Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people about spiritually related topics. We’ve been doing this for 12/13 years, have about 650-something, 660-something of them now. So, if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, just go to BatGap.com and look under the past interview’s menu, where you’ll see them organized in various ways, or you can just explore the YouTube channel. Although the website is actually better organized, we have everything more categorized. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, if you like, I think we’re going to hit 100,000 subscribers this year, which will be nice. And if you’d like to discuss this interview, we don’t have the discussion on YouTube because it was not a very good interface actually and a little hard to moderate. So, for each interview, there’s a link beneath, in the description, to a specific section on the BatGap Facebook group where we have about 16,000 members and people can discuss the interviews there or anything else they want to discuss. It’s a great honor to have Jeffrey Mishlove as my guest today. Probably most of you have heard of Jeffrey, he’s been doing something similar to what I’ve been doing, but since 1986, which is fantastic. Between ’86 and 2002, he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. And now he hosts the New Thinking Allowed series on YouTube. Recently, an organization called the Bigelow Institute sponsored an essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. Jeffrey’s essay won the half million-dollar first prize. We’re going to talk a lot about that today. He is the author of several books, including The Roots of Consciousness, The PK Man, and Psi Development Systems. And he is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited university, which was University of California, Berkeley, in 1980. So welcome, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Thank you, Rick. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Rick Archer: Yeah, really good to have you here. We’re going to probably talk for a couple of hours today. We’ll cover all kinds of topics I’m sure, as you have been doing on your show over the years. You’ve interviewed some remarkable people. Houston Smith, Jean Houston, Ram Dass, all kinds of people. It’s very impressive. I’ll be linking to the website for both the New Thinking Allowed and the Thinking Allowed programs from your page on BatGap. So, people can go there and check them all out. Having listened to quite a few interviews of you, also by you, over the years, but of you in the last week, I thought we might want to start with Uncle Harry’s story. What do you think?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, it’s a great story in the sense that if you had to ask yourself, what was the single most powerful dream you’ve ever had in your life, in my case, that was a dream that occurred to me in March of 1972. That would be nearly 50 and a half years ago. And I remember it vividly and it literally changed my life. At the time, if you had known me, you would have seen a graduate student in criminology, doing field work at San Quentin Prison in the psychiatric unit working with murderers and rapists in group therapy. It was at that time that my Great Uncle Harry died, and the day that he died, he was in Wisconsin, I’m still asleep in the early morning in California. He appeared to me in a dream that was so powerful. It was like merging of our souls. There was content associated with it, but the content was really trivial compared to the state of consciousness that the dream embodied. When I woke up, I was crying, sobbing tears of joy, and singing, at the same time, a sacred song from the Jewish religious tradition. And so, I wrote home and said, I had a dream, how’s Uncle Harry? Immediately my mother called me up, and she said, he just died. Apparently, at the very moment I was having that dream about him, and that really stimulated me to reconsider what I was doing with my life. I knew that I was very interested in human deviance, the outer reaches of human behavior, but frankly, although at any university you could study crime, you could study psychopathology, it’s much harder to study mysticism, parapsychology, psychic functioning, life after death, intuition, creativity, which were the topics that really interested me. I agonized over that for many months, but eventually, was guided by even more dreams to pursue a career in the media. That led me to have the confidence because I was then, even back in 1972, I started doing interviews and was in touch with the leading thought leaders in the fields that interested me the most who were passing through the San Francisco Bay area where I lived. So, I had the confidence to set up this unique doctoral degree at the University of California.
Rick Archer: Why do you think it is that our society back then and even now is much more knowledgeable about and interested in deviant behavior than mystical and spiritual experiences? And when I say our society, obviously our society has a spectrum and there are people on the spectrum who are more interested in the spiritual stuff, but at least the mainstream, more predominant segment of the spectrum, seems to be more fascinated with the darker stuff.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, it’s certainly in the universities, the guardians of reality, so to speak, the universities, the scientific establishments are very materialistic in their orientation. And in fact, if you take a viewpoint that challenges their basic understanding of the material world as being fundamental, they can get very hostile.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I remember hearing you say that you were invited to speak at that consciousness conference in Tucson. When they found out what you were going to speak about, which was I guess maybe consciousness surviving physical death or some such thing, they retracted the invitation or some sponsor of the conference said, if he’s going to do that, I’m not sponsoring it, right?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, it was about a big money donator who felt very sympathetic to consciousness research, as am I. But his attitude was that anything having to do with survival of consciousness after death is purely anecdotal, and therefore doesn’t belong at a scientific conference. Well, he’s wrong on both counts. There is actual experimental evidence relating to human postmortem survival. And, of course, from my point of view, the researchers into consciousness sometimes say how can we explain paranormal consciousness when we can’t even explain normal consciousness, so let’s work on that first. My philosophy is it’s just the opposite. You won’t explain normal consciousness if you don’t understand the paranormal capabilities of the human mind.
Rick Archer: True, because if they think that normal consciousness is actually somehow manufactured by the brain, the whole thing is upside down to begin with. So, they’re not going to understand that. It’s like looking at a radio and saying, how does all this beautiful music come out of it? How does this, how do these circuits create Beethoven? Which of course, they’re never going to figure out because it doesn’t.
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s a very good analogy.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I was going to go to that Tucson conference, just when COVID hit, and I had to cancel. In fact, the conference was canceled. And later on, our mutual friend Jeffrey Martin said that he had been to it for 10 years or something. He said he’s getting a little tired of it because they’re still just trying to, the whole discussion is about how does the brain create consciousness, rather than how does consciousness create the brain and everything else?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I did participate as part of a panel on exactly this, non-local consciousness. So, I and four other parapsychologists had a panel on the opening night of the conference, and it was very well attended. So, I do see movement. I think that slowly, very slowly, the whole culture is shifting.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Through one funeral at a time as Max Planck put it. As the people cling to the old paradigm die off. Speaking of paradigms, and maybe Thomas Kuhn was before your time, did you interview him by any chance?
Jeffrey Mishlove: I never knew him, but I certainly was exposed to his work.
Rick Archer: Yeah, for the listeners, he wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is really essential reading. I think it explains the whole process through which paradigms or structures of knowledge get established and are eventually toppled when enough new evidence shakes them hard enough. Okay, so you just quickly brushed over how you at a very young age started interviewing people. And there’s a whole nice story behind that which we don’t have to go into. But it was synchronistic in a way where you ended up with this, what was it, a radio station or public access TV? Tell it in brief.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, it sure is. After my Uncle Harry dream, I began agonizing about how am I going to make this switch out of criminology to study the mystical life. And I wasn’t getting anywhere for months, which I think is important. If you’re willing to really focus on something for months until you can find a solution, your whole soul gets tightened up, tightened up, tightened up. And then finally, there’s a release. And the release came to me several months later, in which one day I knew, without a doubt, I was going to have a dream that night, and I would find an answer in the dream. And I did. I dreamt I was visiting friends in Berkeley across town. I knocked on the door of their apartment, no answer. In the dream, I found a key, let myself in, walked into the middle of their living room. And there in the middle of the living room floor was a magazine. I picked it up. In the dream it was named E Y E. As I was paging through the dream, or through the magazine, I woke up with this feeling like I knew I had the answer. I knew the answer was in the magazine. But I had no clue as to what the answer was. So, I did something very unusual. It’s a dream interpretation technique I recommend whenever it’s possible, I literally acted out the dream. I woke up at seven in the morning, put on my tennis shoes, ran all the way across town, five miles, came to this apartment, knocked on the door. As I had dreamt there was no answer. I happened to know where they kept the key right under the floor mat, and found it, let myself in, walked into the living room. And there, exactly as I had dreamt, was a magazine sitting on the floor, was spread open and I picked it up and noticed the name was ‘Focus’. And it literally brought focus to my life. And for San Francisco, viewers, and listeners of your program, they’ll recognize that as the magazine of Public Radio and Television in the San Francisco area. As I was paging through it, it dawned on me for the first time in my life that I could pursue my interests by getting involved in the noncommercial sector of the media. So that’s when I went over to KPFA Pacifica radio, which is another nonprofit radio network in Berkeley, and volunteered and even though I had my master’s degree at the time, they said, sure, sit at this desk. And when you hear the doorbell ring, press this button, and let people in the front door. That’s how I got started and I did it gladly. And within two weeks, I had produced a radio program. I learned how to do it and produced a little program about how you don’t have to be from out of town to be psychic. Just began interviewing a lot of my friends in Berkeley and the program director liked that so much that he said, we have a regular spot for you every Tuesday and Thursday at noon, would you please host this program called ‘The Mind’s Ear?’ And so, within three weeks of my dream, I’m sitting across the table, just as you been doing for years now with world class leaders in the fields that interested me the most. And that was a life changer. So, I’ve literally been doing interviews since, I think it would be November 1972.
