Is There Life After Death? moderated by John Cleese - 2018 Tom Tom Festival

[Music] [Applause] Charlotte villains I'm here for one reason that is I am a celebrity you see but I'm a celebrity is fascinated in what these guys do and I think that they're dealing were the most interesting things that you can possibly deal with and they're here to tell you about some of them today and I don't know they're their labels so they should I think they should just explain to me I mean starting with Bruce Bruce Grayson who are you anyway professor no but just keep talking I'm professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at UVA and former director of the division of perceptual studies neuro behavioral sciences I'm gonna let handle that okay let's find it then we go Jim Tucker yes I'm Jim Tucker I'm a a child psychiatrist at the division of Professional Studies and I'm the current director okay Emily Kelly I go there's something wrong with the my Kevin no it was always a trouble with Mike's don't worry but teetley in the afternoon we'd never get a microphone away in the afternoon so there's a nice embarrassing pause now if we don't get embarrassed away yeah I'll take this one okay I'm Emily Kelly and I'm a research assistant professor in the same division of perceptual studies and Kim Penberthy compan Buffy yes I am NOT British I'm American I'm a clinical psychologist in the division of perceptual studies and I am currently being blinded by that light so forgive me if I'm squinting at you I'm not winking I promise q I'm Emily's husband and also a professor in adop's and an experimental psychologist [Laughter] still the chairs are excellent aren't they they've got really really good chairs together here and they put them they they've spaced them nicely - the thing about tonight you see when I'm talking to an audience I usually love to have some idea of what the audience is like and by that I mean you know what you know and what you're not likely to know what's likely to make you cross and what's likely to make you interested but with you like I haven't the slightest idea whether you were very open to these ideas or convinced that there's something going on that the materialist reductionist scientists don't think is possible all whether you are here to shoot us down in flames but anyway it's gonna be it's gonna be great fun I think you should just start with Bruce Bruce tell us what you're doing at the moment what are you looking at what are you trying to find out about thank you John thinking more clearly than ever before while your heart has stopped and there's no blood going to your brain looking down and seeing your body on the operating table and noticing details unexpected details that you're searching later verifies for you meeting deceased loved ones family and friends who you thought were still alive meeting deceased people who you don't know but later recognize from family photos all these are things that happen in some new death experiences that may have some bearing on the question of whether we survive death of the body which is our topic for tonight is it possible that our consciousness or our mind survives bodily death there's a wide range of human experiences that suggest this is exactly the case near-death experiences occur to us when we're on the threshold of death and therefore they raise the possibility that they may teach us something about what happens after death now I've been collecting and analyzing near-death experiences for more than 40 years and I have detailed information about more than thousand of these cases each one is unique filter through the individuals background and personality but there are some features that they all share in common and some of these common features have important bearing on the question of whether we survive death and whether some part of us does and if so what what part is that one of these features that may have some bearing on the question of survival is enhanced mental functioning thinking clearer than ever seeing more vividly forming more detailed memories at a time when your brain is seriously impaired now how is that possible it seems to defy common sense and yet it happens James was a 25 year old nurse who got deeply depressed and decided to end his life he took some medications from the hospital where he worked took an overdose and lay down in his bed expecting to die he didn't in fact he became sicker and sicker very nauseous with painful stomach cramps and decided maybe he better call for some help so he roused himself tried to get out of bed and get to a telephone but by this time the drugs had kicked in and were making him very unsteady he had trouble standing trouble walking not only that but the drugs were making him hallucinate and he was seeing little people all around his bed making it hard for him to get to the telephone at this point he told me he drew up out of his body and was several feet above his body and behind him thinking very clearly then he looked down at his body staring up staggering around looking very confused he remembered being in the body and hallucinating but from where he was up above he couldn't see these little people now that convinced James that his mind in his body were not the same thing and it suggests that I need to think about that also are they the same thing another feature comment and ease that makes us question whether we survive is seeing things accurately from some visual perspective not in the body this too defies common sense heckling you see if you're not in the body and yet