50.860 --> 00:29:55.860
got at the Monroe Institute and the Conference on Near-Death Studies.

00:29:55.860 --> 00:30:02.420
Integrating again, both, makes for a much more holistic, better picture of what we're trying

00:30:02.420 --> 00:30:09.060
to understand here. That's what the film The Conscious Connection is about at consciousnessfilm.info

00:30:09.060 --> 00:30:14.660
and again Dave Beatty of Dreamtime Entertainment and Wilson Hawthorne of Telemedia, I forget the

00:30:14.660 --> 00:30:22.100
name, excuse me, are co-producing that. But that's the essence of the content of the combination of

00:30:22.100 --> 00:30:28.980
both aspects of reality I think are what's missing and we keep talking about that and how that is

00:30:28.980 --> 00:30:36.420
integrated into a coherent whole and applied meaning to an application of, because application

00:30:36.420 --> 00:30:38.180
means this.

00:30:38.180 --> 00:30:44.820
When you talk to experiencers, they talk about an evolution of society.

00:30:44.820 --> 00:30:48.540
They talk about the world as it should be in my mind.

00:30:48.540 --> 00:30:57.220
They talk about the end of a collective destruction, one that is only for the enhancement of survival,

00:30:57.220 --> 00:31:02.020
good and peace and all of that, all that stuff that we want.

00:31:02.020 --> 00:31:07.340
If everybody had a kundalini awakening, I certainly think we'd be much better off.

00:31:07.340 --> 00:31:11.780
I think that's a very important point because we're talking about paradigm shifts and it

00:31:11.780 --> 00:31:16.860
might sound kind of intellectual or abstract or philosophical, but it's really kind of

00:31:16.860 --> 00:31:21.420
critical and practical because the world is going to hell in a handbasket with pollution

00:31:21.420 --> 00:31:26.200
and climate change and species extinction and potential for thermonuclear war and all

00:31:26.200 --> 00:31:31.200
these other things, and all those things are manifestations of the predominant paradigm,

00:31:31.200 --> 00:31:38.920
which is, as you said, materialistic and reductionistic. And I think that we've seen, and it's more

00:31:38.920 --> 00:31:46.120
obvious than ever, that that paradigm has been inadequate and that it needs to be revised.

00:31:46.120 --> 00:31:50.700
Which is not to say we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm always interested

00:31:50.700 --> 00:31:56.660
in the juxtaposition of science and spirituality. Spirituality is ancient, goes back thousands

00:31:56.660 --> 00:32:02.500
of years, science is relatively new, but each of them has something to offer, not only to

00:32:02.500 --> 00:32:08.040
all of us, but to each other. Spirituality can enable science to explore all kinds of

00:32:08.040 --> 00:32:14.020
realities that scientific methodologies so far haven't considered even exist, much less

00:32:14.020 --> 00:32:20.820
could be explored. And vice versa, I think a scientific empirical attitude can help spiritual

00:32:20.820 --> 00:32:27.720
seekers avoid magical thinking and fruitless imagination and to be rigorous in their pursuit

00:32:27.720 --> 00:32:32.500
of spiritual experience. And also, of course, all the tools of science, such as Dean Radin

00:32:32.500 --> 00:32:38.140
and various neurophysiologists are employing, can help to measure, to some extent, these

00:32:38.140 --> 00:32:43.060
inner states that people are experiencing. Perhaps, eventually, we'll be able to identify

00:32:43.060 --> 00:32:49.860
by a brain signature for higher states of consciousness or other such things, and just as we have

00:32:49.860 --> 00:32:54.020
for ordinary states of consciousness, such as waking, dreaming, and sleeping. So I think

00:32:54.020 --> 00:32:59.860
we're moving toward a merger of these discrete disciplines of science and spirituality, and

00:32:59.860 --> 00:33:05.540
perhaps 100, 200 years from now, maybe even sooner, it'll seem absurd to isolate them

00:33:05.540 --> 00:33:11.360
from each other. They will have conjoined into a single methodology of gaining knowledge

00:33:11.360 --> 00:33:16.240
with naturally different facets as science and spirituality both have now, but they'll

00:33:16.240 --> 00:33:22.720
be partners, collaborators in helping us understand the nature of life and of reality.

00:33:22.720 --> 00:33:28.240
I agree with you completely. A symbiotic kind of relationship in a sense. And I see consciousness

00:33:28.240 --> 00:33:32.640
having that kind of relationship with the brain in a sense. The question is, of course,

00:33:32.640 --> 00:33:36.900
does consciousness persist at the bodily depth? It's something we all want to know. But getting

00:33:36.900 --> 00:33:41.220
to your point too, you know, neuroscientists look for spirituality in the brain, looking

00:33:41.220 --> 00:33:46.740
for that God spot. Andrew Newberg, I'm looking for that and I don't want to go into great

00:33:46.740 --> 00:33:51.260
detail about it, but if you say God, God, God, God, in my ear, you're going to see a

00:33:51.260 --> 00:33:56.820
little area in the ipsilateral parietal lobe light up a great deal on the left side as

00:33:56.820 --> 00:34:02.100
opposed to other areas. Does that mean we have an area, a signature, as you mentioned,

00:34:02.100 --> 00:34:08.700
spirituality. No, that's a bold leap to go there, but we do see, however, we do see

00:34:08.700 --> 00:34:14.020
certain manipulations of the brain, we see tumors in certain areas of the brain,

00:34:14.020 --> 00:34:18.980
electrical stimulation in certain areas that do make it difficult for people to

00:34:18.980 --> 00:34:24.620
distinguish internal from external reality. You remove the lesion, I forget

00:34:24.620 --> 00:34:30.420
where in the brain, in the brainstem, periaqueduct, doesn't matter, periaqueduct

00:34:30.420 --> 00:34:36.820
gray, removing a lesion for instance, tumor from that area, for some reason some people

00:34:36.820 --> 00:34:40.980
become more spiritual, some become less spiritual or religious.

00:34:40.980 --> 00:34:42.300
The point is it alters...

00:34:42.300 --> 00:34:44.840
You probably know Jill Bolte Taylor's story, right?

00:34:44.840 --> 00:34:46.980
My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor.

00:34:46.980 --> 00:34:47.980
Oh, yeah.

00:34:47.980 --> 00:34:48.980
Oh, indeed.

00:34:48.980 --> 00:34:49.980
Yes.

00:34:49.980 --> 00:34:53.840
A neuroanatomist who had a stroke, she was more than aware, unfortunately, that the left

00:34:53.840 --> 00:34:59.740
side of her brain was slowly shutting down and lives in a right hemisphere world, which

00:34:59.740 --> 00:35:05.620
she craves and loves, thought everybody should experience it. It was like an epiphany for

00:35:05.620 --> 00:35:11.740
her, more of a spiritual side as her left brain egoic literal sense of viewing the world was

00:35:11.740 --> 00:35:14.980
essentially dissolved literally before her eyes.

00:35:14.980 --> 00:35:18.660
- Yeah. Just to interject again, I'll try not to do this too often, but I interviewed

00:35:18.660 --> 00:35:22.220
her about a year ago and she has a new book called "Whole Brain Living" and what you just

00:35:22.220 --> 00:35:27.320
said reminded me of that because my assumption, and she's kind of arguing this in this book,

00:35:27.320 --> 00:35:32.200
that full spiritual development is going to not involve just some little spot in the brain

00:35:32.200 --> 00:35:39.480
that can be identified, but rather a holistic development of all aspects of the brain and

00:35:39.480 --> 00:35:42.800
correspondingly all aspects of the personality.

00:35:42.800 --> 00:35:47.160
So it'll be a global thing throughout the whole brain, a global transformation.

00:35:47.160 --> 00:35:52.280
Again, we have yet to even begin to fully understand, we don't even understand the ordinary

00:35:52.280 --> 00:35:53.280
brain.

00:35:53.280 --> 00:36:02.280
Talking about the brain though, you can't ignore the work, as controversial as it is, by Hamerhoff and Penrose, orchestrated reduction theory.

00:36:02.280 --> 00:36:10.280
That's interesting, looking at microtubules and cells of the brain, the cytoskeletons of the neurons, they give it structure.

00:36:10.280 --> 00:36:15.280
They're considered, according to them and others, to be acting like quantum computers.

00:36:15.280 --> 00:36:22.280
And they serve in the act of creating, I think, Hamerhoff said, a conscious moment.

00:36:22.280 --> 00:36:29.040
He goes on further to say that based on that, consciousness will persist after bodily death.

00:36:29.040 --> 00:36:32.200
It's a bold leap, but he may be in the right direction.

00:36:32.200 --> 00:36:35.560
I was going to ask you about that actually, because I've seen this speak, but I couldn't

00:36:35.560 --> 00:36:36.560
remember.

00:36:36.560 --> 00:36:41.200
So Hameroff is arguing then that the brain is more like a receiver transmitter than a

00:36:41.200 --> 00:36:42.640
creator of consciousness.

00:36:42.640 --> 00:36:46.760
Is that what he's saying with his microtubules, that that's just like the electronic, so to

00:36:46.760 --> 00:36:49.760
speak, of the radio that we call the brain?

00:36:49.760 --> 00:36:54.960
saying that neurons interact non-locally with other neurons? Within the brain.

00:36:54.960 --> 00:37:01.240
Yes. In the brain, which is entanglement in action, quantum mechanics in action,

00:37:01.240 --> 00:37:07.960
also analogous to ESP in action, but he considers that as a facilitating event

00:37:07.960 --> 00:37:12.800
which he calls the consciousness. So non-locally, so let's say I have a neuron

00:37:12.800 --> 00:37:16.760
in my right hemisphere and another one totally separate from it, not touching it

00:37:16.760 --> 00:37:22.320
in my left stemosphere. Is he saying that those two neurons and others like them can all communicate

00:37:22.320 --> 00:37:24.280
without actually physically touching?

00:37:24.280 --> 00:37:31.080
Yes, exactly. They're entangled. That explains how does the brain compute all that it's capable

00:37:31.080 --> 00:37:37.740
of doing so unless it is a quantum process. And we now know that quantum processes can

00:37:37.740 --> 00:37:44.560
exist in warm, wet environments like the brain. This has been realized not long ago. And that's

00:37:44.560 --> 00:37:50.780
That's why this theory also has implications for phenomena like the NDE or the OBE and

00:37:50.780 --> 00:37:55.740
for consciousness persisting after death because you can't even go beyond the microtubules

00:37:55.740 --> 00:37:59.580
because we have to talk about bio photons.

00:37:59.580 --> 00:38:07.260
That's the ultra-v photon emissions generated by microtubules.

00:38:07.260 --> 00:38:09.700
So basically an electromagnetic field.

00:38:09.700 --> 00:38:12.420
That can be picked up by instruments, yes?

00:38:12.420 --> 00:38:14.340
Yes, it can be.

00:38:14.340 --> 00:38:19.420
people can actually alter the emissions, and I'd like to mention that when we talk maybe

00:38:19.420 --> 00:38:26.300
about ESP, but it serves in a sense as a form of information exchange, like entanglement

00:38:26.300 --> 00:38:32.460
between neurons, and potentially it may serve as the basis for exchanging information between

00:38:32.460 --> 00:38:39.380
individuals at a distance, again, as a foundation for ESP, among other things.

00:38:39.380 --> 00:38:43.860
But you can make the case here, and this is where I'm going, talking about the Orr-Corr

00:38:43.860 --> 00:38:51.800
theory and microtubules, you can make the case that we are essentially light beings.

00:38:51.800 --> 00:38:52.800
Humans are light beings.

