Mark Anthony Interview

Summary:

Rick: 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 and about spiritual topics, sometimes scientific and spiritual and so on. We’ve done well over 600 of these now. If you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P,and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, go to the website and it’ll be obvious how to do that. My guest today is Mark Anthony. Mark is a lawyer. He’s also sometimes referred to as the psychic lawyer because he’s psychic. Also sometimes called the psychic explorer. And he’s world-renowned. He’s educated in law at Oxford. He’s a near-death experience researcher, a paranormal expert, and a legal analyst who appears all the time on radio and TV around the world and speaks at conferences and expos and so on. He’s very interested in science as well as the psychic world, quantum physics and so on, and the interface between that field and the psychic phenomenon. And he is a columnist for Best Holistic Life magazine, author of three best-selling books, the latest one I read this week called “The Afterlife Frequency.” And let’s see. This book was designated by PrettyProgressive.com as one of the top books about faith in God. And it was submitted for a Pulitzer Prize. What was their rationale for choosing this as one of the top books about faith in God, Mark?

Mark: With PrettyProgressive.com, actually I was informed by them. I received an email, and it came to their attention, and PrettyProgressive said, “We reviewed your book, and we feel that it is one of the top books about faith in God,” certainly in 2022. And it was very … it was quite an honor. When I was looking at the list of the other books that were on there, the Dalai Lama’s latest book was also on that list. So for whoever submitted it to PrettyProgressive.com, I want to thank you. And because I write about the afterlife, I write about faith in God. And I was asked in an interview this week from a South African paper, “Well, what do you mean when you say God?” “Well, what I don’t mean is a neurotic white guy sitting on a throne with a scepter smiting people for not tithing 10 percent.”

Rick: [Laughter]

Mark: That’s an artist’s conception which evolved at the end of the Roman Empire and throughout the medieval era. Certainly a lot of people think of God in terms of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel with … you see the finger of God touching Adam, giving God life, and God is a wizened white guy with a beard. What I’ve come to know is that God is energy. God is the source of universal love. God is an intelligence and an energy that is pervasive through everything. And as you indicated, Rick, during your introduction of me, and I thank you for that, is that I’m interested in quantum physics. And one of the late 19th century, early 20th century heroes in the realm of engineering and quantum physics is Nikola Tesla. And he said something quite relevant, I believe, that what one person calls God, another calls the laws of physics. And I think that the more we understand particle mechanics and quantum physics, the more we’re going to understand the nature of God.

Rick: Good. Yeah, I’m glad we started on this particular topic. In fact, I was going to say that sometimes I get feedback from people when I interview psychics and mediums and channelers and people like that. They say, “Well, what does this have to do with spirituality, really? What does it have to do with ultimate reality?” And they might reference Vedanta or something like that. But actually, if you study Vedanta carefully, you see that they have all kinds of discussion about the subtle body and reincarnation and what happens to the soul after death and various lokas that exist in creation worlds or levels that one could go to. So these guys who were interested in ultimate reality, Vedanta means the end of knowledge or the end of the Veda, took this stuff very seriously. And there’s whole sections in their literature about it. And my attitude is that part of growing spiritually is to just have a thorough understanding of the mechanics of life. And if one doesn’t actually recognize or realize that something continues after the physical body dies, that’s a huge gaping hole in their understanding of life. And it’s going to, in my opinion, negatively impact how they live the life that they’re living now. So I feel that it’s important to really have that appreciation and that understanding and have it deeply ingrained. It really shifts one’s perspective.

Mark: I’m really glad that you brought up the Vedanta, the Vedas, the Hindu holy scriptures, because in a Hindu spiritual journey, what we consider to be a psychic experience is something that you’re supposed to try to have as a Hindu. In the West, we question the existence of an afterlife. We question the existence of God, whereas in the East, in Hinduism and to an extent Buddhism, people try to see God. Also with Hinduism, when you look at the three aspects of the divine, you have the creator, which is personified in the god Brahma, the sustainer personified in Vishnu, and the destroyer, which is Shiva. And there are some parallels in Christianity with the Trinity, God, the father, God, the son, God, the Holy Spirit. But when you look at the Vedas on a deeper, even deeper level, and a number of quantum physicists have said this, and I think it was, it may have been Richard Feynman, and I could be wrong on that, but it was either Feynman or Heisenberg was one of the founders of quantum physics. And he said that, “I wish I would have discovered Hinduism sooner, because so many of the concepts of Hinduism have a parallel to quantum physics. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred from one form to another.” And in my work as a medium and afterlife researcher and NDE, near-death experience researcher, this is what we keep seeing. The who and what we are, which I term the electromagnetic soul, never dies. It is pure energy, which, you know, even though the body may cease to function, our EMS, our electromagnetic soul, continues on, and then returns. And so Hinduism explains that very, very eloquently. And maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, because it seems like we’re kind of now splashing into a reincarnation discussion.

Rick: But we’re going to loop around, and that’s all right.

Mark: Okay. Hey, any show that has Buddha in the title, I think reincarnation is safe to talk about. So imagine you’re at the gas pump, and Buddha walks up and says, “What is the sound of gas happening?” No, I mean, no, but…

Rick: You’re not supposed to do that around a flame. Okay, anyway.

Mark: I know, I see people on their cell phones all the time at a gas pump, and there’s always a sticker there that says, “Do not do this because of electrical arc.” So for all the listeners, please, for five minutes out of your life, you can leave your cell phone in your car. But even in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, there are passages in all of these religions which reference reincarnation. And so reincarnation, the eternal cycle, the doctrine of samsara, which it’s referred to in both Hinduism and Buddhism, the eternal cycle of life, which corresponds with the law of thermodynamics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred. One of my favorite passages is the transfiguration. And the transfiguration is in the New Testament, and it’s where Jesus goes to the top of a mountain with a select group of his disciples. And all of a sudden, he begins to glow white, and a white mist forms around him. And then the spirits of the prophet Elijah and the prophet Moses appear on either side of him. Now, we could spend probably the entire episode just talking about this passage, because Elijah — excuse me, Moses was the bringer of the laws. Elijah was the enforcer of the laws, and Jesus signifies the embodiment of the law of God. At least that’s some of the interpretations of it. And I always find this fascinating, because if that isn’t mediumship, I don’t know what is. Jesus bringing forth the spirits of Moses and Elijah, but then when they go down to the bottom of the mountain, and Jesus says, you know, don’t talk about this to anybody at this time. And then the question is, well, who do you say that I am? And the disciples, some of them say, well, many feel that you are the prophet Elijah. Others feel that you’re John the Baptist. When Jesus replies, he said that Elijah has returned, but they did not recognize him, for he appeared as John the Baptist. Now, hold on. John the Baptist was Jesus’ first cousin, and he was executed by Herod Antipas. You know, the Salome danced for Herod and said, I want John the Baptist’s head on the platter. It’s one of the gory sections of the New Testament.

Rick: It was one of my Halloween costumes when I was a kid.

Mark: Oh, my gosh, how cool is that?

Rick: Head on a plate. I won the prize.

Mark: I bet you did. Well, Elijah lived something like eight centuries before that. So Jesus is saying that Elijah returned, but in the form of John the Baptist. There are a lot of progressive Christian scholars, also Hindu and Buddhist scholars, who’ve examined this passage very closely, and they feel that this is a reference to reincarnation. We also know that in the early centuries of the Christian church, origin of Alexandria, he was a Christian scholar, wrote that we lead a succession of lifetimes until we don’t need to return, and even Satan will find his way out of the darkness to eventually be with God. But then in the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople circa 525 AD, reincarnation was banned as heresy and removed from the latest version of the Bible, but the transfiguration did not get edited out. So for people who believe that Christianity initially referenced reincarnation, it appears that that’s one of the passages that made it through. And I’ve always found that immensely fascinating because so many people are like, oh, no, no, reincarnation, that’s evil. That’s this, that’s that, but it very well may have been a huge part of what Christianity was actually all about in the early, the first three centuries of Christianity.

Rick: Yeah, Yogananda mentions in his autobiography that reincarnation was edited out at the Council of Nicaea, or maybe it was that council that you just mentioned. But anyway, he said he felt that the rationale was that the church leaders at that time felt that it granted too much latitude to people. You know, like, you better get it right now, you know, and otherwise people might say, yeah, just live, eat, drink, and be merry. I’ll get it together in the next lifetime.

Mark: Well, Yogananda has a very good point there, because in the third century, the Council of Nicaea, that’s when the doctrine of the Trinity was introduced, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And part of the imperial decree, and this was under Constantine the Great, and it’s interesting because I went to Catholic school and there was St. Constantine. Let’s see how saintly he was in a minute. But he, part of the imperial decree was that Jesus was the Son of God and he will return. But until he does, I, Constantine, Emperor of the Romans, am God’s vicegerent, in other words, his representative on earth. And I am the equal of the apostles. So with the stroke of the pen, Constantine wrote himself into the New Testament, and every Roman and then subsequent Byzantine Greek Orthodox emperor all the way up into the Middle Ages, took this divine right of kings and equal of the apostles. And this is where reincarnation began to decline, because a century and a half later at the fifth ecumenical council, then in Constantinople, they banished it. And because now Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire and an extension of imperial authority. So they don’t want people having an out with reincarnation. It became this, my way or the hell highway. If you do not obey the laws of the empire, meaning what the emperor wanted and the laws of the Rome, then you will be cast into eternal damnation. And see, this is where, and with all due respect to my evangelical colleagues and friends, this is where Christianity went from being peace and love and understanding to a fear-based religion. Because let’s face it, the one thing the Romans really understood how to inflict, was fear. You know, you don’t have an empire that vast and that efficient and that ruthless, without being able to inflict fear. So when Christianity originally, even though Jesus was Jewish, it didn’t catch on in the Jewish communities. It caught on in the Greek communities. It fit very much with the Greek humanistic mindset. And through the Greeks, then it got subsumed by the Romans and then became an extension of imperial authority.

Rick: Interesting. Well, that’s pretty geeky, but it’s also very interesting. And, you know, I think that has been the fate of many religions is that they start out really pure and profound because some guy is really living the deepest truth that the religion can, you know, that the religion ends up referencing. But for him, it’s a living experience, not a belief. And then like the old party game where you whisper something and it goes around the room and comes back to you completely different than what you whispered. You know, with each generation, there’s a crumbling on the rocks of ignorance that happens to the knowledge that this great teacher, whoever he may have been brought out. And what you end up with is just a distorted remnant of the original thing, which in many respects is quite the antithesis of the original thing, quite contrary to its intentions and purposes.

Mark: Exactly. Perfectly said.

Rick: Yeah. OK, so let’s get back to talking about you a little bit and then we’ll get into many more of these kinds of points. From your book, I gathered that you had your family about three, four generations back. People in it had psychic abilities. Is that right?

