• Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher and researcher who moved from evangelical Christianity to atheism to a spiritually engaged worldview through personal synchronicity experiences and deep academic research.
• Her work spans coincidences and synchronicities, near-death experiences, past-life and intermission memories, after-death communications, and moral realism.
• She and Rick explore the idea that consciousness is the foundational substrate of reality — not an emergent property of matter — and that we are all nodes in one vast, interconnected conscious network.
• They discuss how our individual intentions and needs ripple out through that network, potentially orchestrating meaningful coincidences as a kind of intelligent, adaptive response.
• The conversation also examines the ethics of specialization without holistic perspective, how moral values may be grounded in the intrinsic worth of conscious experience, and what near-death and pre-birth memories tell us about the soul’s relationship to the body.

Key Takeaways

• Synchronicities aren’t easily dismissed by probabilistic arguments alone — the cumulative volume and specificity of these events points to something beyond chance operating in the structure of reality.
• Near-death experiences, intermission memories, and reciprocal after-death communications form an interlocking body of evidence that consciousness persists independently of the physical body.
• The dominant physicalist and moral anti-realist worldviews that prevail in mainstream academia may be culturally and ethically costly — a deeper understanding of consciousness as foundational changes how we relate to ethics, death, and each other.
• Narrowly specialized thinking, whether in science, politics, or business, tends to produce harm when disconnected from a wider perspective — accessing deeper consciousness may be the antidote.
• The entry of the soul into a developing body is neither fixed nor binary; pre-birth memories and intermission cases suggest a gradual, dynamic process with significant metaphysical implications for how we approach life-and-death ethical questions.

Full transcript, edited for readability:

Introduction: From Evangelical Christian to Independent Researcher

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. We’ve done well over 600 of them now and if this is new to you and 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 there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website and a page that covers a few alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Sharon Hewitt Rawlette. Sharon is a philosopher and writer who studies extraordinary experiences and what they have to tell us about consciousness and the deeper nature of the world we live in. She has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and has taught for two years at Brandeis University before leaving academia in 2010 for a career as an independent writer and researcher. Her foray into the realm of extraordinary experience began with synchronicities and her first non-academic book was The Source and Significance of Coincidences published in 2019. In 2020, she published a memoir about her personal spiritual journey The Supreme Victory of the Heart. And then in November ’21, she was named a runner-up in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay contest for her essay Beyond Death, on the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after death. And that’s how I found out about her. She has also contributed to a forthcoming collaborative volume on Deep Weird and a French collective work on the role of the trickster in paranormal phenomenon. She also wrote a book in 2016 called The Feeling of Value, Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness. OK Sharon, is that a good introduction? Did I cover all the bases?

Sharon: Yeah, I think so.

Rick: Good. How did you first get interested in this kind of thing?

Sharon: Well, it was through coincidence or synchronicity experiences that I had. I probably had always had sort of a vague interest in whether phenomena like telepathy or clairvoyance were real. I actually grew up an evangelical Christian and then lost my faith in college. I went to a Christian college, but it was an environment that really encouraged intellectual exploration. And so while I was there, I suddenly found myself able to conceive of the world without God in a way that I had never been able to before. And once I was able to actually conceive that that might be the case, I realized that I didn’t have any good evidence for God’s existence. So I became an atheist, or at least a hopeful agnostic in my better moments. And that went on for about a decade.

A Transformative Synchronicity: The French Grocery Store Map

Sharon: It was after those 10 years that some big transitions were happening in my life, some really difficult transitions. And I started to have these experiences that were very much like what I had wished to have before when I was about to give up my childhood faith. Some of them would be seeing a number that was very important to me at crucial moments where I was in a really difficult place and then it would pop up in a really improbable way.

Rick: 33.

Sharon: Yes, 33, exactly. And so you tell people who are skeptical about this, well, this number keeps showing up. And they’re like, yeah, so what? So I started exploring more. And through coincidence, a couple of really important books came to me. One of them was one of Ian Stevenson’s books about his research on reincarnation. And one of them was a book by a French philosopher, Bertrand Meilleur, about the evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy. So I started exploring these topics more and more. And it was about five years after that that suddenly the big one hit. So the big one was something that happened in 2015. I was going up to the mountains to hang out with some friends of mine from college.