00:38:52.800 --> 00:38:53.800
In the sense that we emit light?

00:38:53.800 --> 00:38:54.800
Microtubules...

00:38:54.800 --> 00:38:55.800
Is that what you're saying?

00:38:55.800 --> 00:38:56.800
Huh?

00:38:56.800 --> 00:38:57.800
In the sense that we emit light?

00:38:57.800 --> 00:38:58.800
Yeah.

00:38:58.800 --> 00:38:59.800
Bio-photons?

00:38:59.800 --> 00:39:00.800
Literally, literally light beings.

00:39:00.800 --> 00:39:01.800
Yes.

00:39:01.800 --> 00:39:04.800
Photons are light energy.

00:39:04.800 --> 00:39:10.000
And what we know about light is that it can transmit information.

00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:11.000
So we have...

00:39:11.000 --> 00:39:12.000
I'm on a fiber optic cable right now.

00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:13.000
...information being transmitted in the brain.

00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:19.400
brain, yeah, via light, you know, the Big Bang is allowing me to see everything I'm seeing,

00:39:19.400 --> 00:39:25.240
you know, the light's just coming into my retina from 4.3 billion years ago, just now

00:39:25.240 --> 00:39:31.000
entering my retina, bouncing off it, the brain's doing its thing, allowing me to see. So in

00:39:31.000 --> 00:39:36.560
a sense, we're connected with our universe in that very strange way, if you want to look

00:39:36.560 --> 00:39:43.600
at it like that, but getting back to the brain, more specifically, we don't know about these

00:39:43.600 --> 00:39:45.120
glial cells.

00:39:45.120 --> 00:39:50.480
Nobody talks about glial cells, and they are something that acts very much like quantum

00:39:50.480 --> 00:39:55.040
computers, and they comprise over 90% of the brain.

00:39:55.040 --> 00:39:57.200
Those are neurons then, a certain kind of neuron?

00:39:57.200 --> 00:40:01.080
Yeah, and it's called, sort of like a triparite neuron.

00:40:01.080 --> 00:40:05.360
We have a synapse that, where we have two connections.

00:40:05.360 --> 00:40:10.240
cells allow three connections, but we don't hear about that.

00:40:10.240 --> 00:40:15.680
But the point is that there's a lot that's going on in this picture of our brain, at

00:40:15.680 --> 00:40:21.920
least in my mind, that is poorly understood, that has a lot to do with the transmission

00:40:21.920 --> 00:40:28.920
of light energy surrounding glial cells, also magnetite, an unusual element that also exists

00:40:28.920 --> 00:40:35.880
in the brain that's highly responsive in the electromagnetic process and yet little attention

00:40:35.880 --> 00:40:37.320
is also given to that.

00:40:37.320 --> 00:40:42.560
So you have the microtubules, you have magnetite, you have glial cells and you can make the

00:40:42.560 --> 00:40:46.360
case initially that we are light beings.

00:40:46.360 --> 00:40:52.600
But that aside, the point is we do not understand the brain and its role as a quantum computer.

00:40:52.600 --> 00:41:01.120
Yet we probably exist as many physical quantum systems interacting with a quantum mechanic

00:41:01.120 --> 00:41:02.120
world.

00:41:02.120 --> 00:41:08.720
And when we see these, when we have these extraordinary human experiences and all this varying range

00:41:08.720 --> 00:41:14.640
in detail and diversity, we're seeing, I think, possibly evidence of quantum mechanics in

00:41:14.640 --> 00:41:16.840
action in everyday life.

00:41:16.840 --> 00:41:18.480
Maybe that's a stretch.

00:41:18.480 --> 00:41:25.480
But at this level of understanding, we don't have the ability to use science other than

00:41:25.480 --> 00:41:26.640
what exists.

00:41:26.640 --> 00:41:33.400
And the thing that only exists in my mind is not traditional scientific theories, although

00:41:33.400 --> 00:41:39.760
certainly some are applicable without question, but more so in the area of quantum physics.

00:41:39.760 --> 00:41:47.080
As controversial some theories within it are, much of it is well accepted and valid.

00:41:47.080 --> 00:41:51.800
But you hate to use that as always the answer because it isn't.

00:41:51.800 --> 00:41:57.040
Like false memories and illusions and imagery, you could use it as a basis for reality.

00:41:57.040 --> 00:42:01.160
Now I hate to keep running to quantum mechanics as the answer, you have to be very careful

00:42:01.160 --> 00:42:03.840
particularly since we don't understand quantum mechanics.

00:42:03.840 --> 00:42:05.160
I mean I think it was...

00:42:05.160 --> 00:42:06.160
Well yes.

00:42:06.160 --> 00:42:07.160
That's exactly right.

00:42:07.160 --> 00:42:09.640
One of the founders of quantum mechanics says if you think you understand it, you don't.

00:42:09.640 --> 00:42:10.640
Well some people say that.

00:42:10.640 --> 00:42:16.160
And spiritual people like us tend to reference it as if we knew what it actually was.

00:42:16.160 --> 00:42:21.840
we're talking theoretical physics but we see quantum processes, quantum computers

00:42:21.840 --> 00:42:25.880
and we see quantum processes in the brain. Yeah. And we're moving in that

00:42:25.880 --> 00:42:30.600
direction but we can't use it as a basis to explain everything away without

00:42:30.600 --> 00:42:37.600
question. Veridical perceptions in near-death experiences it's probably one

00:42:37.600 --> 00:42:43.560
of the most important lines of evidence in my mind you know for a paradigm shift

00:42:43.560 --> 00:42:49.520
probably one of the most critical ways in which we can say that we here we have

00:42:49.520 --> 00:42:53.640
subjective evidence that clearly contradicts established scientific

00:42:53.640 --> 00:42:58.120
principles and thus we should move on and have a paradigm shift.

00:42:58.120 --> 00:43:00.120
Define veridical perceptions.

00:43:00.120 --> 00:43:04.160
Sure. Veridical perception is one who obtains

00:43:04.160 --> 00:43:09.160
information during near-death or out-of-body experience that's later

00:43:09.160 --> 00:43:14.120
are found to be true, accurate, and detailed by an independent third party.

00:43:14.120 --> 00:43:17.860
Yeah, can you give me a couple of examples from people I've interviewed?

00:43:17.860 --> 00:43:22.620
You made an interesting point about philosophy and spirituality, and it ties in here, because

00:43:22.620 --> 00:43:28.640
that's the argument at hand here, the science and philosophy, and where we integrate it,

00:43:28.640 --> 00:43:32.200
and how do we balance each and come to some understanding.

00:43:32.200 --> 00:43:38.880
Nevertheless, when we interviewed Bruce Grayson, he's a, for those who don't know, a psychiatrist,

00:43:38.880 --> 00:43:45.760
one of the leading researchers in the field of near-death studies, he told us a story

00:43:45.760 --> 00:43:50.400
and Dave Bady and I at the conference and it went something like this.

00:43:50.400 --> 00:43:55.720
One person he interviewed at the time of that person's near-death experience, I forget

00:43:55.720 --> 00:43:59.440
the person's name, he's about 25 years of age, he's from South Africa.

00:43:59.440 --> 00:44:05.280
He was hospitalized with severe pneumonia and couldn't catch his breath, had to be resuscitated

00:44:05.280 --> 00:44:08.520
many times and there was a primary nurse who worked with him every day.

00:44:08.520 --> 00:44:12.800
She had to take some time off for a few days going on vacation.

00:44:12.800 --> 00:44:17.280
And she told him that another nurse would be taking care of him.

00:44:17.280 --> 00:44:23.160
While she was away, I believe her name was Anita, he had another respiratory problem.

00:44:23.160 --> 00:44:25.360
He had a near death experience.

00:44:25.360 --> 00:44:29.720
While he had this near death experience, he saw Anita.

00:44:29.720 --> 00:44:34.360
Anita came to him and said, "Jack, I want you to go back.

00:44:34.720 --> 00:44:38.700
I want you to find my parents, tell them I love them very much, and I'm sorry I wrecked

00:44:38.700 --> 00:44:41.220
their red MGB."

00:44:41.220 --> 00:44:48.260
Now that was back in the 1970s in South Africa when she wrecked the red MGB.

00:44:48.260 --> 00:44:54.740
So when Jack woke in the hospital, he started to tell the nurse about his experience.

00:44:54.740 --> 00:45:00.300
And when he talked about Anita, the nurse began crying and rushed out of the room.

00:45:00.300 --> 00:45:05.980
Well, it turned out that Anita took the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday and her

00:45:05.980 --> 00:45:10.740
parents surprised her with a gift, a red MGB.

00:45:10.740 --> 00:45:15.300
She got so excited, jumped in her car, took her for a test drive, ran into a telephone

00:45:15.300 --> 00:45:19.700
pole and died a few hours before his near-death experience.

00:45:19.700 --> 00:45:24.900
So there's no way, in Bruce Graveson's mind at least, that he could have known at the

00:45:24.900 --> 00:45:31.780
time that she had died or certainly how she had died and yet he did. There's many cases like that.

00:45:31.780 --> 00:45:36.100
There are dozens of cases like this, yeah, probably more than dozens. It happens all the time.

00:45:36.100 --> 00:45:41.300
And I can go on and on and besides, I've been telling the story about the woman on the beautiful

00:45:41.300 --> 00:45:48.580
butterfly. Got the picture after his NDE and that was his sister who he saw who he never met

00:45:48.580 --> 00:45:54.580
because she died before he was born. His parents had never told him about her and then he said,

00:45:54.580 --> 00:45:57.060
"Hey, I had this experience. Do I have a sister?" and they said, "Yeah."

00:45:57.060 --> 00:46:03.300
Yeah, I could elaborate more. It goes on and on about, certainly, individuals blind from birth

00:46:03.300 --> 00:46:08.580
who have an NDE and for the first time they experience sight and see their world. They're

00:46:08.580 --> 00:46:12.900
describing this to Jeff Long, founder of the Near-Death Experiencer Research Foundation.

00:46:12.900 --> 00:46:18.340
We interviewed medical oncologists. He interviewed a woman named Vicky, blind from birth,

00:46:18.340 --> 00:46:26.180
And she describes a visual field as being to the left, to the right, up, down, back, and front.

00:46:26.180 --> 00:46:32.340
And Jeff said, "What do you mean, back?" And she said, "Yeah, I can see 360. I can see all around

00:46:32.340 --> 00:46:38.340
me." And I said, "No, we who have sight from birth, we have eye sockets. We can only see

00:46:38.340 --> 00:46:44.820
in front of us." There are many cases, people who are blind from birth who describe that

00:46:44.820 --> 00:46:52.420
circular view. So what would you conjecture might be the mechanics through which a person could have

00:46:52.420 --> 00:46:57.140
that kind of experience? Either they're blind and they can see or they're under anesthesia

00:46:57.140 --> 00:47:03.860
and they can see what's going on? Rich, some of it we haven't yet fully clearly defined death

00:47:03.860 --> 00:47:10.260
clinically and I think we're just seeing now that the brain certainly survives a lot longer

00:47:10.260 --> 00:47:16.940
than we expected. It certainly survives much longer than 10 to 20 seconds after cardiac

00:47:16.940 --> 00:47:23.540
arrest. It could last for hours under ideal conditions and very possibly longer than that,

00:47:23.540 --> 00:47:29.600
especially the auditory nerve. Thus, people may be able to hear for quite a bit of time

00:47:29.600 --> 00:47:35.900
when they are declared dead and then for some reason they're resuscitated and come back,

00:47:35.900 --> 00:47:40.500
But they're never really dead dead, that's why we call it near death experience.