Mark: Yes. Both my parents, my father and my mother had these abilities. My dad was a U.S. Navy SEAL and a NASA engineer. Mom was a commercial illustrator and she was in fashion. So it’s not like they were running around waving Ouija boards and wearing turbans. We were, for all intents and purposes, the all-American family next door, sort of. And then as I started getting older and I was listening to the stories my parents were telling, I was able to track psychic ability on both sides of the family back into the 1890s. So I’m assuming, Rick, that it goes farther than that. But, you know, that was because a lot of times these things weren’t discussed and the two sides of the family were very different about this. My dad’s family, they were very conservative Baptists from Pennsylvania. And my father had four siblings, three sisters and a brother. And one of his sisters, Marjorie, was also a medium, like my dad. Their mother, Isabel, was a medium. And then their maternal grandmother, Grace, was a medium. And then meanwhile, on my mom’s side of the family, they had come over from Italy and my mother’s grandmother, my maternal great grandmother, Giovanna, was widely respected in the Italian community of North New Jersey and Little Italy in New York City as the woman who knows things. And officials from the Catholic Church would come and meet with her. And what’s really cool, Rick, is back in 2016, PBS did a special called The Italian Americans, and they actually did an entire segment on Giovanna and referenced her psychic abilities. And it was great because like on the commercial breaks, my cousins, you know, were all calling, “Did you see that? Did you see that?” But, you know, because we’d known about it for a long time and it was very, very heavily documented. And all three of my books, Never Letting Go, Evidence of Eternity, and The Afterlife Frequency, I give a lot of stories about my family because these were some very, very interesting people. And my father’s sister, Marjorie, was made to suffer horribly because of her psychic ability.

Rick: I was wondering about that. I mean, if you have psychic abilities and you grow up in a family that doesn’t support it, it must be kind of like growing up gay or something in such a family and just feeling all kinds of repression and frustration.

Mark: Well, for Marjorie in particular, this happened about 20 years before I was born. She was married to this evangelical guy. And I’m going to just call him a religious fanatic. I don’t even think he deserves the term zealot. And he was afraid of her abilities. And so he worked, he was a machinist, and he worked at this steel plant in Pennsylvania. So one morning he’s getting ready to go to work and Marjorie starts clutching her stomach, her solar plexus, that area. And she goes, “I have a terrible feeling.” She begged him not to go to work. “Something horrible is going to happen.” They had a huge fight. “Fine, fine. He stays home.” So that day, a crane is lifting thousands of pounds of steel beams and the cable snaps and the beams crush the machine shop that he worked in and killed everybody in it.

Rick: Wow.

Mark: One would think he might possibly be thankful. It increased his fear to the point he conspired with a psychiatrist and had Marjorie diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She was literally taken from her home by these two men that came to their home in an ambulance, put into a straitjacket, and taken to an insane asylum where for the following six months she was subjected forcibly to electroshock therapy. It damaged her brain so much that she never again talked about seeing spirits. And so I didn’t know about this. I mean, obviously this had happened like 20 years before I was born. And when I was exhibiting psychic ability and I was getting ready to start school, I was starting first grade when I was five, and my father said, “You’re not to talk about this to anybody.” He said, “You can talk about it to your mother and I, but nobody else.” And I’m like, “Why, Daddy?” He goes, “Because people who see things, others don’t get taken away.” Rick, that scared me. And here I’m this little kid and I remember shaking and then my dad could see how afraid I was. I remember he held me and he says, “Mark, I love you and your mother loves you. People won’t understand.” And when I started Catholic school, I was like, “Oh, angels, saints.” I was like, “Hey, this is the place for you.” And then I started listening to the things that they were saying. Like, “No, I better not say anything about this.” And then as I got older, I found out about the horrible fate that had befallen my Aunt Marjorie. And so I realized, don’t talk about it outside of the family.

Rick: Wow, I hope things have improved. I know even now, you know, people have Kundalini awakenings and things and they don’t know what they are and doctors don’t know what they are and they end up on Thorazine or some such thing. So I’m sure that there are many, I mean, and the psychic thing, even now, I mean, most people aren’t going to accept it. I just hope that society is growing in a direction where such experiences and abilities will be admired and praised and dealt with appropriately. Because, I mean, in an ideal world, we would all be endowed with all kinds of marvelous abilities and insights and experiences.

Mark: It’s an interesting thought, is that if everybody had these experiences, or let’s take it in, if everybody were suddenly telepathic, would there then be world peace? You know, it’d be hard to stage a surprise invasion, let’s say, of Ukraine. You know, if everybody in Ukraine knew it was coming and everybody in Russia was like, “Oh, we don’t want to do that.” If we could all, if we’re all interlinked, interconnected, it’s an interesting thought. Also, I think that to some extent, certainly in the West, in Europe and Japan, the psychic ability is becoming openly discussed. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely embraced. There are countries in the Middle East where people like me get beheaded. So, you know, it’s still a fringe topic in some areas. But then in other areas, like I’ve been part of a number of studies, and I’m not at liberty to talk about the study that’s coming up, but I’ve been part of studies in laboratories conducted by scientists. You know, why can you do this? How can you do this? And the conclusion that they’ve reached is you can’t be making this up. You know, the information that I’m getting is very detailed and it’s more than, “Oh, your grandmother’s here and she loves you.” I mean, anybody can say stuff like that. For example, yesterday and the reason I bring this up is I got this email about 20 minutes before the show started. I did a telephone reading for this woman. She’s a very nice lady, and her fiancé had passed. And he came through and he kept talking about the blue car, blue car, golf cart, blue car, golf cart. And in the vision I was getting from him, I saw him driving around on this golf cart. She goes, “I don’t know what that means.” Well, today she sends me an email and she said, “I was so concerned about this blue car, I called his daughter.” And she goes, “Oh, yeah. Years ago, we had this blue golf cart that he always drove around in. She sent me a picture of it.” You know, she didn’t know it. And that’s what I love when things like that happen because people say, “Well, you’re reading their mind.” Well, first off, how do I read somebody’s mind over the phone? Secondly, how do I read something that isn’t in her brain to begin with? Third, this was something that was 100% accurate but had to be validated from a third party. And she actually sent me the picture of him sitting in this blue golf cart. And he came through from the other side riding around in that. And I think one of the reasons spirits will do something like that is so, because they can see future events… he knew that she was going to call his daughter and he knew that she was going to discover this. So that is a spirit’s way of letting her know that, “Oh, yeah, that was me talking to you. This is correct, and there’s your validation.”

Rick: Yeah, there’s a whole chapter in your book about, I think you call it “No, no, no” or something where —

Mark: Yeah, avoiding the “No, no, no” syndrome.

Rick: Yeah, where you come out with all kinds of stuff in a reading and the person just sits there and says, “No, that doesn’t mean anything.” And then they get in touch with you later on. And there was one about Boston cream pie and — what was it? Ladybugs and something else. And it turned out to be — and Elsie the cow. And it turned out to be a pug terrier, Boston — no, one of those Boston terriers.

Mark: A dog named — a Boston terrier named Elsie that had a cow with ladybugs on it. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: But the person didn’t get it when you were saying it.

Mark: No, they didn’t. And I had — I mean, we could talk all day, but along those lines, this happened a couple months ago. And this one really cracks me up. So I’m doing a reading for this woman, and her mother’s spirit came through. And I said, “She’s talking about a younger male. This looks like he could be around seven years old, but he’s in this world and something with his eyes and eyesight.” And she said, “Well, I don’t have any children, but my sister does. And she has a little boy who’s seven, and I’m very, very close to my nephew.” I said, “Well, there’s something about his eyes. He’s got to get his eyes checked.” She goes, “Okay.” And now I’m hearing Little Richard singing, “Tooty fruity, ah, Rudy.” And I’m hearing, “Tooty fruity, ah, Rudy.” And so I’m singing this to her, and she’s like, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all.” And she said, “Yeah, I know who Little Richard was, but it’s not like I’m a fan.” I said, “All right, don’t worry about it. Just write it down.” So a month later, I receive an email. And she said, “I called my sister, and my sister said, ‘Yeah, my boy, he’s been complaining about blurred vision and a hard time seeing things.'” So my client said, “The three of us, I went with my sister and her son. We went to the eye doctor, made an appointment for him. And the second we walked into the doctor’s office, all of a sudden on the radio, it starts playing, ‘Tooty fruity, ah, Rudy.'” Now-

Rick: Isn’t that something?

Mark: It just …

Rick: It’s something that happened a month later, and this spirit somehow was able to know that that was going to come on the radio.

Mark: Exactly. And see, spirits can see future events. And everything is … okay, we all know from science everything is made of molecules. Molecules, in turn, are made of atoms. Atoms are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons, which in turn are composed of a smaller particle of electromagnetic energy known as a quantum. Now, for the physics people watching, technically, an electron is a proton because it’s 1/1800 the size of a proton. All right, so electrons are quantums. So everything, and Rick that means you and me

Rick: You just said electron is a proton. I think you meant to say electron is a quantum.

Mark: Excuse me, what I meant was yeah, is a quantum. Yes, thank you for catching that. Yes, an electron is a quantum because it’s 1/1800 the size of a proton. All right, so everything at the most basic subatomic level is electromagnetic energy, and that means our bodies, the air we’re breathing, the radio waves, which are electromagnetic energy that this show is being broadcast on, the surface of Mars, the rings of Saturn, and beyond. Everything is, for the most, you know, is electromagnetic energy. And quantum theorists, from the time of Albert Einstein to the present day, believe that on this quantum level, that time does not exist, that everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen is occurring simultaneously. And that’s how and why spirits are able to discern future events, because they too are pure electromagnetic energy. So the spirit was saying, “Hey, my grandson needs glasses. He needs his eyes examined. And to verify that, I’m going to tell you what song’s going to be playing when you get there.” And I know that that sounds at first far-fetched, but when you start looking at it on a quantum physics level and this is where my theory of the electromagnetic soul comes in. What are we really? The brain does not create consciousness. The brain is like a computer hard drive that houses consciousness. We know from the field of neuroscience, neurobiology, the science that studies the brain, that the brain has an electrical field. We know from quantum physics, energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred from one form to another. We know from faith that every great spiritual teacher teaches that the soul, the consciousness, is an eternal flow of energy, comes into the body, moves on after the body dies. So I developed the term, the electromagnetic soul, the EMS, to describe what we really are, which is pure consciousness that is eternal electromagnetic energy, which is why spirits are able to discern past, present, and future events, because they don’t have the limitations that we do, being on a lower physical vibration. So I know that’s a lot to digest.

Rick: No, that’s good. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that I want to talk to you about, and I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve been reading your book. And one thing with regard to this ability to see the future and so on is, I don’t know if this quite nails it, but if somehow the electromagnetic field is … if that’s the level at which souls operate, or of which they’re composed somehow, we can talk more about that. We know from Relativity Theory that from the perspective of a photon, which is part of the electromagnetic field, time pretty much collapses. I mean, from our stationary perspective, it takes two million years for light to get here from the Andromeda Galaxy. From the perspective of a photon coming from the Andromeda Galaxy, traveling at the speed of light, space and time completely collapse, and they are here instantaneously. There’s no time lost in the trip. So somehow or other, if spirits are operating on that level, they’re not constrained by time the way stationary beings such as we are.

Mark: Exactly. Beautifully said. I’m going to play back this recording and use that for my next book.

Rick: Okay. I get 10% of the royalties.