Rick Archer: Wow, that’s a great story. I had a kind of similar thing in terms of this desire that wouldn’t let me alone, if I should do an interview show. I was trying to get the local radio station here to let me do it there. And for some reason, they didn’t want to, it’s just a little thing with a 10-mile radius, and finally, a friend said, you’re thinking too small, go over to the public access TV station, start recording them. And so, I did that, did a bunch of them in that, and then that just kind of like, one thing led to the next, had to learn a lot along the way, set up a YouTube channel to create a website. But it’s like, well, your dream actually is a good illustration of a couple of things. One is, you seem to get a lot of guidance from dreams, which is cool. And another thing is like, who’s guiding us in these circumstances? Was it really Uncle Harry? Was it some other kind of intelligence representing itself as Uncle Harry? And then, what sort of intelligence or omniscience would it take to give you a dream that would show you that you had to go to this apartment five miles away and find a magazine on the floor? And that, how did that intelligence know that what you needed to find, in order to embark on the path you’ve taken, was somewhere in that magazine? I mean, that kind of stuff really fascinates me, as I’m sure it does you.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I have a way of thinking about it and explaining it to people, which is, first of all, I would say the whole universe is conscious.
Rick Archer: Yep.
Jeffrey Mishlove: And we partake of that consciousness. But at the time, I was desperately trying to do something more positive with my life. And my sense is that when you try to become the best version of yourself, the universe wants to help you and the universe will create synchronicities in order to help you along on that path.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Which implies that consciousness is not only awareness, but it’s intelligence. Sometimes people speak of consciousness, and it has this plain vanilla connotation, but it’s really an omnipresent field of intelligence, and which is orchestrating the whole universe, from the quarks to the galaxies so beautifully, and us in between.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Now, I have to think we never talked about this Rick, but since I know now you’re in Fairfield, sounds like you have been through the Science of Creative Intelligence.
Rick Archer: I have a master’s degree in it, and I was a TM teacher for many years. I’m not in the TM movement anymore, although I have no gripe with it, but I’ve kind of branched out.
Jeffrey Mishlove: But what you’re saying the Science of Creative Intelligence as the Maharishi developed, is basically the philosophy of Vedanta. It’s a very ancient philosophy. As far as I’m concerned, it’s part of what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy, you can find it in every culture and every mystical tradition. And I think it’s the ground of thinking for understanding paranormal events.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And he felt that this is a scientific age, and we need to speak in the language of the age. And there’s that the ancient seers actually took a very scientific approach because they weren’t content with believing things. They wanted to experience them in the beliefs, if we can call them that, were only hypotheses that needed to be tested. So, he felt like well, we can apply the scientific method as it has been developed in modern times, to the science of, to consciousness, and empirically investigate everything there is to know about consciousness.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, when I created my doctoral program in Parapsychology at Berkeley, I defined Parapsychology in a way very different than other people use the term because I felt we needed to include the ancient thinking of the Rishis of India and the shamans of Siberia, the mystical teachings of every culture. In a way these people were the early Parapsychologists.
Rick Archer: Yeah, one thing, we don’t necessarily need to do it right this minute, although we might. But one thing I hope we can get into is how objective and repeatable and reliable can the subjective investigation be, as compared with objective methods? Because subjectivity, by definition is considered sort of, w–.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Woo-woo
Rick Archer: Or, unreliable or just a fabrication of the individual’s nervous system or mind, as opposed to the things we can really nail down if we use mass spectrometers and other kinds of physical instruments.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, you’re absolutely right, we live in a materialistic age that values sensory experience, and physicality, the things in the external world much more. But from a scientific point of view, parapsychology can be viewed like any other behavioral science, you have to look at the statistics. I’ll give you one example that most people are familiar with, the research that says that if you take a little baby aspirin every day, you can reduce your odds of having a heart attack or a stroke, and which is true, I take a baby aspirin every single day because my doctor has prescribed it for me. However, the research and extrasensory perception from a statistical perspective is stronger than that. The findings of parapsychology are stronger than the findings that aspirin helps prevent heart disease.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and the findings of a lot of things of this nature. For instance, when we had all those things in the TM movement, where we went to troubled areas and had large groups meditating, and the sociologists measured all the social statistics, like crime rate and economic indicators, and all that, they got very high statistical significance, in terms of the correlation of numbers of people meditating in an area and the impact it had on society. But of course, and actually, some very credible journals were more or less forced to publish this stuff because they couldn’t find any way to shoot holes in it, but it was, they did so quite reluctantly.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I’m very interested in that research on the Maharishi Effect. Yeah. Seems to me, it’s very significant.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I participated in a bunch of those things. I spent three months in Iran and all kinds of interesting adventures. But anyway, the principle behind that was just that consciousness is a field and if you enliven the field, it influences everybody in the vicinity.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I think that’s probably why you do these video broadcasts. And it’s why I do them, too.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And there’s a deeper reason where I think we might, well a related reason, why I think we might both do them. And that is that I think both of us since we were quite young, had a feeling that the more fundamental level on which we could work, the more impact we might have, the more leverage we might have in terms of making a positive contribution to the world. And for you, it seems to have mainly been in terms of parapsychology. But I think that includes what I was also interested in, which is consciousness and developing that in my own experience and understanding as fully as possible and sharing it with others as much as possible.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah. It’s hard to be in the field of parapsychology without studying consciousness, because in effect, parapsychology is looking at the direct effects of consciousness, acting outside of the instrumentation of the human body. So, it’s like receiving information from a distance in space or time outside the range of the senses, and also influencing events well beyond the range of the body itself and the muscles.
Rick Archer: Why do you think it’s important that people understand that? Why do you think it’s important they understand that consciousness gives rise to matter and not the other way around? What do you think society would be like if the understanding that consciousness is fundamental were the norm, as opposed to being a little sort of niche thing over off to one side?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, I mean, Jesus said, as they were nailing him to the cross, ‘Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do’. And, if Vladimir Putin really knew the self himself, it’s, I say the Self, because it’s not his personally, it’s, we all share it. But if all the people who are building nuclear bombs or, trashing the oceans or attacking other countries or, doing all the horrible things that people do, really had that level of self-realization that we’re talking about here, I don’t think they’d be doing those things. We’d really have a different kind of world. It’s about for me self-awareness. Socrates is the one I think who said, ‘know thyself’. That’s the main dictum of philosophy. And yet we live in a culture in which people studiously are encouraged not to understand the power of their own minds. As a result, we have enormous problems in society. Social alienation is higher now than it’s been for quite a while, and it’s always been relatively high in my lifetime. The problems of social alienation include pollution and violence and all sorts of things that occur largely, I think, because people are ignorant of their own true nature. I would agree with you completely.
Rick Archer: Yeah. On a similar note, very related, similar question. Regarding the theme of your essay, why do you think it’s important that people understand that consciousness survives physical death? What kind of impact is that going to have on their lives?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, the way I view it, Rick, is that even here in the body, we partake of the same consciousness that people who have left their body partake of, so that we’re one with those people. If we understood the depth of our own consciousness, we would realize that we’re already interfacing with what the Tibetans called the Bardo planes. It’s not something that you have to wait until you die before you can experience. It is, the common dictum is, well, nobody has come back from the dead to talk about it. It’s simply not true.
Rick Archer: I mean, it’s true, both in terms of NDEs, near death experiences, and in terms of people who’ve actually died and then communicated through people which we can get into in your, in our conversation, people have come back both ways.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah. In fact, extensively.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I printed out the whole table of contents for your essay because it provides us a nice structure of points to go through. So, I’ll kind of use it, but we can deviate from that any way you want, as we go along. One thing that was, I was impressed by when I heard you describe your process of writing this essay, which, incidentally, I will link to on your BatGap page, and I highly encourage people to read, is the one-pointedness with which you worked on it. I mean, you stopped doing your interviews, you just cut out all distractions, and you sometimes work 12-hour days, focused on this thing. And another thing, which you’ve actually alluded to earlier, is that you just had a certainty that you were going to win it. I was reminded of this earlier when you spoke about, starting your interview show and that is, what is it, another thing Christ said something like, if you want something, just believe you already have it or something, and you will get it. Paraphrasing very roughly. But I’m glad I didn’t try to write an essay for this thing because you would have beat me by a mile. I would have spent a lot of time for nothing.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I certainly did have that one-pointed consciousness, and I did have a sense of knowing that I was going to win as if I was seeing the future. As if it had already happened. That’s all true. And I can’t say that I forced it or that I made it happen in any way. The competition was really very intense. And I think it was, in some ways, just something synchronistic really the way it worked out. I have to say this, there were over 200 essays that were submitted in this competition. There were over 1200 people who applied to submit an essay, and there are essays that were submitted that never received even honorable mentions. A total of 29 essays actually won financial awards in this competition, but I know people who have written essays that didn’t win any awards, and when I have looked at them, they’re masterful. They’re brilliant essays. So, I’m inclined to think that the Bigelow competition has been a big boost for the whole field in many, many ways. Some of which we probably won’t learn about for years.
Rick Archer: Yeah, what people will see if they start reading your essay is that it’s very, it’s organized in a very clear way. And it’s footnoted, you have well over 200 footnotes, referencing things that one could read. It has well over 100 embedded videos that are excerpts from your interviews with various people. So, it’s really easy to read. And I learned all kinds of things that I hadn’t known. I just finished it this morning, I kind of timed it so I would finish it before the interview. But it’s an impressive work. I heard you say in one interview that you were planning to use some of the prize money to further develop your New Thinking Allowed Channel. How, what ideas do you have for doing that?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, for one thing, I think I’m slowly beginning to move on to other projects, I’ve been doing the New Thinking Allowed Channel very intensively for seven years. And, a 12-hour day is normal for me. But now I’m looking at doing some documentaries. I’m looking at doing some research possibly. I’m also on the board now at the Bigelow Institute. So, one of the things that we’re doing with the New Thinking Allowed channel is starting to bring in other interviewers. I have one interviewer, Emmy Vadnais, who is an occupational therapist and a healer herself. And we’re getting wonderful feedback from our viewers about her interviews. So that would be an example of how we’re expanding the channel.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you’ve been putting up, I’ve heard you say, often four interviews a week on New Thinking Allowed.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Sometimes five.