it happens out was a 55 year old truck driver who went to the emergency room with irregular heartbeat in the Opera in the emergency room during diagnostic testing his heart condition deteriorated rapidly and he was rushed to the operating room for what eventually became quadruple bypass surgery in the middle of this operation he felt himself rising up out of his body and floating weightless above it he looked down and to a surprise saw himself there lying on the table with a sheet over his body and you saw his surgeon down there looking very perplexed and as L described it the assertion was flapping his arms as if he was trying to fly l didn't understand that and frankly I didn't either I've been working as a doctor for more than 40 years nostrils I've never seen a surgeon do that I later talked to Al's doctor and asked him about this and he acknowledged that yes he had done that that were he had trained in his home country to be a surgeon he developed this habit when he walks into the operating room all scrubbed in with sterile gloves on in his residents and it in a tent and in turns his assistants are starting the operation he doesn't want to risk touching something not in the sterile field with his clean hands so he puts them where he knows they won't touch anything sterile and then he instructs his interns here come over there go back over there so what Alfa was trying to fly was just instructing his assistants on how to do the operation now how did I'll know this how could he see this this is not an isolated case a recent survey of more than a hundred near-death experiences in which people reported seeing things from an out-of-body perspective found that more than 90 percent were completely accurate in what they said another common feature that people report in NDEs is seeing deceased friends and family now many of us would expect to see deceased loved ones when we die so that's not so surprising but sometimes more surprising things happen for example people sometimes see deceased loved ones that they thought were still alive Eddie was a nine-year-old boy who was hospitalized in a coma from meningitis he was a coma for about 36 hours before his fever finally broke his family were erected around him by the bedside all night long and finally about 3:00 a.m. he opened his eyes and excitedly told his parents that he had just been to heaven and it seemed his dead grandfather and Auntie Rosa and uncle Lorenzo and then you said they also saw my sister Teresa we're told me I had to come back now Teresa was this older sister who was in college in Vermont and as far as anyone knew was perfectly healthy later that morning when his parents went home they immediately called the college and they found that choice to have in fact been killed in a car accident just after midnight how did Eddie know about that Jack was a 25 year old electrical engineer who was hospitalized with pneumonia one day as his young nurse Anita was fluffing up his pillow she mentioned him that this weekend was going to be her 21st birthday and she was going to be gone for a few days visiting her parents shortly after she left Jack's condition went downhill and he had trouble breathing he eventually stopped breathing entirely he then had a near-death experience you know what she saw nurse Anita surprised to see you there he said what are you doing here and she said I've come to fluff your pillow up one more time and I'd like you to go back and tell my parents that I love them and I'm sorry I wrecked the red sports car when Jack recovered he told the nurse about this experience she started tearing up and left the room in me Utley later Jack learned that Anita's parents had an effect surprised her with a red sports car for her birthday and excited to try it out she raced down the highway and crashed into a concrete barrier dying instantly the hakka jack notice how could any novice how can these things happen and finally there are some people in near-death experiences who meet what appeared to be deceased people who they don't know Levi was a 35 year old man who was born in Holland who had a cardiac arrest his heart stopped he had a near-death experience saw his grandmother who had died and then saw a man who didn't recognize us but who looked at him very lovingly he didn't over this was didn't know what to make of it so he didn't talk to anybody about this ten years later when his grandpa his mother was on her deathbed she confessed to him that her husband who are raised Levi as his father was not in fact his biological father Levi's biological father was in fact a Jewish man who had been captured by the notches when they came into town taken to a concentration camp and never seen again and then his mother showed Levi a photograph of his father which he recognized immediately as the man from his near-death experience so we have in near-death experiences heightened mental thoughts when your brain isn't functioning we have accurate perceptions from outside the body we have meeting with deceased loved ones who you didn't know had died we have decease meetings with loved ones who he didn't know period and we don't have a good physical explanation for this so all these things should make us think about is there something about us that survives the bodily death and if so what is that thing when I started getting interested in all this nonsense some time ago I I was reading a lot about out-of-body experiences which are obviously not necessarily connected with dying now-u don't mention them is there any reason for that because they're