Mark: Exactly. Because what I call what I do, mediumship is the accepted term, and what I call readings but what it really is, it’s interdimensional communication. Because we’re here in the material world dimension. Our vibration is at a lower, slower … ah everything on the quantum level has a vibration. In other words, this pen at the subatomic level is made of the same electromagnetic energy that I am, but its vibration is at a lower level than I am, ergo I’m alive. And so when we die, think of your soul as like a drop of water, and that drop of water leaves the brain and then plunges into this eternal sea that I call the collective consciousness. And it’s another dimension, another form of reality. And a lot of people think that the other side, and I love the fact you said it takes 2 million years for light to get here from the Andromeda galaxy. So they think that heaven and all that’s orbiting somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy. But for our purposes, with the spirits that are connected to this particular dimension, it’s the difference between our world and their world, it would be analogous to the difference between AM radio and FM radio. We live in AM, which uses frequency, amplitude, modulation, and the other side is FM radio, a higher frequency, and they’re two systems that coexist. And they’re parallel, but occasionally, and more often than you might think, they overlap. And that’s spirit communication. And it doesn’t always have to be through a medium. It could be in a dream that you have, or suddenly you feel something, or you feel that there’s somebody that you love who’s passed in your peripheral vision, and you look and maybe they appear to have vanished. We can talk about that as well. And so, in my research, that’s what I’ve discovered, that the other side, heaven, nirvana, the afterlife, isn’t some nebulous, distant place. It is here. It’s just a different frequency.

Rick: Right. And the only difference between you and the pen, or one of the differences, is that the pen doesn’t have a subtle body, and the pen doesn’t have the apparatus to cognize subtler dimensions. But traditionally, like we referred to Vedanta earlier, it’s understood in that system that we have five sheaths, or coverings, that cover up the self, or the Atman. There’s the gross body, and then the subtle body, composed of several different things–breath, mind, and intellect–and then the causal body, which is called the bliss sheath. And all those things are there now, and when you die, according to this system, your gross body drops off, but the other things aren’t affected at all.

Mark: Right.

Rick: All that dies is the gross body. And so, you know, if that’s the case, then why … but most people are kind of just locked into the gross body, and are pretty foggy on these other levels. But why not be able to enliven these other levels, so that we function interdimensionally, quite naturally, all the time, and are able to, you know, unlike the pen, perceive things that are beyond the perceptual capacities of the mere gross body?

Mark: I love that. And people who work on their spirituality–I believe that people who don’t necessarily intend to work on their spirituality, like a near-death experiencer, somebody that’s in an accident, or they die on an operating table, or, you know, some other thing happens where their consciousness, their electromagnetic soul, leaves their body, and then goes to the other dimension and returns, they come back with an understanding of that, of the interconnectedness. Then there’s people who work on out-of-body experiences, also known as astral projections. Then there’s people that work on meditating and raising their vibration, their awareness, their consciousness. So, this is something that … what’s that old quote that Al Capone used to say, “Some people are born great, others achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them”? Well, some people are born enlightened, others achieve enlightenment, and some have enlightenment thrust upon you. When you talk about somebody with a near-death experience, that is such an amazing, fascinating realm. And I’ve been privileged to be a keynote speaker a number of times for the International Association for Near-Death Studies. And, you know, I had an NDE when I was four, and encountering other people that have had NDEs, it really does alter one’s perception of the world. And we sort of touched on this earlier, Rick, when I said, “Well, if everyone were telepathic, what if everyone had had an NDE and everyone realized that we’re all energetically interconnected, that there is an afterlife?” And that one of the side effects of, or several of the side effects of NDEs, a sense of interconnectedness, a sense of timelessness, less emphasis on materialism, an understanding that there is reincarnation, we’re going to come back. If everybody in the world had an NDE, would we still have these conflicts? You know, what would be the point of country A trying to conquer country B? What would be the point of being prejudiced against somebody who looks or behaves differently than you do? Because you would now be aware that those are just fleeting material manifestations, because the greater reality transcends that and is beyond that. And I wonder sometimes, and this is certainly a question if anybody listening wants to join in the discussion, are we placed in this incarnation to learn these lessons, to be confronted by these things, so that it will cause us to have some type of spiritual awareness, some type of transformative experience? It certainly makes for fascinating conversation, that’s for sure.

Rick: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that point up, because I kind of put a pin in it when you mentioned earlier, “If everyone in the world were psychic, would we have wars?” And the thought I had when you said that was, well, you kind of have to have a certain level of spiritual development, I think, to be psychic. And so it’s a little bit of a cart before the horse question or kind of just very rhetorical or hypothetical, because everybody in the world isn’t going to be psychic if the people are predominantly at a lower level of consciousness, and therefore prone to creating wars. But if everyone were somehow at a higher level of consciousness, then psychic abilities, nonviolence, and many other qualities would be natural symptoms of their higher level of consciousness.

Mark: I agree with that. I agree with that. And there’s also an assumption that people who are psychic are all, you know, Jesus and Gandhi-like, and that’s not the case either.

Rick: Yeah, bring that into that. Can a person be like a mean and nasty psychic, you know, who’s using it for nefarious purposes?

Mark: Well, I’ve certainly met a few, quite a few. I won’t say quite a few, but I’ve met a number of them, and I’m not going to name any names. But there are people who, even though they have these abilities, that doesn’t make them a real positive person. And some people try to use these abilities for financial and for material gain. Like, when I was at a conference helping parents heal, it was at this beautiful resort in Arizona, which was on reservation land, and there was a casino near it. And the casino had all these great restaurants. So, like, one night, a group of us went to the casino because we wanted to go to this cafe that was there. And we’re walking by all the slot machines, and everyone’s looking at me like, “Well, come on, Mark.” My ability doesn’t extend to picking the right slot machine. And then, of course, the skeptics say, “Well, you know, if you’re so cosmic, why didn’t you win the lottery?” Well, first off, that’s not why I have this ability. It’s not why I’ve been given this ability. The way I look at it is, if I’m supposed to win the lottery, then I will. But it is not about, you know, using this for that. And that’s because when you’re on the spiritual level, you realize how all these materialistic and superficial things don’t matter, because that’s a material world construct versus the infinity of the other side. Now, that being said, it’s not like I have an ass like, “Okay, friends and relatives on the other side, if you want to give me winning lottery numbers, I promise I’ll do good with the money.” And then there’s assuming if they give you, let’s say they give you six numbers, okay, did it come with when those numbers are coming out? Remember, we’re dealing with entities where time isn’t relevant. Oh, they may give you six winning numbers, which will come out 11 years, 8 days, and 10 hours from now. So people always say, “Oh, you should be doing this.” But the reason that spirit communication exists is to help people understand that we have one life, and it’s eternal, and that we have material world incarnations. The reason I’m doing this is we go to the other side, we come back, we go to the other side, we come back, that life is energy, life is an eternal flow, and that we incarnate into what I call the material world, aka planet Earth. But we know that life here isn’t permanent, but life in the energetic, in the spiritual, in the electromagnetic soul sense is.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, obviously it’s a gift, you know, and I suppose–pardon? Oh, Irene sent a question. Okay, I’ll ask it in a second. So what you have, and what others like you have, is a gift, and I suppose you could abuse the gift and, you know, cash it in for lesser rewards, so to speak. But, you know, I mean, to put it in perspective, imagine Jesus with all of his abilities, presuming he was really able to do those things, using them to, like, raise money as a circus performer or something. It would just be so crass and so absurd. He obviously had a higher calling, and he didn’t forget that, even when he was, you know, faced with crucifixion. You know, they said, “Well, why don’t you just use your powers to, like, make this go away?” And, you know, I have to kind of go by the will of God here. So, you know, I guess that, yeah, I made the point.

Mark: No, that’s a great point, and gosh, I’m so glad that you brought that up, Rick. I’ve been so looking forward to this interview because I knew we were going to have great, great discussions. Look at both Jesus and Buddha. Both of them were of royal lineage. Buddha Siddhartha was a prince who gave up his royalty to become enlightened, and he went into the wilderness for over 40 days, all right? And then in Jesus, who was a descendant from the house of David. So Jesus was of royal lineage, and he went into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, and Satan tempted him. Meanwhile, Buddha was tempted by Lord Mara, which would essentially be the Buddhist equivalent of the devil, illusion, temptation. So we have the same essential story from two great avatars. Was Satan tempting Jesus with actual material wealth? Was Mara actually tempting Buddha with material wealth? Or was this where the spiritual sages went …i.e. they had to be isolated to (ask themselves) do I give into my ego, or do I give myself to the spiritual nature? Because think of it, both Jesus and Buddha, they had the family bloodline, so they already had the status. They obviously had the speaking ability, the psychic ability, the healing ability that they could have transformed that. Let’s say they went into politics, or like you said, raising money or cashing in on their abilities. They could have been quite successful in embracing the material, but instead they rejected what could be called Satan, or what could be called Mara, or illusion, temptation, ego, edging God out; and embracing the way of the light, which is peace and love and understanding, and not an obsession with materialism or status. I’m so glad that you brought that up, because that is also, what do you do with the psychic ability? Well, I facilitate communication for people in our world with their loved ones in spirit, because it’s all about healing and resolution. It’s not about, “Oh, spirits, give me the winning lottery numbers”, because then you’re taking that to a completely different frequency. Whereas when these gifts are used in the furtherance of peace, love, healing, and resolution, that is what they’re supposed to be used for. That’s my understanding.

Rick: That’s good. I mean, a lot of people, most people, I think, conceive of themselves as a very limited entity, limited both in space and time, and life is about gratifying that entity. But in a broader perspective, God is all-pervading, and we are waves on the ocean of God. We’re instruments of the divine, or have the potential to be. And if you have some dawning ability, and you utilize it as an instrument of the divine, then it’s not about my will, it’s about thy will. There’s that beautiful St. Francis prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” You become an instrument of cosmic intentions, rather than just a self-gratification machine. It accelerates your own evolution, but it actually makes you a much more useful tool in the world. Something of lasting and tremendous value can come of it. Did I lose you? You’re there.

Mark: No, I’m here.

Rick: Oh, okay, good.

Mark: No, I was listening. I have complete agreement with what you just said, because there are people out there who have these abilities, and they try to use them for purposes other than facilitating communication with the other side. They try to use them to win the lottery and that type of thing. And if they do, and that’s their focus, that’s their journey. But from what I’ve seen, because, you know, one of my parents who comes here, I go, “Well, Mom, Dad, do you want to give me lottery numbers?” And they’re like, “Mark, you know that’s not what this is for.” I thought, “Yeah, well, I couldn’t hurt to ask.”

Rick: You’re doing okay. You don’t need to win the lottery. It’ll just cause you problems. Irene sent a question over, which is on the theme that we’re discussing. She said, “It seems that those gifted with the most profound psychic abilities are very pure and good souls. So perhaps those abusing their abilities are not as developed in their spirituality or in their soul quality.” Or their abilities, for that matter. Yeah, as a matter of fact, maybe there’s some kind of safety valve where, you know, if you abuse such abilities, then they end up getting shut down, or you end up getting knocked down. You know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Because an extremely powerful being with great abilities, like Darth Vader, could be pretty dangerous.