Rick Archer: Wow. I mean, and you just mentioned 12-hour days. So, I imagine you actually put in some preparation time for these four or five interviews.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I do indeed, I try to read all the books of the people that I interview, which I know is relatively rare, many interviewers, never even open the books, but
Rick Archer: I know I do it too. But it takes me a whole week to do one and you’re doing like five times as much. That’s amazing.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I learned how to skim through the books. Yeah. I usually do most of my book reading while walking in the woods, listening to the books. Get my exercise in that way.
Rick Archer: Good way to do it. Yeah. One thing I was thinking, take it or leave it, that you might do with the New Thinking Allowed Channel is take all the Thinking Allowed interviews and put them up on the new channel. Because right now it’s you have to order DVDs, which is so 1990s. You could get them up on the internet and it will be a tremendous legacy. Lots more people
Jeffrey Mishlove: The original Thinking Allowed Channel is actually owned by a separate company. My former business partner, Arthur Black, is now the owner of that company. But we do, we put up one video from the original Thinking Allowed series every week, and we keep it up for just a week at a time. So, they are up. Arthur Black has actually set up a paid, a subscription-based video channel where the other Thinking Allowed videos can be found,
Rick Archer: I see, Okay, fine. Okay, so proceeding along here. Let’s, just to get us back on track. Let’s throw in a Max Planck quote that I’ve heard before, but I saw it in your essay. ‘I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness’. And of course, Max Planck and some of his buddies actually studied Vedic literature and all. A good friend named Phil Goldberg, who wrote a book called ‘American VEDA’, you should interview Phil. It was all about how eastern thought, particularly Vedic thought, has influenced the west over really, quite early, way back in the 1800s, but anyway, so, you use the word. Well, let me back up a little bit, “white crows”. Okay, what do you mean by white crows?
Jeffrey Mishlove: It’s a term that was first used by one of my intellectual heroes William James, a great Psychical Researcher, and Psychical Research, of course, is the discipline that sort of preceded what we call Parapsychology today. He was also regarded as the founder of psychology itself in the United States, as well as the founder of Religious Studies and one of America’s foremost philosophers. He said, if you want to disprove the hypothesis that all crows are black, you only need to find one white crow. And what he meant by that is, if you want to disprove the hypothesis that we don’t survive death, that consciousness dies with the death of the body, you just need one good contrary example. He was studying a medium who lived in Boston near him, where he lived, named Leonora Piper and he added Mrs. Piper is my white crow. She’s one of the most extensively studied mediums in the history of Psychical Research, consistently regarded as an authentic person who’d never a hint of having any kind of cheating going on. William James was a champion at that time of research with mediums and as a result, he, in spite of his enormous stature in the academic community, he was laughed at and treated very rudely, because of his interest in Mrs. Piper. He even published an article I cite from Science. He had a debate with his opponents in the pages of Science magazine, I believe it was in about 1903. He’s defending Mrs. Piper, and he’s complaining about the poor quality of the criticisms of the research with Mrs. Piper. And he’s saying, well, the mediums are scientific outlaws, and any of their defenders are quasi-insane. And he goes on to say any stick is good enough to beat a dog of that stripe with, meaning his critics didn’t even care that they had weak arguments and didn’t even realize.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, modern day critics of the same ilk, for instance, Dean Radin, has had people say to him things like, well, I don’t need to look at your research because it couldn’t possibly be true. So, I’m not going to bother. And things like that. I don’t know. I think that if you explain the word scientism that will lead into that question I should ask.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah. I refer to our present era as the Dark Age of scientism. I think in some of the Vedic traditions they think of it as a Kali Yuga. But in any case, scientism is the belief that the materialistic worldview that works so well, in science and technology generally, is the explanation that will account for everything in the universe, that you never have to look beyond materialistic mechanistic way of thinking. That’s all you will ever need. Anything that doesn’t fit the materialistic mechanistic worldview simply doesn’t exist. It can be regarded without any further ado as fantasy.
Rick Archer: Yeah, so they’re about 120 years behind the cutting edge of science because Einstein and the quantum physicists blew that out of the water at the turn of the 20th century.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, long ago, and it gets even deeper when you go into things like the Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem in which he points out, in effect that there is no explanation that will ever be complete in a pure scientific mathematical sense. Mathematics can’t even justify itself, for example.
Rick Archer: So, in the case of your argument in this essay, there’s a whole flock of white crows. Lots of them, crowing around, you can’t even find any black crows.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, I think I’ve come up with a good 26 examples of undeniable evidence that pretty much disproves the viewpoint that consciousness dies with the death of the body.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Again, it seems like the main reason this isn’t, hasn’t convinced more people is that the people, the influential people, have refused to take it seriously. They’ve just, they keep brushing it off. And I imagine what will happen is what Thomas Kuhn predicted, which is that the anomalies will just become overwhelming enough that they won’t be able to.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I’m pretty sure that will be the case. But even now, for the last 75 years, ever since they’ve been making sociological measurements in the United States, 70% or more of the public believes in an afterlife, and that’s even while religious participation is declining. So, you can’t say ‘oh, well, they accept whatever their church tells them’. That’s not it, there. It’s because of if you want my opinion, it’s because we have evidence, and we’ve always had evidence from near death experiences. People coming back and saying what it was like. Once people have had a near death experience, they almost universally know beyond any doubt that we survive death. And that gets spread around the culture and even in academia people are afraid to talk about it. But if you ask them privately, you’ll find that it’s the same that 75% or so accept the paranormal phenomena.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And some of the people who’ve had these near-death experiences are people like, Eben Alexander, who himself was an atheist and materialist, and then had this incredible near-death experience. We’ve both interviewed and completely flipped his worldview. I heard the thing about religions declining. If, of course you’ve heard the term spiritual, but not religious. A lot of people are beginning to define themselves that way. And I saw an article the other day about how a lot of people are leaving the Mormon church. Quite a large group of them have formed this group of some, I forget what it’s called, where they’re all taking psilocybin and having these mystical experiences. Kind of amusing, in a way.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I think that category of spiritual but not religious, is one of the fastest growing demographic categories in the Western world. Actually, it’s really a significant portion of the population. I’m going to guess close to 30%.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And if we just flesh that out a little bit, what does that really mean? To me, it means people who want to have direct experience and not just rely on believing stuff. That’s spiritual, but not religious.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I think that’s true. And I also think that we live in an era where we are the inheritors of global culture. Now, I know there’s a downside to that. But what it means is that we have the ability to acquire knowledge about Buddhism and Vedanta and Shamanism and Zoroastrian traditions and Kabbalah. And people, in fact, what they do good or bad, is they often pick and choose the best aspects of a variety of traditions and integrate that into their personal lifestyle. I’ve interviewed one fellow, a so-called religious traditionalist, who thinks that this is a terrible idea, they don’t like it, they can’t stomach the idea. But as far as I’m concerned, it can be very healthy if it’s done judiciously, and with some kind of personal integrity.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m going to skip towards the end of my notes here where you said, I heard you say, that most of the people you have known who have psychic abilities tend not to be the most moral people, they use them for good or bad, or whatever. And they just behave like ordinary human beings with psychic abilities. Kind of like if Superman didn’t really have a strong moral code. Whereas the most moral people wouldn’t consider using psychic abilities or flaunting them or displaying them in any way. That kind of jives with a lot of the traditional teachers and Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras outlines all these abilities and then says, but you can get sidetracked if you indulge in them or you certainly wouldn’t want to make a show of them or try to earn a living doing them on street corners or something.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I think some people are called to it. People who are professional mediums often have a calling. Many people I’ve interviewed who never thought of themselves this way. Didn’t want to be a medium, but something pushed them the way you and I got pushed to follow our own unique paths. So, I think that’s perfectly valid. I don’t object, and I don’t object if people charge money for it, as well, if it’s coming from their own core, if it’s part of their personal destiny, part of what it means for them to be the best version of themselves, it can be a beautiful thing.
Rick Archer: I think it would be good, I mean, it’s good in life in general, whatever you do in life, if there were some ethical or moral development accompanying the development of these abilities, because otherwise, if there isn’t, inevitably, people are going to use them for perhaps nefarious purposes.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there’s a whole tradition of black magic and sorcery and the misuse of these abilities has always been part of human culture. It’s something that shamans have always understood, for example. And like any other ability, mathematical ability, or athletic ability, you can have it without being a highly moral person.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and in this case, you’re playing with powerful stuff. You could end up not only harming others, but really harming yourself quite even worse. A couple of questions came in, here’s one from Wesley in Oregon. What does Jeffrey think about the potential? This is related to what we’ve been talking about just now. What does Jeffrey think about the potential capabilities of humans, as we progress spiritually as individuals and collectively, what kinds of capabilities might open up and become more common? Like psychic, telekinesis, traversing dimensions? Which reminds me of a Steven Wright joke, he said, if you believe in telekinesis, raise my hand. [laughing] But anyway, that was this question.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, that’s a good question. In answer, I would say, you can go to the Yoga Sutras, for example, where they list all the siddhis. I think that those powers of the mind, and I don’t think the Yoga Sutras is a complete list, but it is a large list, are going to become more and more prominent. The way I think about it is based on the dictum by John Lilly, the great medical doctor and researcher. I had the pleasure of interviewing him. He died many years ago. He wrote in a book that programming and bio programming of the human bio computer, or programming and meta programming of the human bio computer, and his dictum is this, he says, in the province of the mind, what you believe to be true is true, or becomes true, within certain limits to be defined by experience and experiment. And those limits are further belief systems to be transcended. So, I ultimately don’t think there’s any limit at all. Ultimately, the goal is cosmic consciousness. The goal is perfect enlightenment. It may take us a very long time to get there, but I don’t see, the only obstacles towards us being there, are our own beliefs.