very similar they are they are an out-of-body experience where you feel you're leaving your physical body it's something that often happens as part of a near-death experience but it can also happen under other circumstances as well and the reason I chose just to talk about the near-death experiences is because we have some other information about what's going on with the body at that time so it's a little easier to study what's going on with it fascinates me any body experiences there's almost a better chance of being able to check what happened you know people I know woman on the operating table bad car accident who said she left her body and went into the waiting room and saw her parents there right and her brother was there and his sister arrived late and Gilligan's Island was on me on the television and when she recovered consciousness and started talking to her family of course it it scared them and she stopped talking about but those kind of things are particularly fascinating because again how did they get the knowledge right right go on what were you gonna say I was going to say that that what makes the near-death experience out-of-body experience so much more interesting to me is that we know the brain is not functioning very well with us when this is happening so we know that it is more than just the brain imagining this something that is happening when the brain is not functioning right right good Jim well I'm going to talk about children who report memories of past lives and this was work that has been going on at UVA for over 50 years division for sexual Studies officially started in night 67 so we've now celebrated 50 years but Ian Stevenson who started our division actually started studying these cases in the early 1960s and we have continued on even after he is no longer with us and we've now studied over 2,500 cases from around the world basically of young children who reported memory of a past life and what they typically do is describe a recent ordinary life that often ended violently or ended when the person was young and Ian spent many many hours and traveled many miles trying to find these cases and mostly found them in Asia because in cultures was a belief in reincarnation people talk about the more but now with the internet and was people known but our work we hear from American families all the time so I'll give you a couple of examples and this first one is one that we talked about yesterday so there's we got a letter one day from this mother in Oklahoma and she said that she and her husband were just ordinary people her husband was a police officer and her she worked in the County Clerk's office but for the last year their five-year-old boy Ryan had talked about a past life in Hollywood and he would cry about Hollywood wanting his mom to take him back there so to try to help him kind of process this stuff she decided to go to the public library and check out some books on Hollywood and they were looking through when one day when they came to a picture from an old movie called night after night and Ryan pointed to one of the men in the picture and said hey mama that's George we did a picture together and he pointed to another one of the men and said and mama that's me I found me well the first person he pointed to was George Raft who was quite a well-known back in his day but the other man he pointed to that he said he had been was an extra with no lines in the movie so Ryan's mom wrote to me to see if I could help figure out who this guy was so I went to Oklahoma and I talked with the parents I talked with Ryan and then afterwards as we were trying to figure out who this person was Ryan's mom was emailing me sometimes on a daily basis with all these details that Ryan was given about his past life he was describing quite a life that to be honest I thought was rather unlikely for an extra with no lines in a movie eventually with the help of a Hollywood archivist we were able to figure out who this guy was this archivist she went to the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got all the materials on the movie night after night and there was one picture that included an identification of this guy and he was a fella named Marty Martin who died in 1964 it turned out that Marty Martin did have quite a life so Ryan said how he had danced on stage in New York and Marty Martin danced on Broadway Brian said even went to Hollywood and worked in the movies which Marty Martin did mostly working on dancing in movies he said that he then worked for an agency and Marty Martin started a successful talent agency in fact Ryan said is an agency where people changed their names and then it Marty Martin worked at a talent agency Ryan said how he had seen the world from big boats and talked about visiting Paris Marty Martin and his wife went to Europe on the Queen Mary and we have pictures of them in Paris Ryan said he had a big house with a swimming pool which Marty Martin did and Ryan said that the street address had the word Rock or mount in it and Marty Martin lived on north Roxbury Ryan also said one time that he didn't understand why God would let you get to be 61 and then make you come back again as a baby which is sort of an interesting philosophical question on its own but we got Marty Martin's death certificate which said that he was 59 but then I talked with his daughter and with his stepson who both said no he was actually 61 so I looked into it and I found three census records to marriage listings in a passenger list that all gave ages for Marty Martin that