March 22, 2024 • 53 mins
This episode brings you Scientific and afterlife experts discussing the matrix of reality, and how it only takes a small group of people to change the world! Are you one of them?
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. This is the place to be if you're
ready for the best podcasts of the paranormal, curious, and
sometimes unexplained. Now listen to this.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:45):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know
that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and so
will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. Have you
(01:16):
ever had to deal with a nasty skeptic, you know
the ones I'm talking about. You share your belief or
your thoughts about the afterlife and they shut you right down.
There's nothing you can do or say that can convince them.
The International Association for Near Death Studies also called ians
(01:37):
dot org, is our partner in changing the conversation about
the reality of the afterlife. Each year, they host a
conference that all are welcome to attend, coming up in
August of twenty twenty four. You can join the conference
live in Phoenix, Arizona. Details at conference dot ions dot org.
(01:58):
Today you'll meet four highly respected panelists, including doctors, professors,
and scientists Eben Alexander, Neil Grossman, Marjorie Woollacott, and Stephen Schwartz.
You'll hear their views on skepticism, these nasty skeptics, how
we deal with them, and ultimately how we can transform
(02:22):
the world. So let's start off with doctor Eben Alexander,
neurosurgeon and author of the book Proof of Heaven.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
I had spent the first fifty four years of my
life honing a very kind of conventional scientific worldview. I
had the advantage as a youth of my father being
very scientific. He was chairman of a neurosurgical training program.
But he also had a very strong faith in.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
God and power of prayer.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
He was deeply spiritual, but also deeply scientific. I wanted
to believe all that I had learned in my Methodist church.
But in that career building up towards being a neurosurgeon
and trying to make sense of consciousness, mind and brain,
I just couldn't understand how consciousness could survive independently of
the brain. I bought into the materialist position of brain
(03:09):
creating consciousness, physical world being all there is, and I
now realized that I just had it one hundred and
eighty degrees wrong. My point is I often make these days,
is to the true open minded skeptic, I mean a
truly educated, open minded doubter of all skeptic, the first
position they reject, from materialism to idealism and all the
(03:30):
various dualisms relating mind and brain, the one that's the
most ridiculous is materialism. It's the one that is the
absolutely most hopeless. And so it's really just a complete
flip from what I believe before. But it's the one
that makes far more sense.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
He was asked what recommendation he'd have to a skeptic.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
I would recommend a strong personal experience. Good news is
that doesn't mean being smoked down by a truck, or
meningitis or anything else like that. We're all conscious so
we have the ability to go within. And that's one
thing I must say I loved about Marjorie's book, you know,
as a neuroscientist with similar training that I had had,
(04:10):
I loved the way that Marjorie was able to have
such profound kind of insights, awakenings, and revelation through process
of meditation. I think any conscious sentient being can come
to a much deeper understanding by exploring consciousness once you
realize that it's not created by the brain at all,
but is basically fundamental in the universe and is allowed
(04:33):
in through a filtering mechanism of the brain. Going within
is actually a way of going out into the universe
and gaining tremendous information, guidance, kind of sense of insight, connection,
meaning purpose. All of that lives in those realms, all
of real creativity. Some of the best, most extraordinary inventions
and concepts from people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Robert Lewis, Stevenson,
(04:58):
Salvador Dali, Beethoven, and others. They would all talk about
how the universe basically gifted them with these insights, these creations.
They weren't thinking their way to it, and of course
in our materialist world, and in the modern conventional scientific world,
we're used to this notion of thinking our way to it.
We establish a certain body of facts and empirical evidence
(05:22):
and rational thought, and then we follow that towards what
we think is the answer. And yet that slow kind
of methodical plotting is not necessarily the way to some
of the deepest truths and insights. I know certainly Einstein
was a beautiful example of that, just drifting off in
a sailboat being hauled in by the harbor police late
at night because he just got lost in thought. But
(05:44):
that's where so much of this comes from, and not
just following the breadcrumbs of our logical linguistic mind, but
actually opening our minds to the possibility and trusting that
the universe can show us so much more so, for me,
personal experience is absolutely crucial. I loved the quote from
(06:05):
Jessica Utz, who was a statistician who did so much
work with remote viewing, with precognition, things like that. She
was the head of the American Statistical Association in twenty fifteen,
and at her presidential address to six thousand plus statisticians
from sixty two countries around the world. She made it
(06:25):
very clear that the evidence is there for anyone who
studies it, and there certainly are people here. I think
Stefan Schwartz is well known for having a tremendous amount
of that evidence lined up supporting remote viewing, various protocols
showing the reality of this not in doubt. And yet
the American I got exactly the organization that supposedly summarized
(06:48):
the report to Congress AIAR. I knew their acronym, but
it was something about American Institute of Research or what
have you. But anyway, their report said that remote viewing
could not be used for operational intelligence, that the data
wasn't quite that good. But she said that in terms
of proving the reality of remote viewing of a precognition,
(07:11):
that we can know the future in many different experimental
settings that are mind bending. When you realize what's going
on there, it's very real. But her point, and what
she said in the address is when she talks to
all those experts out there, all the statisticians, the people
who manipulate this data and come to an understanding of it,
it's very real. She would ask them, well, have you
(07:33):
read the data? Are you familiar. What are you familiar with?
And they'd say, well, I don't spend the time studying
that because I don't believe it can exist. So these
are scientists, and these are the ones who get the
bully pulpit with NPR and New York Times Science section,
who say, oh, NDEs or they're hallucinations, they're not real
because those people have not had them. And not only that,
(07:55):
they haven't even talked to people who have had them.
I notice how Sean Carroll, it seems to be on
circuit these days, is kind of the atheist scientist. He
was on CBS Sunday Morning a week ago, and he
was there basically to debunk Dean Rayden's very high quality
work supporting the reality these kind of phenomena. And I
know in Sean Carroll's book The Big Picture, he very
(08:17):
proudly says that all he needs to know about near
death experiences has to do with the fact that one author,
Alex Malarkey, reported a near death experience but then said
he made it all up. And so Sean says, that's
all I need to know. In fact, he says in
his book The Big Picture, which is supposed to be
a very erudite look at modern science and understanding of
(08:39):
the nature reality. He says that no respectable people pay
any attention to things like NDEs and it just shows
this kind of extraordinary sense of closed mindedness. It's important
to point out when we talk about skeptics. I truly
believe that the open minded skeptic, who is very knowledgeable
(08:59):
about all this data concerning the mind brain relationship, the
one position you have to reject is ridiculous and impossible
as materialism, that somehow consciousness is arising from physical matter
and that that's all there is to it. And that's
why I believe that indies in many ways are the
tip of the spear. But there's no way from my
(09:20):
point of view, and I realized this early on after
my de that you can approach this just by hm, well,
let's study indies and learn everything we can about them,
because at the end of the day, people are still
going to come up and say, well, they didn't really die,
they just almost died. We want to know what happens
when you really die, and to do that, I think
you need a much broader view at the nature of
(09:41):
consciousness and the relationship between mind and brain. That's where
it starts getting absolutely fascinating. In that theater of operations,
one of the first things you realize is that the
old notion that we can only know things through the
kin of our physical senses, what I can see with
the eyes and hear with the ears, is false. And
that's what remote viewing precognition, all the work on out
(10:03):
of body experiences and of course near death experiences with
veritical perception, shared death experiences, and then especially that absolute
gold mine thanks to Ian Stevenson and the brilliant workers
at Division and Perceptual Studies Jim Tucker, of more than
twenty seven hundred cases now of past life memories and children,
where the best answer in many of those cases is
(10:26):
a true reincarnation. Anybody who's sitting there trying to find
memory located in the brain, or trying to find consciousness
located in the brain, had better start realizing that they
need to greatly enlarge their theater of operations if they
want to get to any answers at all. So it's
really all about consciousness, and that's why I love this convergence.
Over many decades of work both in quantum physics, where
(10:50):
it's now basically painted into a corner where idealism is
the best answer. You know that this is a mental universe,
and that mind is at the origin of all that exists,
and that all this beautiful physical universe seems to be
a projection from mind. And I think the best way
to look at that as an individual is just to
realize that the causal principles involved in our lives cannot
(11:14):
be reduced to the simplistic little meanderings of electrons, quarks
and protons in the sub atomic world with some bottom
up causation. But that's really where all this is headed
and taking a much bigger view, and the reason I
think it's been so challenging for the scientific community. The
conventional material of scientific community is really almost like it's
(11:35):
burned into the DNA over four hundred years of thinking, well,
we look at the material world and understand it, if
we get too close to the mental or the mind,
we might get burned at the state. That was the
risk back in those early days, and it's no longer
the risk. But there's this incredible intense avoidance really, and
I think Neil has in my mind one of the
(11:55):
best answers of that, and I'll let him get into it,
but it has to do with the emotions involved.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Now here's doctor Marjorie Woollacott, her most recent book titled
Infinite Awareness, The Awakening of a Scientific Mind. When I
was in high.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
School, I actually was hoping I could go to college
and find out where the spirit or the soul resided
in the human body. But then I went to college
and started taking courses in biology, and they said, please,
that's impossible. I was convinced by my neuroscientist professors that
was a silly question to ask, and so I became
a materialist. Then, through a spiritual awakening when I was
(12:31):
at about thirty, I knew at the deepest level of
my being that there was consciousness beyond my body. But
it was very hard to talk to any other scientist
about that, and so I kept that really hidden in
a certain sense from my colleagues until probably about ten
years ago, when I was getting ready to retire, and
I felt then I could come out of the closet
(12:51):
and be open.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We need
to go into our first break and we'll be back
with this amazing Hammel discussion about skepticism about the reality
of life after death and about what can happen for
the tipping point to occur that all people believe in
the afterlife. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on
(13:14):
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 6 (13:23):
Keep it here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Sanders Champlain will be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
We are happy to announce that our Coast to Coast
AM official YouTube channel has now reached over three hundred
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recent and past shows for free, so head on over
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(14:01):
is free show audio, so don't wait. Coast to COASTAM
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doctor Sky.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Keep it right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Pyronormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain
and this episode is dedicated to dealing with skeptics. We'll
continue hearing from doctor Marjorie Woollcott, neuroscientist and her latest
book is called Infinite Awareness, The Awakening of a Scientific Mind,
(15:02):
in which she explores scientific studies supporting the premise that
consciousness functions beyond the mind.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I think that if I were talking to a skeptic,
the first thing I would find out is if they're
curious at all about the data, which I think you
were saying too, because a lot of skeptics aren't curious.