Sharon: I was thinking a lot about an ex of mine and I had fallen out of touch with him. I was thinking about the country of France, where I had lived with him. So I’m driving up to Pennsylvania to see my college roommates. I’m hanging out with my friends. We go out one afternoon to look for a grocery store and my friend gets out her smartphone and she asks it to find the nearest grocery stores and then she hands me her phone. When the map comes up, it’s not those grocery stores in Pennsylvania anymore. It is five French grocery stores by the name of Eau de Claire. Each of them has the name of a French town after it. One of them I specifically remembered the name of.

I think your phone thinks that we’re in France. What is going on? I pushed one button. We hadn’t even been talking about the subject.

Sharon: When I got home after that trip, I googled the town that had come up on the phone because I wanted to know where exactly in France it was. It’s the town of Cahaya. And it turned out that it was in Brittany, which is the region where I had lived with my ex. When I saw that it was in that region, it was like something — the emotion was very powerful. I went online and just out of the blue typed in his name and the date that this happened and see if anything pops up. And lo and behold he had posted on his blog that he was going to be in this little town in Brittany on that particular day. And when I googled that town, it was two miles from Cahaya and that grocery store that I had seen on the phone.

The Statistics of Synchronicity: Are Skeptics Right?

Rick: Yeah. And your book contains dozens, if not hundreds, of such stories, not just in your life but in the lives of all kinds of people, many of which are jaw-dropping. But I think you and I are interested in not brushing them away.

Sharon: Well, I did do a lot of research about those probabilistic arguments because I’m somebody who’s mathematically inclined. I wanted to know, well, are the skeptics right about that? I spent months going through this, and coming to this argument, and figuring out how it worked. And I actually wrote a scholarly article about this. Because nobody had really dealt with it in the depth that it needed to be dealt with. The people who had written articles were skeptics who, in maybe five or six pages, were just like, yeah, one in a million events happen every one in a million times.

Yes, it’s true that a certain amount of these events are bound to happen purely by chance. But you have to look at the overall picture. In my experience, it’s above what you would expect to see by chance.

Rick: Yeah. And I’ll have you tell a story. Just this morning, I was listening to your book. And there was the story of one guy who was a pastor or a minister of some sort and he was having doubts about whether he was really having an impact with what he was doing. And then there was some other lady who was feeling suicidal. You know what story I’m referring to? Tell that story.

Sharon: Yeah. So the pastor, he was out traveling around. He had a bus. He was touring around. He was talking in different places. And yeah, he was worried about whether he was having any impact, whether he should just quit what he was doing. And he pulled into a gas station. And as he’s walking back to his bus from this place, he passes a payphone that rings. So finally, he’s like, well, let’s go see who this is. So he picks it up. And the woman on the other end asks for him. She had been in a despairing state, like maybe suicidal, and she had been praying. She thought that this pastor maybe was the only person in the world who could help her. And so she prayed, well, God, please find me a way to get in touch with him. And then these numbers had popped into her head. And so she had written them out. It looked like a phone number. And so she called him. And she thought that she was calling his office in Oregon or something. But somehow these were the numbers of this payphone that he happened to be walking by.

Rick: Yeah, and he answered it. And it not only restored his confidence, but it probably saved her life.

Consciousness as the Invisible Network Behind Coincidence

Sharon: Sure. So the way I lay things out in my book, I have different chapters for different possible sources for these events. Do they come from God? Do they come from angels? Do we create them ourselves through telepathy or through psychokinesis? Is there a law in the universe that just makes similar things happen together? I think probably all of those explanations are the right explanation for individual experiences that people have.

Sharon: The more I think about it more systematically, the more I think that all of these events are still part of some underlying order to the world that we haven’t quite understood. The way that I have started thinking about it is that we’re all part of this invisible network. And I think it’s ultimately a mental network. We’re all part of consciousness. We’re all part of this larger mind. And when we have needs or desires or intentions, those things don’t just have an effect on the world through our physical actions that we take or the words that we say, but they automatically affect all the other conscious beings in the universe.

It’s almost like there is this enormous algorithm that’s happening: okay, we need to meet this person’s need — which way best meets the needs of all other conscious beings at that same time? And then that one gets actualized.