meant in fact he was 61 when he died and not 59 and all together we verified that over 50 of Ryan's statements matched with Marty Martin's life another example that I will tell you about is a recent case that I studied a little boy that I'll call Steven he was also five years old when he started talking about how he had been a soldier who died in a war and that it was in the jungle and his parents asked him if it was Vietnam and and he said yes and then he gave a last name which was an unusual last name and the state where he was from so his mom went on to Vietnam Memorial website and found that in fact there was a soldier killed with that name from that state who had been killed in Vietnam she pulled up pictures of a bunch of the people who had been killed and when she got to the one of him the little boy said that's me so she didn't do any more research she wrote to me and to let me know what what Steven was saying so then I did do a little more research online I got a subscription to a online newspaper collection did a little sort of detective work and when I went to see the family I brought some pictures with me now I didn't want to overwhelm a five-year-old little boy with lineups of pictures so what I did was show in pairs of pictures where one of the pictures is from this man's life and the other one wasn't so for instance I showed him a picture of the man's high school and then a different high school and he picked the correct one I showed him pictures of two houses and again he picked the correct one so then after that visit I continued to do online detective work I also wrote to the man's sister and I heard back from his niece the sisters daughter and she sent me some family photos so then I sent some more pairs of pictures to Stephens mom and the good thing about these tests when when she showed them to Steven was that she didn't know which was the right picture either so there was no chance that he was picking up on cues from anything as he looked at the pair's now all together we showed him eight pairs of pictures a couple of them he didn't make a choice on but for the others he was six out of six now along with the knowledge that these kids seemed to have about a past life a lot of them also show emotions and behaviors that seemed linked so I mentioned Ryan crying about Hollywood and we hear this all the time of kids sometimes crying on a daily basis about missing their family begging to be taken to their family for the kids who where the previous person died violently a lot of them will have nightmares repeatedly about that death so there's an a well-known American case for a little boy from the time of his second birthday started having horrible nightmares multiple times a week of a plane crash and as the case developed it became clear that that he had memories of a particular pilot who was killed during World War two also it's a violent death cases a lot of them will the kids will show phobias intense fear toward the mode of death and this seems particularly true in drowning cases where these kids will just be intensely afraid of being put in water and also there are cases where and and Ian Stevenson was really interested in these and studied several hundred of them there are cases where the children will be born with birthmarks or even birth defects that match wounds usually fatal wounds on the body of the previous person so for instance there was one little boy where the previous person had been killed by a shotgun blast to the side of his head at the man's neighbor said he mistook his neighbor for a rabbit and shot him in the side of the head with shotgun and then this little boar he was born with this just a stump for an ear and underdeveloped right side of his face Ian also listed 18 cases where the children were born with two birthmarks ones that matched both the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of the previous person so with all this these cases you know I think provide pretty good evidence that something is going on that there is this carryover from the past life but I have never argued that these cases mean that we all reincarnate that we all come back here in fact you can make the case that these are exceptional cases because the previous person typically died violently or died young came back quickly with intact memories so maybe that the usual pattern for most of us is not that we come back here but we may have all kinds of different types of existence after we die but regardless I do think that these cases contribute along with near-death experiences and the other things to a good body of evidence that there are times where consciousness does survive after the body dies and and in these cases attaches to it too new like and anything has a new life here that's what I [Applause] I'm fascinated by the idea that they might happen to some people and there's a correlation with bad endings bad deaths isn't there but that's not always the case because in this one with the agent there's a 40-year gap between the guy dying and the child being born so it's a little bit more about that yeah and with that World War 2 case and there's a fifty-year yeah there but the average interval is only four and a half years so it's it's typical that they come back very quickly I mean there are always exceptions pretty much to anything but it does seem that for many of the cases it's or you can make a reasonable argument that the previous person had sort of unfinished business and that it might have led them to stay attached to this room or this world and then be