Rick Archer: Yeah. St. Teresa of Avila said, it appears that the Lord Himself is on the journey. So, we’re all moving along. We’ve already covered this point, but I just want to read it out because this person is from Ukraine, and I just feel we all feel so much compassion for what’s happening there. Marxium Curtis asks, greetings from Ukraine. Thanks for the truth told. Would Putin do what he does if he knew his true nature?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I’d like to say no. It’d be very comforting to say no, but I suppose at the end of the day, I don’t know. And I am reminded of a wonderful book by Stanislav Grof, called The Cosmic Game, in which he points out that we’re looking at this from our human perspective. But from another perspective, for example, once we all die, and we’re all in the afterlife, you’re going to be there probably with Putin. And there’s a sense in which you and me and Putin are all the same person. We’re all versions of each other. And we’re acting out a kind of cosmic game and from our human perspective, it seems like what Putin is doing involves terrible, terrible suffering. But think of it from this end. If you look at the research on near death experience, there’s a phenomenon there that is known as the life review, that many near death experiencers report in which they relive every moment of their lives second by second, but not only from their own perspective, but they relive from the perspective of every other person they have ever influenced positive or negative. I have to assume that if this principle holds that Putin himself at some point is going to experience all the pain from every individual person as a result of his actions, and all the good things that he may have done, and so we all will do that. But ultimately, it seems living in this physical environment that we live in, there needs to be a balance between positive and negative that creates the dramatic tension within which spiritual growth on the physical plane becomes possible. And for that to occur, there need to be Putin’s in the world.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it might sound harsh, but I believe I agree with you. Some sages have said that the angels in heaven don’t evolve very much there. Because there’s no contrast. There’s no challenge that they don’t even want to close their eyes and meditate because everything is so beautiful. It’s just the time for reaping the rewards of a life well lived, perhaps, but it’s not as evolutionary as it might be on Earth. And so, they end up wanting to come back and live this more difficult life because of the evolutionary opportunities it affords.
Jeffrey Mishlove: And many people suggest that before we’re born into this physical plane, we have a conversation with our spiritual guides about what it is we intend to accomplish. I know Carolyn Myss talks about a contract, we make a contract, this is what we’re going to do in this lifetime. I have to assume that people, or souls like Putin are, said would you like to be a world leader who ends up creating a war and causing enormous suffering. It means that you will have to experience all of that suffering yourself at some point, but it’s part of the cosmic plan. Somebody needs to do it, would you volunteer?
Rick Archer: You may be right? There are stories like that, in the Vedic literature, there’s like, some highly evolved soul is given the choice, would you like to live X number of lives as a really good guy, or come back as this demon and you’re going to end up battling Krishna, he’s going to kill you, and then you’re going to get enlightened after one life. He said, okay, I’ll do that.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, but I’m very sympathetic from a human point of view that Putin has done a horrible thing.
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, a lot of this is speculative, of course because I mean, we’re drawing upon what ancient traditions have said. And even they, did they know for sure? Or did they just sort of cook up a whole mythology that kind of made sense. You’d like to think that the great Yogi’s and seers could actually cognize these different levels of creation that are closed off to most of us and that there’s some authenticity or reliability to the way they’ve mapped it out. But, again, it’s one of those hypothetical things that we just need to investigate. Who knows?
Jeffrey Mishlove: I’m very moved by one of the hymns in the Rig Veda, about the creation of the universe. It’s just beautiful description of how the universe was created, because the one consciousness was very lonely and out of this loneliness, it developed a certain heat and a certain hunger and out of the hunger came the multiplicity of experiences that are possible for us now in the physical world. Then the hymn ends by saying, who knows if this is really true, it says, maybe even the highest god and the highest heaven doesn’t know for sure.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I love that verse. It’s great. A lot of humility in whoever put that into the Vedas. Okay, so a question came in as long as we get it in here, you’re going to have to explain what this means. Someone named Zack Chowfant is asking ‘What is Jeffrey’s opinion on ‘In the macro cycle kinetic phenomenon’ reported by SORAP’?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Okay, I can explain that. I’ve done interviews on that. SORAP is a group of people that were active in Missouri during the 1960s, maybe 1970s and 80s. I think there may be some splinter groups that are still active. And it was originally established by a great American writer named Neihardt. I think it’s John Neihardt, who is the author of Black Elk Speaks, very popular book. He was the poet laureate, I think of the state of Missouri, if I recall correctly, or maybe it was Nebraska, but he was very interested in psychokinesis. And he set up these groups and they were called SORAP for I think, is a Society for the Study of Psychokinesis, something of that, or telekinesis, as they put it, and they held seances. They had many, many powerful phenomena reported, like literally earthquake-like experiences where the houses they were in would begin shaking, and many, many things like materializations would occur and people would go into trance and speak in tongues, and on and on. And parapsychologists learned about this, especially because one of Neihardt’s students, a man named John Richards continued to work after Neihardt died. Richards himself was apparently a powerful medium. So, several parapsychologists, William Cox in particular, wrote a book all about it. What they reported was that these phenomena were authentic, that they, William Cox set up what he called a mini-Lab, which was a scientific lab, sealed in glass, so it couldn’t be broken into. He put objects in the mini-lab and he’d have cameras focused on the mini lab and in what the cameras caught was, for example, there could be a pencil and paper inside the mini lab. And it seemed as if the spirits, I’m going to call them spirits, but we can’t be sure, but what the video cameras captured was the pencil inside the mini lab writing messages all by itself.
Rick Archer: And is that videotaped?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, yeah. I have videotaped copy of that. Many of the messages were sent to people. I interviewed sociologist James McLennan who wrote a book about this, and he himself personally received, I think, dozens, maybe hundreds of letters that were ostensibly dictated by the spirits. Now, these phenomena are so strong and so bizarre that most people simply find them unbelievable. That’s true of all macro psychokinetic phenomena, large scale, mind over matter phenomena, whether it’s caused by humans or whether it’s caused by extensible spiritual entities. Most people simply say, I can’t go that far and believe in that. It’s just a step too far because it’s very rare. It seems to violate, in a gross way, all of our understanding of how the physical universe works. But I can tell you from my own research, and I’m referring now to a book I wrote called The PK Man, a 10-year study I did have a man who exhibited macro psychokinetic abilities, that such phenomena are real, they do occur. So, while the researchers themselves have yet to accept the validity of the SORAP phenomenon, for the very reason that it’s just too mind blowing, neither can they deny it. And so, my inclination is to say, accept it. I’ve seen too much of it myself to deny it any longer.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And I think what happens is, most people ignore it because they hear a little bit about it, and if they’re in a position to actually research it, if they were in a position, they’re probably going to say, well, to heck with that. I’m going to lose my salary if I go into that, or I’ll lose my chance at tenure. Or everybody will say I’ve gone crazy, so I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m just going focus on my area, I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear about that thing.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, what a shame because this is a power that’s innate in most people. Whenever Uri Geller used to go around doing demonstrations, back when I started on the radio, I got involved with Uri Geller and the 1970s. We’d bring him into the studio, and we would receive dozens and dozens of phone calls from listeners who said they’re experiencing macro psychokinetic events, silver ware bending spontaneously, or watches that hadn’t worked in years, starting up automatically, just because Uri Geller was on the radio.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I guess I’ll resist the temptation to elaborate on that because I want to keep our time efficient here. In fact, there’s a bunch of chapters in your essay, and I was thinking of just sort of running through and spending just a few minutes on each one. If we spend even 10 minutes on each one, we wouldn’t even have enough time, so we’ll have to keep them all short. But before I get into that a question came in from my friend Landon Hall in New Hampshire. Landon is a BatGap volunteer, she helps to proofread the transcripts of the interviews. She’s asking, you mentioned that human beings can work with the Bardo states during their lives and not wait. Can you say more about that? Do you simply mean mediumistic communication with beings on the other side in the Bardo or something more? And must you practice Tibetan Buddhism in order to work with the Bardo states?
Jeffrey Mishlove: What a great question. Thank you, Landon. And also, I commend you for being a volunteer. I know that New Thinking Allowed depends on our volunteers, and it’s wonderful that you have them as well, Rick, the question is about, could you just repeat it?
Rick Archer: What does it mean to work with Bardo states? Do you have to practice Tibetan Buddhism, are you communicating with beings in the Bardo or what are you doing?
Jeffrey Mishlove: I had a brief senior moment there.