Mark: Yes, absolutely. And if you look at, all right, let’s take the Third Reich, all right, Hitler’s regime. They actually had a black magic division to the SS. And Heinrich Himmler was in charge of this. And he had black magic witches. This is from one of my lectures. I’ve done the research on this, called “Rulers, Royals, Psychics, and Spirits, the Mystics Behind the Thrones of Power.” And so we know that Hitler used to consult astrologers on when to make moves and things like that. It drove his generals crazy. Like, you know, Mercury would be in retrograde. And he refused to take this offensive action during the Battle of Stalingrad, which went very poorly for the Germans. So maybe the Russians were supposed to win the Battle of Stalingrad, not the Germans. You always got to be careful on that. But Heinrich Himmler had black magic witches consulting him. So during the Battle of Britain, this is in 1940, the war begins in Europe on September 3rd, 1939. And then on June, excuse me, May 10th, 1940, Hitler invades France. Holland and Belgium fall within days. The French army, supposed to be the best in Europe, was obliterated within six weeks.  France collapses. Everyone expected Britain to be, you know, hoisting the white flag. But Winston Churchill said, “We will never surrender,” makes his very inspiring speech. And then the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, begins pummeling Great Britain in what’s known as the Battle of Britain. And the RAF is fighting back. And things are going very badly for Great Britain for the first month and a half of the war. Well, Gerald Gardner, who is known as the father of the modern Wiccan movement, was a very famous English witch. You can call them warlocks or witches. And he brought together all the witches of Great Britain. They’re from Scotland, England, Wales. And they went to New Forest. And it was the crescent, the waning of the crescent moon. And they formed this … the witches called this Operation Cone of Power. And it was at midnight. And they all started under Gardner’s chanting. They directed their energy towards Hitler’s brain. And they said, “You will not cross the sea. You will not cross the sea. You will not come here.” And they did this, the chanting and chanting for hours. Well, let me tell you something. When you get hundreds of witches converging in southern England, it’s not like that. It was kept secret for very long. And it even got out to the BBC. And I remember when I was a kid, I heard an old recording of it. And the commentators said, “Even the witches of Great Britain are fighting Adolf Hitler.” And then when the Churchill administration found out about it, they let it get out there because it was good for morale. Well —

Rick: Probably would have spooked the Nazis too since they believed in that stuff.

Mark: Yes, they did. And within 30 days, all of a sudden, the RAF started winning. They started shooting down more German planes. Now, I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but that certainly is fascinating. Now, also, the British were working on radar. They started doing that. And they made a very bold move, which would have been right after the cone of power. They knew that the Germans were concentrating on their airfields, so they made a daring attack and they bombed Berlin. Because Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, said, “The British will never bomb us.” And then they bombed Berlin, and Hitler was so furious, he switched the bombing to the British cities, which was no picnic and killing a lot of people. But what happened was then the Royal Air Force started gaining the initiative, and they began shooting down two times as many planes as they had lost. And so the so-called Battle of Britain was the first defeat inflicted upon the Nazis. And there are a lot of people in mystical circles who said, “Well, you don’t underestimate British witches.” They may have been witches, but they were not about to let a bunch of black magic Nazi witches attack the British Empire. So history is so full of these amazing stories. And then the British started doing … they did a couple raids where they dropped leaflets with astrological reports and giving wrong information that the Germans were getting because they knew it would get to Hitler. So the British definitely exploited Hitler’s obsession with astrology and their obsession with black magic. I always thought that was interesting.

Rick: That’s interesting. Our witches can whoop your witches.

Mark: You bet.

Rick: For some reason, it reminds me of a story that I think will kind of be relevant. I had a really good friend. He died a few years ago. But he was teaching transcendental meditation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, back in the ’70s or so. And one morning, he was sitting meditating, and he had all these horrible images and negative things. He felt like he was under attack of some kind, and he didn’t know what was going on. Later on, he discovered that a big article had come out in the local paper claiming that he was satanic, and he was teaching this satanic thing, Hinduism, and blah, blah, blah. And somehow all the people reading the paper were having these thoughts about him, and he was sitting there picking it up.

Mark: Wow. Well, yeah, and he was probably extremely empathic because that tends to come with …

Rick: He was. He had profound experiences, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, he was picking up on the negativity. I remember when I first started practicing law, I was just barely turned 24. Here I was, young prosecutor out to save the world, and I would come home at night, and I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. And I didn’t understand what was going on. I was just panicking and feeling all this. And I remember my mother, who was a very gifted psychic, she said, “Mark, you’re not shielding yourself.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” Well, can you think of a place where there’s more unhappy people than a courthouse? I mean, why do you go to the courthouse? Because you’re happy and life is good? No, you’ve been arrested, you’re getting sued, you got a ticket, you’re having a divorce, you’re fighting over your kids. Maybe you’re lucky in filing for an adoption or a marriage license, but pretty much the rest of it, there’s a lot of angst there. And here I am, this wide-open psychic, drawing all this energy, and Mom was telling me, “Sever the links, envision you’re surrounded by mirrors, reflecting this away,” and she said, “and envision a beam of white light, the white light of the divine, the Holy Spirit, Vishnu, however you wish to conceive of God.” And all of a sudden, nervous breakdown stopped.

Rick: So you were able to do that.

Mark: Yeah, thank you, Mom.

Rick: That’s cool. I mean, spiritual people in general have, whether or not they’re psychic, but often have trouble with hypersensitivity and kind of vulnerability to their environments and all. And so integration and stabilization is a big part of spirituality that more and more people are recognizing these days.

Mark: Yes, yes. And also, a lot of times, people that are very spiritual and they pick up on these things, if they mention it to a doctor, the doctor immediately wants to start prescribing medications. And I’m not saying that mood-stabilizing medications and sedatives are not necessary in some circumstances, but I also tend to feel that at this point in the 21st century, we are an intensely over-medicated society.

Rick: Oh, it’s a huge percentage of the population that are on some kind of tranquilizers or all these things.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, they talk about children having ADHD, well, I’m sorry.

Rick: Right, so they’re giving them Ritalin and all that.

Mark: They’re giving Ritalin and I think it’s more important to look at what they’re eating. Look at what they’re eating for breakfast. Are they having a Big Gulp with 100 grams of sugar and 100 grams of caffeine? Really? You pump 100 grams of sugar and 100 grams of caffeine into some child and expect them to sit there and do fractions?

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Mark: I don’t think so.

Rick: I was at the grocery store one time and I was behind some people in line and the woman said to her husband, “Oh, pick up a box of donuts. We’ve gotta give the kids something for breakfast tomorrow.”

Mark: Yeah.

Rick: Crazy.

Rick: Reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. His favorite breakfast was chocolate-frosted sugar bombs and then he would pile sugar on top of that. Pour some milk on.

Mark: Yeah, I had this cartoon that I found, and it shows these two explorers and they’re in a jungle talking to some indigenous people and they’re showing them a laptop. They go, “We bring you technology.” And the other one says, “We’ll be back next month with antidepressants.”

Rick: That’s good. Okay, so there’s a couple of thoughts in my head that have been hanging in there throughout this conversation. One is, I’ll take this one first. Have you heard of Ken Wilber?

Mark: I’ve heard the name, but I’m not familiar with his work. But yeah, so you just said that I recognize the name.

Rick: He’s this brilliant guy. He’s been on BatGap. He’s considered a philosopher of sorts. And one of his little teaching methods or points that I find highly helpful is he has the idea of lines of development. And he kind of says you could think of a human being as having various lines of development. There’s the emotional, the intellectual, the senses, consciousness itself, various other things. And these lines of development don’t necessarily develop in balance with one another. They can get really out of whack, where one line is quite advanced, and others are quite stunted. And I find that useful for understanding how a person could, let’s say, have psychic abilities but have nefarious motivations, or be kind of very eloquent and impressive as a spiritual teacher and yet be sexually abusing their students or various other things like that. So, I’m a big advocate of holistic development, how everyone can achieve it.

Mark: I totally agree with that. And in Great Britain, psychics are regulated by law. They used to have — oh, let me — if I can warp back in time to World War II, Winston Churchill used to consult with Helen Duncan. And Helen Duncan was a physical medium. Now, what a physical medium — and I’ve yet to see one in the current era that even begins to be legitimate. And I don’t want to get into those stories. But a physical medium is able to project from their body a mist, which is called ectoplasm, which can form an image of the person, the spirit, communicating. And Helen Duncan was doing a mediumship demonstration in November of 1941. And this is about a couple weeks before Pearl Harbor. So, the U.S. wasn’t in the war yet. The Battle of Britain was over, but England was still fighting for its life. The Germans had invaded Russia. And during this demonstration — and Churchill wasn’t at this one, but — because his were in secret — an image of a young sailor formed with an insignia on his uniform that said HMS Barham. And there was a woman there who said, that’s my husband. Well, little did anyone there know that a couple hours before, the battleship was one of Britain’s best ships in the Mediterranean. The HMS Barham had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. And then this Navy wife began telling all of her Navy wife friends, and they’re flooding the British Admiralty. And they’re like, how do they know about this? Because the Brits were keeping their naval losses top secret. And so then the British military police started keeping Helen Duncan under surveillance. And in early 1944, she was arrested and charged with violating the Witchcraft Act of 1735. And what it was, the British military was afraid that she might do something which could have given — breached the security of the upcoming D-Day invasion, which was in June of ’45. So Churchill, the British Prime Minister is not able to pardon, like, the United States. She served, I think, like six or nine months in prison. And anyway, Churchill loses the election — I’ve never understood that — in 1945, but he gets re-elected as Prime Minister in 1950. And he — one of the first things he did is get rid of the British Anti-Witchcraft Act of 1735. And it was replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which set standards, legal standards for mediums. And then when Britain joined the EU, that got replaced by a Consumer Protection Act. Now, with Brexit being — I don’t know what they’re going to do with mediums, but the British have always been at the front of spirit communication technology. In fact, in the 1930s, Great Britain actually had a psychic warfare division, which several other countries do to this day. But I always found that very, very fascinating. And from what I understand, Helen Duncan’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren are still trying to clear her name.

Rick: Okay, I won’t comment on that because a few questions have come in. And let’s see. Comment for Mark. It wasn’t actually Al Capone that said that quote about some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. It was William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, she said.

Mark: That is correct, but that was one of — Capone quoted it. Capone loved that particular quote. So, yes, it was Shakespeare, but that was Al Capone said that. And so he’s the one it’s associated with. But I want to thank the listener because I’m aware of that. But, you know, think about Al Capone. By the time he was 19 years old, he was running Chicago. That’s a lot of power.

Rick: 19?

Mark: Yep.

Rick: Wow.

Mark: He came up through — well, he was a cold-blooded, ruthless killer. I saw his house in South Beach, Miami about a year ago. I was on one of these tours. And his house is — in Miami is for sale. And they can’t get anyone to buy it. So, yeah.

Rick: Here’s a question from my friend Tree Wiseblood who’s been on BatGap. She lives down in Australia. She said, “When I was on this path,” in other words, her spiritual quest, “She experienced a test from the darker forces. Did you have a test or battle like Jesus did?”

Mark: Oh, my whole life has been a battle. But as far as a negative spiritual event, no. I’ve always seen my work and the connections I’ve made as from the light. But I’ve certainly been challenged by people living in the material world. I was working for a government agency. And it’s a long story. But I had left the practice of law to work for this government agency. And I knew that I was going to be leaving that because my first book, “Never Letting Go,” was coming out. And the elected official who hired me, his political enemies, found out that I was a psychic, leaked it to the news. There was all these attacks on me. I mean, it was absolutely horrible. And my mother had passed a couple years earlier, but I went to see my father, the ex-Navy SEAL, the NASA engineer. He was in his 80s at the time. And I said, “Dad, I don’t know if I can handle this.” And he came up to me and he put his hands on my shoulder. And he looked me in the eye and he said, “Mark, you hold your head high. You know who you are. You know what you’re doing is good and right.” And he said, “Tell all those people to pack sand.” And it’s like, “Thank you, Dad.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, Nancy Reagan got a lot of crap for supposedly consulting with a psychic or an astrologer or something. I don’t even know if she did.