reborn and start another life very good thank you thank you Emily give us give us a picture of what you're interested in okay well um I hope this new one works alright you know and hear me okay good several years ago I did a survey asking people whether they had ever experienced any of a number of the kinds of things that were interested in near-death experiences past life memories out-of-body experiences apparitions that sort of thing and I learned about a lot of really interesting experiences that way but maybe the most interesting thing I learned was that the single most often reported experience was being at the bedside of a dying person who seemed to be talking with and seeing someone who was not physically present usually someone who had died earlier such as a spouse parent a sibling there's been virtually no systematic research done on these so-called deathbed visions and so I really had no about how common they might be but in addition to the survey I've also over the years talked to a lot of hospice workers who tell me that these experiences in fact are quite common in fact one hospice doctor told me that he has learned that when such visions start it's time to call the family and make sure they're there in addition to the dying person sometimes people at the bedside will also have unusual experiences sometimes shared by the dying person sometimes not shared by the dying person and this actually happened in my own family my grandmother had had a stroke and she was at home dying she was in a coma and her son-in-law was sitting beside the bed with her he himself as a physician and all of a sudden he saw standing at the foot of the bed my grandfather who had died about seven years previously with his arms outstretched to my grandmother and calling out her name and a few moments later my grandmother died another kind of experience that actually has been studied quite a lot over the years is something that we call crisis cases and these are experiences that happen not at the bedside of a dying person but some distance away and often quite a long distance away typical experience of this kind is one in which a person hasn't sees a vision sees an apparition of a particular person and then later learns if that person had in fact died at about the time of the vision there have over the years there have been reported literally thousands of these experiences reported and investigated thousands of these experiences and I learned about a few more in my survey some very interesting ones but one in particular that I found very interesting was not natural vision but involved a physical event and I wanted to just read to you the description that the woman who had the experience sent to me because she expressed it a lot better than I could the day my grandma died I was headed out to work about 3:00 a.m. I knew she was very sick and I had planned to fly to New Jersey later that day to see her because I knew time was short as I went to put the key in the car I felt this overwhelming presence and all of a sudden my driver window shattered and I thought to myself grandma just died as I got to work I could not shake the feeling of Grandma right next to me the phone call came grandma died at the same time I felt her and that the window and the window shattered I felt this was grandma's way of telling me she's gone now I don't have any idea how often car windows shatter spontaneously but I don't think we can tribute this experience to chance there's still another kind of experience that we are particularly interested in learning about and we call these revival cases or terminal lucidity cases and these are involve people who are suffering from Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia and who seem to recover their mental faculties shortly before they die again I learned about some of these in my survey one woman in particular wrote to me about her grandmother her grandmother had had Alzheimer's and for quite some time she had not recognized anyone but shortly before she died she seemed to recover and the woman actually had a conversation with her a normal conversation in which they sort of went over family affairs family events things that had been happening the woman told me she said it felt like I was talking to Rip Van Winkle another experience like this it was a similar one that was reported was actually reported in US issue of Time magazine that came out several years ago it was reported by a physician named Scott Hague and this special issue of time was devoted to talking about the mind brain problem mind brain issues and nearly all of the issue really all the issue was taking the position that is the predominant position in science today which is that the brain produces the mind produces consciousness and that therefore consciousness is totally and wholly dependent on the brain well dr. Haig wrote a little essay that took quite a different position and he what he did was he described a case of his a patient of his named David who was had brain cancer that had literally been eating away much of David's brain so that toward the end of his life he was completely unresponsive one night doctor Haig went home and he knew that David was gonna die that night and he did he died that night when dr. Haig got back to the hospital the next morning the nurse came up to him and said you know last night David woke up and was able to talk to his family before he died now these experiences these sort of revival cases I think are extremely rare we have we know about a fair number of them but I think