00:47:40.500 --> 00:47:43.740
But the point is we don't have a clear definition of that.

00:47:43.740 --> 00:47:48.580
So some of this recall that we may be considering as a juridical perception may be related to

00:47:48.580 --> 00:47:54.280
that, but it doesn't account for the nuances, the accuracy and detail of these kinds of

00:47:54.280 --> 00:47:58.840
experiences unless we're independent of the body.

00:47:58.840 --> 00:48:04.380
And once the filter mechanism is reduced, this inhibition occurs and we see evidence

00:48:04.380 --> 00:48:10.620
of this inhibition during NDE states in the brain as well as during DMT states in the

00:48:10.620 --> 00:48:18.580
brain where we see this filtering process, a quieting of brain states, the default mode

00:48:18.580 --> 00:48:26.500
network goes into a very relaxed state as if we're in a meditative state of calm.

00:48:26.500 --> 00:48:29.540
Yes, so we're using the word filter here.

00:48:29.540 --> 00:48:34.680
This is important because what you're saying is that the brain actually blots out a lot

00:48:34.680 --> 00:48:38.460
of what we could potentially be experiencing, and that's to our advantage, because if it

00:48:38.460 --> 00:48:41.780
didn't, it would be like being on a heavy LSD trip all the time.

00:48:41.780 --> 00:48:45.700
There's just too much TMI, as they say, too much information.

00:48:45.700 --> 00:48:51.500
But a lot of times what happens in these various states is those filters get thinned or removed,

00:48:51.500 --> 00:48:57.060
and all of a sudden we're open to perceptions that have been there all along, potentially,

00:48:57.060 --> 00:49:01.780
that we were oblivious to because the brain's doing its job, filtering things out.

00:49:01.780 --> 00:49:06.580
Pete: Well, yeah, exactly. And in some ways you can look at it in reverse. You could say that

00:49:06.580 --> 00:49:12.020
the brain actually impedes one's ability to perceive true reality. You can look at it that

00:49:12.020 --> 00:49:17.780
way as well. Once the brain is gone, it's not necessarily dust and dust, ash and ashes. I'm

00:49:17.780 --> 00:49:25.220
doing something else in another alternate reality, as some people believe, or for reasons of worship,

00:49:25.220 --> 00:49:32.020
religion, culture, or they experience it directly. Or, because of this reduction in filtering,

00:49:32.020 --> 00:49:39.540
and not just filtering, but also ego-centered processing, you're kind of allowing for more

00:49:39.540 --> 00:49:46.740
novel interactions in other brain areas that could facilitate what we can describe as self-transcendence,

00:49:46.740 --> 00:49:54.500
a sense of unity, getting back to what Maslow and James talked about many, many decades ago,

00:49:54.500 --> 00:50:00.620
this interconnected hole, if you will, once you do this to the brain. So, are we impeding

00:50:00.620 --> 00:50:05.580
the brain's ability for us to perceive reality, true reality in this way, or is it a pure

00:50:05.580 --> 00:50:11.980
physiologic reaction? Like getting rid of the left hemisphere in Jill Botello's experience

00:50:11.980 --> 00:50:18.260
while she had just the right hemisphere to use as a basis for her perceptual reality.

00:50:18.260 --> 00:50:22.940
Just one quick point to throw in here while we're on the topic of OBEs and NDEs is that

00:50:22.940 --> 00:50:29.840
in Eastern thought, it's understood that we have a subtle body, they call it "shukshma

00:50:29.840 --> 00:50:35.240
sharira," and that when the physical gross body dies, the subtle body isn't affected

00:50:35.240 --> 00:50:39.820
in the least, it carries on and is responsible for reincarnation and all that. But I think

00:50:39.820 --> 00:50:46.860
that one possible explanation for the mechanics of out-of-body experiences and near-death

00:50:46.860 --> 00:50:52.580
experiences is that despite the fact that the physical body may be incapacitated, the

00:50:52.580 --> 00:50:57.260
subtle body is still functioning and it can actually see without physical eyes or

00:50:57.260 --> 00:51:01.300
hear without physical ears. It can see something that's happening a mile away.

00:51:01.300 --> 00:51:06.380
There's a lady named Ingrid Honkola who had this experience where she was a

00:51:06.380 --> 00:51:10.500
little girl, she fell into a tank of water and she was drowning and first she

00:51:10.500 --> 00:51:14.740
left her body and looked at her nanny who was watching television in the

00:51:14.740 --> 00:51:17.700
house, that wasn't going to help, and then she went down the street and

00:51:17.700 --> 00:51:21.460
encountered her mother waiting at a bus stop and she basically in her subtle

00:51:21.460 --> 00:51:26.020
body said, "Hi, mom," and her mother dropped everything she was holding, raced to the house,

00:51:26.020 --> 00:51:30.100
went straight to the tank, pulled her out, saved her life.

00:51:30.100 --> 00:51:37.420
You know, you're saying the same thing I am, only given my background in this sense, I'm

00:51:37.420 --> 00:51:41.060
going to have a little bit of a physiologic spin on it.

00:51:41.060 --> 00:51:46.460
I think the essence of what we're saying is essentially the same about the brain and consciousness,

00:51:46.460 --> 00:51:52.540
And yeah, you reduce the brain's influence, that subtle body or whatever you want to call

00:51:52.540 --> 00:51:58.060
it, consciousness or whatever term it is, it is not restricted, it is not imputed, it

00:51:58.060 --> 00:52:00.340
can do its own thing.

00:52:00.340 --> 00:52:02.940
And I got that sense in my Kundalini awakening.

00:52:02.940 --> 00:52:09.140
I truly did and words can't get that across to the audience, certainly, but I wouldn't

00:52:09.140 --> 00:52:12.220
be talking to you, Rick, if I didn't have the Kundalini.

00:52:12.220 --> 00:52:13.860
I'd be doing something normal.

00:52:13.860 --> 00:52:22.260
I would be spending my time daily writing about it, reading about it, working on the film

00:52:22.260 --> 00:52:23.260
about it.

00:52:23.260 --> 00:52:29.500
Consciousnessfilm.info is with the leading participants in scholarly areas and maybe

00:52:29.500 --> 00:52:33.780
more importantly the people who experience it themselves.

00:52:33.780 --> 00:52:38.700
And that's the issue at hand, how do we integrate the two, the subjective with the science of

00:52:38.700 --> 00:52:43.820
the physical to understand what we call reality.

00:52:43.820 --> 00:52:50.200
we look to Ken Wilber, look at his work, a physicist David Baum, what did Baum say?

00:52:50.200 --> 00:52:54.860
Consciousness is just a byproduct of physical processes and he goes into that.

00:52:54.860 --> 00:52:58.260
And some would say the opposite, that physical processes in the entire universe

00:52:58.260 --> 00:53:02.580
is a byproduct or epiphenomenon of consciousness. That was Mark Gober's

00:53:02.580 --> 00:53:06.220
first book. It was called "The End to Upside-Down Thinking."

00:53:06.220 --> 00:53:12.660
Excuse me, I may have misspoken. Consciousness, Baum believed, is not the byproduct of

00:53:12.660 --> 00:53:17.700
physical properties. It plays, what's the book? "Wholeness and the Implicit Order"

00:53:17.700 --> 00:53:25.200
that he wrote. And he proposed that reality and used the Niels Dohr use of

00:53:25.200 --> 00:53:31.780
complementarity principle. But in Baum's work, he looked at the theory of reality

00:53:31.780 --> 00:53:37.180
of an information field. And he's not alone. That goes beyond locality and

00:53:37.180 --> 00:53:42.060
causality, the integration of the subjective and the objective.

00:53:42.060 --> 00:53:50.020
So he asked deeply for the need for a paradigm shift, and he combined that with Niels Bohr,

00:53:50.020 --> 00:53:56.660
who brought in the mix of complementary principle and quantum mechanics and the observer effect,

00:53:56.660 --> 00:54:01.780
that underscores the notion that the wave, not a particle, alone fully represents the

00:54:01.780 --> 00:54:04.360
atomic scale of physical matter.

00:54:04.360 --> 00:54:11.160
So just as the subjective and the objective are in describing the essence of our reality,

00:54:11.160 --> 00:54:16.160
we see it on the subatomic scale in Bohr's principle.

00:54:16.160 --> 00:54:20.920
Question is, can that be extended to an aspect of human consciousness?

00:54:20.920 --> 00:54:25.520
What we see at the macroscopic level is seen at the microscopic level.

00:54:25.520 --> 00:54:33.440
Possibly, but I don't think it can be proven unless you start looking at the evidence completely.

00:54:33.440 --> 00:54:38.520
Unfortunately, there is a growing acknowledgement in various fields that we're addressing by

00:54:38.520 --> 00:54:45.040
scholars, at least open-minded ones, unbiased ones, as the funerals progress slowly over

00:54:45.040 --> 00:54:46.040
time.

00:54:46.040 --> 00:54:50.480
Collectively, I'm seeing this in the people I'm talking to.

00:54:50.480 --> 00:54:57.000
I'm not talking to ego-centered, highly-driven individuals that walk the halls of academia

00:54:57.000 --> 00:54:58.000
anymore.

00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:00.640
Maybe I fit those shoes a long time ago.

00:55:00.640 --> 00:55:07.800
I try not to anymore and I feel like I don't, especially when I talk to people in our field

00:55:07.800 --> 00:55:13.020
that address these issues from an experiential basis as well as theoretically.

00:55:13.020 --> 00:55:17.560
And I'll tell you, I'm more than impressed by what I hear out there and influenced by

00:55:17.560 --> 00:55:22.520
what I hear from both the scholars as well as those who experience it.

00:55:22.520 --> 00:55:24.280
And I am an experiencer.

00:55:24.280 --> 00:55:29.280
And I'll tell you, I never before talked about my Kundalini, Rick, until now.

00:55:29.280 --> 00:55:30.280
I hinted at it.

00:55:30.280 --> 00:55:31.280
You mean until today?

00:55:31.280 --> 00:55:37.120
In this detail with you, I hinted at it in a few others, but only a few others, because

00:55:37.120 --> 00:55:42.760
I remain in the closet for fear of stigma, as thousands, probably millions do have these

00:55:42.760 --> 00:55:48.280
subjective experiences, like seeing a UFO and we're seeing some of that paradigm shift

00:55:48.280 --> 00:55:53.800
in UFOs, UAPs change, given recent circumstances.

00:55:53.800 --> 00:55:57.160
And that too, I think, is part of the equation as well.

00:55:57.160 --> 00:56:04.160
Mark Gober wrote an interesting book about that. By the way, he was going to be in our film, but that didn't work out.

00:56:04.160 --> 00:56:09.160
It would have been nice to have him participate. But he wrote a recent book, I believe.

00:56:09.160 --> 00:56:10.160
I know, I interviewed him about that.

00:56:10.160 --> 00:56:13.160
On interactions with non-human entities.

00:56:13.160 --> 00:56:14.160
That's right.

00:56:14.160 --> 00:56:18.160
And when I was a member of the Dr. Regina Mitchell Research Foundation,

00:56:18.160 --> 00:56:25.760
we did a study with over 3,000 individuals who claimed to have interacted with non-human entities

00:56:25.760 --> 00:56:31.800
associated with or without these structured craft. And we wrote a paper that was published

00:56:31.800 --> 00:56:37.600
in the Journal of Scientific Exploration with a few of other people, mainly scientists, Ray Hernandez

00:56:37.600 --> 00:56:45.720
included, and basically said that 80% of them came away from their interactions with positive

00:56:45.720 --> 00:56:49.200
after-effects that range in varying ways

00:56:49.200 --> 00:56:53.120
psychosocially and in ways that were

00:56:53.120 --> 00:56:55.880
consistent with the characteristics of

00:56:55.880 --> 00:56:58.920
positive changes that we see in near-death

00:56:58.920 --> 00:57:02.320
experiences, spiritual awakenings, etc.