Mark: Oh, she did. It was Joan Quigley. Yeah, Joan Quigley. In fact, I had friends. I’m a member of the DC bar, and I had friends that work on Capitol Hill, and they said Nancy drove the White House staffers crazy because she’d consult with Joan Quigley, especially after Ronald Reagan got shot. So Nancy would be changing Ronnie’s schedule because of shifts in astrological forecast. So, yeah, yeah, among the whole White House, they said that Nancy Reagan drove every– It’s interesting because a number of presidents on both sides of the aisle have had psychic advisors.

Rick: Yeah. I think that–I was just going to add this is not related to psychic stuff, but, I mean, whoever is in the spotlight that gets a lot of grief for whatever they do. Michelle Obama got castigated for putting an organic garden on the White House lawn.

Mark: I mean, yeah, oh, that’s so horrible, you know.

Rick: I think there was some stuff around Lincoln, wasn’t there? Some premonitions or some foreboding or some such thing?

Mark: Oh, yes. Lincoln administration was extremely involved with psychic phenomenon, and Lincoln himself had a near-death experience when he was a boy. They thought he was dead for like six hours, and then he came out of it and started talking about this country beyond our world. And after he’d been elected president, he and Mary Todd Lincoln were getting ready to leave for Washington. He looked in the mirror, and he had a premonition that he would be elected twice but not survive his second term. And then while they were in the White House, their favorite son– they’d already lost one son. Edward Lincoln had died as a little boy. And then when they were in the White House, they had three other sons– Robert Todd Lincoln, Willie Lincoln, and the other name of the son escapes me right now, but Willie Todd Lincoln died– I believe it was of typhoid.

Rick: Typhoid, yeah.

Mark: +Yeah, and Mary Todd Lincoln started having seances conducted at the White House, and she called in Nettie Colburn Maynard, who was one of the most well-known famous psychics of the day. And we do know from accounts from White House staffers that President Lincoln attended at least one of the seances. And of course, these were supposed to be secret, but boy, this got out and it hit the news, and that’s one of the reasons that Mary Todd Lincoln has been called insane and out of her mind, and all this because of her spiritual beliefs. And then Abraham Lincoln kept having a recurring dream, where he’d walk into the Green Room and he saw a coffin and there were soldiers around it and women crying. And he went up to–in the dream goes to one of the soldiers, and said, “Who died?” And the soldier says, “It’s the president.” And the night before he was assassinated, he had this dream, and he looked into the coffin and saw himself lying there. We know this happened because he told his press secretary, John Hay, who wrote this down in his diary. John Hay–that was the press secretary’s job–was to keep track of this. And then, of course, the horrible events at Ford’s Theater. And for the rest of her life, Mary Todd Lincoln was hounded by the media and insulted and ridiculed and told that she was crazy. But she had become friends with Queen Victoria, who was also consulting with the medium Edward Lees, when Prince Albert died of typhoid. And so Queen Victoria used to consult with mediums to keep in touch with the spirit of Prince Albert. And Mary Todd Lincoln and Queen Victoria corresponded quite frequently with each other. I would like to say this, and this is one of the things that I bring up in my lecture on this. I think Mary Todd Lincoln–she lost two boys, and then after she left the White House, another son died. She saw her husband murdered in front of her, shot in the head. So she’s lost three boys, a husband whose murder she witnessed. Her husband was Abraham Lincoln. During the U.S. Civil War, her brother was fighting for the Confederacy against them. The media kept insulting her, and she was going through menopause. Can we possibly give Mary Todd Lincoln a pass? And I think we need to reevaluate her. I don’t think she was insane. I don’t know how anyone could have withstood the type of pressure that she was under.

Rick: Yeah, and Lincoln too. I mean, sending hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths. But I don’t know. There was something really cosmic about him.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Rick: The way he just kind of came out of nowhere, and he did this incredible job in the nation’s darkest hour, and then he was gone. And it’s probably appropriate that he was gone because he probably served–he’d done his mission.

Mark: He’d done his mission.

Rick: He’d gone back to a better place.

Mark: Yes, and since we’re saying this to the universe, we could certainly use someone like him again. I don’t see anybody in political circles that are like him. And maybe that person, that man or woman is there. We just haven’t seen them because Lincoln always knew that he had some higher mystical purpose. And like you said, Rick, he was there. It’s like Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was considered a washed-up has-been politician. And when Neville Chamberlain–his government fell apart, and King George VI asked Churchill to become prime minister, everyone figured all Churchill was going to do was run the white flag up the pole and look for surrender terms. And it’s interesting because when I was at the Imperial War Museum, which was Churchill’s secret bunker, and the Brits just opened it up about 20, 25 years ago, it’s really cool. So anyone who goes to London, it’s worth the time. They even play a recording of a conversation between Winston Churchill and Harry Truman on the first hotline, which was from D.C. to London. But they also have recordings of interviews with all of Churchill’s secretaries. And they were real old, these ladies. They must have filmed these when–because they were like in their 20s, early 30s. But they were filming these probably in the 70s and early 80s. And all these women said, oh, he was a monster. He was a bully. He said he hated staples and paperclips. You had to punch a hole, tie a ribbon on there, and tag it. And one woman goes, and God help you if you made a typographical error on anything you typed. And then they had an interview with the chief of the Imperial general staff. They’d be like their joint chiefs of staff, General Ismay. And he said Churchill was the–he was a bully. He was the most rude, obnoxious, insulting man. He was always yelling at us, telling us how incompetent we were. And it was the greatest honor of my life to serve under him because any other British politician would have surrendered to Adolf Hitler. And it was funny. I’m sorry. I’m on the Churchill role today. When Churchill was re-elected in 1950 as prime minister, the staff at 10 Downing was like, oh, God, he’s back. And there was this new young lady. She was probably only 18 or 19. And they sent her up to his room. And she knocked on the door. And he was in the bathtub. Churchill took a bath every afternoon. And he’d like take through the bathroom door. And he goes, what have they said about me? And she said, well, they said that you’re rather challenging. Challenging! … I’m a monster. And so he yelled. He goes, but it takes a monster to beat Adolf Hitler.

Rick: [Laughter]  That’s interesting. There’s something to that.

Mark: Anyway, I’m sorry.

Rick: It takes a thorn to remove a thorn is the old saying in India.

Mark: Well, exactly. It does. And the reason I bring this up, with Abraham Lincoln, with Winston Churchill, when things were darkest, the right man arose. And I don’t want to get into modern politics, but Zelensky, I mean, people thought he was a comedian, he’s a TV star, he’s an idiot. And he’s shown some real leadership. So these things do happen. People have their time. It’s like the Beatles. They changed music. They changed outlooks. They brought Hinduism and Eastern philosophy into this. Did they choose that time or was that time chosen for them? And we are now in a point in the world where things that you and I are talking about are becoming more mainstream. Yes, eternal life exists. My latest book, “The Afterlife Frequency,” the subtitle is “The Scientific Proof of Spiritual Contact and How That Awareness Will Change Your Life.” I am presenting theories based on science, based on quantum physics and human physiology to explain the mechanics of spirit communication. And that the afterlife and faith in God is not only realistic but can be explainable through quantum physics. And I think that now is the time for people to understand this.

Rick: Yeah. And with regar   d to some super-duper person showing up to save us all, maybe the times will be such that things will get really dire and some great political leader will arise. But with regard to the world in general, Thich Nhat Hanh said, it may be that the next Buddha is the Sangha, meaning don’t wait for some super special enlightened guy to come. The Sangha means the collection of spiritually oriented people. And what I see from my perspective doing this show and doing what I’ve been doing in my life for the last 54 years is there’s definitely a network around the world, kind of uncoordinated, of people just waking up spiritually. And I get contacted by people all the time who hadn’t really been thinking too much about this stuff, and all of a sudden are having profound spiritual awakenings and wondering what the heck is going on with them. So somehow or other, collective consciousness is shifting, and it seems to be more of a peer-to-peer kind of phenomenon than in terms of any great individual savior coming. But that gives me great optimism. I really feel like we’ve got a chance to make it through this difficult period the world is going through, and it may get quite a bit more difficult before it gets better. And you don’t hear about this on the evening news, but there’s an undercurrent that is lifting humanity and counteracting the negative influences.

Mark: You know, that’s a very, very interesting point. And I would like to add to that and say that, yes, there’s this undercurrent. There’s people that understand what’s going on globally. You know, the climate’s changing. There’s deforestation. There’s massive population. We have the technology to kill each other on a global scale. But there is a huge consciousness that is running counter to that, and that consciousness is in tandem with the communication technology, with the Internet, with social media. Yeah, you know, so, yeah, there have always been sages in India and here and there. But now we have this interconnectedness, which is being created by technology. And so, yes, you know, there’s always downsides to social media and those, but there’s also very positive upsides. So perhaps, you know, Sangha is this global collective understanding. And I’ve lived by the ocean my whole life, and I’ve seen how humanity treats oceans as garbage dumps. And it’s not. It’s not an infinite source. The ocean is a finite system. When I hear people argue with me, oh, global warming, that is ridiculous. I’ve been to Alaska, and I was at the Mendenhall Glacier, and they have an observation point. And along the wall, they take a picture every year, and they’ve been taking pictures, I think, since the 1880s, 1890s, of the same glacier. And you can see how it’s been receding. And you look at the picture and then you look out at the actual glacier. So there it is. I’ve also been to the Amazon. And I was in what I consider to be the deepest, darkest recesses of a tributary along the Amazon, the Ucayali River. And then we’d come upon, I was on a research vessel. It was kind of like, you know, a big version of the African Queen. It was this clankety old boat, about a dozen crew and a dozen passengers. It was really an amazing experience. But then we come up upon areas where farmers and lumber companies had just shaved the rainforest right down to the bedrock. And the Indians were telling us, they go, this is really bad, because when it rains, the soil there is poor, and it washes away the soil right to the bedrock. And then the less rainforest, the less rain. And they’re doing this all over the Amazon. So I’ve seen this not just in the United States, but I’ve seen this in the Arctic. I’ve seen this in the Amazon. I’ve been at coral reefs in the Caribbean in areas that used to be just the most beautiful thing, and now they look dead. So the thing is, and we have the opportunity right now, right now to do something about it. That’s one thing Prince Philip, Sir David Attenborough, now King Charles, they thank them for always being very environmentally conscious, and many other people around the world are. But we need to do something about this now, because 20 years from now, it is conceivable, and very likely we could be at the point of no return. And I’m not trying to be all political, because I know some people, oh, he’s just another left-wing nut. I’m not a left-wing nut. I’m a middle-of-the-road guy. I listen to both parties. Not all ideas of one party are wrong. Not all ideas of another party are right. We have to look at what is facing humanity. And the reason that I’m saying this, prior to COVID, I started getting messages from spirits. I’d be doing readings for people, Rick, and all of a sudden, let’s say it was right around September, October of 2019, and during the reading, I would get visions of the person I was doing the reading, and everyone around them wearing surgical masks. And I remember asking, are you in the medical profession? And people were like, no. I go, well, the spirits keep saying, and I kept getting this, March 2020, March 2020, and I’ve said this to a number of people around me, so it’s been documented. And then in March 2020, I started getting emails right and left from people saying, oh, my God, when you saw the vision of us all wearing surgical masks in March 2020, here we are. And that’s when we went down into lockdown. And then during a couple sessions, I remember people were asked about COVID and the collective consciousness. You can call it the voice of God. I mean, I’ll let you decide how you want to interpret this. Do you remember when the world was in lockdown and all of a sudden, dolphins appeared in the canals of Venice?