they are extremely rare but they're also extremely important because they suggest that as the brain is shutting down the mind is somehow being freed as dr. Haig put it he said David's that night David's mind somehow broke through his diseased brain so that he could say goodbye to his family as I said earlier there's been practically no systematic research done on these sort of deathbed visions and and revival cases and cases of this sort there's been a doctor in a physician in the UK has started doing some research over there in connection with hospice and nursing homes over there but there's still so much that we just basic information that we don't know about these experiences things like how often do they happen to whom do they happen under what circumstances do they happen one of the most important questions that we know very little about is what's the relationship between drugs and these deathbed visions we do have some preliminary information that suggests that drugs may actually inhibit the experience and not cause them but again this is something we just know very little about at this point so we here our group wants to start a study here in Charlottesville and I'm now in the process of looking for funds to support this but as I don't know how many of you all were here last night but as John said last night funds for this kind of research ain't easy to find so but I'm optimistic that we'll be able to find it and maybe in a few years we can come back to the tomtom festival and give you an update on what we found this is fascinating to me at any rate including here's to you and now we've had three people talking I think it might be fun to Stonebridge out to the audience for a bit before we come back to Kim otherwise the just the repetition of the shape of this might become helps cause people to lose their concentration do we have some questions there's a microphone there we've got people I think yes yes so can you stand up and shout oh that's good just working yeah cool so this is more of a philosophical question than it is maybe a scientific one but let's say based on the premises of the stories that you guys have told we believe that there is some form of experience or life after death what then becomes I don't know the point of a corporeal existence versus whatever else you guys have experienced or seeing people experience after death and did you hear that I'm sorry do you mind again I think the shorter way of saying that is if we have life after death what is the point of life itself right thanks for the easy question that was can we postpone that there's a softball for you Ed [Laughter] I remember my good friend Peter Cook who was a genius in the chameleon he was much more concerned with whether there was sex after death it's an interesting question Wells I mean what is the point of any of it do you sort of anything you can ask you that at any point but the point is this is um this may be the way it is at least for some people and if anything's accomplished this afternoon I hope it's that that people are curious because many people in the scientific communities don't have a theory so they say it couldn't have happened which is not really terribly impressive Stan Stan Grof they gave her the recounted and experience to Carl Sagan at the end of which Sagan said it couldn't have happened you know that's an odd what can I say defense so what I'm hoping we'll do today is not convert you to some new situation but cause you to be more curious about this kind of stuff just so that you begin to read the literature because one woman who was a very hot had a very high position in the American Statistical community she was a famous statistician she she pointed out how the amount of evidence there is for this it was unarguable from a status statisticians point of view that the odds were that this was a great deal of truth in this stuff and she commented that the extraordinary thing is that many of the people who felt strongly that it was imagined early or something to do with fraud or something like that that they hadn't read any of the literature and yet they still felt they were in a position to say this is nonsense it couldn't have happened so all I'm saying to you start reading the literature because after a time it's very very hard I think for me to accept anything other than the idea that something as on after we die and if if quantum physics is is incomprehensible as it is and that's the best way we have at the moment of of describing reality I don't see that life after death could be any simpler than that so the key is does it happen not whether do we have a theory to explain it hi first I'd like to say thank you to mr. Cleves for coming to our small town it is a small town I've lived in a lot of big cities but each of you so far have spoken about very segmented things do you find have you encountered people who have multiple experiences because I've experienced some rather strange things in my life but one is I tend to get visits from other people's relatives when they pass and I'll know about it before I get the phone call before they get the phone call I've had family members that experienced I have experienced the my step grandmother died of glioblastoma and she had the clarity before she passed away and she was able to have a conversation my roommate some years later had the same experience with her father very severe case of glioblastoma in both cases both died and six months and they had no cognition whatsoever and her father woke up was able to have a conversation with her and