00:57:02.320 --> 00:57:05.400
So the point is we're also seeing this

00:57:05.400 --> 00:57:08.320
ego dissolution which may be the crux of

00:57:08.320 --> 00:57:10.800
the issue here and people who interact

00:57:10.800 --> 00:57:13.280
with these kinds of phenomena which may

00:57:13.280 --> 00:57:21.680
be triggered differently, UFOs, near-death, ESP-related issues, Kundalini, spiritual awakening,

00:57:21.680 --> 00:57:24.560
past life recall, etc., etc.

00:57:24.560 --> 00:57:30.920
Whatever those triggers for that ego dissolution may be, it seems that that ego dissolution

00:57:30.920 --> 00:57:34.560
gives rise to many similar outcomes.

00:57:34.560 --> 00:57:36.620
And you certainly see this.

00:57:36.620 --> 00:57:38.440
I'm not unique in saying this, Rich.

00:57:38.440 --> 00:57:39.440
You understand that.

00:57:39.440 --> 00:57:40.440
Oh, no.

00:57:40.440 --> 00:57:47.080
But it comes clear to me, you see, in my own personal experience, subjectively and objectively,

00:57:47.080 --> 00:57:50.520
in terms of my research and interactions with scholars in the field.

00:57:50.520 --> 00:57:53.440
So for me, Rick, it's a revelation.

00:57:53.440 --> 00:57:59.160
And it only took me six, seven years to make that bold leap, that evolution down the, I

00:57:59.160 --> 00:58:06.480
hate to use the term again, rabbit hole, to change that mindset from academia to whatever

00:58:06.480 --> 00:58:08.260
you want to call this.

00:58:08.260 --> 00:58:10.320
So it's been quite a journey for me.

00:58:10.320 --> 00:58:12.700
I wouldn't change it in the least.

00:58:12.700 --> 00:58:15.560
It has not been smooth in the least.

00:58:15.560 --> 00:58:23.520
We know, for instance, near-death experiences, 70% have a divorce after seven years following

00:58:23.520 --> 00:58:26.040
their near-death experience.

00:58:26.040 --> 00:58:28.800
Because they change so much and their spouse doesn't.

00:58:28.800 --> 00:58:29.800
Exactly.

00:58:29.800 --> 00:58:34.600
Much more so than the normal instance would be for that given age group.

00:58:34.600 --> 00:58:37.560
We see statistics like that.

00:58:37.560 --> 00:58:42.480
kind of dramatic change in people occurring again overnight that medicine, psychiatry

00:58:42.480 --> 00:58:48.300
can't do, that may not necessarily be good all the time, but the people who experience

00:58:48.300 --> 00:58:52.440
it say that in the long term at least, it's positive.

00:58:52.440 --> 00:58:56.240
It may rock my world for a year or two with anxiety, confusion.

00:58:56.240 --> 00:58:59.720
I may have a negative NDE that may be hellish.

00:58:59.720 --> 00:59:01.160
I may regret it.

00:59:01.160 --> 00:59:04.040
It's not 100% positive in every case.

00:59:04.040 --> 00:59:06.760
Don't let me put a beautiful spin on this.

00:59:06.760 --> 00:59:10.780
It can wreak havoc in people's lives, let me underscore that.

00:59:10.780 --> 00:59:15.120
But in general, the majority come away with a very positive outcome.

00:59:15.120 --> 00:59:20.460
There are so many stories in spiritual literature going back thousands of years of people going

00:59:20.460 --> 00:59:24.800
through the ringer after they have some initial awakening and having their whole life kind

00:59:24.800 --> 00:59:29.520
of restructured, quite chaotically in some cases, before they come out the other side

00:59:29.520 --> 00:59:30.920
being a happy camper.

00:59:30.920 --> 00:59:37.280
It happened to St. Francis and St. Paul and so many yogis and it's kind of necessary

00:59:37.280 --> 00:59:42.960
because we're ensconced in our particular mode of conditioned behavior and so on and

00:59:42.960 --> 00:59:48.160
that type of conditioning is completely inappropriate to an enlightened way of functioning.

00:59:48.160 --> 00:59:53.640
So somehow we've got to get from here to there and it often involves a lot of turmoil

00:59:53.640 --> 00:59:59.080
and purification and periods of instability sometimes and all kinds of stuff.

00:59:59.080 --> 01:00:04.000
And there are various methods that can help you get through it all, various spiritual

01:00:04.000 --> 01:00:09.760
practices and physiological treatments such as Ayurveda or other things that can smooth

01:00:09.760 --> 01:00:10.760
the transition.

01:00:10.760 --> 01:00:14.360
David: Yeah, and you're well aware of that for personal reasons.

01:00:14.360 --> 01:00:17.200
Pete: Oh yeah, I've been through all kinds of things.

01:00:17.200 --> 01:00:23.720
David: But why should I be learning how to deal with this chaotic psychological stress

01:00:23.720 --> 01:00:27.920
following a Kundalini or something else extraordinary in my life?

01:00:27.920 --> 01:00:32.360
should I be getting the answers from you or Stanislav Grof or other material in

01:00:32.360 --> 01:00:37.800
that are so few people in number who understand it as opposed to somebody...

01:00:37.800 --> 01:00:42.000
Why were you taught that in school? ...who you think would know. So people

01:00:42.000 --> 01:00:46.920
mistakenly and maybe not in all cases mistakenly go for seeking that help as

01:00:46.920 --> 01:00:51.600
we alluded to earlier and regretting it in the long run. Being mislabeled,

01:00:51.600 --> 01:00:56.960
mistreated, mishandled, making it worse. Maybe the solution will meet the demand

01:00:56.960 --> 01:01:02.080
And, you know, as more and more people start having spiritual awakenings, the help will

01:01:02.080 --> 01:01:05.200
have to come to meet them.

01:01:05.200 --> 01:01:10.040
When we were kids in the 50s and 60s and so on, not a lot of this was going on, and so

01:01:10.040 --> 01:01:15.480
it wasn't taught to us in school or in any kind of training that we went through.

01:01:15.480 --> 01:01:22.880
But these days, such topics are actually studied in universities, and more and more so, because

01:01:22.880 --> 01:01:25.760
it's in the air, it's in the water.

01:01:25.760 --> 01:01:28.760
having experiences and they want to know what they are.

01:01:28.760 --> 01:01:33.840
Again, moving forward 50, 100 years, it could be that spiritual practice and all kinds of

01:01:33.840 --> 01:01:38.160
understanding about it and physiological, neurophysiological correlations to it and

01:01:38.160 --> 01:01:43.520
all could be a standard part of academic training from preschool on.

01:01:43.520 --> 01:01:48.400
And there are changes to medical curriculums where there are more integrative approaches

01:01:48.400 --> 01:01:51.600
that are incorporated, more holistic approaches.

01:01:51.600 --> 01:01:57.840
But you know what's interesting, studies have shown that about 80% of all physiological

01:01:57.840 --> 01:02:07.140
problems have stress contributing either to their complete cause or exacerbating the symptomatology.

01:02:07.140 --> 01:02:13.360
We all understand mind-body connection, but the point is what percent of doctors give

01:02:13.360 --> 01:02:17.680
appropriate advice with regard to reducing their patient's stress?

01:02:17.680 --> 01:02:23.680
studies out of John Hopkins and Harvard did extensive work in this area and found

01:02:23.680 --> 01:02:30.080
that based on their research less than 5% of general practitioners provide advice

01:02:30.080 --> 01:02:35.560
in that area where people can potentially benefit and of course they're more prone

01:02:35.560 --> 01:02:42.400
to managing it with medication or out on the head or some placebo comment. These

01:02:42.400 --> 01:02:46.360
days as compared to 50 years ago you know you hear on Good Morning America

01:02:46.360 --> 01:02:48.360
Some doctor gets up and says, "You should meditate."

01:02:48.360 --> 01:02:52.360
And, of course, exercise is advocated much more than it used to be,

01:02:52.360 --> 01:02:54.360
and how important that is for managing stress.

01:02:54.360 --> 01:02:59.360
So, it doesn't happen overnight, but like many of these things, it's creeping into the mainstream.

01:02:59.360 --> 01:03:06.360
Well, what creeps into the mainstream is, I think, the consistency of the kinds of experiences

01:03:06.360 --> 01:03:10.360
that people are having in terms of the essence of this objective experience.

01:03:10.360 --> 01:03:14.360
Because when you look at these extraordinary experiences that we're addressing,

01:03:14.360 --> 01:03:19.580
we're talking about issues of non-locality, a sense of interconnectedness, of course,

01:03:19.580 --> 01:03:26.220
entering these ultimate dimensions, coherence, again aligning with principles

01:03:26.220 --> 01:03:32.360
in quantum mechanics, the sensation of timelessness, absence of past, present and

01:03:32.360 --> 01:03:38.340
future, which is a common theme in these experiences that again aligns with what

01:03:38.340 --> 01:03:43.420
quantum mechanics is about. The atomic particle is non-local, has no past,

01:03:43.420 --> 01:03:49.060
present future. We see this instantaneous information exchange at the atomic level,

01:03:49.060 --> 01:03:55.780
at the neuronal level, in terms of ESP. You know, we see ESP experiments whereby

01:03:55.780 --> 01:04:03.060
before, and Dean Radin did this, before one is shown an erotic image, the brain

01:04:03.060 --> 01:04:10.220
unconsciously registers it about 0.2 milliseconds before it is shown, and

01:04:10.220 --> 01:04:15.220
and about 2-4 milliseconds before it comes into your conscious awareness.

01:04:15.220 --> 01:04:18.220
So there's something going on, unconsciously,

01:04:18.220 --> 01:04:25.220
that enters our brain-mind system that we aren't aware of.

01:04:25.220 --> 01:04:30.220
Yet that moment of delay between the unconscious and conscious event

01:04:30.220 --> 01:04:32.220
could have an influence on our behavior,

01:04:32.220 --> 01:04:36.220
on our expectation of what's going to happen, and it does.

01:04:36.220 --> 01:04:41.820
So in other words, Dean is verifying that premonition is a real thing, that people can predict what's

01:04:41.820 --> 01:04:50.140
going to happen. Yeah, yeah. We operate in a sense in a quantum-like fashion, and you see

01:04:50.140 --> 01:04:57.340
it physiologically, you see it subjectively. In a group experiment, you see it on an individual basis.

01:04:57.340 --> 01:05:04.860
But the thing is, the major results, the significant results, are based on group statistics. So when

01:05:04.860 --> 01:05:08.700
When you talk about statistics, you bring up controversies.

01:05:08.700 --> 01:05:11.220
And people are going to rip that apart alone.

01:05:11.220 --> 01:05:16.500
When you're talking about results that might lie six, seven standard deviations beyond the

01:05:16.500 --> 01:05:21.560
mean, well, that's odds against chance maybe of 10 million to one.

01:05:21.560 --> 01:05:27.400
But the fact that you use statistics to demonstrate that would still not be convincing enough to

01:05:27.400 --> 01:05:34.260
allow the skeptics to come up with excuses for those results not being valid.