Rick: Well, here’s how I see it. Just as a wave appears to be individual and yet if you go deeper into its origins you realize it’s just the ocean risen up as a wave. We appear to be individual, but ultimately we are the ocean. And as such, there’s only one of us. And that one, I think, is identical to what we might call God.

Matter Emerging from Consciousness: Quantum Mechanics and the Nature of Reality

Sharon: So this idea of the evolution of the world may be going in a certain direction is very inspiring to me. I would like to believe that that’s true, but I tend to say, well, where’s the evidence? So whenever I’m tempted myself to say, well, yeah, maybe the world is evolving into a better and better place, I have trouble coming out and saying that’s what I believe, because I don’t feel like I have a global enough perspective to say whether that’s true or not.

Sharon: But let me throw another ring in here, though, because the revolution of physics has also taught us through Einstein that time doesn’t exist. So for us to say, well, all there is is this molten lava, there’s always the future — there’s always everything that this universe is going to become, which already exists in some way. And so it can be creating itself in a sense.

This is where we’re gonna go, we’re gonna be there, and so our future selves are somehow pulling the evolution of the physical world along that.

Sharon: Because I think, ultimately everything is mind and we have to, something has to experience it in order for it to be real. But then once it is real, once the electron becomes real, because we have observed it to have passed a certain detector, then what is it even that became real? Is it just my experience of an electron? Is there anything to the electron itself? Is the electron having a separate experience from mine?

Rick: The scientific community for a long time has talked about consciousness as something that’s emerging from matter. But really, since we discovered quantum mechanics, it’s looking more like matter is emerging from consciousness. And there’s a certain structure to how it emerges. But that continuously existing physical world doesn’t actually seem to be there. In between us experiencing it, there’s only the possibilities, milling around and interfering with one another.

Moral Realism and the Feeling of Value

Sharon: Yeah, and that’s really part of the reason that I was motivated to write my book, The Feeling of Value, which was actually the dissertation that I wrote at New York University. The dominant view in the subfield of philosophy called metaethics was anti-realism — the idea that good and bad are human constructions. Basically, the best we can do is to take the values that we have and make them more consistent with each other. But ultimately, ethics just comes back to what we as human beings choose to value. And that seemed like a really dangerous worldview.

Value really is a feeling. When you are experiencing the deepest joy, the most wonderful feeling you can imagine — that is the ground of all ethical motivation in the universe. That experience is so majestic it deserves to be in existence.

Sharon: I think those moral convictions that we have come from someplace deeper. They don’t come from a place of just us deciding, well, yeah, I’m gonna care about other conscious beings now. I think that comes from a much deeper place than just human choice. And for myself, I think it comes from our inner experience of consciousness. I think that in experiencing our lives and in experiencing our relationships with other people in the natural world, we actually experience the intrinsic value of what it is to be a conscious being.

Near-Death Experiences, Life Reviews, and the Purpose of Life

Rick: In all of your research, you must have come across many near-death experiences in which people had a life review. And every little thing that they did, they felt the impact of it. Danny Brinkley, he had like four near-death experiences, and he used to be a sharpshooter in Vietnam. And during every of his near-death experiences, he experienced the ramifications, not only of the assassinations he performed, but of the ripple effects, what happened to that person’s family and so on.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah. It used to be when I would hear those accounts from near-death experiencers, I would be like, well, okay, if it’s so obvious to them in that moment that they should have been kind to people, why aren’t we just given that knowledge all of the time so we understand automatically what we’re doing to other people when we’re not being nice? And that’s something I’ve puzzled with for a while, but it seems like the most plausible explanation that I’ve heard is that it’s important for us to be in a setting where the consequences of our actions aren’t immediately apparent, because it tests us in a way. It gives us an opportunity to kind of stretch our spiritual muscles and see, okay, well, are you able to understand the importance of acting kindly towards others, even when it’s not gonna have an immediately obvious effect on you?

This universe is like a playpen of sorts — a safe place to learn these things. There are other beings watching out for us, making sure that even when we make terrible blunders, things can work out in the best way for everyone involved.