They do think they know the answer and then we
should just change the subject. But if they have a
little bit of curiosity, then I go and I start
talking to them about what data I have been convinced
by out there. First of all, looking at the near
(15:33):
death experience carefully controlled and designed studies by Kim van
Lommel that is here, Bruce Grayson is here, Samparnia who
is not here. A number of these research studies, their
prospective studies where you bring in everybody to a network
of hospitals that has cardiac arrest and then you interview
everybody who survived. You ask them what their experience was,
(15:54):
and you find out if they had these vertical experiences
where their heart has stopped, there's no EEG, and they're
watching everything that happened and that can be verified. And
I say to my curious colleague, well, how could you
possibly explain that EEG and the ability to actually perceive
what was going on in the room outside of your body.
(16:14):
And what I like most recently is that there are
now new studies on psilocybins. This is worked by Robin
Carhart Harris in London who has shown that when subjects
are given psilocybin, the brain activity and functional magnetic resonance
imaging actually drops down to very low levels, significantly lower
(16:34):
levels than normal in key hub areas of the brain,
saying that once again it's directly correlated with the intensity
of their mystical experience. So once again it's the lowering
of brain activity that is actually responsible for these beautiful experiences.
And now with meditation, Pinterberger and his colleagues in Germany
are showing the same thing that when you have thought
(16:55):
free meditation in master meditators, your EEG and all almost
all areas of the brain at all frequencies goes way down.
So this tells me it's not my brain pausing those things.
They aren't hallucinations because my brain is going inactive. To me,
those are really great evidence that will help with the
curious scientists who we hope will become a mystic. The issue, though,
(17:18):
is that if somebody isn't interested, I think that I
have to have compassion on them because I used to
be that way myself, and I didn't want to hear
about somebody that I thought was spiritual because I was
the scientist, somewhat an arrogant scientist, and I thought I
knew the answers, and it took an experience to actually
(17:40):
change me to really become open. So that's the very
interesting paradox about the two sides of this issue.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Next, let's hear from doctor Neil Grossman.
Speaker 6 (17:51):
My parents are very strict atheist materialists, but their conditioning
didn't take with me, and the earliest ext experiences I
can remember, the memory just came to me. As a teenager.
My first teacher was really Beethoven. His music sent chills
up and down my spine. I could not explain under
(18:12):
materialist metaphysics why I was so deeply moved by his music.
I then went to MITS to study physics. When I
learned the quantum theory, the Stroding equation, Einstein, I wanted
to know what those guys thought about what it all meant.
Eighty to ninety percent of them were open to a
spiritual or holistic worldview, so that gave me permission to
(18:36):
go in that direction. I think what really cemented it
for me in those early years was my experiences with
my teacher and then mentor Houston Smith. I took Eastern
philosophy course, and when I was reading the Hindu and
Buddhist text, it just rang true to me. But then
what really drove that home is he was with the
Harvard Divinity School working with antheogens or hallucinogens or whatever
(19:00):
were called back then. I nagged him so much to
try it that he relented and my first had some
psilocybin at his home and it was a very very
deep experience, and from then on there wasn't really any doubt,
even though I somehow had to spend forty years in
an academic philosophy department surrounded by materialist atheists, feeling isolated
(19:24):
and alone. What of the empirical data do I find
most compelling or most convincing. I think if one is rational,
then what Evan and Marjorie said is absolutely true. I
think you going back to the time of William James.
He became convinced that there's a something more based on
his studies of mediumship, telepathy and other things that was
(19:46):
available to him. But I think at that time, from
just a perspective of rationality, the evidence was it met
the civil standards for ponderance of evidence, but not the
criminal standards beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, I think, with
the publication of Irreducible Mind, the evidence again from a
perspective of rationality, where we form our beliefs based on
(20:07):
evidence alone, not biased, right, the evidence has met the
beyond the reasonable doubt standard. What that means is that
if somebody looks at the evidence and doesn't believe that
consciousness is independent of the mind, they're being irrational. Okay,
So when I hold that, and then I want to
go back to again in a personal experience late seventies
(20:28):
early eighties, stuff about the near death experiences was just
coming out. Got moodies books Life After Life and ken
Ring's work stuff, and I got very excited. And so
for me, when I first read Moody's book, I had
no doubt whatsoever because it was consistent with what I'd
read from the mystics, my studies of world mysticism and
from my own psychedelic experience. So excitedly I went to
(20:50):
colleagues and what do you think of this? What do
you think that is all last gasp of a dying brain?
And they go through all the possibilities that have now
been completely refuted. But I asked, I remember this very clearly,
what short of having an experience yourself might convince you
that it's real? And this guy said, well, even if
I were to have such an experience, I would believe
(21:12):
myself to have been hallucinated. Well, this is a statement
of someone who's saying I will not believe it no
matter what. Right, So this is not rational. And so
if your question was, well, what can you say to
somebody who very irrationally has society. He's not going to
believe it no matter what, the answer is nothing. I
(21:33):
like to use the term coined a fundamentialist to invite
an explicit comparison with the fundamentalist Christian of any religion
who believes that the earth is less than six thousand
years old. You can bring the Guide to the edge
of the Grand Canyon and look down. He sees those layers,
a scratter of frocks the positive. That's not going to
shake his faith at all. And he said, well, God
(21:54):
just created the world that way, right, And you can
find there's a part of the philosoph well known that
whatever you believe can be held onto no matter what
if you're willing to make adjustments everywhere. Oh they're faking it,
they're lying, or this or that. People experience what they
want to experience, whatever they have all the answers. I
(22:15):
think their biggest response to it is a refusal to
look at the data. That's part of being irrational. When
you have a situation where I don't know of a
single person who has responsibly examined what we call the
evidence of the data who has not come away convinced
of it. So when you know that and you still
(22:37):
refuse to look at the data, there's something else going
on at rational activity, and I think I have a
hunch as to what it is. When I was reviewing
the book The Self Does Not Die, which I strongly recommend,
is over one hundred cases of documented ritical perception occurring
under conditions where it is known that nothing is going
(22:57):
on in the brain. All these people are or monitor
or whatever. See part of that book the author's dialogue
with critics and skeptics, and you can see the irrationality
just piled on and on and on. One of the
cases he talks about is the case of doctor Rudy.
So doctor Rudy's being interviewed and he's talking about one
(23:18):
or two cases which involved a near death experience as
somebody who just well dead and he had been declared dead.
He had seen everything, heard everything, and reported it. At
the end, doctor Rudy, he tears up and he says, well,
I always get emotional when I talk about these cases.
And I almost said outloud, yes, so do I. And
(23:39):
what are these emotions? And I think that's what is
behind the so called skeptic. They're afraid of their own feelings.
They're all bottled up and here dead from the neck down,
as we say, the academic intellectual. They are afraid of
these emotions that you got to feel if you're caring
for see people, if you're doing this research right, it
(24:03):
rubs off on you and you feel these emotions. And
I think the deep down fear is I'll say that
four letter word, is of the fear of love. They
tend to be very much into status, and reputation and
material acquisition and wanting to be thought right, all these
ego games that academics, you know, love to play. Just
(24:26):
just afraid that their emotions are just bottled up. And
I think there's something like a fear of emotion, and
that's not something that rational argument or empirical evidence can address.
So I myself am skeptical about whether there's anything you
can say to the committed skeptical. Actually, we shouldn't be
using the word skeptic. The Charlie Tart in his book
(24:48):
The End of Materialism suggests that we don't use the
word skeptic because that's a good word. We should all
be skeptical of stuff. They are believers, their believes in
an alternative ideology, namely materialism. Right, and just like a
fundamentals Christian, we could bring him to the edge of
the Grand Canyon and he would say to the geologists, well,
(25:09):
I'm skeptical of your theory, right, that these rocks strata
layers prove that the earth is older than what it
says in the Bible. Right, I have my own views,
my own faith, And so the fundament mentalist Christian can
claim to be skeptical in the same way that them
self identified materialists are today. And what sustains them their
(25:30):
skepticism is simply they won't look at the data, won't.
Speaker 5 (25:32):
Look the evidence.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
And here's Stefan Schwartz.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
Wellhen I was twenty three, I woke up. I had
a series of what today we would call very meaningful synchronicities.
But it woke me up and I went from being
very much a person of my background in training to
something completely different. Changed my entire life. And for the
last fifty years I have been an experimentalist because I
(25:59):
care a great deal about data, and I created a
technique called remote viewing along with some other friends, and
I've studied healing, meditation, creativity and came to see that
materialism is a cultural affectation, not a scientific one. I
can expand on that if you like, but it is
(26:20):
inconsistent with the data. I remain a data person as experimentalist.