01:05:34.260 --> 01:05:37.780
People have their lives and their professions and their specialties and so on, and they

01:05:37.780 --> 01:05:43.180
hear about something that completely clashes with their understanding of what's possible,

01:05:43.180 --> 01:05:47.820
and oh, there's some statistics he claims to have verification to seven decimal points,

01:05:47.820 --> 01:05:51.620
and they think, well, maybe, but I don't have time to look into it, and he could have fudged

01:05:51.620 --> 01:05:53.740
the numbers, so they brush it off.

01:05:53.740 --> 01:05:54.740
Right, exactly.

01:05:54.740 --> 01:06:02.660
Well, the method used in statistics, it's an open avenue for critique, yet it's been independently

01:06:02.660 --> 01:06:07.820
documented, demonstrated by independent labs routinely, providing evidence

01:06:07.820 --> 01:06:13.540
according to Dean, providing evidence that's much more valid, more convincing

01:06:13.540 --> 01:06:17.580
than many of the drugs that people take on a daily basis. And that's been well

01:06:17.580 --> 01:06:21.460
established. So here again, do we need a paradigm shift? Well look, do we need a

01:06:21.460 --> 01:06:26.060
paradigm shift? Diane Powell, you know Diane. We just interviewed

01:06:26.060 --> 01:06:31.100
Diane, polymath in my mind, a good friend, a neuroscientist, a

01:06:31.100 --> 01:06:36.620
psychiatrist. She's the one who studies autistic savants? Yes. Talk about

01:06:36.620 --> 01:06:41.420
polymaths. I think you have a story here for us. She wrote a book called the ESP

01:06:41.420 --> 01:06:46.100
Enigma based on her research with autistic savants and she conducted an

01:06:46.100 --> 01:06:50.620
experiment with a five-year-old autistic savant named Haley. You talk about ESP,

01:06:50.620 --> 01:06:56.060
the brain and consciousness, you know, kind of ties it in in a sense. And cutting

01:06:56.060 --> 01:07:02.460
to the chase, Haley worked with a therapist who had a partition in front of her.

01:07:02.460 --> 01:07:09.780
Very simply, the therapist would hold up pictures or equations or sign symbols on the card outside

01:07:09.780 --> 01:07:10.780
Haley's view.

01:07:10.780 --> 01:07:12.300
There's no way Haley could know.

01:07:12.300 --> 01:07:15.980
A triple, quadruple blind, all that sort of stuff.

01:07:15.980 --> 01:07:24.340
And remarkably, Haley was consistently accurate, accuracy of 90%.

01:07:24.340 --> 01:07:29.220
Diane concluded that in all of the series of experiments that were done on her that

01:07:29.220 --> 01:07:35.220
is highly suggestive of some kind of latent communication mechanism, sometimes she couldn't

01:07:35.220 --> 01:07:42.700
explain it, but it was a form, pull it what you will, of ESP, accessing information that

01:07:42.700 --> 01:07:45.860
is beyond our five senses, simple as that.

01:07:45.860 --> 01:07:52.260
She talks about in the book a two-year-old that can speak five different languages, a

01:07:52.260 --> 01:07:56.280
year old, again maybe the age is wrong, but it doesn't matter, but it seems like a five

01:07:56.280 --> 01:08:01.040
year old never exposed to math, yet when given the question, solve the cube root

01:08:01.040 --> 01:08:05.920
for this four-digit number, the answer is provided to the point zero zero decimal

01:08:05.920 --> 01:08:12.360
point. We hear these stories, the Rain Man was based on Kim Peek, and you can read a

01:08:12.360 --> 01:08:18.680
separate book, one was H.I., independent of the other, and memorize it all. Remember each

01:08:18.680 --> 01:08:23.240
word and recite each word in each book back to you, front, you know, forward and

01:08:23.240 --> 01:08:27.920
backwards. And despite the fact he didn't have a corpus callosum, that band of

01:08:27.920 --> 01:08:31.800
white connective tissue that allow for the right and left hemispheres to

01:08:31.800 --> 01:08:35.680
communicate with each other. That's probably a brain glitch, that's not

01:08:35.680 --> 01:08:41.240
necessarily an example of ESP, but the others are. Will we see evidence of

01:08:41.240 --> 01:08:47.480
psychokinesis? Certainly ESP, but enough so that the American Psychological

01:08:47.480 --> 01:08:53.520
Institute Association, I think it was back in 2018, they reviewed all the data that was

01:08:53.520 --> 01:09:01.120
conducted, thousands of experiments done on ESP, and they made a major conclusion that

01:09:01.120 --> 01:09:09.520
basically ESP is valid, cannot be interpreted as being performed under poor conditions,

01:09:09.520 --> 01:09:17.440
under experimental bias, but there is no basis to not believe that ESP, precognition, telepathy,

01:09:17.440 --> 01:09:21.440
and psychokinesis are indeed valid.

01:09:21.440 --> 01:09:23.440
What that means, I'm not sure.

01:09:23.440 --> 01:09:26.440
I can go on and on giving you examples.

01:09:26.440 --> 01:09:29.440
Again, the brainwave states that are changed

01:09:29.440 --> 01:09:33.440
based on telesymmetric effects between twins

01:09:33.440 --> 01:09:35.440
separated in Faraday cages.

01:09:35.440 --> 01:09:38.440
Closes one eye, we see corresponding changes

01:09:38.440 --> 01:09:40.440
in the brain state of another,

01:09:40.440 --> 01:09:42.440
based on eye closure alone.

01:09:42.440 --> 01:09:45.440
But you see these kinds of remarkable examples

01:09:45.440 --> 01:09:51.920
globally in a global consciousness project to individual cases, each essentially saying

01:09:51.920 --> 01:09:53.300
the same thing.

01:09:53.300 --> 01:09:56.720
And here again, where do we go with this?

01:09:56.720 --> 01:10:03.620
At the Rhein Center, when we interviewed John Kroth, the executive director, he introduced

01:10:03.620 --> 01:10:08.680
us to Ed Edwards, who had a unique ability in doing this.

01:10:08.680 --> 01:10:18.220
He was able to modify these photo electrons emitted by a photomultiplier inside an electrically

01:10:18.220 --> 01:10:20.160
shielded environment.

01:10:20.160 --> 01:10:27.200
He was able to modify them using attention alone, which I saw via a computer.

01:10:27.200 --> 01:10:33.600
And John Crother has done this with thousands of people, never was able to see anybody to

01:10:33.600 --> 01:10:40.760
do this, where he can willingly, using attention again, make emission levels, these photonic

01:10:40.760 --> 01:10:47.060
emissions from the photoamplifier, change in accordance with will.

01:10:47.060 --> 01:10:54.040
Dean Radin saw this with individuals who were able to modify the pH in a distant interferometer,

01:10:54.040 --> 01:10:58.840
maybe in a similar fashion as Ed was able to do with this.

01:10:58.840 --> 01:11:04.600
He also extended this to, as he contends at least, to medical healing.

01:11:04.600 --> 01:11:10.920
He also says he can move people and demonstrates this, where he can move them forward and back.

01:11:10.920 --> 01:11:14.420
There could be some power of suggestion here, I don't know.

01:11:14.420 --> 01:11:20.360
But the evidence is convincing enough to me to the point where, you know, it gets ridiculous,

01:11:20.360 --> 01:11:26.400
actually, to keep rehashing it, to keep writing it, because it's only going to be convincing

01:11:26.400 --> 01:11:29.760
to those who truly want to believe it to be real.

01:11:29.760 --> 01:11:36.520
The question that I have with all this is, even if like 75 or 50% of all this stuff is

01:11:36.520 --> 01:11:41.280
actually valid and verifiable, and I think the percentage is higher, and we've talked

01:11:41.280 --> 01:11:46.680
about half a dozen different areas of this kind of phenomenon today, the next question

01:11:46.680 --> 01:11:53.000
is, okay, let's assume that a lot of this is valid, what are the implications of it?

01:11:53.000 --> 01:11:58.600
What does it actually say about the nature of the human mind, the human consciousness,

01:11:58.600 --> 01:12:02.880
reality itself, our relationship to the universe?

01:12:02.880 --> 01:12:09.260
If Uri Geller can bend spoons, or if Jesus could walk on water, or if some contemporary

01:12:09.260 --> 01:12:12.080
person could do something like that, it would be impressive.

01:12:12.080 --> 01:12:17.960
But what does that say about the relationship between human consciousness and the laws of

01:12:17.960 --> 01:12:18.960
nature?

01:12:18.960 --> 01:12:21.880
Because obviously, if a spoon bends, there are certain laws of nature involved, there's

01:12:21.880 --> 01:12:26.120
certain manipulation taking place in physical reality. If Jesus could walk on water, he's

01:12:26.120 --> 01:12:30.720
got some kind of special relationship with the law of gravity or something. So, what

01:12:30.720 --> 01:12:36.540
is human consciousness such that it could have that kind of influence which is ordinarily

01:12:36.540 --> 01:12:43.440
outside the realm of possibility? Do we all possess such capabilities inherently, and

01:12:43.440 --> 01:12:47.440
could there be, or actually is there, some place in the universe of society in which

01:12:47.440 --> 01:12:52.240
such things are the norm. And everybody's walking on water and ruining the cutlery.

01:12:52.240 --> 01:12:59.920
Oh, I have an easy answer for that question, Rick. I wish I did. It's getting to the bottom

01:12:59.920 --> 01:13:05.360
line. All of my bullshit baffling brain, so to speak, what good is it really if you don't

01:13:05.360 --> 01:13:11.800
press it and say, what's the big deal? What's it all mean? Put it in perspective. You talk

01:13:11.800 --> 01:13:15.920
a good line, Davis, but what are you really saying here?

01:13:15.920 --> 01:13:22.000
a practical implication for us all. Exactly. Well, one, it calls for a need for a paradigm

01:13:22.000 --> 01:13:26.280
shift, but that means I don't know. That's something else. Get more people involved at

01:13:26.280 --> 01:13:30.940
the scientific, medical, and societal level. Wake them up at some level. I think it means

01:13:30.940 --> 01:13:35.640
that in terms of making people more aware of the concepts that we're discussing. You've

01:13:35.640 --> 01:13:41.480
done this for many years, and you're to be certainly commended for that without question.

01:13:41.480 --> 01:13:47.560
But you know we don't have an answer because we don't fully understand its potential implications

01:13:47.560 --> 01:13:53.480
because the potential for consciousness, its ability to interact with physical reality,

01:13:53.480 --> 01:14:00.200
which I do believe it does and it does so subtly, not convincingly, bending spoons may

01:14:00.200 --> 01:14:02.400
be all we can do at best.

01:14:02.400 --> 01:14:08.920
There may be other ways too that we're not aware of emotionally among people, behaviorally

01:14:08.920 --> 01:14:14.640
that we're not aware of, karmatic ways, karma, but we don't truly understand the potential

01:14:14.640 --> 01:14:21.640
because that potential has never been cultivated from early on in life, which might be required

01:14:21.640 --> 01:14:28.520
for that potential for consciousness to fully develop so that we can fully realize its true

01:14:28.520 --> 01:14:30.840
potential down the road.

01:14:30.840 --> 01:14:31.840
What does that mean?

01:14:31.840 --> 01:14:32.840
I don't know.

01:14:32.840 --> 01:14:35.720
Teach meditation from age four on?

01:14:35.720 --> 01:14:37.720
Engage in spiritual practice?

01:14:37.720 --> 01:14:38.720
Indeed.

01:14:38.720 --> 01:14:46.680
Let's modify our education in many ways that incorporate spirituality, consciousness studies.

01:14:46.680 --> 01:14:52.440
One huge implication is if everybody in the world, let's say 90% of them or whatever,

01:14:52.440 --> 01:14:57.440
had the kind of experience you had of this Kundalini thing and then you were so much happier

01:14:57.440 --> 01:15:00.240
afterwards, would we still have wars?