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Mark: In Mumbai, the skies cleared. Animals started emerging at our national parks all over the world. And the message, messages, this has happened in several readings, you have been given a chance to put all of your brain power, all your brain trust, your geniuses working for common purpose. And then I realized what that message meant. COVID gave us a glimpse of what humanity could do if we put all of our scientists working together. Think about it. Within, what, two months, a vaccine came up, ideas how to test for this disease, how to begin to control it. It all came there. And then, of course, there came the backlash from the me, me, me, me, me, I can’t inconvenience myself crowd. And, you know, I don’t want to I don’t want to have to limit myself. All that came up. But we saw what could happen. And if we put our scientists, the scientists love working together, you put scientists working together. We’re going to come up with alternative sources of energy that aren’t going to put people out of work. We’re going to come out up with ways to stop deforesting. We’re going to come up with improved means of producing food. It’s all there. We have the technology and the brain power. And that was the flip side of the karmic coin to the COVID crisis. And this message came through to me in many, many readings during that period of time. And then it turned into we’re going to reopen the country and me, me, me, me, me. And it all just fizzled out. So we had a chance. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still have that chance.

Rick: That often happens. You know, I mean, when 9/11 happened, there was a huge global wave of compassion and support for the United States. And then Bush said, well, let’s go shopping and let’s attack Iraq, you know, which had nothing to do with 9/11. So a lot of times there’s opportunities and we squander them. And of course, then you have vested interests like the fossil fuel industries who spend millions of dollars trying to create doubt about global warming because they just they’re thinking about the next quarterly profit. But sooner or later, there’s a Vedic saying, which is Satyamevacayate, which means truth alone triumphs. And the understanding is that eventually, what is it? Martin Luther King said, you know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And I think that might apply to other issues, the kind of things we’re discussing here as well. But it’s really on God’s timetable.

Mark: Sure. And, you know, for the fossil fuel companies, they certainly have a tremendous brain trust. Why can’t they develop these other sources of energy and then corner the market on those?

Rick: They started working on it back in the 70s and then it got shut down, you know.

Mark: So, yeah. So, you know, we have the ability. The question is, you know, and based on humanity’s track record, which isn’t real good. I mean, you know, people always say the good old days. Really? What? Like when? Roman Empire? Right. The Dark Ages. You know, I hear about people. So the good old days of the 1950s, really talk to your African-American friends and see what their parents thought about the good old days of the 1950s. The good old days, the good days are now. It’s what we make of them and how we put our geniuses to work with each other.

Rick: So, well, you know, we’re talking about Churchill. Churchill said of Americans, and this could perhaps apply to all of humanity. He said, you know, Americans always do the right thing, but only after trying every other alternative.

Mark: Yeah, he really did have a way of pointing things. And I think, you know, people talk about, oh, who would you like to talk to if you could go back in time? Well, there’d be several people. I think Churchill would definitely be interesting. I think Albert Einstein, of course, you know, Jesus. But I was asked that in an interview. And I said, well, I think it’d be fascinating to meet Cleopatra for lunch, but I’d want somebody to taste my food first.

Rick: That’s great. Let me throw a couple of questions at you that will be abrupt segues. Sure. So here’s one from Irene again. Do you always turn on and off your abilities or do they sometimes come up as needed for a random person that might need help? Like, you know, Teresa Caputo, the Long Island medium, sometimes she’s just in the laundromat or something and she’s picking up on something. Of course, she has a camera on her. So it seems like a pre arranged.

Mark: Yeah but with something like that show, that’s all scripted. OK, because I’ve been on TV a lot. And when you have a 8 different camera angles, perfect makeup, perfect lighting, perfect sound. And there’s people in the background and you can see their faces. All those people had to sign agreements, to contracts to allow them. There’s a camera crew there and it takes about six hours to film that and then have edited down that one minute segment. So that’s why a lot of people like these reality shows where, you know, the two beautiful people that can’t find anybody in there in a swimming pool and we’re getting close ups. Well, there’s a camera crew at the pool with. So this isn’t some intimate thing by, you know, and if these people can’t find somebody, then the rest of us are doomed. But at any rate. There’s a time I’m doing what spirit communication and there’s a time I’m not, because you have to define the parameters. Spirits will respect that. But there are times when a spirit will come forward and they may want me to get a message through to somebody. But once again, it’s a question of ethics. Do you run up to somebody in a laundromat and say, your husband and spirit wants me to give you a message? Because that person is not there to deal with their dead husband. They’re there to be doing their laundry. So there is discretion that has to come in. You have to be very, very careful about flinging a reading at somebody. And that’s the problem I have with a lot of a lot of these shows when they do things like that, because it isn’t real. It isn’t genuine and it isn’t ethical. It’s like going up to someone and say, you know, I think you need a root canal. And you hold him down and start pulling one of your teeth out. I don’t think I’d want that.

Rick: Yeah. Of course, there are some anecdotes in your book where somebody had a psychic experience, and they weren’t necessarily even a psychic. And it ended up saving somebody’s life. (

Mark: Exactly). Or their own life. So that’s kind of cool.

Mark: Yeah. And spirits will. It’s called spirit intervention. That’s the term I call it. And spirits oftentimes will come in to notify, to alert somebody. In my first book, Never Letting Go, I wrote a story about my mother. And she was she was living in Newark, New Jersey. My family’s living. And this is about 10 years or so before I was born. And there’s different types of spirit intervention. Sometimes they’re very hands on, usually not. And she was … it was cold. It was snowing very heavily. It was like a blizzard. She had a bag of groceries in one hand. And my older sister was only a baby, maybe 14 months old in the other. And mom just wanted to get home. And she stepped out in the street. And all of a sudden, she heard “Shh!” And she looked and there was a bus coming right at her. And she was about to scream. And she said, I felt someone grab my shirt, my coat and pull me. And she felt like she was pulled right up off her and thrown onto the sidewalk. And she said, you know, she was clutching my sister. There was broken jars from her. And the bus went steaming by and there was nobody there.

Rick: Right. Right. There’s another story like that in your book where some guy got shoved out of the way of a car or something. He was listening to music and he was absorbed.

Mark: Yeah. And this does happen. This does happen. Now people say, well, I wish that would happen to me. It’s like, let me tell you something. Don’t test that theory. Don’t walk into traffic and expect, you know, Aunt Martha to come and pull you out of the way from heaven. Those circumstances, those situations do happen. They’re not very common, but there’s a reason why there was the direct intervention. It was not my mother’s time to die. She had too much to accomplish because then other people say, well, why did so and so die? Was it their time? Perhaps it was. These are the questions that we ponder, that we wonder about, because there’s nothing satisfying about seeing a young person die. It’s the most crushing and horrible thing for a parent to lose a child. And why do some people, you know, J.R.R. Tolkien. I remember there’s a scene where Frodo’s talking to Gandalf and he said, like, you know, oh, I wish, you know, I wish, you know, somebody would have killed Gollum. And Gandalf, the wise wizard, says, and J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and a very spiritual man. And he said, some that live, deserve death, others that die, deserve life. Is it for you to decide and to deal out death and judgment?

Rick: And that’s as it was, Gollum saved the day. I mean, he bit off Frodo’s finger. And, you know, if he hadn’t done that, Frodo wouldn’t have been able to resist the lure of the ring. And, you know, the whole thing wouldn’t have gotten resolved.

Mark: exactly, exactly. And it shows that, you know, we all have our parts to play, even the so-called evil people. And, you know, there are the dark energies that walk amongst us, the sociopaths, and they have their parts to play. And sometimes the parts they play don’t always have a happy ending for people. But, you know, the dealing out death and judgment, you know, we have to realize that is for a greater, a greater power.

Rick: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I shall repay.

Mark: Yeah, karma never loses an address, folks.

Rick: Yeah, the karma is a whole interesting thing. I mean, you get into that in your book a little bit, and we could spend an hour talking about karma. And I don’t want to do that right now because I want to get into another topic with you. But basically, it involves it’s not billiard balls, as you say in your book. It’s a vast web of intelligence that’s beyond the capabilities of human intellect that sorts it all out. Anyway, so here’s what I want to ask you about. So you speak of the soul as electromagnetic. Correct me if I’m wrong, but yeah, the electromagnetic soul. And, you know, if we think of the electromagnetic frequency, we think of gamma rays and X-rays and, you know, radio waves and shortwave and cell phones and all that. And visible light and all these different things, some of which can kill us, some of which enable us to live. But it’s all just various frequencies of a fundamental field. And it’s not the most fundamental field because electromagnetism, gravitation, the weak and the strong nuclear forces are four fundamental fields. And some of them have been unified with each other. Electroweak, unification and so on. And then it’s theorized that there’s an even more fundamental field, unified field, some call it, out of which these four fields arise. And then from the four fields, we get matter fields and force fields and the sequential, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the whole universe elaborates. But in any case, this kind of fits, I think, with the idea of a subtle body, the sheaths, the koshas, as they call them, because those aren’t considered to be ultimate. And, you know, maybe they are comprised of electromagnetic frequencies, because obviously a great many very dissimilar things comprise the electromagnetic spectrum. But fundamental to all those sheaths, is considered to be Brahman, you know, the absolute, the ultimate. And that would perhaps correlate with the unified field. So, it’s not electromagnetism. It’s more fundamental. So where am I going with this? I am going somewhere.

Mark: That’s what I love about philosophical discussions. It’s wherever you go, there you are.

Rick: So I don’t know. I’m just kind of playing with it because I think, you know, maybe the soul is electromagnetic in some respect. But, you know, I mean, we know from what we know about all of our electronic devices that electromagnetic devices can store huge amounts of information. So, and they talk of the Akashic field or the Akashic record, and maybe that’s a frequency of the electromagnetic field. Or who knows? I mean, maybe there’s some kind of subtle matter that has nothing to do with electromagnetism. And that’s sometimes discussed in these philosophies. But I’m just playing with it here. And maybe, you know, based upon what I’ve just said, what do you think? How did you come up with electromagnetism as the most likely candidate for what the soul is?

Mark: Getting to the quantum field, everything in our dimension on the most basic level is electromagnetic energy, a quantum. And that the brain has an electrical field which can be measured and quantified. And what’s really fascinating is in this year on February 22nd of 2022 in Tartu, Estonia, an 87 year old man, he had a heart attack and he was rushed to the hospital. And the doctors were doing an EEG on his brain when suddenly he died. And this was the first time in medical history that an EEG was conducted on a person at the point of death. And they saw all five levels of his brainwave frequencies, gamma, alpha, theta, no, gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta go off the charts. And they were absolutely flabbergasted. The report that came out said that this may coincide with what people that have a near-death experience describe as the life review prior to passing. And…

Rick: Because you’re processing a lot of information in a short amount of time.