I have found through my interactions with a number of
people as well as my own experiments, that clearly we
need to think of consciousness as something that is causal
and fundamental.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Let's squeeze in a quick break and we'll pick up
right where we left off. You're listening to Shades of
the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 5 (26:58):
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
There's more Shades of the Afterlife coming right up.
Speaker 6 (27:07):
The best afterlife information you can get well. Shades of
the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
Hi, this is your followist Kevin Randall, and you're listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain.
We're listening to a very sharp team of experts about
why closed minded skeptics don't want to believe when there's
a lot of evidence that our consciousness survives death. Now
we're listening to Stefan Schwartz, who spent many years working
(28:03):
with the Stanford Research Institute and the government in the
field of remote viewing.
Speaker 5 (28:08):
I remain a data person as experimentalist, and I have
found through my interactions with a number of people as
well as my own experiments, that clearly we need to
think of consciousness, as Plank told us, as something that
is causal and fundamental. When I was twelve, I witnessed
(28:30):
a near death experience not mine, but I witnessed a
young woman have a near death experience and nobody could
explain it to me, and so I continued to be
interested in that without really understanding anything. And then I
met George Ritchie in the early sixties, who was like
a sort of precursor to Eben, wrote a very famous
(28:51):
book at the time. And I have come to see
the quest to understand the nature of consciousness as one
of the primary challenges facing not only science but our culture,
because I don't think that until we fully appreciate the
causal and fundamental nature of consciousness that we will be
(29:13):
prepared to face the challenges of climate change and everything
else that is coming upon us. Because we must understand
that we live in a matrix of consciousness, and that
consciousness has continuity between lives, understand that materialism is a
cultural affect, not a scientific one. It arises from the
(29:34):
Council of Trent. Between fifteen forty five and fifteen sixty three,
the Roman Catholic senior hierarchy met in Toronto and Bologna.
They were concerned about reformation, but the outcome of the
fifteen meetings was that they issued an edict in which
they said, anything that has to do with consciousness, they
(29:56):
call it spirit, but read consciousness. That is our world.
And you all in science you can have everything that's
in space and time, materiality. We wish you well with that.
And it was very exciting because science was really just
getting started in its modern context. And then they said,
but there's one thing we need to tell you. If
(30:19):
you get into our realm of consciousness, will kill you. Well,
not only kill you, will torture you and will burn
you alive. Now nobody talks very much about this anymore.
It seems like ancient history. But the fact is that
for three hundred years, as science was developing into the
modern disciplines that we think of today, you literally not
(30:40):
only could lose your position, but you could be killed
as a result of dabbling in anything that involved consciousness.
The last person killed by the Inquisition, which that Trento
meetings produced, that church legitimized torture as an activity, officially
condoned torture chambers, and the last person killed by the
(31:03):
Inquisition was in eighteen twenty six was a man who
was a teacher, a professor who was teaching his students
about the nature of deism. As a result of that,
scientists who didn't want to be humiliated by being told
what they could or couldn't study, made consciousness a taboo,
and therefore they stopped studying it because you could literally
(31:27):
get killed. And so basically they took the position just
like children, well, if you won't let me play that game,
I don't care about that game anyway, and didn't study it.
So this is a really important point because what happens,
and what is happening now, is that we are experiencing
what Thomas Kohn, who probably wrote the most important book
(31:49):
on the history and philosophy of science written in the
twentieth century, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he coined the
term paradigm, and we are in what Kun would call
a paradigm crisis. A paradigm, from his perspective, was an
generally agreed cultural worldview of how the universe work, how
(32:11):
things work, and that when everybody kind of agreed to that,
they didn't have to discuss it anymore and they could
go on and solve the problems that he called normal science.
But what happens is anomalies begin to accumulate. You all
out there are living anomalies, and in fact there are
according to PIM, about four point two percent of the
(32:33):
American population, that's about thirteen million people, plus the tens
of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of physicians who
treated people who had near death experiences, who have had
a direct, impactful contact with the idea that as Max
Planck said when they asked him, what have you learned?
(32:54):
And he said, in response to the question, and it's
in the Observer of twenty five January nineteen thirty one,
he said, what I've learned is that consciousness is causal
and fundamental. You cannot get behind consciousness. Space time arose
from consciousness. Consciousness did not arise from space time. It
(33:15):
is the fundamental. The interesting thing about the founders of
modern physics is that they all came to the conclusion
that Plank was right, and so we inherited their equations,
but we did not inherit the wisdom and conclusions that
they drew from doing those equations. The central thing you
learn about dealing with skepticism is its mediocrity. Some years ago,
(33:40):
I was asked by ABC News to take part in
a debate with a neurophysicist named Jerry Levy and a
skeptic named Dan Dennett and ed may at Sri and myself,
And when it came my time to speak, I'd looked
at Dennett and said, since you have such very strong
(34:01):
feelings about this subject, I can only assume that you
have taken the time to actually deeply reach into the
literature and critique it, and that's where your feelings are arising.
Is that correct? And he looked at me in such
a condescending tone, said, you don't think I actually read
this stuff, do you? There was absolute dead silence in
(34:24):
the hall. This was all filmed by ABC. There are
about six hundred reporters and news directors. There was first
of all absolute silence at that comment. Then there were snickers,
then there were giggles. When I see people critique near
death experiences, I'm mindful, for instance, recently of Bruce Grayson's
exchange with Carolyn Watts and mobs. You see the quality
(34:48):
of mediocrity. If you look recently at Daryl Bem's very
interesting experiments about precognitive awareness, in which he has been
replicated now to a point where there are is better
than one in a billion chance that this could be
possibly happening by chance, he was attacked by a skeptic
named Wagamaker, and he used as his basis for his
(35:12):
skepticism the work of a mathematician named Wesley Johnson, and
Wesley Johnson and Jessica Utz joined with Daryl Bem in
writing a refutation of the Wagamaker critique, in which Wesley Johnson,
who was the basis upon which the critique was base, said,
you didn't understand a word that I wrote. I could
give you examples of this over and over again. I
(35:34):
think what we are experiencing is a change in consciousness,
and this is not the first time this has happened.
Between the eighth and second centuries, there was something that
historians know as the Axial Age, and during this period
of time, as almost every major religion that we see
today began, all the pre Abrahamic religions began. Literally, consciousness
(36:00):
of humanity change. And I think that is the process
and why this meeting has as many people attending it
as it does. We are witnessing a change in the
consciousness of the culture, and I think that that is
very significant because what it is doing is helping us
prepare to see ourselves as part of the matrix of life,
(36:23):
not as something independent of it, and that only by
understanding the matrix and its relationship to the planet will
we be able to prepare for change. So I applaud
you all for being here, because you are early birds,
you are the early swallows. Going back to Capistrano.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Let's go back to Eban Alexander.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
I was talking to my opening statement of Jessica Utz
and those statisticians, where she is basically saying, if you
look at the evidence, these are real effects. The statistics,
the empirical data point that out, and then of course
to and on basically the doubters out there, and again
skeptic is not really a very good word for them,
because Neil says, they pretty much made up their mind.
(37:03):
They don't even want to review the data because they know,
based on their theoretical model of the world that it's false.
But to end that little story, though, Jessica Hutzan said, well,
what's the best answer, more data or would you like
to have a strong personal experience. Almost universally what they
wanted was the strong personal experience. So the data is there,
(37:27):
but I think what really can help people to get
to the next level is the strong personal experience, and
this is why again we're such fans of meditation. A
lot of the work we do involve some tools differential
frequency sound that intersects with the brain in the lower
brain stem, as opposed to most sounds that have their
influence in the recently evolved near cortex. And I believe
(37:49):
it's by going for the lower brain stem, by getting
its circuits that evolved three hundred million years ago that
were actually intercepting consciousness at a very primitive level. So
I believe that people can actually cultivate experiences. I think
the real shame in what we're facing now, even as
much as I feel that the world is waking up
to this, and I personally know a lot of scientists
(38:11):
who I think are helping to lead the charge in
this kind of understanding. And from my point of view,
it's inevitable that over the next decade or so, the
scientific community and hopefully by extension, the world at large,
will wake up to the reality of these experiences telling
us something very deep and profound about the nature of
human existence and why we're here. But I must say
(38:33):
that in spite of the progress and optimism that I
sense in certain members of the scientific community. I find
myself somewhat distressed that the major media, for example, New
York Times, Scientific American, a lot of the places that
might be fascinated by this and want to share this
incredibly good news with humanity about the scientific investigation of
(38:55):
consciousness to date have really not been very open to
it at ally. Please, and I know the people in
this panel are aware of some of the work that's
happened recently. For example, in our book Living in a
Mindful Universe, Karen Nowell and I push the position of idealism,
which I believe is the ultimate answer in terms of
any kind of framework of understanding. This is a mental universe,
(39:18):
and that all the physical emerges from that.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
This is a mental universe, and all of the physical
emerges from that. Wow, powerful words. When we get back,
you'll be extremely interested in the closing words from this panel.
Let's go to the break. You're listening to Shades of
the after Life on the iHeart Radio and Coast to
(39:43):
Coast AM Paranormal podcast Network.
Speaker 6 (39:55):
Stay there, Sandra will be right back.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Hey, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren. Don't
forget to check out my show strange things each week
as I.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
Bring you the world of the truly amazing and bizarre
right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
This is Afterlife Expert Daniel Bradley, and you're listening to
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paronormal Podcast Network.
(40:47):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain.
I welcome you to do some research on these great folks,
Neil Grossman, Marjorie Woollcott, Stefan Schwartz, and our friends at
the International Association for Near Death Studies i AMS dot org.