Rick Archer: Very rare, I must say.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, what I think is that the Bardo planes, in other words, the afterlife realms, and there are several of them, many of them, interface with our personal, unconscious, through dreams. For example, Uncle Harry came to me in a dream from the Bardo plane. So, there’s a direct interface there, and you can go from your dreams into the Bardo planes as well. Now, this was documented extensively by the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’ and also in his ‘Red Book’, which documents his own experiences with active imagination. That was the technique he used. So, through meditation, through imagination, also experienced meditators, I’ve done several interviews with a researcher in England, a Scottish Buddhist meditator who has shown that meditators who, advanced Buddhist meditators who are, they’re not Tibetan Buddhists, but they practice, they have a particular practice where they can enter into the Bardo planes in their meditation. So, he tested them, and he measured them, their experiences using what’s known as the Near-Death Experience scale. He found that their experiences were quite comparable to the experiences of people who have an actual near-death experience. So, it was called ‘meditation induced near death experience’. Very, very similar. Now another example would be work that Raymond Moody has done, he calls it the shared death experience, where people who are sitting at the deathbed of a loved one or maybe even distantly located at the moment of death, but emotionally connected to a loved one actually experience their passage as they die, how they move into the early stages of the afterlife. That’s very common, actually. So, we carry the afterlife with us all the time.
Rick Archer: I interviewed a fellow named William Peters, who specializes in shared death experience wrote a book about it and everything.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, and I’ve interviewed him as well.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap amongst the people we interviewed,
Rick Archer: There is, anyway. Which is not to say that people couldn’t watch my interview with Jean Houston and your interview with Jean Houston and they’d hear the same thing because I think we each tease different ideas on people and different points come up. Okay, what was I going to say, I just want to say to Landon, that if you’re practicing some form of deep meditation, you traverse all sorts of subtle levels of the mind, of creation, of the Bardos or whatever, as you know, dive deep. And in meditation, and you get more and more familiar with these deeper levels, and you incorporate them into your ordinary awareness eventually. Sometimes it can actually be perceptual where you’re normally perceiving stuff that is outside the realm of human perception. And other times, you may not perceive it so much as just benefit from it, because you’re so intimately connected with these deeper impulses of intelligence that they guide your life much more smoothly and readily than they might otherwise have done.
Jeffrey Mishlove: And, also mystical experiences, which are widely reported in an enormous variety of circumstances, you can get hit on the head with a rock and have a mystical experience on occasion, seem to be almost identical to the near-death experience.
Rick Archer: And you don’t have to almost die to have them. You can, nor do you have to get hit with a rock, there are much safer ways of having these experiences.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Right.
Rick Archer: Before we get back to your outline, another question, I just want to pop this in here and make sure we get to it. This is from a fellow named Jezz Fletcher, who happens to be working on a yacht in the Mediterranean. Having read all the published Bigelow essays, he was surprised that none mentioned the recent declassification of new unidentified aerial phenomenon. They may not directly relate to the question of survival of human consciousness, but they do at least punch a hole in the materialistic earth centric paradigm. What are your thoughts on that?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, the government revelations I don’t think go quite that far. What they’re suggesting is that the Navy has tracked aerial phenomena that seem to defy our technology. They can move faster, they can change directions, faster than anything built by any human, commercial enterprise, or government. They also seem to have a certain intelligence and even I would say, they demonstrate a kind of telepathy because they are known in effect to read the minds of the Navy pilots. Like, for example, in one instance, Navy pilots out on training missions had a rendezvous point, they were going to meet at and this unidentified object, they were observing it in one location, and it just instantly zipped away, disappeared, and appeared right at that point where all the aircraft were supposed to meet each other suggesting somehow it had obtained that knowledge. So yeah, that part of it might suggest that it defies our western understanding of consciousness. But many people in the UFO community still imagine that these phenomena will ultimately be explained along materialistic principles, that they are vehicles that came across interstellar distances from advanced civilizations. Once we’re advanced enough, we’ll be able to do it too, using the same materialistic science that we now use. I’m inclined to think that there’s a large overlap between UFO phenomena and the afterlife. It goes back to the 19th century in which in addition to deceased individuals appearing in spiritualistic seances, extraterrestrials would appear and that’s true right up until the present day. There is an enormous overlap. Whitley Strieber, for example, reported that in his encounter, in which he had sex with an extraterrestrial there was a deceased individual sitting in the room watching the whole thing. So, the way I put it as a matter of fact, in my acceptance speech at the Bigelow Institute Award ceremony, that I urged the billionaires out there who are interested in space exploration to put some of their money into the far reaches of human consciousness because as far as I can tell, we’re never going to be able to travel interstellar distances until we master hyperspace. The mastery of hyperspace is necessary if you want to travel more than one light year, I would say. As soon as you begin to understand hyperspace, you’ve got to pay attention to the relationships between hyperspace and consciousness. And when I think of the Bardo planes, I think of it in terms of hyperspace. I think the Bardo planes are a real place. The way to explain real places that we can’t touch in our three-dimensional world most of the time, although occasionally there seem to be overlaps, is to think of it in terms of higher dimensions of space itself.
Rick Archer: I forget who it was, but I heard somebody say recently, I’ve heard the idea before, that extraterrestrial civilizations, if they’re capable of visiting us, would have to have attained higher states of consciousness, because if they hadn’t, then they would reach a certain technological threshold in which they would blow themselves up before they gained the technologies to travel lightyears, and so there must be some kind of filtering process, perhaps?
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s related to what is known as the Fermi paradox, which is, considering there are so many billions of stars in just in our galaxy that seemed to have the capability of supporting life, the planets, we’ve found hundreds and hundreds of planets, you can even see them now through our advanced telescopes, and other stars. Why haven’t we been able to pick up more radio? In fact, any radio or television signals from the civilization that must be out there? And the theorists say, well, it’s because as soon as a civilization attains that kind of capability, they’re likely to destroy themselves.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Which in a way might be a kind of a safety factor because if someone attained the ability to travel throughout the galaxy and develop commensurate destructive capabilities, they would be a real menace, like Darth Vader. So, who knows? I mean, we’re speculating again, here.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Sure.
Rick Archer: So, let’s get into this outline, and just spend a few minutes on each one just to give people an overview. So, you broke your essay down into, and you call this the spectrum of arrows, because each one of these is an arrow, which provides evidence for the survival of consciousness after physical death. So, we’ll just spend a few minutes on each one, and you can just come out with whatever you think is most interesting or exciting.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Okay, I’m trying to give you short answers.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So near death experience?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there are over a million people who have had near death experiences. People say that doesn’t really count as evidence for the afterlife, because they didn’t die, which, of course, they didn’t die. That’s how come they’re telling us about their experiences. But I do think it’s fair to say that the experiences that they have are indicative of the early stages of the afterlife, they get into the early stages, and then they come back. So that’s my summary.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Also, the most interesting ones are ones where they’re not only having a near death experience, but they’re having an out of body experience in which they’re probably under anesthesia, they’re unconscious, but they experience stuff in the hospital or somewhere, which later turns out, they can talk about it. And sure enough, it’s true. There’s a red sneaker on the ceiling, or my cousin got a Snickers bar from the vending machine in the lobby, and he doesn’t eat candy and things like that.
Jeffrey Mishlove: The thing is those experiences are indicative of what we call Living Agent Psi or ‘psychic functioning amongst the living’. At least that’s how some parapsychologists would rather explain them. They think that talking about the afterlife is a step too far. But from my perspective, if you’ve got Living Agents Psi, you’re already showing that the human mind can operate outside of the body.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I’ll say that too. I say, how could you have a problem with life after death if you’re able to accept Psi phenomena which clearly show that we’re not limited to our bodies? What’s the big, it’s not a big leap.
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s true. But within the Parapsychology community, it’s one of those esoteric arguments. It goes on.
Rick Archer: Okay. Here’s the next major category, after death communications.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, that’s probably the biggest single category because most people, when a loved one dies, or even a close friend, they often experience some form of after death communication. It could be in a dream, like my dream of Uncle Harry, it could be through synchronicities, that occur. One person has written a book about how, because of a communication before death, they began experiencing these little cat’s eye marbles everywhere. And it seemed to them that this was a communication from the other side. A great example is in a brand-new book written by a Congressman Jeremy Raskin. It’s called, Unbelievable I think was the title.
Rick Archer: Jamie Raskin
Jeffrey Mishlove: Jamie Raskin
Rick Archer: He’s on the January 6 committee; his son committed suicide or something.
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s right. He wrote about that, both of these. So, January 6, while he was part of the impeachment hearing, he led the impeachment hearings right after the January 6 event and his son, on December 31, had committed suicide. So, he talks about before his son died, he lost a pair of glasses. And his son told him, ‘I’m sure you’ll find them Dad’, then the next thing he knows his son has died by suicide. But then shortly after, a few days later, he’s out in the backyard. And he sees these birds swirling around forming like a cloud of birds. But the strange thing is, they’re all different species. They’re not the same. They’re like Cardinals and Orioles, and very colorful birds all flying together. And it’s amazing, right in his backyard, and he goes and he calls his wife and she sees it. He walks closer towards the birds, and then they disperse, suddenly. As they disperse, he looks down at his feet, and there are the glasses that he lost. He describes that as an after-death communication from his son.
Rick Archer: And of course, there are so many more. I mean, people could hear any one of these stories and brush them off. But let’s see, okay, we’re going to get into that later on. I was going to talk about that chess match, but we’ll get into that later. There was one after death communication, where somebody dictated an entire system of psychoanalysis or some kind of therapy to somebody and it became something that was helping people in ways that no other system had been able to help them you want to tell us about that?