Intermission Memories and Evidence for Life Between Lives

Sharon: Well, we didn’t talk a lot about some of the other experiences that I mentioned in my book Beyond Death. One of them that I think is crucial for cementing the evidence for life after death is the existence of intermission memories. One of the skeptical arguments people bring against near-death experiences is, well, those people aren’t permanently dead. They’re just provisionally dead. So, one of the things I think is really important is that in children and also some adults who have memories of past lives, they don’t just have memories of their life in a body, but they have memory of the time after they died in that body.

Sharon: They have memories of things like NDEers report of being able to observe what was going on. A lot of them observed their own funerals or burials and were able to remember specific facts about what happened that were then able to be verified. You’ve got memories of interactions with other deceased people on the other side. And they also have frequently memories of having observed things going on in their future family’s life before they’re born, and sometimes even before they’re conceived.

There are a few cases where children or adults remember having communicated from the afterlife — being an apparition, appearing in a dream, even having poltergeist effects. And those events have been verified by living people.

Sharon: When you have these cases of people who remember being on the other side of that communication, these reciprocal cases, then the skeptical argument about wishful thinking combined with psychic abilities of the living doesn’t hold water anymore.

When Does the Soul Enter the Body? Pre-Birth Memories and Abortion

Rick: As we speak, this is May 14th, I think it is. And there are big protests taking place all over the country right now about abortion. One point that I never hear raised in the discussion, but it seems to me would be a critical part of it if we could deal with the esoteric nature of it, is when does the soul enter the body? Does it enter at conception? Does it enter after, at the end of the first trimester? That would seem to have huge ramifications for the ethical issues around abortion.

Sharon: Well, I would say, first of all, that the evidence that I have seen points to there being many different possible entry points for the soul. And also that it’s not an all or nothing thing — the soul can kind of be lightly attached to the body. And like, sometimes it’s experiencing what the fetus is experiencing. And then sometimes it goes off into something more interesting, and then it comes back. And then more and more frequently as the fetus becomes more developed, it will stay with the fetus more consistently.

If the pregnancy is interrupted, it doesn’t mean that the soul doesn’t get a chance. It doesn’t have the chance of that particular life, but it can come back to the same mother and father, or to someone else.

Sharon: I think it is really important for people to understand that there’s variability about when the soul attaches to the body of the fetus, but also that if the pregnancy is interrupted, it doesn’t mean that the soul doesn’t get a chance. It doesn’t have the chance of that particular life, but it can come back to the same mother and father or to someone else. And most of the people who have memories of having been aborted in a previous life are very understanding about it. Most of them understand, it wasn’t a good time for my mom or my family. So I just came back at a better time.

Staying Open: The Value of Expanding Our Worldview

Rick: Yeah, on this particular issue, I think it would be good if people who are pro-abortion spent time reading and understanding the arguments of people who are anti and vice versa. The reason I interview people like you about topics like this is I just think that a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the way life works will benefit anybody. It’ll just make your life much more fearless and confident and fulfilled and just beneficial in every way.

Sharon: Yeah, it kind of circles back to what we were talking about at the very beginning — staying open to more possibilities. Because a lot of people view the world through a very narrow lens, the way that they were taught to growing up or the way their immediate community views it. And it can be really helpful, even if you don’t accept another viewpoint, just to consider it and say, well, it’s possible that that could be true. What if those things are true? I don’t have to be as fearful of these eventualities because it might turn out that death is not the end.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I think that as we move along, the kinds of ideas we’re discussing are moving more and more into the public domain. More and more people are thinking about them, more and more people are having spiritual experiences and pondering these kinds of things.

Sharon: Yeah, and being more open about them, discussing them. And I think it’s so important to be able to hear people tell their stories in their own words because hearing near-death experiencers and people who’ve had amazing synchronicities tell those stories in their own words and seeing their face, it’s so inspiring. It opens you to understand that they’re just somebody like you. They’re not some crazy person. We didn’t have that before the internet.

Rick: Yeah, me and many others, Jeffrey Mishlove, for instance, and many others. All right, well, I’ve found this to be a really fulfilling and enlivening conversation. Maybe we’ll do another one in a year or two. Great, well, thanks, Sharon. Really appreciate it. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching.

Sharon: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: See you later.

Sharon: Bye-bye.

Rick: Bye.