Let's continue with doctor Eben Alexander.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
The recent experiments in quantum physics keep pointing us ever
more strongly in that direction that entanglements reel, that spooky
action at a distance, as Einstein put is real. But
what that really means is that consciousness is fundamental and
it returns tremendous power to human beings when we come
to realize the implications of that in terms of manifesting
(41:31):
the world of our dreams. The other kind of bastion,
in my mind, that kind of materialist thinking really belongs
in the eighteen hundreds but doesn't really belong in the
late twentieth century, and how it has survived is beyond me.
But the other kind of bastion, as Neil will tell
you from working for all those years in an academic
philosophical department, is our institutes of higher education. The colleges
(41:56):
are hardcore pushers. So this kind of material mindset on
our youth. I'm hoping that we can reverse that trend
very rapidly with this awakening, because obviously to change the future,
we begin and have the most effect by changing our youth.
And that's why I love when we give talks and
we have a lot of young people there, but they're
not the average you know, the average age of my audiences,
(42:19):
or people in their fifties and sixties and what have you.
But to wake up the youth, to bring this kind
of knowledge and awakening, I think to college campuses is
an absolutely crucial move. And then of course the other
move is to awaken our mass media. I was in
touch with one of my editors for Proof of Heaven
just a few weeks ago, trying to put this out there,
(42:40):
with the whole new series of proposed articles to go
out to the press, and she said none of her
journalistic colleagues who would write about this kind of stuff
believe that indieas are real. So we obviously have our
work cut out for us.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
And here's Marjorie will accut.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
I just want to add one thing that related to
the academic community. If you do look at panel and
many of the people out here in the audience, we
are talking because we are toward the end of our
professions and we don't have to worry about credibility amongst
our colleagues in terms of getting tenure, getting promotion, and
getting our grants funded and getting papers published. When I
(43:15):
publish a regular paper in neuro rehabilitation, there's no question
about it's being accepted by a major journal. When I
put the word meditation on it, suddenly it's like, oh,
this isn't real research, and we don't publish that kind
of research. It's just observational. It's not real science. I
think with Pim Van Loomo said in one of his
interviews something about the idea that our National Academy of
(43:36):
Sciences has most people there who are atheists and materialists,
and until we change that, we're not going to change.
Really all of the young people at universities having the
ability to get tenure and get promotion who have ideas
about consciousness being fundamental. So, as Evan was saying, we
need to start with the young people. We've just started
a new Academy for the Advancement of Post Materialist Sciences
(43:59):
and Stefan is on the board, and we're trying to
encourage young professors to do research in this area and
help them with the gaining of promotion and tenure and
things like that so that we can begin to change
the academic communities culture.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Here's Stefan Schwartz.
Speaker 5 (44:16):
I want to leave you with this thought. There is
a lot of research that has been done, particularly at
Van Rensler Politech, about how many people it takes to
change the culture. This idea that the few change the many.
Very few people understand that the American Revolution that only
about three percent of the population supported it and only
about thirteen percent of it were actually involved in it.
(44:39):
So this is small groups of people who begin to
give you examples of how this process works. And I'm
up here doing this panel because I'm into social transformation.
I believe in data, and I think the data is
absolutely clear there are now at least nine protocols that
are carried out at uniities all over the world. That is,
(45:02):
it's a billion to one that they're not correct. I
don't think the question is data anymore. I think the
question is culture, and the question about how to do
this is by changing people's state of consciousness in your
immediate community in which you live. Look at smoking. I
can look out at this audience and a lot of
(45:23):
people younger than me, but nonetheless old enough to remember
that when you went to somebody's house there was on
the coffee table, there was a pack of cigarettes, and
an ashtray and one of those ronson lighters your mother
told you not to fool with. Today, you never see
hardly anybody smoking. This is about changing consciousness. And if
(45:44):
we change consciousness by our beingness, that is the nature
of who we are and what we stand for. Just
before Gandhi was assassinated in nineteen forty eight, he was
interviewed by the Times of India. They porter that was
set up to interview him up in his ashram came
to him and said, Goh Gandhaji, my editor says, I
(46:07):
only should ask you one question, and Gandhi said, well,
what's the question, And he said, my question is how
did you force the British to leave India? They were
one of the most powerful nations on earth. India was
the crown jewel of their colonial empire. You are a
man who had no official position, you had no money,
(46:28):
you had no army. How did you force them to leave?
And Gandhi's answer is the point that I want to make.
He said, it isn't what we did that mattered, although
that mattered. It isn't what we said that mattered, although
that mattered too. It was the nature of our character
who we are, that led the British to choose to
(46:53):
leave India. The difference between force and choose, those two
verbs is the key to this thing. You all are
the beginning group. There are thirteen million of you. We
have three hundred and eighteen million people in the United States.
When we get to thirty one million thereabouts, we're going
to see a fundamental change in the culture. And this
(47:16):
change is absolutely essential because, as I said earlier, it
is the only way we are going to create a
culture focused on well being that will allow us to
move into the future. And I invite you to join
me in doing.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
That, And here is Neil Grossman.
Speaker 6 (47:35):
I certainly do agree with Stefan that we are on
the cusp of a cultural change. I think our present
leadership is the one step backwards or a giant spring
forward in the coming years. But I'm an optimist and
I've been wrong before. Nevertheless, I want to get back
to ask Evan a question about arriving at a belief
(47:57):
based on evidence, rationality thing and coming to a belief
based on direct experience. I think Evan is right that
it's direct experience that wins every time. But yet, having
been a philosopher and taught critical thinking, I do believe
that rational argumentation examining the evidence is important or not unimportant.
(48:19):
So I want to ask you, Evan, because you were
not looking at the evidence when you were at Harvard
Brain Surgeon, because you believed, like Dennett, that it was
a lot of crap. Right, And Dennett, incidentally is a
hero to academic philosophers, And that tells you something about
the environment I've been in the last forty years. So
suppose someone took a gun to your head, Evan and said, Evan,
for the next nine months, you have to immerse yourself
(48:42):
in what irreducible mind and that kind of thing. You
read the papers and the books and all of that,
would anything there have convinced you.
Speaker 4 (48:50):
Absolutely. I think the evidence is overwhelming. The problem was
that was not in my field of purview. But I
believe anyone who takes a look at the evidence. I
know how much trouble we've had finding debate opponents who
support the materialist position because they're a dwindling breed, because
once they start actually looking at the evidence, they jump
(49:10):
ship because there really is nothing to support that materialist position.
That is what is so astonishing. So yes, the evidence
is all around us. All we have to do is
look at, certainly for the scientific crowd, irreducible mind beyond physicalism.
Those are absolutely landmark books from division and perceptual studies.
But there are other books that I think for kind
of the lay press. The Self Does Not Die is
(49:33):
a very important work, and I think that book is
crucial in getting out there. I love Science of Near
Death Experiences by John C. Hagen. Third, I think is
a very concise kind of medical, peer reviewed work that
properly reflects on this. The evidence is out there, and
there are many other books that have come to the
four recently that I think are hitting on the same
(49:54):
kind of target, like our book Living in a Mindful Universe,
Minos Cavatos and deep Ac Chopers book The Universe of
a bunch of different works, and there's some that are
to come out in the next year or so that
I think are also crucial and take it to the
next level, like Bernardo Castrip's coming book in April of
next year of the Idea of the World. And there
(50:15):
are others. So I think the evidence is there.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Let's go back to Stefan Schwartz.
Speaker 5 (50:19):
I would recommend that you look at the structure of
scientific revolutions and read it not in terms of science,
but in terms of how culture changes, because it's very important.
I would suggest One Mind by Larry Dassi is a
very good book. I recommend very strongly Pim Van Lommel's
book Consciousness Beyond Life and Dean Raiden's Entangled Mind, I
(50:42):
think is an excellent book. I encourage people to look
at the journal Explore. If you're in the professional community,
these are academic papers, but Explore is a journal for
those of you who are in that medical world that
is folkocused on what science looks like when it incorporates
(51:04):
consciousness within its rubric.
Speaker 6 (51:07):
And back to Neil Grossman, I think that Stephen is
very right, and he talks about this as a cultural thing.
What's emerging from the data. It's not just a belief
that consciousness is not created by the brain. But the
consequence of this is that unconditional love is the most
important thing in the universe, and that's what we must
aspire to. And that's what happened to me in the
(51:27):
forty years in the desert is in some way I
came to love my colleagues and accept them. But this
unconditional love business is completely inconsistent with the social order
we have today. Capitalism is a greed based social order,
and the people who are the neediest and greediest are
the ones who went to the top and are running
(51:48):
things now. And how we change from that to a
world order governed by the principles of unconditional love. I
don't know how it's going to happen, but it has
to happen or we're not going to make it.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
I believe we are going to make it. Why because
I was once one of those closed minded skeptics. What
changed me was the fear of dying. What may change
you a loved one passes an illness. My advice for
all of us keep our integrity, share, be a kind
and loving person, and you know how it feels good
(52:23):
to be around. Good people will have a ripple effect
on others. As a reminder, my home base is we
Don't Die dot com. You can get a free copy
of my book if you enter your name an email
address on the bottom of that front page. I'm so
grateful you've been with us today. It only takes a
(52:44):
small percentage to make a giant difference. I'm Sander Champlain.
Thank you for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on
the iHeartRadio and Cost to cost am Hairinormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
And if you like this episode of Shades of the Afterlife,
wait until you hear the next one. Thank you for
listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal
Podcast Network.