Jeffrey Mishlove: There are a couple of examples of deceased psychiatrists who came back and said, I’ve now from the other side, I’ve figured out what was missing in the psychotherapy that I was doing. So, they come back and communicate the entire new system of psychotherapy. The most famous of these used to be called the Fisher Hoffman Process, where Fisher was a deceased psychotherapist. Hoffman was a tailor who lived in Oakland, California, had been one of his patients. One night, in the middle of the night, Fisher appears a year after he died. He’s at the foot of Hoffman’s bed, fully materialized, I think, or at least fully apparent to Hoffman, and he takes him through the whole therapy process, explains the whole thing to him and says, you now, you go out and teach this form of psychotherapy. Fisher, Hoffman, the tailor, says to him, how can I do this? I’m just a tailor, who’s going to listen to me? And Fisher said, don’t you worry about that doors will open. And that’s just what happened. All kinds of doors opened for this tailor. He attracted the interest of a very well-known psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo. They helped him refine and set up the therapy. And today, even today, it’s called the Hoffman Quadrinity Process, and it is offered as a therapeutic system all over the world. It supposedly was dictated by a deceased spirit.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and when we get to the chess story, we’ll leave that as a teaser for now. Something similar happens but we’ll leave it, always leave them wanting more, PT Barnum said. Okay, so next thing here, next point is reincarnation. I’ve interviewed Jim Tucker, you probably interviewed Ian Stevenson, right? You’ve been doing this so long.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I’m going to go through reincarnation very quickly, because this is what people need to know. At the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies founded by Dr. Ian Stevenson a half a century ago, I first met him in 1973. They have been studying cases of young children who begin describing their past lives as soon as they can begin to speak. They have in their database 2700 of these cases that have been investigated by researchers. And in approximately 1700 of these cases, the information provided by the children is sufficiently specific that researchers or family members have been able to identify the previous person. So that, I count that in my essay as one of the 26 white crows that I’ve written about. It could have been 1700 white crows.
Rick Archer: Yeah, in some cases, these stories are remarkable. I mean, did you interview Ian?
Jeffrey Mishlove: No, I didn’t interview him. We communicated with each other, but never did an interview.
Rick Archer: We’ve probably both interviewed Jim Tucker. I imagine you’ve interviewed Jim too.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Actually not
Rick Archer: You should.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I know Jim Tucker and had a
Rick Archer: He was Ian’s successor really?
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s right.
Rick Archer: Anyway, if you listen to that kind of interview with Jim, if you read his books, there’s so many remarkable stories of minute details that some little kid remembers about some pilot in World War II or something that he claims to have been.
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s right. And one of the factors that often accompanies these reincarnation cases are what are called announcing dreams, where the parents will often have a dream in which the spirit of the being that is going to be born into their family comes to them and tells them, I’m about to be born in your family.
Rick Archer: Yeah, my sister and her husband, her husband in particular, had that experience with both of their kids. Okay, this next one has a strange name, which I had never heard before reading your essay, although I’m from Connecticut, and there’s a place in Connecticut called Darien, but this is called ‘Peak in Darien’ experiences. So, what does that mean?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, these are the most wonderful cases. Now in this case, Darien refers to a province in the country of Panama. And in the, I believe it was the 15th century or the 16th century, the Spanish conquistadores discovered Panama, and they went and they climbed this mountain peak in the province of Darien. What they saw surprised them, they didn’t expect it. They saw the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the Isthmus of Panama. This is where you’re having an experience and you encounter something you don’t expect. In this case, it could be for example, the case I cite in the book is one, is a young man, he’s in a hospital. There’s a very attractive 21-year-old nurse, who he gets friendly with while he’s in the hospital, and when she goes off for a weekend, and while he’s in the hospital, he has a medical emergency, and has a near death experience. While he’s having the near death experience this same nurse appears to him and he says, what are you doing here? And she says to him,’ I’m here now, but you can’t stay. You have to go back. But when you go back, will you please tell my parents that I’m very sorry, I crashed the red MGB’. So, he gets back from his experience, he’s recovering. He tells one of the nurses what happened, and she breaks into tears. Because it turns out that this young nurse went away to celebrate her 21st birthday with her parents and they gave her as a birthday present a little red MGB car, and she went out on a ride immediately and crashed the car into a telephone pole and was killed. So, she shows up in his near-death experience, but he had no way of knowing that she had already pre-deceased him. That would be an example of a Peak in Darien experience. And the reason that some important records because oftentimes deathbed situations a person experiences, as they’re about to die, relatives, deceased relatives coming to greet him, or her. And so, the skeptic would say, well, that’s just psychological expectation. But when the person who is coming to greet you with somebody that you believe is alive, you can’t attribute that to psychological expectation at all. So, it’s just another example that gives weight to the idea of an afterlife. It points in the direction of the afterlife.
Rick Archer: So, the next one is instrumental transcommunication.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, that’s one that will appeal very much to people who are materialist who enjoy working with radios, televisions, computers, and other gadgets, because there are 10s of 1000s of hobbyists who are using electronic means to communicate with the deceased. In fact, it’s very common in all these ghost hunter TV shows they use these devices. And often, you’ll watch these TV shows and they’ll show you the voices that come through. Often people actually have two-way conversations with these voices that can be heard on their electronic devices. The phenomenon has been studied extensively by researchers, including Annabella Cardoso in Spain. She’s a former senior diplomat with the Portuguese Foreign Service, was a Consul General in the Chargé d’Affaires of various major consulates for Portugal. She conducted experiments because she became a very talented operator of instrumental transcommunication, has had many, many hours of communication with deceased relatives that have been recorded. She went into an acoustical laboratory electronically shielded and did this research in that shielded laboratory. It’s been published in a scientific journal, and it’s very strong evidence that the deceased are capable of communicating with us using electronic devices.
Rick Archer: Yeah, if one reads your essay, there are videos embedded in it, as I said, and some of those show examples of what you’re talking about. They’re quite remarkable. I’d never heard anything like that. But you hear voices, and the setup is explained, how it’s controlled, and it’s not faked and all that stuff. But various people start speaking and saying interesting things, even some of them with quite a sense of humor and with a British accent, very interesting.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, I have to admit, when I started out, I was very skeptical of this area. It seemed like it was rife for psychological projection. You hear a noise coming through the static, and you can imagine that it sounds like a deceased person speaking to you. But when you look at the strongest cases, there’s no doubt that there’s two-way communication going on.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Also, there were things with film where images are showing up on film, even though under, it’s very controlled circumstance that there was no one was meddling with the camera. But there’s all kinds of faces and other things showing up on the film and writing all kinds of interesting things. So, we can only touch upon it here, but it’s just one of those things, which is out of sight, out of mind. But if you look into it, it’s very compelling. The next category is xenoglossy, what does that mean?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Xenoglossy is the ability of an individual to speak a language that they have never learned. There are a handful of well researched cases in this area. They’re obviously suggestive of reincarnation, particularly because often these languages are spoken in a dialect that wasn’t used for hundreds of years. People come through not only speaking that language, but with the personality of someone from an earlier period. So, it seems to be either an example of reincarnation memory coming through, or it could be an example of possession. It’s sometimes hard to tell.
Rick Archer: Something that’s related to this is where somebody will have a head injury or something and all of a sudden, they can play jazz piano where they hadn’t been able to play piano before. Or they become really good at math all of a sudden, or some such thing. It’s really hard to explain.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, that’s right. There are many cases of the savants who have an injury and as a result of the injury you gain capacities rather than lose.
Rick Archer: Okay, now we’re getting into the mental mediumship category, and this would be a good time to ask Rita’s question, Rita from somewhere in the US. Can you speak about the difficulty in identifying authentic psychic occurrences versus fraud? Modern day magicians are capable of tricks that can be even more astonishing than psychic claims. I used to be a huge believer, now I am a hoper that it’s true, and this is a concern of mine.
Jeffrey Mishlove: It’s a valid concern. There have always been individuals who are capable of and willing to use fraudulent techniques to deceive people. You can deceive people about spiritual contact with the afterlife that can make, you can make a living at it. So that’s why psychical researchers and parapsychologists have developed the experimental method because the whole idea of doing things using laboratory conditions is that you create conditions to rule out fraud. For example, if you’re doing research on pre-cognition, the ability of individuals to see the future. Well, if they’re looking at a target that doesn’t exist in the present day, they’re describing a target in the present day that won’t exist until sometime in the future, like what’s going to happen in the stock market three days from now. You can avoid the problem of cheating or sensory leakage unless the researchers themselves are cheating, and you try to, because researchers sometimes do cheat in every field of science. You avoid that problem by making sure there are teams of people working together, so not a single person, can’t just cheat all on their own. So, the scientific method evolved for that purpose. Now, you gain something by using the scientific method in that respect. That is, you can rule out most forms of cheating. Now, skeptics are very clever. And in fact, they’ll say, well, I can’t figure out how any cheating could have occurred in present day experiments but give me another 30 years and I’m sure that I will. That’s the viewpoint that skeptics take but parapsychologists will tell you, our research is far more rigorous than most conventional sciences because we’ve had to deal with these problems and have constantly had to battle skeptics who won’t accept our research, no matter how good it is.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and a lot of these people have been very cooperative and open to having skeptics come and scrutinize them every which way and, stipulate all kinds of controls and limitations that they have to abide by. They’ve really bent over backwards to try to make it as solid as possible.