01:15:00.240 --> 01:15:04.080
Would we still have huge wealth inequities resulting in poverty?

01:15:04.080 --> 01:15:06.320
Would we still be trashing the environment?

01:15:06.320 --> 01:15:07.320
I think not.

01:15:07.320 --> 01:15:12.120
I think that development of consciousness is the ultimate leverage point through which

01:15:12.120 --> 01:15:16.400
change can take place in the world because I think the world as we see it is a manifestation

01:15:16.400 --> 01:15:20.640
of the ambient level of consciousness of everyone living here.

01:15:20.640 --> 01:15:25.440
And so obviously there's something amiss or lacking in the ambient level of consciousness.

01:15:25.440 --> 01:15:30.280
If you want a forest to be green, you have to make every tree green in the forest.

01:15:30.280 --> 01:15:35.280
If this enlightenment phenomenon or whatever you want to call it, spreads as it seems to

01:15:35.280 --> 01:15:40.860
be doing slowly but surely, then I think that could ultimately bring about a much more ideal

01:15:40.860 --> 01:15:47.060
world which manipulating politics and economics and so on has never been able to do.

01:15:47.060 --> 01:15:51.880
I can't say it better than that, Rick. I think that is the ultimate goal, and I may have

01:15:51.880 --> 01:15:56.600
alluded to it earlier because what we hear from people who are having these experiences

01:15:56.600 --> 01:16:02.360
is just that. All the reasons why you think that would be the case, why there would be

01:16:02.360 --> 01:16:09.840
peace, this evolution of society towards peaceful ways and the end to war and suffering in all

01:16:09.840 --> 01:16:15.520
of its crazy manifestations only because of these positive outcomes that you hear from

01:16:15.520 --> 01:16:19.720
people and the love expressed and the oneness and the connectedness and the things we talked

01:16:19.720 --> 01:16:20.720
about.

01:16:20.720 --> 01:16:24.680
The thing is, how do we make it real now for people?

01:16:24.680 --> 01:16:30.160
We can't induce it like it was induced in me because that would be the ultimate.

01:16:30.160 --> 01:16:35.880
Maybe we can find an answer to that and give it in the pill or some other form to be incorporated

01:16:35.880 --> 01:16:36.880
in one's perspective.

01:16:36.880 --> 01:16:41.660
>>Rick: Well, people can start spiritual practices and they might not have a big transformation

01:16:41.660 --> 01:16:45.360
overnight but it definitely gets the ball rolling and more and more people are doing

01:16:45.360 --> 01:16:46.360
that.

01:16:46.360 --> 01:16:50.220
>>David: Well, meditating is a beautiful thing for a variety of mental and physical reasons

01:16:50.220 --> 01:16:59.380
but people spend their time with shamans meditating hours a day, decades on end, doing whatever

01:16:59.380 --> 01:17:05.620
they can to achieve that state of enlightenment, like Kundalini, like going to the crown chakra,

01:17:05.620 --> 01:17:08.620
I don't have all the terms, something like that.

01:17:08.620 --> 01:17:12.820
You educate me, whatever it is, I get it.

01:17:12.820 --> 01:17:17.540
And people spend all this time and effort trying to achieve that state in meditative

01:17:17.540 --> 01:17:20.060
yogic practices, most of them fail.

01:17:20.060 --> 01:17:21.780
I don't know, you know, seeking you shall find.

01:17:21.780 --> 01:17:23.260
I don't know the statistics.

01:17:23.260 --> 01:17:30.020
I find that if you have a sincere intention and if you put that intention into some sort

01:17:30.020 --> 01:17:35.520
of action, doing something that you think might work, you usually get an effect.

01:17:35.520 --> 01:17:38.140
And sometimes those effects are very profound.

01:17:38.140 --> 01:17:40.620
My life turned around, certainly, when I first learned to meditate.

01:17:40.620 --> 01:17:44.340
I was a high school dropout, arrested a couple of times, a total mess.

01:17:44.340 --> 01:17:49.120
And within a few months I was back in school and had a job and things were a lot better.

01:17:49.120 --> 01:17:51.660
I think you're more the exception to the rule.

01:17:51.660 --> 01:17:56.620
some reason you found your way and there are many other paths one could have taken. You took the

01:17:56.620 --> 01:18:03.100
obvious correct one, but nevertheless it was risky at that time in your life which path you were going

01:18:03.100 --> 01:18:08.780
to take. I don't think I would have lived unless I'd made that turnabout. But how many people can

01:18:08.780 --> 01:18:14.620
do that on their own and how many people now can't come to that realization on their own and it's a

01:18:14.620 --> 01:18:19.580
necessary one and they're certainly not going to get it from anybody other than from within.

01:18:20.380 --> 01:18:23.900
But that's why you and I do what we're doing. That's why you write your books. That's why I do this

01:18:23.900 --> 01:18:26.140
You know you want to spread the word

01:18:26.140 --> 01:18:32.140
That's part of the symptom and for some reason I don't know why you feel this drive and that's part of it

01:18:32.140 --> 01:18:34.220
And don't ask me why?

01:18:34.220 --> 01:18:35.740
You understand

01:18:35.740 --> 01:18:40.940
I now understand you better. I know you've had these experiences. I've heard you talk about it through the years

01:18:40.940 --> 01:18:43.340
But I get it now. I didn't

01:18:43.340 --> 01:18:49.040
Several years before uh for some reason you just got to do it with fierce determination

01:18:49.660 --> 01:18:57.740
don't get in my way, don't get in my way. Not surprisingly, we have to question this three-dimensional

01:18:57.740 --> 01:19:03.060
perception of reality that we have and come to the realization that there are alternative

01:19:03.060 --> 01:19:09.140
viewpoints and practices that we could integrate. We don't know which are successful, how best

01:19:09.140 --> 01:19:14.300
to achieve it in each and every case, like prescribing a medication for a particular

01:19:14.300 --> 01:19:20.100
disease. We're not at that level by far. Eventually, yeah, we'll get there. And part of that paradigm

01:19:20.100 --> 01:19:25.220
shift eventually will incorporate that where everybody will be running around having more

01:19:25.220 --> 01:19:30.340
of a maybe a spiritual awakening mindset, that sense of unity and connectedness.

01:19:30.340 --> 01:19:36.100
I think it's happening. You hear gallop polls and things like that of the number of people

01:19:36.100 --> 01:19:41.140
who have had some kind of extraordinary spiritual experience. And there's a high dropout rate

01:19:41.140 --> 01:19:46.180
in terms of institutionalized religion, but on the other hand, more and more people are

01:19:46.180 --> 01:19:50.260
identifying themselves as spiritual but not religious. They're enthused about spirituality,

01:19:50.260 --> 01:19:54.340
they're just not so into doctrines and religion beliefs.

01:19:54.340 --> 01:19:58.340
Pete We see that too with these transformations. People who are

01:19:58.340 --> 01:20:02.100
into organized religion will give that up and become more spiritual.

01:20:02.100 --> 01:20:03.140
Pete Ironically.

01:20:03.140 --> 01:20:04.340
Pete Huh?

01:20:04.340 --> 01:20:05.700
Pete Ironically, yes.

01:20:05.700 --> 01:20:08.420
Pete Yeah, we see that a great deal. And we also see

01:20:08.980 --> 01:20:12.900
hardcore materialists who denounce people who wouldn't dare listen to this show,

01:20:12.900 --> 01:20:17.860
a variety of personal and philosophical and scientific reasons that they go

01:20:17.860 --> 01:20:24.180
worshipping non-human entity in the form of a god every Sunday, which is a contradiction

01:20:24.180 --> 01:20:28.900
greatly. But getting back to your point about surveys, I think there was a Gallup survey

01:20:28.900 --> 01:20:36.340
early 2000s, about 80 million, 40-50% of Americans said that they've had, I think it was a religious

01:20:36.340 --> 01:20:40.180
but spiritual experiences that altered their life.

01:20:40.180 --> 01:20:41.180
That's what I was alluding to.

01:20:41.180 --> 01:20:43.180
It's your impact on their life.

01:20:43.180 --> 01:20:46.980
Now, to me, I wouldn't go so far as to say a paradigm shift.

01:20:46.980 --> 01:20:51.180
Let's not go crazy with that term, but I'd like to know more about that.

01:20:51.180 --> 01:20:53.180
That is significant.

01:20:53.180 --> 01:20:57.980
And that's why, again, the science of the self has to be explored more seriously.

01:20:57.980 --> 01:21:02.980
The essence of true experiences, the hard problem of consciousness, as we call it,

01:21:02.980 --> 01:21:04.980
we're not going to find it in the brain,

01:21:04.980 --> 01:21:09.460
going to find it with a materialistic approach, nor are we going to find it talking to people

01:21:09.460 --> 01:21:15.060
who have these kinds of experiences, whether or not we find it integrating the two or it's not

01:21:15.060 --> 01:21:22.980
resolvable. It just is. And that's not the question. The question is its application and how do we

01:21:22.980 --> 01:21:30.260
transform people and modify individuals and in turn society collectively for the good of humanity.

01:21:30.260 --> 01:21:34.900
and that's the bottom line. That's why I'm here, Rick. I wouldn't be here and I wouldn't be here

01:21:34.900 --> 01:21:39.460
blowing your audience unless I had these experiences. So what am I doing? I'm not

01:21:39.460 --> 01:21:44.660
promoting my book. I get a weak cup of coffee for every book I sell. You know what I mean.

01:21:44.660 --> 01:21:50.660
For every book I sell. It's not the point. I'm promoting the film, ConsciousnessFilm.info,

01:21:50.660 --> 01:21:55.780
co-produced by Dave Beatty and Wilson Hawthorne. Why? I'm not going to make a dollar on it.

01:21:55.780 --> 01:22:02.180
That's not the point. We understand that. We'll be spending money. I can't tell you the effort we had

01:22:02.180 --> 01:22:09.380
traveling across country to these places with my painful back, working off of Go Save Me funds,

01:22:09.380 --> 01:22:13.140
and thank you very much for everybody that contributed out of the goodness of their heart.

01:22:13.140 --> 01:22:18.420
But you see, we've had a lot of people who get it, who've had these kinds of either awakenings,

01:22:18.420 --> 01:22:23.380
or they understand the importance of it, that are willing to give. And I'm not asking for money

01:22:23.380 --> 01:22:27.220
here. That's not my point. I'm saying there's a consciousness connection.

01:22:27.220 --> 01:22:33.460
How's the film coming along? We're done with the interviews. We're now in the editing phase,

01:22:33.460 --> 01:22:39.940
editing process of the transcripts, the video, etc. So you see like a potential release within

01:22:39.940 --> 01:22:45.460
two years? Yeah, and we'll hope to stream it, of course. And you know, we're not going to make

01:22:45.460 --> 01:22:50.580
money. We want to wake people up. Sorry for that expression, but share the views that we have.

01:22:50.580 --> 01:22:57.860
You share the thoughts that you share and the guests that you have about the reasons behind the film.

01:22:57.860 --> 01:23:04.500
Give people hope that there possibly is life after death. That there is reason to believe

01:23:04.500 --> 01:23:09.140
that these experiences exist for whatever it might be worth for that individual.

01:23:09.140 --> 01:23:13.460
I think it's really important. I think... Make them curious. Truth seekers.