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. This is the place to be if you're
ready for the best podcasts of the paranormal, curious, and
sometimes unexplained. Now listen to this.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:45):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know
that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and so
will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. Have you
(01:16):
ever had to deal with a nasty skeptic, you know
the ones I'm talking about. You share your belief or
your thoughts about the afterlife and they shut you right down.
There's nothing you can do or say that can convince them.
The International Association for Near Death Studies also called ians
(01:37):
dot org, is our partner in changing the conversation about
the reality of the afterlife. Each year, they host a
conference that all are welcome to attend, coming up in
August of twenty twenty four. You can join the conference
live in Phoenix, Arizona. Details at conference dot ions dot org.
(01:58):
Today you'll meet four highly respected panelists, including doctors, professors,
and scientists Eben Alexander, Neil Grossman, Marjorie Woollacott, and Stephen Schwartz.
You'll hear their views on skepticism, these nasty skeptics, how
we deal with them, and ultimately how we can transform
(02:22):
the world. So let's start off with doctor Eben Alexander,
neurosurgeon and author of the book Proof of Heaven.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
I had spent the first fifty four years of my
life honing a very kind of conventional scientific worldview. I
had the advantage as a youth of my father being
very scientific. He was chairman of a neurosurgical training program.
But he also had a very strong faith in.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
God and power of prayer.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
He was deeply spiritual, but also deeply scientific. I wanted
to believe all that I had learned in my Methodist church.
But in that career building up towards being a neurosurgeon
and trying to make sense of consciousness, mind and brain,
I just couldn't understand how consciousness could survive independently of
the brain. I bought into the materialist position of brain
(03:09):
creating consciousness, physical world being all there is, and I
now realized that I just had it one hundred and
eighty degrees wrong. My point is I often make these days,
is to the true open minded skeptic, I mean a
truly educated, open minded doubter of all skeptic, the first
position they reject, from materialism to idealism and all the
(03:30):
various dualisms relating mind and brain, the one that's the
most ridiculous is materialism. It's the one that is the
absolutely most hopeless. And so it's really just a complete
flip from what I believe before. But it's the one
that makes far more sense.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
He was asked what recommendation he'd have to a skeptic.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
I would recommend a strong personal experience. Good news is
that doesn't mean being smoked down by a truck, or
meningitis or anything else like that. We're all conscious so
we have the ability to go within. And that's one
thing I must say I loved about Marjorie's book, you know,
as a neuroscientist with similar training that I had had,
(04:10):
I loved the way that Marjorie was able to have
such profound kind of insights, awakenings, and revelation through process
of meditation. I think any conscious sentient being can come
to a much deeper understanding by exploring consciousness once you
realize that it's not created by the brain at all,
but is basically fundamental in the universe and is allowed
(04:33):
in through a filtering mechanism of the brain. Going within
is actually a way of going out into the universe
and gaining tremendous information, guidance, kind of sense of insight, connection,
meaning purpose. All of that lives in those realms, all
of real creativity. Some of the best, most extraordinary inventions
and concepts from people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Robert Lewis, Stevenson,
(04:58):
Salvador Dali, Beethoven, and others. They would all talk about
how the universe basically gifted them with these insights, these creations.
They weren't thinking their way to it, and of course
in our materialist world, and in the modern conventional scientific world,
we're used to this notion of thinking our way to it.
We establish a certain body of facts and empirical evidence
(05:22):
and rational thought, and then we follow that towards what
we think is the answer. And yet that slow kind
of methodical plotting is not necessarily the way to some
of the deepest truths and insights. I know certainly Einstein
was a beautiful example of that, just drifting off in
a sailboat being hauled in by the harbor police late
at night because he just got lost in thought. But
(05:44):
that's where so much of this comes from, and not
just following the breadcrumbs of our logical linguistic mind, but
actually opening our minds to the possibility and trusting that
the universe can show us so much more so, for me,
personal experience is absolutely crucial. I loved the quote from
(06:05):
Jessica Utz, who was a statistician who did so much
work with remote viewing, with precognition, things like that. She
was the head of the American Statistical Association in twenty fifteen,
and at her presidential address to six thousand plus statisticians
from sixty two countries around the world. She made it
(06:25):
very clear that the evidence is there for anyone who
studies it, and there certainly are people here. I think
Stefan Schwartz is well known for having a tremendous amount
of that evidence lined up supporting remote viewing, various protocols
showing the reality of this not in doubt. And yet
the American I got exactly the organization that supposedly summarized
(06:48):
the report to Congress AIAR. I knew their acronym, but
it was something about American Institute of Research or what
have you. But anyway, their report said that remote viewing
could not be used for operational intelligence, that the data
wasn't quite that good. But she said that in terms
of proving the reality of remote viewing of a precognition,
(07:11):
that we can know the future in many different experimental
settings that are mind bending. When you realize what's going
on there, it's very real. But her point, and what
she said in the address is when she talks to
all those experts out there, all the statisticians, the people
who manipulate this data and come to an understanding of it,
it's very real. She would ask them, well, have you
(07:33):
read the data? Are you familiar. What are you familiar with?
And they'd say, well, I don't spend the time studying
that because I don't believe it can exist. So these
are scientists, and these are the ones who get the
bully pulpit with NPR and New York Times Science section,
who say, oh, NDEs or they're hallucinations, they're not real
because those people have not had them. And not only that,
(07:55):
they haven't even talked to people who have had them.
I notice how Sean Carroll, it seems to be on
circuit these days, is kind of the atheist scientist. He
was on CBS Sunday Morning a week ago, and he
was there basically to debunk Dean Rayden's very high quality
work supporting the reality these kind of phenomena. And I
know in Sean Carroll's book The Big Picture, he very
(08:17):
proudly says that all he needs to know about near
death experiences has to do with the fact that one author,
Alex Malarkey, reported a near death experience but then said
he made it all up. And so Sean says, that's
all I need to know. In fact, he says in
his book The Big Picture, which is supposed to be
a very erudite look at modern science and understanding of
(08:39):
the nature reality. He says that no respectable people pay
any attention to things like NDEs and it just shows
this kind of extraordinary sense of closed mindedness. It's important
to point out when we talk about skeptics. I truly
believe that the open minded skeptic, who is very knowledgeable
(08:59):
about all this data concerning the mind brain relationship, the
one position you have to reject is ridiculous and impossible
as materialism, that somehow consciousness is arising from physical matter
and that that's all there is to it. And that's
why I believe that indies in many ways are the
tip of the spear. But there's no way from my
(09:20):
point of view, and I realized this early on after
my de that you can approach this just by hm, well,
let's study indies and learn everything we can about them,
because at the end of the day, people are still
going to come up and say, well, they didn't really die,
they just almost died. We want to know what happens
when you really die, and to do that, I think
you need a much broader view at the nature of
(09:41):
consciousness and the relationship between mind and brain. That's where
it starts getting absolutely fascinating. In that theater of operations,
one of the first things you realize is that the
old notion that we can only know things through the
kin of our physical senses, what I can see with
the eyes and hear with the ears, is false. And
that's what remote viewing precognition, all the work on out
(10:03):
of body experiences and of course near death experiences with
veritical perception, shared death experiences, and then especially that absolute
gold mine thanks to Ian Stevenson and the brilliant workers
at Division and Perceptual Studies Jim Tucker, of more than
twenty seven hundred cases now of past life memories and children,
where the best answer in many of those cases is
(10:26):
a true reincarnation. Anybody who's sitting there trying to find
memory located in the brain, or trying to find consciousness
located in the brain, had better start realizing that they
need to greatly enlarge their theater of operations if they
want to get to any answers at all. So it's
really all about consciousness, and that's why I love this convergence.
Over many decades of work both in quantum physics, where
(10:50):
it's now basically painted into a corner where idealism is
the best answer. You know that this is a mental universe,
and that mind is at the origin of all that exists,
and that all this beautiful physical universe seems to be
a projection from mind. And I think the best way
to look at that as an individual is just to
realize that the causal principles involved in our lives cannot
(11:14):
be reduced to the simplistic little meanderings of electrons, quarks
and protons in the sub atomic world with some bottom
up causation. But that's really where all this is headed
and taking a much bigger view, and the reason I
think it's been so challenging for the scientific community. The
conventional material of scientific community is really almost like it's
(11:35):
burned into the DNA over four hundred years of thinking, well,
we look at the material world and understand it, if
we get too close to the mental or the mind,
we might get burned at the state. That was the
risk back in those early days, and it's no longer
the risk. But there's this incredible intense avoidance really, and
I think Neil has in my mind one of the
(11:55):
best answers of that, and I'll let him get into it,
but it has to do with the emotions involved.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Now here's doctor Marjorie Woollacott, her most recent book titled
Infinite Awareness, The Awakening of a Scientific Mind. When I
was in high.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
School, I actually was hoping I could go to college
and find out where the spirit or the soul resided
in the human body. But then I went to college
and started taking courses in biology, and they said, please,
that's impossible. I was convinced by my neuroscientist professors that
was a silly question to ask, and so I became
a materialist. Then, through a spiritual awakening when I was
(12:31):
at about thirty, I knew at the deepest level of
my being that there was consciousness beyond my body. But
it was very hard to talk to any other scientist
about that, and so I kept that really hidden in
a certain sense from my colleagues until probably about ten
years ago, when I was getting ready to retire, and
I felt then I could come out of the closet
(12:51):
and be open.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We need
to go into our first break and we'll be back
with this amazing Hammel discussion about skepticism about the reality
of life after death and about what can happen for
the tipping point to occur that all people believe in
the afterlife. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on
(13:14):
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 6 (13:23):
Keep it here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Sanders Champlain will be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
We are happy to announce that our Coast to Coast
AM official YouTube channel has now reached over three hundred
thousand subscribers. You can listen to the first hour of
recent and past shows for free, so head on over
to the Coast to COASTAM dot com website and hit
the YouTube icon at the top of the page. This
(14:01):
is free show audio, so don't wait. Coast to COASTAM
dot com is where you want to be. Hi, it's
doctor Sky.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Keep it right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Pyronormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain
and this episode is dedicated to dealing with skeptics. We'll
continue hearing from doctor Marjorie Woollcott, neuroscientist and her latest
book is called Infinite Awareness, The Awakening of a Scientific Mind,
(15:02):
in which she explores scientific studies supporting the premise that
consciousness functions beyond the mind.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I think that if I were talking to a skeptic,
the first thing I would find out is if they're
curious at all about the data, which I think you
were saying too, because a lot of skeptics aren't curious.