Jeffrey Mishlove: That’s true. And now with regard to mental mediumship, of course, and even worse for physical mediumship the rule of thumb from people and you could call it the skeptical community or the rationalist community. Their rule of thumb is however they want to describe themselves, I call them scoffers, that if somebody claims mediumistic ability, that automatically means they’re a fraud. OK. It begins with a Swiss researcher, an economist named Willhelm Eisenbies, and he had the bright idea that if you want to come up with really strong evidence for survival of consciousness, what if we could find a deceased chess master who would be willing, working through a medium, to play a game of chess with a living chess master. He actually was able to enlist the support of Viktor Korchnoi, who at the time was the number two ranked chess player in the world. He had a friend named Robert Rawlins who was a medium who practiced automatic writing and had a spirit guide. So, in one of his sessions with Rawlins, he said, ‘would you ask your spirit guide to check around in the spirit world and see if there are any deceased chess masters who would be willing to play a game of chess with Viktor Korchnoi?’ And sure enough, one of them did. His name was Géza Maróczy, who had been in his day number two in the world and died in 1951. This game took place in 1987 and it ran for several years, because they had to communicate via mail and Korchnoi was traveling all over the world. At the end of the game, Korchnoi won, but he was afraid he would nearly lose. The game was analyzed extensively by one of my colleagues, Vernon Neppe, who was a chess player himself. He pointed out that Maróczy, who died in 1951, had a weak opening by modern standards. In his day, it would have been considered a strong chess opening, but he was off to a bad start, because subsequently, since he died, amongst the world of professional chess players, they had discovered great counter moves to that opening. Nevertheless, in spite of the weak opening, Maróczy played a strong game. Korchnoi was afraid he was going to lose at one point, but he won the game, nevertheless. It was at one time examined by the great American chess master Bobby Fischer, who happened to be the brother-in-law of a parapsychologist, Russell Targ, a good friend of mine, and Bobby Fischer looked at the moves. He said, yes, this game was played at the Grandmaster level. It’s considered a some of the strongest proof ever of survival of consciousness, because not only do you have a personality coming through, a personality who was incidentally able to describe hundreds of events from his life as a living chess player with like 98% accuracy but was also able to exhibit a rare skill to play chess at that level. That skill had somehow stayed with him after his death. So, for people who might say, well, reincarnation evidence only shows that memories can be transferred, which isn’t really true, it shows a lot more than that, or that when people have near death experiences or after death communications, it could be explained away by telepathy. You can’t really explain away a skill, like playing chess at the Grandmaster level as an example of telepathy.
Rick Archer: And also, Maróczy however you pronounce it, hadn’t reincarnated he was still on the other side, and he was communicating the chess moves to a very amateur chess player, right? Who was then just saying, okay, move to, move your queen to here.
Jeffrey Mishlove: The medium Robert Rawlins didn’t even know how to play chess at all when the project began
Rick Archer: He had to be taught the rudiments of it,
Jeffrey Mishlove: The rudiments, so that he understood the meaning of the moves.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Interesting. And in terms of knowledge being moved from one lifetime to the other, I mean, maybe, how do you explain child prodigies like Mozart an all. Maybe they were great musicians in a previous life, and they’re just ?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, how is it that a four-year-old can start composing symphonies?
Rick Archer: Right. Okay, the next category. I think we’ve, let me see what questions have come in here. Okay, these don’t quite fit into any category, and but I’ll get to them. We’ve touched a little bit about on physical mediumship, I believe. Is there anything more we want to say about that?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, we talked about it briefly in terms of the phenomenon associated with instrumental transcommunication. We’ve talked about photographs appearing. The most remarkable phenomenon that occur in physical mediumship sections are, is materialization. And the most dramatic of these would be full form materialization where spirits appear and can be photographed. There are many instances of this, of course, again, it triggers the boggle threshold of people, and many people will say, I just can’t deal with this, I can’t accept it, it’s got to be fake. Often these photographs even look fake, which complicates matters further, but if you study the conditions under which they were taken, it doesn’t appear that they were fake. There are many examples. The most recent one I cite in my essay is from a New York Times journalist Leslie Kean, the author of the book, Surviving Death, who attends a session of a physical medium, in England, a medium named Stuart Alexander, who I’ve interviewed a few times. In his sessions, routinely, people report spirit materialization. And Lesley herself, witnessed this and documented extensively and speaks about it how first, what happened in this instance, is the ectoplasm, which is a mysterious substance that often appears in seances is produced. It looks like an amorphous cloud. This is something like coming out of your steam iron, a cloud forms, and then suddenly, the cloud kind of takes shape. And she says, a human hand appeared. And she was able to touch the human hand and shake the hand, and then the hand evaporates back into the cloud.
Rick Archer: It’s not like the slime in Ghostbusters.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Not quite, I suppose there might be some parallels there. In any case, phenomena like this have been attested to under good lighting, and seance conditions for well over 100 years.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and I don’t think you would argue that there haven’t been frauds, I mean, sure, in the whole course of interest in all these things, I’m sure there have been people who’ve been fraudulent as there are in any field. I have a good friend who is Harry Houdini’s great nephew, and, of course, Houdini, he spent a lot of time trying to debunk fraud. And he was sincerely interested in finding someone who was the real deal. I don’t know if he ever was satisfied that anybody was that he talked to, or maybe you know otherwise.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, no, I think Houdini probably went to his grave feeling that he hadn’t found what he was looking for, evidence that would convince him. But also, he is a complex character because he developed a public persona as a person who exposes fake mediums. There’s at least one famous case on record on medium known as Marjorie, her actual name was Mina Crandon. Back in around 1925, she had entered a competition sponsored by Scientific American for proof of the afterlife. She was a great medium and produced evidence in front of a committee from Harvard University, and then yet another committee from the Scientific American, and they were going to award her the prize of $5,000, which back in 1925, was a lot of money. Then Houdini stepped in. He was convinced that he would be able to expose her. There are accounts that suggests that he actually tried to trip her up by planting, he had her in a wooden box. Her hands were strapped into this box, they could stick out on each side of the box, her neck was enclosed in the box, so just her head and her hands, came out of the box. Houdini apparently planted an object in the box. He was planning to open up the box and show that the object, I think it was a saw or something like that, and then claim that that proves she was cheating. He had planted it for the purpose of exposing her. It was a trick on his part completely. So, I don’t know that Houdini was always really completely honest, himself, in his investigations. There are many, many other accounts, suggesting that the medium known as Marjorie was authentic. For the most part. It could well be that sometimes mediums who are authentic are under a lot of pressure. This is a profession where they’re expected to perform on demand, and they will cheat, especially if they’re in trance, and it’s their unconscious that is operating instead of their conscious mind. That’s why scientific conditions are very appropriate. Oftentimes you’ll find that mediums who have been accused of cheating in conditions where you can’t be sure, because it’s not controlled by scientists, when they’re put into a laboratory situation and cheating is impossible for various reasons, then authentic phenomenon appear.
Rick Archer: Okay good. This is a poignant question from Chris Thomas. “How can I overcome my crippling fear of death? Your essay seems to imply there’s nothing to worry about, but as a scientist I just can’t let go of the fear I might not exist at some point.”
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I guess as a scientist, if you study the evidence, you can become partly convinced, but usually, the best way to be convinced is to have a firsthand experience, which I had in 1972, with my dream of Uncle Harry, the most powerful dream of my life. Today, I can say 50 years later. So, I have no doubt. And maybe that’s what it will take for you if you’re a scientist, especially if your colleagues are going to start laughing at you if you think otherwise. That’s one of the real problems in the scientific community, where so many scientists just like everyone else accepts the reality of paranormal phenomenon and postmortem survival, but they’re afraid to talk about it openly. All I can say is continue to familiarize yourself with the evidence, open yourself up to your own dream experiences and other experiences you might be having of a paranormal nature. Sometimes people in the scientific community have such experiences and then they deny that it ever happened. This happened to me, or I was witness to this back in the days when I was working with Uri Geller in the mid 1970s. I took Geller to a physics lab at Berkeley at Cal , and he bent the ring of another physicist named Forrest Moser while I was watching, right in front of everybody’s eyes.
Rick Archer: Ring? Like a wedding ring kind of thing?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, yeah, he held it in his hand, the ring became soft, and bent. And Moser said, if anybody were to tell me what I’m telling you, what I just witnessed, if anyone were to say that this was real, I would tell them to take a vacation. And funny thing, he himself took a vacation shortly thereafter. And when he came back from his vacation, he said, oh, no, this didn’t happen.
Rick Archer: Interesting. What I would suggest to Chris is find an effective spiritual practice of some kind because there’s two things, there’s knowledge and there’s experience. As a scientist, that you don’t just form hypotheses, you test them and try to get empirical evidence. So, there’s ways of getting empirical evidence for all these things we’re talking about. And actually, the final chapter of Jeffrey’s book gets into this where he starts talking about consciousness as the ultimate reality and so on. One can explore that experientially, and when you become familiar with that level of experience, then fear dissipates. There’s a verse in the Upanishads, which says, certainly all fear is born of duality. And you can reach a level of experience, which is beyond duality, which is beyond relativity, which is sort of absolute pure consciousness. And in doing that, there is no fear at that level. That gets incorporated into your daily life. I mean, obviously, if somebody dangles you from the Golden Gate Bridge by your ankles, you’re going to experience fear that’s human, but in general, the fear of death, I don’t think Yogi’s and mystics and so on, have very much fear of death, if any, because they just knew with certainty with, in their gut
Jeffrey Mishlove: Near-death experiencers
Rick Archer: That too
Jeffrey Mishlove: Lose, but you don’t want to necessarily have to have a crisis in order to lose your fear of death. I do agree with Rick, completely. Spiritual practice can often get you there. When you understand that you’re one with the universe, then nothing can harm you.