01:23:13.460 --> 01:23:20.340
Our understanding of the way things work has a big impact on our life. If you think that when you die

01:23:20.340 --> 01:23:26.260
that's it, lights out, that has a major impact on how you see the world and feel about your life

01:23:26.260 --> 01:23:31.060
and so on. Whereas if you feel the opposite, that this is one chapter in a much longer story,

01:23:31.060 --> 01:23:37.380
that has a huge impact. For me, spiritual development is a two-legged thing. One leg

01:23:37.380 --> 01:23:42.580
is actual subjective experience, the other leg is understanding, and you have to have two legs to

01:23:42.580 --> 01:23:48.980
walk. It's a tough balance, it really is, and we all need to integrate that. But for most people,

01:23:48.980 --> 01:23:50.980
They've fallen to the materialist camp.

01:23:50.980 --> 01:23:54.980
There's so few people, Rick, that I run into that are like me.

01:23:54.980 --> 01:23:56.980
Not that they're bad, not that they're wrong.

01:23:56.980 --> 01:24:00.980
I could be the oddball. I'm not saying I'm right in this. Not at all.

01:24:00.980 --> 01:24:02.980
This is just the path I'm on.

01:24:02.980 --> 01:24:05.980
I probably could use psychiatric help, all I know.

01:24:05.980 --> 01:24:09.980
I don't know. But the point is, there's very few people,

01:24:09.980 --> 01:24:14.980
and you might relate to this, very few people that I can talk to about this.

01:24:14.980 --> 01:24:20.480
which has meant that this film has been such a source of intellectual stimulation for me

01:24:20.480 --> 01:24:25.480
and reward because it allowed me to speak to people as I've mentioned

01:24:25.480 --> 01:24:31.480
like Long and Mishlobe and you now is a thrill for me having been a fan of yours for many years

01:24:31.480 --> 01:24:36.480
Raymond Moody a friend of mine up here in Sarasota going out for a cup of coffee

01:24:36.480 --> 01:24:41.480
Diane Powell, these kinds of experiences which you take for granted

01:24:41.480 --> 01:24:43.800
because you talk to them weekly.

01:24:43.800 --> 01:24:46.600
For somebody like me, it's a treat.

01:24:46.600 --> 01:24:48.880
It's what I call, excuse the expression,

01:24:48.880 --> 01:24:50.800
cognitive orgasm.

01:24:50.800 --> 01:24:52.700
Like Tom Campbell talking to him

01:24:52.700 --> 01:24:55.560
about his simulation theory, who's in the film.

01:24:55.560 --> 01:24:58.280
Now, if you want to go five standard deviations out,

01:24:58.280 --> 01:25:00.400
you start getting to theoretical physics

01:25:00.400 --> 01:25:02.360
about simulation theory.

01:25:02.360 --> 01:25:06.040
But you know something, Diane Powell describes to it.

01:25:06.040 --> 01:25:08.200
In fact, she will explain,

01:25:08.200 --> 01:25:10.560
maybe not convincingly to herself,

01:25:10.560 --> 01:25:13.080
but she'll throw this possibility out there,

01:25:13.080 --> 01:25:17.260
and she has to me, that maybe autistics advance

01:25:17.260 --> 01:25:18.880
how to rationalize, in other words,

01:25:18.880 --> 01:25:23.240
how this five-year-old can solve these complex math equations

01:25:23.240 --> 01:25:25.040
without prior exposure to the math,

01:25:25.040 --> 01:25:28.360
is that they're tapping into some external field,

01:25:28.360 --> 01:25:30.680
semantic field, as some people call them,

01:25:30.680 --> 01:25:32.440
information field.

01:25:32.440 --> 01:25:34.720
- You and I were talking about the podcast

01:25:34.720 --> 01:25:38.440
Put Closer to Truth earlier, and a lot of his episodes,

01:25:38.440 --> 01:25:43.080
He speaks to people like Roger Penrose who say that mathematics seems to be the language of nature.

01:25:43.080 --> 01:25:48.520
That it took mathematics to create a universe. So the mathematics was around a long time before

01:25:48.520 --> 01:25:52.120
human beings came along to become aware of it or to understand it.

01:25:52.120 --> 01:25:57.720
So somebody like that little kid who can, you know, solve cube roots of long numbers

01:25:57.720 --> 01:26:03.320
might just be tapped into the language of nature in a way which is beyond intellectualizing.

01:26:03.960 --> 01:26:09.800
There's another guy I saw a video of who could sit there for eight hours and read out all the numbers

01:26:09.800 --> 01:26:14.920
of pi which are totally non-repetitive and there's no way he could memorize that much but he was able

01:26:14.920 --> 01:26:21.320
to tap in and just do that. Yeah and you can't explain it using traditional rules that we're

01:26:21.320 --> 01:26:28.440
taught. No you can't. Newtonian physics doesn't work, it doesn't apply. So what do we do? Research.

01:26:28.440 --> 01:26:33.100
And we come up with alternative ideas that may be meaningful. It sounds plausible

01:26:33.100 --> 01:26:37.960
It's highly suggestive maybe but obviously you can't prove it

01:26:37.960 --> 01:26:41.720
So it turns a lot of people on who like these these ideas and it could be right

01:26:41.720 --> 01:26:46.360
Maybe there's an avatar that's playing a game and we're part of the computer, you know

01:26:46.360 --> 01:26:51.160
That's not my idea, but you have people ascribing to this

01:26:51.160 --> 01:26:55.800
I have a few questions that I want to be sure to ask you before we run out of time

01:26:56.440 --> 01:27:00.760
A couple of them are from the audience. One is, here's Donna Rebidao, whom you know.

01:27:00.760 --> 01:27:05.240
You interviewed her at the Monroe Institute and she just wanted to say hi and ask how you're doing.

01:27:05.240 --> 01:27:10.840
Donna, it's a pleasure to have you chime in and thank you for contributing to the film.

01:27:10.840 --> 01:27:12.600
It's very thoughtful. Thank you.

01:27:12.600 --> 01:27:18.840
Here's one from Tanta Dadleni in Bombay and she wonders,

01:27:18.840 --> 01:27:22.360
"Do you believe that parallel universes exist?"

01:27:23.160 --> 01:27:32.160
It's something I can't believe with certainty. I'm not one to argue with Stephen Hawking and his multiverse theory or Everett and all of that.

01:27:32.160 --> 01:27:38.660
They're branches to a string. Are there alternatives and possibilities that coexist with ours?

01:27:38.660 --> 01:27:49.160
Maybe at the same time and space, but maybe at a slightly different phase to ours that makes it imperceivable, but does exist? I don't know.

01:27:49.160 --> 01:27:56.760
If you may be ascribed to that universe is constructed mathematically, I think you come to that kind of conclusion. That's how they did

01:27:56.760 --> 01:28:03.160
So it depends on your basis for your perspective given your discipline from where you come from

01:28:03.160 --> 01:28:06.280
I have no basis to come to any firm conclusion about that

01:28:06.280 --> 01:28:13.960
Sexy idea though. Yeah, and speaking of universes. I haven't read your UFO book, but I wanted to ask you while we still had time

01:28:14.480 --> 01:28:21.760
What conclusions have reached about that? For instance, do you feel that the whole UFO phenomenon has a spiritual implication?

01:28:21.760 --> 01:28:29.640
Sometimes spiritually oriented people think okay. These folks must be very highly evolved spiritually and they have a paternal

01:28:29.640 --> 01:28:34.920
attitude toward humanity and they're gonna prevent us from blowing ourselves up and they will

01:28:34.920 --> 01:28:41.280
Help us when we reach a sufficient level of maturity not to try to blow them up if they reveal themselves and so on

01:28:41.720 --> 01:28:45.360
What were your conclusions studying this whole thing enough to write a book about it?

01:28:45.360 --> 01:28:48.240
Definitely reptilians from the Pleiades

01:28:48.240 --> 01:28:56.560
I thought those are the real handsome Aryan looking ones, you know, there's them too Billy Meyer would talked about

01:28:56.560 --> 01:29:05.080
Look, we could spend obviously hours discussing this and you open up a whole can of worms with me and many others on the topic

01:29:05.080 --> 01:29:11.600
UFOs are real people claim certainly that they interact with non-human entities associated with them

01:29:11.600 --> 01:29:17.680
I know many well-balanced people who tell me that these little four-foot creatures with the big heads big eyes

01:29:17.680 --> 01:29:23.080
Come right through the walls in the bedroom and interact with them. I hear that many times

01:29:23.080 --> 01:29:28.680
You think they're coming from a galaxy far far away or do you think they actually are just other dimensional?

01:29:28.680 --> 01:29:33.940
They're just popping into our dimension without actually having to travel from someplace. There's no basis to know

01:29:34.760 --> 01:29:42.200
Based on the science I hear it's unlikely from elsewhere and more likely from here or interdimensional versus

01:29:42.200 --> 01:29:45.820
Extraterrestrial they've got some kind of wormhole or something

01:29:45.820 --> 01:29:52.940
Yeah, you know the trim virtual wormholes that Stephen Hawking getting here from there in a blink of an eye it kind of makes sense certainly

01:29:52.940 --> 01:29:58.460
Express bus kind of thing, but the phenomenon obviously is valid the questions

01:29:58.460 --> 01:30:03.840
We don't know what it is. Do we have non-human entities, you know back-engineered craft?

01:30:03.840 --> 01:30:05.840
I don't want to go there.

01:30:05.840 --> 01:30:06.840
It may do.

01:30:06.840 --> 01:30:09.840
People say they're changed consciously.

01:30:09.840 --> 01:30:11.840
They certainly are when they interact with the phenomenon.

01:30:11.840 --> 01:30:15.840
We see this in a study that I participated in.

01:30:15.840 --> 01:30:17.840
That's a form of spirituality.

01:30:17.840 --> 01:30:21.840
It alters their level of curiosity, their level of truth-seeking.

01:30:21.840 --> 01:30:25.840
They interact with the UFO, something I can't explain in the sky.

01:30:25.840 --> 01:30:27.840
They become, at some level, a truth-seeker.

01:30:27.840 --> 01:30:30.840
That's more of a spiritual mindset.

01:30:30.840 --> 01:30:37.540
I kind of went down that path when I saw that unusual two objects in the sky.

01:30:37.540 --> 01:30:43.460
So it had a spiritual impact on me as well as a scientific one, as you alluded to, looking

01:30:43.460 --> 01:30:48.760
at both, but the Kundalini was the cherry on top.

01:30:48.760 --> 01:30:50.840
I don't know what to make of the UFO phenomena.

01:30:50.840 --> 01:30:56.220
I could say a lot of firm things about it, yet there's more questions obviously than answers.

01:30:56.220 --> 01:30:59.840
And we spoke to Gary Nolan about that at Stanford University.

01:30:59.840 --> 01:31:04.920
in the film as well, and we got some very interesting answers regarding the phenomenon.

01:31:04.920 --> 01:31:10.520
He's leading research in the field, for those of you who might not know, and I think, can

01:31:10.520 --> 01:31:13.200
you tie consciousness into that phenomena?

01:31:13.200 --> 01:31:15.080
At some level, yes, you can.

01:31:15.080 --> 01:31:17.240
I think you can, indeed.

01:31:17.240 --> 01:31:24.320
You know, one conclusion I would reach to our whole conversation and also our respective

01:31:24.320 --> 01:31:30.000
endeavors in life, investigating all this stuff, is to quote, I forget who it was, maybe you'll

01:31:30.000 --> 01:31:35.440
know, he said, "The universe is not only curiouser than we can imagine, but curiouser than we can

01:31:35.440 --> 01:31:43.040
imagine." There is so much going on that is so anomalous and so unusual by contrast with regular

01:31:43.040 --> 01:31:49.120
mundane so-called reality that people could suddenly be aware of it all, they'd be blown away,

01:31:49.120 --> 01:31:54.000
freaked out, so perhaps we're protected by our filters in not being aware of it all.