They do think they know the answer and then we
should just change the subject. But if they have a
little bit of curiosity, then I go and I start
talking to them about what data I have been convinced
by out there. First of all, looking at the near
(15:33):
death experience carefully controlled and designed studies by Kim van
Lommel that is here, Bruce Grayson is here, Samparnia who
is not here. A number of these research studies, their
prospective studies where you bring in everybody to a network
of hospitals that has cardiac arrest and then you interview
everybody who survived. You ask them what their experience was,
(15:54):
and you find out if they had these vertical experiences
where their heart has stopped, there's no EEG, and they're
watching everything that happened and that can be verified. And
I say to my curious colleague, well, how could you
possibly explain that EEG and the ability to actually perceive
what was going on in the room outside of your body.
(16:14):
And what I like most recently is that there are
now new studies on psilocybins. This is worked by Robin
Carhart Harris in London who has shown that when subjects
are given psilocybin, the brain activity and functional magnetic resonance
imaging actually drops down to very low levels, significantly lower
(16:34):
levels than normal in key hub areas of the brain,
saying that once again it's directly correlated with the intensity
of their mystical experience. So once again it's the lowering
of brain activity that is actually responsible for these beautiful experiences.
And now with meditation, Pinterberger and his colleagues in Germany
are showing the same thing that when you have thought
(16:55):
free meditation in master meditators, your EEG and all almost
all areas of the brain at all frequencies goes way down.
So this tells me it's not my brain pausing those things.
They aren't hallucinations because my brain is going inactive. To me,
those are really great evidence that will help with the
curious scientists who we hope will become a mystic. The issue, though,
(17:18):
is that if somebody isn't interested, I think that I
have to have compassion on them because I used to
be that way myself, and I didn't want to hear
about somebody that I thought was spiritual because I was
the scientist, somewhat an arrogant scientist, and I thought I
knew the answers, and it took an experience to actually
(17:40):
change me to really become open. So that's the very
interesting paradox about the two sides of this issue.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Next, let's hear from doctor Neil Grossman.
Speaker 6 (17:51):
My parents are very strict atheist materialists, but their conditioning
didn't take with me, and the earliest ext experiences I
can remember, the memory just came to me. As a teenager.
My first teacher was really Beethoven. His music sent chills
up and down my spine. I could not explain under
(18:12):
materialist metaphysics why I was so deeply moved by his music.
I then went to MITS to study physics. When I
learned the quantum theory, the Stroding equation, Einstein, I wanted
to know what those guys thought about what it all meant.
Eighty to ninety percent of them were open to a
spiritual or holistic worldview, so that gave me permission to
(18:36):
go in that direction. I think what really cemented it
for me in those early years was my experiences with
my teacher and then mentor Houston Smith. I took Eastern
philosophy course, and when I was reading the Hindu and
Buddhist text, it just rang true to me. But then
what really drove that home is he was with the
Harvard Divinity School working with antheogens or hallucinogens or whatever
(19:00):
were called back then. I nagged him so much to
try it that he relented and my first had some
psilocybin at his home and it was a very very
deep experience, and from then on there wasn't really any doubt,
even though I somehow had to spend forty years in
an academic philosophy department surrounded by materialist atheists, feeling isolated
(19:24):
and alone. What of the empirical data do I find
most compelling or most convincing. I think if one is rational,
then what Evan and Marjorie said is absolutely true. I
think you going back to the time of William James.
He became convinced that there's a something more based on
his studies of mediumship, telepathy and other things that was
(19:46):
available to him. But I think at that time, from
just a perspective of rationality, the evidence was it met
the civil standards for ponderance of evidence, but not the
criminal standards beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, I think, with
the publication of Irreducible Mind, the evidence again from a
perspective of rationality, where we form our beliefs based on
(20:07):
evidence alone, not biased, right, the evidence has met the
beyond the reasonable doubt standard. What that means is that
if somebody looks at the evidence and doesn't believe that
consciousness is independent of the mind, they're being irrational. Okay,
So when I hold that, and then I want to
go back to again in a personal experience late seventies
(20:28):
early eighties, stuff about the near death experiences was just
coming out. Got moodies books Life After Life and ken
Ring's work stuff, and I got very excited. And so
for me, when I first read Moody's book, I had
no doubt whatsoever because it was consistent with what I'd
read from the mystics, my studies of world mysticism and
from my own psychedelic experience. So excitedly I went to
(20:50):
colleagues and what do you think of this? What do
you think that is all last gasp of a dying brain?
And they go through all the possibilities that have now
been completely refuted. But I asked, I remember this very clearly,
what short of having an experience yourself might convince you
that it's real? And this guy said, well, even if
I were to have such an experience, I would believe
(21:12):
myself to have been hallucinated. Well, this is a statement
of someone who's saying I will not believe it no
matter what. Right, So this is not rational. And so
if your question was, well, what can you say to
somebody who very irrationally has society. He's not going to
believe it no matter what, the answer is nothing. I
(21:33):
like to use the term coined a fundamentialist to invite
an explicit comparison with the fundamentalist Christian of any religion
who believes that the earth is less than six thousand
years old. You can bring the Guide to the edge
of the Grand Canyon and look down. He sees those layers,
a scratter of frocks the positive. That's not going to
shake his faith at all. And he said, well, God
(21:54):
just created the world that way, right, And you can
find there's a part of the philosoph well known that
whatever you believe can be held onto no matter what
if you're willing to make adjustments everywhere. Oh they're faking it,
they're lying, or this or that. People experience what they
want to experience, whatever they have all the answers. I
(22:15):
think their biggest response to it is a refusal to
look at the data. That's part of being irrational. When
you have a situation where I don't know of a
single person who has responsibly examined what we call the
evidence of the data who has not come away convinced
of it. So when you know that and you still
(22:37):
refuse to look at the data, there's something else going
on at rational activity, and I think I have a
hunch as to what it is. When I was reviewing
the book The Self Does Not Die, which I strongly recommend,
is over one hundred cases of documented ritical perception occurring
under conditions where it is known that nothing is going
(22:57):
on in the brain. All these people are or monitor
or whatever. See part of that book the author's dialogue
with critics and skeptics, and you can see the irrationality
just piled on and on and on. One of the
cases he talks about is the case of doctor Rudy.
So doctor Rudy's being interviewed and he's talking about one
(23:18):
or two cases which involved a near death experience as
somebody who just well dead and he had been declared dead.
He had seen everything, heard everything, and reported it. At
the end, doctor Rudy, he tears up and he says, well,
I always get emotional when I talk about these cases.
And I almost said outloud, yes, so do I. And
(23:39):
what are these emotions? And I think that's what is
behind the so called skeptic. They're afraid of their own feelings.
They're all bottled up and here dead from the neck down,
as we say, the academic intellectual. They are afraid of
these emotions that you got to feel if you're caring
for see people, if you're doing this research right, it
(24:03):
rubs off on you and you feel these emotions. And
I think the deep down fear is I'll say that
four letter word, is of the fear of love. They
tend to be very much into status, and reputation and
material acquisition and wanting to be thought right, all these
ego games that academics, you know, love to play. Just
(24:26):
just afraid that their emotions are just bottled up. And
I think there's something like a fear of emotion, and
that's not something that rational argument or empirical evidence can address.
So I myself am skeptical about whether there's anything you
can say to the committed skeptical. Actually, we shouldn't be
using the word skeptic. The Charlie Tart in his book
(24:48):
The End of Materialism suggests that we don't use the
word skeptic because that's a good word. We should all
be skeptical of stuff. They are believers, their believes in
an alternative ideology, namely materialism. Right, and just like a
fundamentals Christian, we could bring him to the edge of
the Grand Canyon and he would say to the geologists, well,
(25:09):
I'm skeptical of your theory, right, that these rocks strata
layers prove that the earth is older than what it
says in the Bible. Right, I have my own views,
my own faith, And so the fundament mentalist Christian can
claim to be skeptical in the same way that them
self identified materialists are today. And what sustains them their
(25:30):
skepticism is simply they won't look at the data, won't.
Speaker 5 (25:32):
Look the evidence.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
And here's Stefan Schwartz.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
Wellhen I was twenty three, I woke up. I had
a series of what today we would call very meaningful synchronicities.
But it woke me up and I went from being
very much a person of my background in training to
something completely different. Changed my entire life. And for the
last fifty years I have been an experimentalist because I
(25:59):
care a great deal about data, and I created a
technique called remote viewing along with some other friends, and
I've studied healing, meditation, creativity and came to see that
materialism is a cultural affectation, not a scientific one. I
can expand on that if you like, but it is
(26:20):
inconsistent with the data. I remain a data person as experimentalist.