Rick Archer: Just thinking there’s some cool Gita verses. Read the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, there’s some great verses in there about this. Let’s see. I’ve quoted them before. Okay, another question here. This one is from, this is interesting question from Eva Kubek in Melbourne, Australia. Can we cure depression by removing negative entities attached to the energy centers?
Jeffrey Mishlove: While there are many forms of psychotherapy known as spirit releasement therapy, spirit release therapy, that do that. As a matter of fact, but I don’t know that that accounts for all forms of depression. It certainly can account for forms of depression or obsession or anxiety that are caused by spirit attachments, but I think there may well be other sources of depression beside besides that, yeah.
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah. Okay, here’s a question from Richard Higgins in Julian, North Carolina. “Thank you, Mr. Mishlove for all your wonderful interviews. Would you say a few words about the amazing Dean Brown, one of my favorite interviews? I can’t find any of his books other than two leather bound books giving scientific instructions concerning nuclear reactors. Does he have any books show showcasing his vast knowledge of linguistics and the Vedas?”
Jeffrey Mishlove: There is a translation published by Dean Brown of the Upanishads, and it is for sale through the Philosophical Research Association, or Society, in Los Angeles, the society that publishes the books of Manly Hall. Dean Brown was a great friend of mine, one of my best friends. He died in, gosh, when was it about 20 years ago. I have to say this, after he died, many people would come up to me and say, I’m sorry for your loss, because people understood he was my best friend. And I would think to myself, well, I’d usually say thank you for your condolences, but I would think to myself, I’m not sorry for my loss at all. I know he’s passed into another world, and I’ll see him again. I didn’t consider it really a loss of a permanent nature, just a temporary thing.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you didn’t lose anything. He didn’t lose anything.
Jeffrey Mishlove: But he was a wonderful man, a wonderful man and a great inspiration to me a true polymath, a theoretical physicist. He knew Einstein, a yeah. A man who studied many, many foreign languages, translated the Upanishads. I could go on and on in praise of Dean Brown. I’ve loved him dearly.
Rick Archer: With all the, you’ve devoted over half a century to all of this and have interviewed so many hundreds of fascinating people, and in-depth conversations, and you’ve pondered every profound idea there is to ponder. What is your sense of where humanity is going? Let’s say you and I were to live another 100 years, which is, we’re not going to but let’s say we were. What do you think we’d end up seeing if you could speculate?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I, there are two questions, actually, that is important to look at. One is the future of humanity, and the other is future, the future of consciousness. And the simple truth is, humanity is not going to survive, humanity will become extinct.
Rick Archer: That’s right. What’s your timeline?
Jeffrey Mishlove:
Well, I don’t have a precise timeline. But I would say we’re at real risk that it could happen sooner rather than later. I’ve been exploring this question with a medium, trying to get answers from the other side about it. And they tell me that humanity is much closer to its extinction than we are to its birth. Now, the birth of humanity, I think we know could go back anywhere from 30,000 to 300,000 years. Some people even say millions of years, but however long it is, I think it’s fair to say we’re closer to our end than our beginning. For one thing, in my lifetime, for the first time in human history, we have the capability of destroying ourselves. The human species has the possibility of ending all human life on this planet and not only that, I hear from social commentators that we’re closer to, what the people talk about the nuclear clock, we’re closer to zero to midnight
Rick Archer: Doomsday clock or something.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, the doomsday clock. I don’t know that humanity will destroy itself or will be destroyed by a comet or something. But the simple fact is that consciousness isn’t going to be destroyed if that happens. Consciousness will continue and we’ll evolve into other species eventually. I think that time and space are infinite. And so, the possibilities for development of consciousness are endless. However, the human species is in real trouble. Look what we’re doing to the planet, look at how many species go extinct every year.
Rick Archer: Every day, I think it’s like 150 a day if you count every last little insect and everything else, things that are going extinct.
Jeffrey Mishlove: And that’s largely because of our behavior.
Rick Archer: Yeah, have you ever heard these stories about UFOs supposedly deactivating nuclear facilities? Or missile launching sites and things?
Jeffrey Mishlove: I think those are credible.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Some people think that they’ll come in the nick of time and prevent us from doing ourselves in. Either to, preventing us from nuking ourselves or from, or provide some kind of technologies that will enable us to clean up the environment and get clean.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I suspect that’s wishful thinking .
Rick Archer: Could be, yeah.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I think if anything, they’re watching us. They’re very interested in the question of, can we survive this very dangerous time in our history? Will we evolve spiritually, enough sufficiently to overcome our propensity to use the power that we now have to destroy ourselves and I’m kind of, to be honest, I’m pessimistic. I try every day to communicate with people in a positive way to get people in touch with their own spiritual energy so that we could avoid such a terrible catastrophe. But it just seems to me that the weight of civilization is moving slowly but inexorably in a different direction. We may become one of those extinct civilizations that is no longer capable of communicating electromagnetically with other potential civilized planets in the galaxy.
Rick Archer: I would say that I’m optimistic, but I don’t know if I’m realistic. If it weren’t for my familiarity with spirituality, and awakening and all that, if all I knew was what I saw on the news, I would be pessimistic for sure. But I think that there’s this undercurrent of awakening consciousness happening in the world, which may save the day. I mean, it’s a kind of a pitched battle, I think, between that and the forces of destruction. There’s a fellow I interviewed a couple of months ago named Duane Elgin, who had this interesting.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Oh, I know Duane.
Rick Archer: You know Duane?
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah.
Rick Archer: So, he had this, like three scenarios, where everything is going to crumble in all three of his scenarios. In scenario number one, it’s just going to stay crumbled, and we may all die. And scenario number two, there’s going to be some kind of Chinese style authoritarian AI society. In scenario number three though the undercurrent of spirituality will come and kind of lift us out of the chaos of the crumbling, and things will turn out good in the end. And there are a lot of ancient cultures which predicted something like that. A sort of a collapse of all the systems that weren’t working, and then eventually, some kind of Age of Enlightenment or new age or brighter time.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I think it’s good to have a sense of humility when it comes to forecasting the future.
Rick Archer: For sure, yeah. And like you say, and I mean, nobody dies. And I think the main thing is to do what you can to make to do that make the best of this opportunity, that, of the life you’ve been given, both for yourself and for others, and then we’ll just see what happens. But we ain’t going nowhere. Ultimately,
Jeffrey Mishlove: I think that it’s very likely that you and I have both had previous lifetimes as members of species that no longer exist.
Rick Archer: Could be yeah. I mean, I would say not only could be, but almost definitely. Interesting. Well, we’re speculating, but what can you do? It’s good to be able to play with all possibilities, not to have the attitude that no, this couldn’t be or that couldn’t, but just to say, who knows? Take everything as a hypothesis that’s worth considering. I mean, if all the hardcore scientists who are brushing aside all the evidence that you’ve brought out would have that attitude, it would have become mainstream by now.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, one of my dictums is ‘Be curious, rather than judgmental’.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Good one. All right let’s end on that note. That’s a good ending point. So, thanks so much Jeffrey. It’s been wonderful spending a couple of hours with you, and in the whole week, reading your essay and listening to a lot of your talks. Over the years, I’ve listened to a number of your interviews, usually, when I’m going to interview somebody that you’ve interviewed, like, for instance, Bernard Carr was my previous guest. So, I listened to all of your Bernard Carr interviews, got a lot out of them.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I’m delighted to be on your show, Rick. I can tell you that many of my viewers, and many of my guests speak very highly of the work that you’re doing. It’s an honor for me to be here with you. Thank you.
Rick Archer: Oh, yes. And likewise, I mean, my dear friend, Angel Marcloid, who is the video editor for BatGap, has been bugging me for years to get you on BatGap, because she’s a big fan of your work and as are a lot of people. Anyway, it’s wonderful. I hope we meet in person one of these days, if I ever get down in New Mexico, be sure to make that happen. And maybe we’ll meet somewhere else as well.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Good.
Rick Archer: Okay. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. There’s a really cool new thing that I just, somebody just notified me of it the other day. He had developed this whole system, where you can type in a phrase like I just typed in the word eggs as an experiment. After that, I typed in the word chickens. And it instantly brings up all the BatGap interviews in which those words or phrases were mentioned. All you have to do is click on them. It shows the video where the word was mentioned. If you click play, it immediately begins to play it from the very spot where that word was mentioned. It’s really neat, and I’ll have it up on the site pretty soon. We have to figure out; right now it’s hosted on a server that is sitting on top of his refrigerator. So, we’re going to get it into a more stable situation and get it running, and I’ll send out an announcement about that.
Jeffrey Mishlove: We have a similar function on the New Thinking Allowed Foundation website, Newthinkingallowed.org, and it includes not only our videos, but many others, and we could add your videos into it as well.
Rick Archer: Great. Alright. Let’s talk about that. I’ll communicate with you outside of this moment here. Okay, so thanks so much. And thanks to those who for listening or watching. I will see you next week. Thanks Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Mishlove: You’re welcome.