01:31:54.000 --> 01:32:01.920
It's just fascinating to consider that the realities that we swim in contain so much

01:32:01.920 --> 01:32:07.520
mystery and wonder and incredible possibilities that all of us, regardless of our level of

01:32:07.520 --> 01:32:12.080
spiritual realization, are largely oblivious of. It's just interesting, isn't it?

01:32:12.080 --> 01:32:18.720
it is interesting. Not only are people not fully aware of it all, people who

01:32:18.720 --> 01:32:23.360
experience some of this aren't fully aware of it all, and people who experience

01:32:23.360 --> 01:32:30.500
it all become more curious about it, more spiritual over it, and try to make the

01:32:30.500 --> 01:32:36.040
most sense of it, I think. The more open you are, the more you want, the more

01:32:36.040 --> 01:32:41.480
answers you quest. It's almost a byproduct of spirituality. You truly do

01:32:41.480 --> 01:32:44.900
become a truth seeker and that's something that Einstein I think always

01:32:44.900 --> 01:32:50.780
talked about. Never stop being curious about the world and put everything you

01:32:50.780 --> 01:32:55.640
have into it and that's spirituality and that's what he was certainly alluding to

01:32:55.640 --> 01:33:01.400
and that's where you come from and I'm applying that finally where I'm not

01:33:01.400 --> 01:33:06.080
curious about one specific thing in my academic discipline that nobody cares

01:33:06.080 --> 01:33:11.300
about except for a few people in that academic discipline which has little

01:33:11.300 --> 01:33:17.900
implication, maybe some, in that specific area of study, which doesn't compare in

01:33:17.900 --> 01:33:23.960
comparison in every way to the essence of the issue that you just summarized.

01:33:23.960 --> 01:33:29.840
And that what I'm trying to get across, it's all the complex, it's way more

01:33:29.840 --> 01:33:34.400
important than what I've ever done. And I thought to experience these things, to

01:33:34.400 --> 01:33:39.840
come to that realization, as many people do, and I'm glad I did. And I'm glad for

01:33:39.840 --> 01:33:44.720
opportunity to share that with your audience and you too, Rick. And again, I want to thank you

01:33:44.720 --> 01:33:49.360
for all you've done to help many, many people better understand us all.

01:33:49.360 --> 01:33:50.880
Rick Well, you know, we're all just playing

01:33:50.880 --> 01:33:56.080
different positions on the same team. One of us is on first base and others in the outfield, whatever.

01:33:56.080 --> 01:34:02.080
The team needs all the positions. I'm just reminded of the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita where

01:34:02.080 --> 01:34:08.000
Arjuna, the warrior, is talking to Krishna, who is supposed to be God incarnate. And he says,

01:34:08.000 --> 01:34:14.640
I want to know who you really are. I want to sort of see your true nature." And Krishna,

01:34:14.640 --> 01:34:19.040
who's supposed to be God incarnate, says, "Sorry, you couldn't handle it. It's too much for

01:34:19.040 --> 01:34:23.800
a human being to actually experience." But Arjuna sort of pleads with him for a while,

01:34:23.800 --> 01:34:27.320
and finally Krishna says, "Okay, here you go," and shows it to him, and the rest of

01:34:27.320 --> 01:34:32.820
the chapter is Arjuna begging to have it taken away. It's indeed too much for a human being

01:34:32.820 --> 01:34:37.980
to actually experience the full magnitude of the intelligence that pervades and orchestrates

01:34:37.980 --> 01:34:38.980
the universe.

01:34:38.980 --> 01:34:45.140
>> RICK It's overwhelming, let alone having one of these experiences that's very real,

01:34:45.140 --> 01:34:48.580
profound and vivid in the form of Kundalini, like you know.

01:34:48.580 --> 01:34:52.340
That's a game changer, a life changer from that moment forward.

01:34:52.340 --> 01:34:58.340
And it pales in comparison to understanding the bigger questions that we can't handle.

01:34:58.340 --> 01:34:59.340
That's right.

01:34:59.340 --> 01:35:00.860
Maybe we do need to filter it out.

01:35:00.860 --> 01:35:06.300
And maybe the brain does purposely impede that information from us so that we don't freak

01:35:06.300 --> 01:35:07.860
out in the process.

01:35:07.860 --> 01:35:08.860
Right.

01:35:08.860 --> 01:35:12.620
And that's why spiritual development is a long-term enterprise.

01:35:12.620 --> 01:35:17.420
You're not gonna pop some pill and get enlightened next weekend, and if you could, you wouldn't

01:35:17.420 --> 01:35:18.860
be able to function.

01:35:18.860 --> 01:35:23.100
It's really a long-term thing where the mind, the nervous system, the personality, all aspects

01:35:23.100 --> 01:35:28.780
of our life have to be cultured and integrated and refined as we go along.

01:35:28.780 --> 01:35:32.860
And there are many instances of people sort of going a little bit too fast and becoming

01:35:32.860 --> 01:35:35.420
incapacitated in various ways.

01:35:35.420 --> 01:35:40.220
Yes, and I'm not sure if this is a case in point, but how about people who microdose quite

01:35:40.220 --> 01:35:42.220
a bit or do a lot of psychedelics?

01:35:42.220 --> 01:35:47.540
Well, if they're doing micro, sometimes that's okay and it works out well, but macro can

01:35:47.540 --> 01:35:48.540
be...

01:35:48.540 --> 01:35:49.540
And you can get too much...

01:35:49.540 --> 01:35:50.540
...alphobic and also be dangerous.

01:35:50.540 --> 01:35:51.540
Too much.

01:35:51.540 --> 01:35:52.540
Exactly.

01:35:52.540 --> 01:36:00.340
can create major psychological problems. People must, must be very cautious about that. I'm

01:36:00.340 --> 01:36:05.660
not de-emphasizing the importance of it, nor its use. I've done it in the 60s in Central

01:36:05.660 --> 01:36:12.380
Park, Grateful Dead concert, and that's very different. I'm tempted now to try mushrooms.

01:36:12.380 --> 01:36:17.060
I know many people who do, and they say it's wonderful. It opens up their awareness. It

01:36:17.060 --> 01:36:22.260
gives them that level of spirituality that they were unable to attain beforehand. I don't

01:36:22.260 --> 01:36:24.940
know if that's putting the cart before the horse. I don't know if it should come

01:36:24.940 --> 01:36:29.060
about naturally as opposed to chemically. I don't know if that's a false imagery,

01:36:29.060 --> 01:36:33.380
that's biologic in nature. So I don't know what they're believing in but I

01:36:33.380 --> 01:36:37.420
believe they're benefiting in some way because they say they are. But I know many

01:36:37.420 --> 01:36:42.100
people aren't and again those that aren't maybe aren't careful or under the right

01:36:42.100 --> 01:36:46.220
guidance to begin with and maybe under the right guidance you can be very

01:36:46.220 --> 01:36:50.220
successful in the right hands. And I was offered the opportunity to go to some

01:36:50.220 --> 01:36:55.380
place for my film down in South America to film somebody on ayahuasca. You know, put

01:36:55.380 --> 01:36:59.220
a microphone to the camera while having somebody ingest the ayahuasca and

01:36:59.220 --> 01:37:04.460
following them around for a day and getting their reactions of that

01:37:04.460 --> 01:37:09.700
experience. Again, not a novel idea, but that's something that would be very

01:37:09.700 --> 01:37:15.000
interesting to incorporate, especially their perspective of the event. We

01:37:15.000 --> 01:37:19.500
know it is a pronounced event, but it does have pronounced changes on people's

01:37:19.500 --> 01:37:23.500
psychosocial religiosity, whatever you want to call it.

01:37:23.500 --> 01:37:28.500
That alone is dicey, unless the person thinks it's beneficial.

01:37:28.500 --> 01:37:30.500
Should everybody start microdosing?

01:37:30.500 --> 01:37:32.500
You know, people on Wall Street do it all the time.

01:37:32.500 --> 01:37:37.500
Should I trust that person making the trade for me on Wall Street to be doing DMT?

01:37:37.500 --> 01:37:41.500
To be picking it up from cow manure and saying, "Here, Bob, chew on this."

01:37:41.500 --> 01:37:45.500
I'm tempted. I've had the opportunity. Tempted.

01:37:45.500 --> 01:37:51.260
But at seven years of age, I don't want to play around with brain chemistry, and I want to finish the film first Rick

01:37:51.260 --> 01:37:56.220
I have that attitude - it's like I don't want to play Russian roulette with my brain like you

01:37:56.220 --> 01:37:59.340
I did that in the 60s and it was an eye-opener, you know

01:37:59.340 --> 01:38:00.060
I realized whoa

01:38:00.060 --> 01:38:06.460
The main takeaway from my first experience with it was just to recognize that everyone sees the world so differently

01:38:06.460 --> 01:38:11.260
I thought we all saw the same world and all sudden I'm seeing such a different world and I kind of realized I think it

01:38:11.260 --> 01:38:16.100
was Gandhi who said, you know, it's easier to wear shoes than to pave the earth with leather.

01:38:16.100 --> 01:38:21.500
I realized, oh, if I change my own perspective, that would be really significant. So I kind

01:38:21.500 --> 01:38:26.620
of got onto that kick. But I think once you have that realization, perhaps through psychedelics,

01:38:26.620 --> 01:38:32.140
if that's how you have it, it's important to embark on a kind of a systematic path and

01:38:32.140 --> 01:38:37.940
not think that more and more and more psychedelics are going to do it for you, because generally

01:38:37.940 --> 01:38:40.820
speaking, that has not panned out to be true.

01:38:40.820 --> 01:38:47.260
Yet some people would advocate for that. Yeah, but then look at their lives. How's it going for him? Right exactly

01:38:47.260 --> 01:38:54.080
By the way, my battery is running low. Oh, I should let you go. So let me wrap it up before your battery dies

01:38:54.080 --> 01:39:00.340
I've really enjoyed talking to you and listening to you in other interviews as I prepared for this

01:39:00.340 --> 01:39:03.860
Appreciate the work you're doing and I hope you keep it up

01:39:03.860 --> 01:39:09.620
I'm sure you will you're having fun with it and I appreciate all those who've been listening or watching and

01:39:10.380 --> 01:39:14.680
and I hope you stay tuned for the next one. Any final thoughts?

01:39:14.680 --> 01:39:19.540
I just want to thank you for the opportunity to share what I did, for whatever it's worth.

01:39:19.540 --> 01:39:24.740
As I've said maybe too many times, thank you again for all you've contributed and for your

01:39:24.740 --> 01:39:31.180
guest's contributions. But again, let me just emphasize that the film is Consciousness Connection.

01:39:31.180 --> 01:39:37.580
The website is consciousnessfilm.info and please take a look at it and if you can provide any

01:39:37.580 --> 01:39:44.580
support to it, and if not, we understand. Any questions, don't hesitate to email me at davisri57@yahoo.com,

01:39:44.580 --> 01:39:51.180
and my website is bobdavisspeaks.com. That's bobdavisspeaks.com.

01:39:51.180 --> 01:39:55.860
Okay, and I'll put all that stuff on your Bath Gap page, including your email address

01:39:55.860 --> 01:40:00.900
since you have just made it public. Great. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks, Bob.

01:40:00.900 --> 01:40:02.740
Thank you, everybody. Talk to you next time.

01:40:02.740 --> 01:40:06.100
[MUSIC PLAYING]

01:40:06.100 --> 01:40:26.940
Thank you.