I have found through my interactions with a number of
people as well as my own experiments, that clearly we
need to think of consciousness as something that is causal
and fundamental.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Let's squeeze in a quick break and we'll pick up
right where we left off. You're listening to Shades of
the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 5 (26:58):
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
There's more Shades of the Afterlife coming right up.
Speaker 6 (27:07):
The best afterlife information you can get well. Shades of
the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
Hi, this is your followist Kevin Randall, and you're listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain.
We're listening to a very sharp team of experts about
why closed minded skeptics don't want to believe when there's
a lot of evidence that our consciousness survives death. Now
we're listening to Stefan Schwartz, who spent many years working
(28:03):
with the Stanford Research Institute and the government in the
field of remote viewing.
Speaker 5 (28:08):
I remain a data person as experimentalist, and I have
found through my interactions with a number of people as
well as my own experiments, that clearly we need to
think of consciousness, as Plank told us, as something that
is causal and fundamental. When I was twelve, I witnessed
(28:30):
a near death experience not mine, but I witnessed a
young woman have a near death experience and nobody could
explain it to me, and so I continued to be
interested in that without really understanding anything. And then I
met George Ritchie in the early sixties, who was like
a sort of precursor to Eben, wrote a very famous
(28:51):
book at the time. And I have come to see
the quest to understand the nature of consciousness as one
of the primary challenges facing not only science but our culture,
because I don't think that until we fully appreciate the
causal and fundamental nature of consciousness that we will be
(29:13):
prepared to face the challenges of climate change and everything
else that is coming upon us. Because we must understand
that we live in a matrix of consciousness, and that
consciousness has continuity between lives, understand that materialism is a
cultural affect, not a scientific one. It arises from the
(29:34):
Council of Trent. Between fifteen forty five and fifteen sixty three,
the Roman Catholic senior hierarchy met in Toronto and Bologna.
They were concerned about reformation, but the outcome of the
fifteen meetings was that they issued an edict in which
they said, anything that has to do with consciousness, they
(29:56):
call it spirit, but read consciousness. That is our world.
And you all in science you can have everything that's
in space and time, materiality. We wish you well with that.
And it was very exciting because science was really just
getting started in its modern context. And then they said,
but there's one thing we need to tell you. If
(30:19):
you get into our realm of consciousness, will kill you. Well,
not only kill you, will torture you and will burn
you alive. Now nobody talks very much about this anymore.
It seems like ancient history. But the fact is that
for three hundred years, as science was developing into the
modern disciplines that we think of today, you literally not
(30:40):
only could lose your position, but you could be killed
as a result of dabbling in anything that involved consciousness.
The last person killed by the Inquisition, which that Trento
meetings produced, that church legitimized torture as an activity, officially
condoned torture chambers, and the last person killed by the
(31:03):
Inquisition was in eighteen twenty six was a man who
was a teacher, a professor who was teaching his students
about the nature of deism. As a result of that,
scientists who didn't want to be humiliated by being told
what they could or couldn't study, made consciousness a taboo,
and therefore they stopped studying it because you could literally
(31:27):
get killed. And so basically they took the position just
like children, well, if you won't let me play that game,
I don't care about that game anyway, and didn't study it.
So this is a really important point because what happens,
and what is happening now, is that we are experiencing
what Thomas Kohn, who probably wrote the most important book
(31:49):
on the history and philosophy of science written in the
twentieth century, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he coined the
term paradigm, and we are in what Kun would call
a paradigm crisis. A paradigm, from his perspective, was an
generally agreed cultural worldview of how the universe work, how
(32:11):
things work, and that when everybody kind of agreed to that,
they didn't have to discuss it anymore and they could
go on and solve the problems that he called normal science.
But what happens is anomalies begin to accumulate. You all
out there are living anomalies, and in fact there are
according to PIM, about four point two percent of the
(32:33):
American population, that's about thirteen million people, plus the tens
of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of physicians who
treated people who had near death experiences, who have had
a direct, impactful contact with the idea that as Max
Planck said when they asked him, what have you learned?
(32:54):
And he said, in response to the question, and it's
in the Observer of twenty five January nineteen thirty one,
he said, what I've learned is that consciousness is causal
and fundamental. You cannot get behind consciousness. Space time arose
from consciousness. Consciousness did not arise from space time. It
(33:15):
is the fundamental. The interesting thing about the founders of
modern physics is that they all came to the conclusion
that Plank was right, and so we inherited their equations,
but we did not inherit the wisdom and conclusions that
they drew from doing those equations. The central thing you
learn about dealing with skepticism is its mediocrity. Some years ago,
(33:40):
I was asked by ABC News to take part in
a debate with a neurophysicist named Jerry Levy and a
skeptic named Dan Dennett and ed may at Sri and myself,
And when it came my time to speak, I'd looked
at Dennett and said, since you have such very strong
(34:01):
feelings about this subject, I can only assume that you
have taken the time to actually deeply reach into the
literature and critique it, and that's where your feelings are arising.
Is that correct? And he looked at me in such
a condescending tone, said, you don't think I actually read
this stuff, do you? There was absolute dead silence in
(34:24):
the hall. This was all filmed by ABC. There are
about six hundred reporters and news directors. There was first
of all absolute silence at that comment. Then there were snickers,
then there were giggles. When I see people critique near
death experiences, I'm mindful, for instance, recently of Bruce Grayson's
exchange with Carolyn Watts and mobs. You see the quality
(34:48):
of mediocrity. If you look recently at Daryl Bem's very
interesting experiments about precognitive awareness, in which he has been
replicated now to a point where there are is better
than one in a billion chance that this could be
possibly happening by chance, he was attacked by a skeptic
named Wagamaker, and he used as his basis for his
(35:12):
skepticism the work of a mathematician named Wesley Johnson, and
Wesley Johnson and Jessica Utz joined with Daryl Bem in
writing a refutation of the Wagamaker critique, in which Wesley Johnson,
who was the basis upon which the critique was base, said,
you didn't understand a word that I wrote. I could
give you examples of this over and over again. I
(35:34):
think what we are experiencing is a change in consciousness,
and this is not the first time this has happened.
Between the eighth and second centuries, there was something that
historians know as the Axial Age, and during this period
of time, as almost every major religion that we see
today began, all the pre Abrahamic religions began. Literally, consciousness
(36:00):
of humanity change. And I think that is the process
and why this meeting has as many people attending it
as it does. We are witnessing a change in the
consciousness of the culture, and I think that that is
very significant because what it is doing is helping us
prepare to see ourselves as part of the matrix of life,
(36:23):
not as something independent of it, and that only by
understanding the matrix and its relationship to the planet will
we be able to prepare for change. So I applaud
you all for being here, because you are early birds,
you are the early swallows. Going back to Capistrano.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Let's go back to Eban Alexander.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
I was talking to my opening statement of Jessica Utz
and those statisticians, where she is basically saying, if you
look at the evidence, these are real effects. The statistics,
the empirical data point that out, and then of course
to and on basically the doubters out there, and again
skeptic is not really a very good word for them,
because Neil says, they pretty much made up their mind.
(37:03):
They don't even want to review the data because they know,
based on their theoretical model of the world that it's false.
But to end that little story, though, Jessica Hutzan said, well,
what's the best answer, more data or would you like
to have a strong personal experience. Almost universally what they
wanted was the strong personal experience. So the data is there,
(37:27):
but I think what really can help people to get
to the next level is the strong personal experience, and
this is why again we're such fans of meditation. A
lot of the work we do involve some tools differential
frequency sound that intersects with the brain in the lower
brain stem, as opposed to most sounds that have their
influence in the recently evolved near cortex. And I believe
(37:49):
it's by going for the lower brain stem, by getting
its circuits that evolved three hundred million years ago that
were actually intercepting consciousness at a very primitive level. So
I believe that people can actually cultivate experiences. I think
the real shame in what we're facing now, even as
much as I feel that the world is waking up
to this, and I personally know a lot of scientists
(38:11):
who I think are helping to lead the charge in
this kind of understanding. And from my point of view,
it's inevitable that over the next decade or so, the
scientific community and hopefully by extension, the world at large,
will wake up to the reality of these experiences telling
us something very deep and profound about the nature of
human existence and why we're here. But I must say
(38:33):
that in spite of the progress and optimism that I
sense in certain members of the scientific community. I find
myself somewhat distressed that the major media, for example, New
York Times, Scientific American, a lot of the places that
might be fascinated by this and want to share this
incredibly good news with humanity about the scientific investigation of
(38:55):
consciousness to date have really not been very open to
it at ally. Please, and I know the people in
this panel are aware of some of the work that's
happened recently. For example, in our book Living in a
Mindful Universe, Karen Nowell and I push the position of idealism,
which I believe is the ultimate answer in terms of
any kind of framework of understanding. This is a mental universe,
(39:18):
and that all the physical emerges from that.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
This is a mental universe, and all of the physical
emerges from that. Wow, powerful words. When we get back,
you'll be extremely interested in the closing words from this panel.
Let's go to the break. You're listening to Shades of
the after Life on the iHeart Radio and Coast to
(39:43):
Coast AM Paranormal podcast Network.
Speaker 6 (39:55):
Stay there, Sandra will be right back.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Hey, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren. Don't
forget to check out my show strange things each week
as I.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
Bring you the world of the truly amazing and bizarre
right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
This is Afterlife Expert Daniel Bradley, and you're listening to
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paronormal Podcast Network.
(40:47):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain.
I welcome you to do some research on these great folks,
Neil Grossman, Marjorie Woollcott, Stefan Schwartz, and our friends at
the International Association for Near Death Studies i AMS dot org.