Mark: Massive surge. And we see this with people in terminal lucidity. When somebody is non-responsive, they could have Alzheimer’s, they could have severe brain impairment, brain cancer, whatever, and all of a sudden they come back to full lucidity prior to passing, talk to people. This is a surge of electromagnetic energy. I liken it to a light bulb, an incandescent bulb that suddenly gets very bright before it brightens and explodes before it burns out. Why? Well, the light bulb did not create the amount of electricity flowing through it. It merely regulates it, specifically the tungsten in the filament. So think of your brain as the tungsten, as the filament. And then prior to death, the brain is no longer able to regulate that amount of electricity because it’s degrading. And neurobiologists, neuroscientists all agree that you don’t grow a billion new neurons right before you die. So I started studying quantum physics. I’ve been studying it my whole life. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred. We know that. We know from neuroscience, which studies the brain, that the brain has an electromagnetic field, that the pineal gland in the brain regulates brainwave frequency. And so I started seeing that, and I’ve been brain mapped a number of times and studied what happens when I go into spirit communication and how brainwave frequencies adjust. And once again, getting to frequency, frequency, how am I hearing these things? How am I experiencing those? So I developed the term the electromagnetic soul. My colleague, Dr. Gary Schwartz, who’s the head of psychology, parapsychology, engineering, surgery, and physics at University of Arizona, he endorsed the afterlife frequency. He called me up, and he said, “Mark, I love electromagnetic soul, EMS. I’m going to start using it.” He said, “I was trying to develop a term years ago called the electromagnetic dynamical interface between brain-body systems.” He goes, “But EMS, that made it concise.” So, I’m seeing scientists saying, “You’re really onto something here.” And so that’s how and why I came up with the electromagnetic soul. But as Dr. Schwartz pointed out, some people say, “Well, that sounds very technical. It takes the spirituality out of it.” And what he said is, “Well, let’s look at the word soul. Doesn’t that stand for source of universal love?” So, the EMS is the electromagnetic source of universal love. And the thing is, Rick, when I was a little boy, I remember I was about eight years old, and my dad worked in the space program. And I loved my dad, and I loved my mom. I always got along great with my parents. And daddy was my hero, okay, because he worked with astronauts. And here I am, eight years old, and we were looking at the stars one night, and he was explaining to me that nothing is impossible. He said, “A mystery is only a question for which we do not yet have the answer. And enough money, enough research, enough dedication goes into something. You’re going to come up with an answer. It’s going to be based on science, but you’ll have that answer.” And that really, really imprinted itself on me. And so that’s why I was looking for spiritual, scientific explanations for spiritual phenomenon. And the EMS theory, the electromagnetic soul, applies not just to the afterlife, but to understanding the different forms of spirit phenomenon. Near-death experiences, shared-death experiences, where more than one person experiences a deathbed vision, where somebody prior to passing will look up, and they’ll start talking about people they know who’ve passed, the mediumship to visitations. I’m going to talk about deathbed visions for a moment, and then shared-death, if that’s okay. A deathbed vision is when somebody is in the process of dying, and they see spirits of loved ones. I think George Floyd may be the most heavily documented deathbed vision in history, because when the police officer had his knee on his throat, and there’s people filming this, George Floyd said, “Mama, I’m through.” He was extremely close to his mother who’d passed, and it’s very painful watching that video. “Mama, I’m through.” Was he seeing the spirit of his mother? More recently, who didn’t love Betty White? Betty White, our favorite Golden Girl. I can’t think of a time in my life when Betty White wasn’t on television. Back in the ’60s, she married game show host Alan Ludden, and they were married until I think he died in 1981, ’83, somewhere around there. She said he was the love of her life, and Betty White expired on New Year’s Eve 2021, just two weeks before her 100th birthday. And right before she died, And thihis has been documented by her health care, her caregiver, and by actress Vicki Lawrence from Carol Burnett’s show on Mama’s Family. They said that right before Betty White died, she opened up her eyes, looked up, and said, “Alan.”

Rick: Oh, how nice.

Mark: When I read that, it brought tears to my eyes. So a deathbed vision, what’s going on here, Rick, I believe, is as the tungsten, the filament, meaning the human brain, is beginning to degrade, the energy, the vibration of the electromagnetic soul is beginning to expand, and as it expands, it’s interfacing with the afterlife frequency. Now, this is how a shared death experience becomes a deathbed vision, when people in close proximity to the dying person will also see these spirits. They may get caught up in the person’s life review, where they’re reviewing their life. They may feel somewhat lifted up, off their feet. They may hear indescribably beautiful music, and at the point of death, they may actually see a surge of light come out of the person’s body as he or she dies. What’s going on here? As that person’s EMS, electromagnetic soul’s energy, is expanding, people in close proximity who also have electromagnetic souls, their frequencies are now interfacing with the frequency of the person who’s transitioning, which is how and why they will become part of, at least for a very limited period of time, the dying person’s transition from the material world to the afterlife frequency. The thing about shared death experiences, they’ve been reported for thousands of years, but now it’s becoming more mainstream. Because, you know, when you start talking about stuff like this in medieval Europe, you ended up getting burned at the stake for witchcraft, you know. And back in the 1950s, you ended up like my Aunt Marjorie at an insane asylum. But now that we’re beginning to see that there really is something to this, and what’s so fascinating is my friend and colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Long. I don’t know if you’ve had him on the show.

Rick: Not yet, but he’s on the radar. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, he founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.

Rick: I’ve had Bruce Grayson and a whole bunch of other people.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: William Peters, who does shared death experiences.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re all my friends. You know, we all know each other. They’re all great guys. And what, but NDERF, the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, is the largest database of NDE and shared death experiences. And they compile this data. Here’s what’s so fascinating. Near death and shared death experiences, it doesn’t matter if you believe in God and if you believe in God, what your religion is. They’re getting these reports not only from the U.S. and Western Europe, but South America, Africa, China, an atheist country, from Iran, an extremely conservative Muslim country. They’re getting it from Australia, everywhere, everywhere. And there is a commonality between all of them. And certainly, with near death experiences, the cause of death doesn’t matter. Anaesthesia is irrelevant. It’s not hypoxia or anoxia, you know, oxygen deprivation. Age doesn’t matter, religious background. The one thing is my friend and colleague, Nancy Evans Bush, and she is president emeritus of IANS, International Association for Near Death Studies. She said that near death experiencers don’t think there’s a God. They know there’s a God. And people who are atheists that have an NDE come out of that going, there really is something.

Rick: I have some very sceptical friends, you know, and we have long conversations, very friendly conversations. But, you know, I say you’re going to be pleasantly surprised. And, you know, you’re serving a role, I guess, with the scepticism business. But, you know.

Mark: You know, I know I’m telling a lot of stories, but can I tell a story? You just brought up such a great point.

Rick: Before you do that, keep that story in mind. I was thinking about the terminal lucidity thing that you mentioned. And, you know, sometimes people have really eroded brains from dementia and Alzheimer’s and stuff. And yet they sit up and get really lucid for a little while. And you use the light bulb example. I mean, it’s been known — it’s been discovered that there are people who have basically hardly any brain. It’s like a coconut where there’s brain around the skull inside, but the rest of it is all liquid. And yet they’re perfectly functioning people.

Mark: Exactly.

Rick: They never even knew they had this. So I’m just thinking that maybe — maybe this is what you were saying. But at the moment, just prior to death, there’s such a surge of whatever it is.

Mark: The EMS, yeah.

Rick: That it lights up even if they only have 10% of their original brain cells. Those 10% get such a surge of energy that they’re able to just function lucidly on the 10% for a few minutes, and then they die. Is that the way it works?

Mark: Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And the thing is, if there was just one type of brain impairment, then scientists — but it happens all across the board. It’s such a wide variety. It could be dementia. It could be Alzheimer’s. It happens with brain cancer. It happens with severe brain injury. It happens with schizophrenia. It happens in people whose brain is damaged from deprivation of oxygen. And then all of a sudden, they go from being totally nonresponsive to lucid and speaking to people, talking to them. And my theory, my belief is that, once again, consciousness is not created by the brain. It’s only hosted. And who and what we are is enshrined energetically within the electromagnetic soul, and that’s what’s communicating. Okay? So it’s just like the same way as when an incandescent light bulb, all of a sudden it gets real bright. Boom. It’s because this massive amount of electricity, this electromagnetic energy, is no longer able to be contained by this degrading filament. And conversely, the degrading brain is no longer able to regulate this amount of energy that is the EMS.

Rick: Yeah. And before you tell your story, and while we’re still on this point, there’s just a point I’ve been wanting to throw in here about the fundamental nature of consciousness. I would suggest that consciousness is beyond electromagnetism. It’s the unified field, perhaps, and it’s beyond any relative, more excited state. And so the soul, as you call it, or the subtle body, as Vedanta calls it and other systems, that itself is not consciousness. That is a reflector of consciousness. It’s part of the apparatus that reflects consciousness, just as our gross body is part of that apparatus. But consciousness itself is more fundamental than that. And it’s kind of like, you know, they use the movie screen analogy where everything playing upon the screen is dependent upon the screen, but does not influence the screen. Go ahead. That’s it. That’s the point.

Mark: Well, in “Afterlife Frequency” and in my book, “Evidence of Eternity,” I write about my best friend, Billy. And, you know, we met when we were 11 years old, grew up together, went to junior high, high school, college, after college, I went to law school, and he went to live in Asia. And he was teaching English to Japanese executives. And, in fact, “Afterlife Frequency” opens with one of our adventures in Bangkok, Thailand.

Rick: Oh, I remember that. You got stuck in the middle of a mobile mob.

Mark: Yeah, I almost wasn’t here in a lot of senses. I mean, that was almost it for me. And we had this ongoing debate for our entire life of the existence of the afterlife. And, obviously, I was arguing for it. And he said, well, there’s no science, no technology to prove it. And so I even performed his wedding ceremony. He met this amazing woman from Japan. And it was a great day, Rick. It was one of the best days of my life. Because here I am, I was a notary public and also, you know, an attorney. And they were at this Oceanside Hotel, beautiful early summer day. Everybody that I loved was there. My best friend, his wife, my family, my parents were there, his parents, all of our friends from little kids up to, you know, adulthood. It was just one of those shining moments. And then a couple years, three years or so after that, he died from suicide. And I was absolutely devastated. And I remember him saying, there’s no proof for the afterlife. There’s no science. There’s no technology. You can’t prove it. And so about a year after he died, I was a speaker at a paranormal convention in Estes Park, Colorado at the Stanley Hotel. And I had just given my talk. And so I’m down there signing books in the convention hall. And my manager, Rocky, she travels with me. She was walking around. And all these ghost hunters and paranormal investigators were there. And she was walking by this one guy named Chris, and he was displaying the spirit box. So she’s walking by the spirit box, and all of a sudden she hears, “Get Mark.” She stopped and she looked at it. And the ghost hunter said, “That thing just said something to you.” And she hears, “Get Mark.” And he said, “Do you think that means you’re Mark? Mark Anthony?” And all of a sudden I hear, “Mark! Mark!” And I look up, and they’re like, “Get over here now!” And I’m like, okay, sorry. I run over, and all these people, you know, it was a paranormal convention. So there was like a crowd of people. And I walk up, and my heart almost stopped, Rick, because as I walked up I heard, “Dude!” And I looked at Rocky, and tears were rolling out of her eyes. She goes, “Mark, that voice!” I go, “That’s Billy’s voice.” And it was his voice. And all of a sudden this thing said, “Love you, bro.” And it was his voice. And the ghost hunter said, “Oh, my God.” He said, “This is very unusual. You both.” It called Mark by name. “You both recognize the voice.” And here’s the thing. He always called me “bro” and “dude.” We grew up in the surf culture in East Coast Central Florida. And I’ve got to see if I can say this without breaking down now. The last thing he ever said to me in this world, he hugged me and goes, “I love you, bro.” And that’s what came out of this. And so at first I was like, “Oh, my God, what a beautiful spiritual experience.” And then I started thinking, I go, “He used technology. He used technology.” And the spirit box scans electromagnetic frequencies for the voices of spirits. And it does it in the lower hertz range. I think it’s between like 3 and 13 hertz. And it keyed right in, or he keyed right in. So that also led to my electromagnetic soul theory, because the atheist communicated to me from the afterlife through technology.