Let's continue with doctor Eben Alexander.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
The recent experiments in quantum physics keep pointing us ever
more strongly in that direction that entanglements reel, that spooky
action at a distance, as Einstein put is real. But
what that really means is that consciousness is fundamental and
it returns tremendous power to human beings when we come
to realize the implications of that in terms of manifesting
(41:31):
the world of our dreams. The other kind of bastion,
in my mind, that kind of materialist thinking really belongs
in the eighteen hundreds but doesn't really belong in the
late twentieth century, and how it has survived is beyond me.
But the other kind of bastion, as Neil will tell
you from working for all those years in an academic
philosophical department, is our institutes of higher education. The colleges
(41:56):
are hardcore pushers. So this kind of material mindset on
our youth. I'm hoping that we can reverse that trend
very rapidly with this awakening, because obviously to change the future,
we begin and have the most effect by changing our youth.
And that's why I love when we give talks and
we have a lot of young people there, but they're
not the average you know, the average age of my audiences,
(42:19):
or people in their fifties and sixties and what have you.
But to wake up the youth, to bring this kind
of knowledge and awakening, I think to college campuses is
an absolutely crucial move. And then of course the other
move is to awaken our mass media. I was in
touch with one of my editors for Proof of Heaven
just a few weeks ago, trying to put this out there,
(42:40):
with the whole new series of proposed articles to go
out to the press, and she said none of her
journalistic colleagues who would write about this kind of stuff
believe that indieas are real. So we obviously have our
work cut out for us.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
And here's Marjorie will accut.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
I just want to add one thing that related to
the academic community. If you do look at panel and
many of the people out here in the audience, we
are talking because we are toward the end of our
professions and we don't have to worry about credibility amongst
our colleagues in terms of getting tenure, getting promotion, and
getting our grants funded and getting papers published. When I
(43:15):
publish a regular paper in neuro rehabilitation, there's no question
about it's being accepted by a major journal. When I
put the word meditation on it, suddenly it's like, oh,
this isn't real research, and we don't publish that kind
of research. It's just observational. It's not real science. I
think with Pim Van Loomo said in one of his
interviews something about the idea that our National Academy of
(43:36):
Sciences has most people there who are atheists and materialists,
and until we change that, we're not going to change.
Really all of the young people at universities having the
ability to get tenure and get promotion who have ideas
about consciousness being fundamental. So, as Evan was saying, we
need to start with the young people. We've just started
a new Academy for the Advancement of Post Materialist Sciences
(43:59):
and Stefan is on the board, and we're trying to
encourage young professors to do research in this area and
help them with the gaining of promotion and tenure and
things like that so that we can begin to change
the academic communities culture.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Here's Stefan Schwartz.
Speaker 5 (44:16):
I want to leave you with this thought. There is
a lot of research that has been done, particularly at
Van Rensler Politech, about how many people it takes to
change the culture. This idea that the few change the many.
Very few people understand that the American Revolution that only
about three percent of the population supported it and only
about thirteen percent of it were actually involved in it.
(44:39):
So this is small groups of people who begin to
give you examples of how this process works. And I'm
up here doing this panel because I'm into social transformation.
I believe in data, and I think the data is
absolutely clear there are now at least nine protocols that
are carried out at uniities all over the world. That is,
(45:02):
it's a billion to one that they're not correct. I
don't think the question is data anymore. I think the
question is culture, and the question about how to do
this is by changing people's state of consciousness in your
immediate community in which you live. Look at smoking. I
can look out at this audience and a lot of
(45:23):
people younger than me, but nonetheless old enough to remember
that when you went to somebody's house there was on
the coffee table, there was a pack of cigarettes, and
an ashtray and one of those ronson lighters your mother
told you not to fool with. Today, you never see
hardly anybody smoking. This is about changing consciousness. And if
(45:44):
we change consciousness by our beingness, that is the nature
of who we are and what we stand for. Just
before Gandhi was assassinated in nineteen forty eight, he was
interviewed by the Times of India. They porter that was
set up to interview him up in his ashram came
to him and said, Goh Gandhaji, my editor says, I
(46:07):
only should ask you one question, and Gandhi said, well,
what's the question, And he said, my question is how
did you force the British to leave India? They were
one of the most powerful nations on earth. India was
the crown jewel of their colonial empire. You are a
man who had no official position, you had no money,
(46:28):
you had no army. How did you force them to leave?
And Gandhi's answer is the point that I want to make.
He said, it isn't what we did that mattered, although
that mattered. It isn't what we said that mattered, although
that mattered too. It was the nature of our character
who we are, that led the British to choose to
(46:53):
leave India. The difference between force and choose, those two
verbs is the key to this thing. You all are
the beginning group. There are thirteen million of you. We
have three hundred and eighteen million people in the United States.
When we get to thirty one million thereabouts, we're going
to see a fundamental change in the culture. And this
(47:16):
change is absolutely essential because, as I said earlier, it
is the only way we are going to create a
culture focused on well being that will allow us to
move into the future. And I invite you to join
me in doing.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
That, And here is Neil Grossman.
Speaker 6 (47:35):
I certainly do agree with Stefan that we are on
the cusp of a cultural change. I think our present
leadership is the one step backwards or a giant spring
forward in the coming years. But I'm an optimist and
I've been wrong before. Nevertheless, I want to get back
to ask Evan a question about arriving at a belief
(47:57):
based on evidence, rationality thing and coming to a belief
based on direct experience. I think Evan is right that
it's direct experience that wins every time. But yet, having
been a philosopher and taught critical thinking, I do believe
that rational argumentation examining the evidence is important or not unimportant.
(48:19):
So I want to ask you, Evan, because you were
not looking at the evidence when you were at Harvard
Brain Surgeon, because you believed, like Dennett, that it was
a lot of crap. Right, And Dennett, incidentally is a
hero to academic philosophers, And that tells you something about
the environment I've been in the last forty years. So
suppose someone took a gun to your head, Evan and said, Evan,
for the next nine months, you have to immerse yourself
(48:42):
in what irreducible mind and that kind of thing. You
read the papers and the books and all of that,
would anything there have convinced you.
Speaker 4 (48:50):
Absolutely. I think the evidence is overwhelming. The problem was
that was not in my field of purview. But I
believe anyone who takes a look at the evidence. I
know how much trouble we've had finding debate opponents who
support the materialist position because they're a dwindling breed, because
once they start actually looking at the evidence, they jump
(49:10):
ship because there really is nothing to support that materialist position.
That is what is so astonishing. So yes, the evidence
is all around us. All we have to do is
look at, certainly for the scientific crowd, irreducible mind beyond physicalism.
Those are absolutely landmark books from division and perceptual studies.
But there are other books that I think for kind
of the lay press. The Self Does Not Die is
(49:33):
a very important work, and I think that book is
crucial in getting out there. I love Science of Near
Death Experiences by John C. Hagen. Third, I think is
a very concise kind of medical, peer reviewed work that
properly reflects on this. The evidence is out there, and
there are many other books that have come to the
four recently that I think are hitting on the same
(49:54):
kind of target, like our book Living in a Mindful Universe,
Minos Cavatos and deep Ac Chopers book The Universe of
a bunch of different works, and there's some that are
to come out in the next year or so that
I think are also crucial and take it to the
next level, like Bernardo Castrip's coming book in April of
next year of the Idea of the World. And there
(50:15):
are others. So I think the evidence is there.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Let's go back to Stefan Schwartz.
Speaker 5 (50:19):
I would recommend that you look at the structure of
scientific revolutions and read it not in terms of science,
but in terms of how culture changes, because it's very important.
I would suggest One Mind by Larry Dassi is a
very good book. I recommend very strongly Pim Van Lommel's
book Consciousness Beyond Life and Dean Raiden's Entangled Mind, I
(50:42):
think is an excellent book. I encourage people to look
at the journal Explore. If you're in the professional community,
these are academic papers, but Explore is a journal for
those of you who are in that medical world that
is folkocused on what science looks like when it incorporates
(51:04):
consciousness within its rubric.
Speaker 6 (51:07):
And back to Neil Grossman, I think that Stephen is
very right, and he talks about this as a cultural thing.
What's emerging from the data. It's not just a belief
that consciousness is not created by the brain. But the
consequence of this is that unconditional love is the most
important thing in the universe, and that's what we must
aspire to. And that's what happened to me in the
(51:27):
forty years in the desert is in some way I
came to love my colleagues and accept them. But this
unconditional love business is completely inconsistent with the social order
we have today. Capitalism is a greed based social order,
and the people who are the neediest and greediest are
the ones who went to the top and are running
(51:48):
things now. And how we change from that to a
world order governed by the principles of unconditional love. I
don't know how it's going to happen, but it has
to happen or we're not going to make it.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
I believe we are going to make it. Why because
I was once one of those closed minded skeptics. What
changed me was the fear of dying. What may change
you a loved one passes an illness. My advice for
all of us keep our integrity, share, be a kind
and loving person, and you know how it feels good
(52:23):
to be around. Good people will have a ripple effect
on others. As a reminder, my home base is we
Don't Die dot com. You can get a free copy
of my book if you enter your name an email
address on the bottom of that front page. I'm so
grateful you've been with us today. It only takes a
(52:44):
small percentage to make a giant difference. I'm Sander Champlain.
Thank you for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on
the iHeartRadio and Cost to cost am Hairinormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
And if you like this episode of Shades of the Afterlife,
wait until you hear the next one. Thank you for
listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal
Podcast Network.
Host
Sandra Champlain
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