Rick: That’s really cool. I just want to interject here that those who want to investigate more what Mark, the kind of thing Mark just explained, check out, well, you can check out my interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, who does the New Thinking Allowed show. But then you’ll find a link on his page in batgap.com to his essay for the Bigelow Institute’s contest about the survival of consciousness after physical death. And he won the prize, half a million dollars I think he got. But it’s a very well laid out and researched essay in which he has discussions of instances in which people from the other side spoke through telephones or televisions or various other electronic devices. And he also has video clips embedded in the essay of people talking about this kind of thing. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that in there as a footnote for further research if people are interested.

Mark: Yeah, and that’s why I wrote the book, The Afterlife Frequency, because I’m aware of Jeffrey’s work, and it’s great, but I go into even greater detail, and I offer the scientific explanation for why these happen. And this is really great because what’s happening now, Rick, is we’re having people from different disciplines beginning to discuss and present the evidence that this is … We’re beyond it’s real. Now it’s a matter of will we have the technology to communicate with the other side? And we have the rudimentary forms now, like the spirit box and the EVP. I sit on the board of directors of the Cell Phone Foundation that Dr. Gary Schwartz is working on.

Rick: Yeah,I interviewed Mark Pitstick.

Mark: Yeah, Mark’s a great guy. So I think this is very exciting for humanity that I think we’re going to be proving beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of the afterlife and that who and what we are, the electromagnetic soul, stays coherent after physical death.

Rick: Yeah, and who knows? I mean, Gary Schwartz thinks, and it may well be, that one day we may communicate with people on the other side through technological devices as readily as you and I are now talking through Zoom.

Mark: Wouldn’t that be cool?

Rick: It would really be cool.

Mark: All right, so who’s the first person you dial up?

Rick: Who, me? Oh, geez, I don’t know. Maybe just out of curiosity, my mother, just to say hi. But there are also some incredible people in history who probably will be getting a lot of calls, like you mentioned, Jesus, people like that, that you’d want to talk to.

Mark: Yeah, you know, certainly, you know, our loved ones we’d want to connect with. And maybe that is what humanity is going to need. Maybe this is the song of maybe we’re going to have this collective knowledge on planet Earth, which is then be going, be able to connect with this vast, infinite knowledge base on the other side.

Rick: And that might seem far-fetched, but imagine, you know, I mean, if you lived in Lincoln’s time, think how far-fetched all the things we take for granted now would have seemed. And, you know, you would have had to just be, it would have been relegated to science fiction or just something that is impossible.

Mark: A hundred years ago, try to explain a microwave oven to somebody. You know, you put something in a box, press a few buttons, and voila, it heats it up.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, your dad worked on the Apollo missions, and today’s average iPhone has much more computing power than the lunar lander did, you know?

Mark: Yeah, I remember him working on slide rules. And it’s like, and I remember trying to figure it out, and like, they sent people to the moon with this?

Rick: I know. Anyway, I interrupted you about 15 minutes ago. You were about to tell a story.

Mark: That was the story.

Rick: Oh, you told it.

Mark: That was the story with Billy, is how he, how the atheist, chose technology to communicate with me from the other side. And, you know, it’s funny, not a day goes by that I don’t think of my best friend. He was like my brother. I mean, you don’t get many friends like that in life. If you’re lucky, you get one. And I just happened to meet him when we were 11 years old and we were riding bikes to school. And who knew one day he’d be talking to me from the other side, through the spirit phone or spirit box.

Rick: Yeah.

Mark: Spirit phone, that’s coming.

Rick: Okay, so let’s see here. So there are probably some points in your notes that you sent me that we haven’t discussed yet, but we’ve covered quite a bit. But is there anything that comes to mind that you feel is really important that we should cover before we close? And you mentioned the phrase “spiritual situational awareness,” and I forget what you mean by that, but maybe that would be a point that you want to leave people with.

Mark: Spiritual situational awareness. All right. When you have a dad that’s a Navy SEAL, every time we were somewhere, dad, be aware. You got to be aware of what’s going on around you. And when you work with police officers, military, situational awareness is be aware of what’s happening 360 degrees around you. Spiritual situational awareness takes that to an even deeper or higher level, shall we say, because spiritual situational awareness is being aware of when spirits are connecting with you and making contact with you. And I, to help people define and develop their spiritual situational awareness, I introduced the raft technique in the afterlife frequency. And the way I developed that is I was here in my office and I was working on the afterlife frequency. And I was like, how do I explain to people who aren’t mediums how they can have a spiritual experience? Nothing was happening. Nada. It was like, you know, the dreaded writer’s block. So I thought, well, I’ll go for a walk on the beach. That always clears my head. So I’m walking down my driveway and all of a sudden I get this cold chills and tingles. So I said, OK, spirits, I know. And that electromagnetic activity and I felt directed in the opposite direction. So instead of going to the beach, I start walk along this bike path. It’s around 11 in the morning. I see these two objects shining in the light and I walk up to them and it’s a nickel and a penny. And I go to pick them up and I hear my mom’s voice. My parents are in spirit. If their heads down, it’s bad luck. And I started laughing because the Italian side of the family has a superstition for all occasions. And then dad’s voice chimes in. It’s money. Grab it. So I’m laughing. I’m holding this nickel and this penny. Oh, six cents. And then all of a sudden I go. Six cents. And then I knew something was going on and my parents already heard their voices. The cold chills and tingles resonated through me. I go, OK, mom, dad, what are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to tell me? And all of a sudden I see my mind’s eye Rick. I see my dad look like he was about 40. He was standing in the ocean holding this blue canvas raft. And I remember this is all blue canvas raft of these yellow rubber ends to at least ride waves with it. And he was a swimming instructor and scuba diver. And I’m like, all right. And then I hear my parents voices in unison. Mark, teach people to recognize signs from spirits, accept the contact is real. Feel it without fear. Trust the message. R.A.F.T. I go, that’s it. And I ran back. The words just flew out of me. And so the raft technique enhances your spiritual situational awareness. And my parents made sure they walked me right through it. Then walk along. I see the coins. I hear their voices. So I recognize the spiritual contact. I had the coins in my hand. I accept it as real. It’s the third step feeling without overthinking. That’s where people go wrong. That’s where people torpedo a psychic, a spiritual experience every time. Oh, it’s got to be a coincidence. My imagination. This can’t be happening. That’s impossible. You feel it without overthinking it and then trust the message. Now, trust. In our world, you have a lot of people who claim that they are motivated to do acts of violence, terrorism, insurrection, because they were guided by God. Those are not messages from God. Those are not messages from spirits. Those are messages from the human ego, edging God out. Messages from the divine, messages from spirits are about peace, love, healing, protection, resolution. Those are the messages from spirits. And that’s how to tell the difference. So God is not going to tell you to put on a bomb vest and blow up an airport. God is not going to tell you to go shoot people out of school. No, that has nothing to do with spirituality or the higher frequencies of the divine. Messages about Love, healing, peace, resolution. You get a message that says call your child right now, they could be in danger, and then you find out that they are,  That’s a spiritual message. And so that’s what spiritual situational awareness is, is teaching people how to be aware when these subtle messages are being transmitted to you, how to recognize, accept, feel, and trust it. And I give examples of this in the Afterlife Frequency and some exercises to help develop your awareness.

Rick: That’s nice. I wonder if a lot of people are like me in the sense that I don’t experience messages or hear voices or any of that kind of stuff, but I feel like my life is divinely guided. And I feel like I’m character in a play that’s written by a master playwright who has kind of divine wisdom. And I have a certain script I’m supposed to follow, but I also have a lot of improvisational latitude. And I can move it this way and that. But a lot of times, there have been many times in my life where I’ve wanted a particular thing, and it has been blocked, and then something better happens. And I think, “Oh, so that’s why that was being blocked. I’m so glad it was.” You know, that kind of thing.

Mark: There you go. That’s it.

Rick: People might be listening to this and thinking, “Well, you know, I’m not like this guy. I’m never going to be a psychic.” But you can sort of have the benefits of being a psychic without actually having psychic abilities.

Mark: Exactly. And what you just described, Rick, with what happens to you, you naturally do RAFT. See, yes, I’m a medium, so it’s more likely for me to see and hear them. But for other people, when you feel that guidance, and when you feel that guidance, and maybe you wanted this, but it didn’t work out, and it seemed like you were pushed in another direction, something better happened. Well, guess what? There’s the RAFT technique. It does work. I get a lot of people, since the book came out, sending me messages like, “Wow, I used the RAFT technique, and it really works.” And it takes time. You know, not everyone is a psychic or a medium. It’s like not everyone’s an Olympic swimmer. Not everyone is an accomplished musician. I mean, I can bang around on a piano, but I’m never going to be an Elton John or a Billy Joel or a Rachmaninoff. I can swim, but I’m never going to be a Michael Phelps. The thing is, we’re all good at doing different things. This is my skill set. But that doesn’t eliminate you from taking advantage of the beautiful messages that spirits can send to us.

Rick: Right. And I think there’s something to the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” And by “help themselves,” I would interpret that to mean put yourself in the flow of God’s grace, by perhaps doing some kind of spiritual practice, whatever resonates for you. You can get more tuned into that divine intelligence, and it’ll support your life a lot more if you do.

Mark: Absolutely. I could not agree more.

Rick: Yeah. All right. Well, I didn’t necessarily want to have the last word here. Anything you want to say in final, final conclusion?

Mark: It’s a long story, but I’ll just crystallize it down to this. It was made very clear to me when I decided, or rather when I received the spiritual message, to leave the active practice of law and focus entirely on my spiritual path. And it was my mother’s spirit came through. I was driving back from court. She had died two weeks before, and I was very upset. And all of a sudden, I felt one of those waves of grief coming over. So I pulled over at this convenience store, and I was sitting there. And all of a sudden, this flash of light went off. And was it in my head? Was it in the car? And I remember, Rick, I looked to the side, and I saw the silhouette of my mother in this beautiful silver white light. And then her voice filled my head. And she said, Mark, you’ve been given the gift of mediumship so that you would not be crushed by grief. But now you must help those who are suffering with theirs. All right, so I’m trying to just process that now. I’m breaking out in a sweat. And then her voice returned and said, it is your life mission to help people understand that God exists, that heaven, the afterlife exists, that souls are immortal living spirits, that you can communicate with souls, and that you will all be reunited with your loved ones, when it is your time to leave your world and transition into the light. And that’s the message I want to leave with everyone.

Rick: That’s great. And I think it’s very important that people understand that. I think it can make a huge difference in their lives, as we were saying in the beginning. So thanks for what you’re doing. You’re doing it. And you seem like a pretty young man. You’ll probably be doing this for decades.

Mark: I’ll do my best.

Rick: Just don’t step in front of any buses.

Mark: I do my best not to do that. Yeah, I don’t trust the, oh, someone will swoop in. I was a personal injury lawyer, too. I know stuff happens. But thank you, Rick. It’s been such an honor. I’ve been so looking forward to being your guest on ‘Food’ at the Gas Pump. And I want to thank all your listeners for tuning in. Keep doing it. Because this is one of those shows that’s a cut above, because it presents spirituality in a way that other people don’t, and in a way that it should. So thank you, Rick. I appreciate it. God bless. Namaste.

Rick: Oh, thank you. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching. And coincidentally, next week’s guest, Anastasia Mollering, is her name, is a near-death experience person. So we’ll kind of continue in the same theme here. So thank you, Mark. And we’ll be in touch.