her brother and we were all adults that when in both of these cases and very clear and he was able to kind of rectify some things and just kind of say goodbye peacefully but I feel like I've been exposed to a lot of these kinds of things I'm wondering do you find that there are certain people who are sensitive or where there are multiple experiences there definitely are and it differs with some of these different experiences I know with near-death experiences people who have near-death experiences often do not have hist of unusual events but after the nd after the near-death experience there opened up and the door doesn't close and they often have many experiences after that I think it's somewhat different with the reincarnation memories well it is although there do seem to be some families where the reincarnation memories actually it's almost like a genetic thing but to answer your question I think in general there are people who report a number of different kinds of experiences and you know some people seem to be basically sort of more psychic than others and they can have all different kinds of things I will say I think I think ed can speak to this better than I can but there is a fair amount of experimental evidence showing that people who do well in experimental tasks have certain personality profiles so in addition to the what you're pointing out that people do have I mean you having just one-off experience it's not very common most people do have multiple ones but I think there is a definite personality profile of some sort that that contributes to that my question is related to past death experiences my mother always had a near phobia regarding necklaces turtleneck sweaters and always jokingly said I think I was strangled in past life my father of course told her that it was probably more likely in her future [Laughter] [Applause] he was a character well I guess I have two questions one I mean it sounds like that's very typical to things that you've heard elsewhere and I would like to reassure her of that and also reassure her that if that's the case maybe she's safe in the future well as far as so you're suggesting she's suggesting that as a memory of a past life that then led to this unexplained phobia basically and that's certainly possible I mean with our child cases typically the kids lose the memories and lose the fears as they get older but there are certainly exceptions and you know the question is how much do we generalize from our cases where people have actual intact memories of a past life compared to people who don't so you know with an unexplained phobia we certainly can't say for sure that it's connected to past life experience but it's plausible that it could be and as long as she doesn't have other precognitive abilities you know hopefully she can be rest assured that she's not actually seeing her future but more likely to be seen her past sorry I know it's hard to hear through this I have an extremely rare form of paroxysmal dyskinesia if you're familiar with that basically I have what appears to be grand mal seizure but I mean I've attained consciousness and one thing that I've noticed in that is I can be completely paralytic for up to 16 hours but my friends have found that they can snap me out of it by being wrong and making me angry so I was but I'm an English literature major they'll start talking about bacon ism and things like that yeah the English majors get it yeah or saying that early modern literature is not relevant to the modern life but I've noticed that what you were saying about mind when the brain is not fully functional because I've probably experienced neural storm more closely than any person with a functioning brain at this point has so with the mind being able to get me out of a paralytic state that's one kind of example that we're definitely interested in I mean a lot of a lot of the stuff we study cases near-death cases in particular we have a lot of that occur under conditions like deep general anesthesia or cardiac arrest heart stopping which basically abolish --is the conditions that most neuroscientists think are required for anybody to have a conscious experience and yet people are not only reporting experiences but the most intense transformative experiences of their entire lives so this is another example of that sort of thing okay so with the children who have these memories from a previous life and children stop remembering things you know they don't remember things before they're what seven or eight or something like that um do they lose this recollection and also I'm curious the families of the dead people do they engage with them and really relate to them after this all kind of comes out well most of the well almost all the kids stop talking about the past life as they get older and and usually around the time or six or seven and many of them seem to lose the memories and as you say that's when all children lose memories of their early hood but we have learned that a fair number of them if you go back you wait long enough and energy than when they're adults they say they do still have some memories so they have stopped talking about it gone to school tried to be normal or whatever but it may be that some of those memories still stay now in a lot of cases the two families do meet and it varies the amount of connection some of them establish a big connection and the the previous family will visit the child or vice versa repeatedly as the child gets older sometimes actually the previous family develops more of an attachment for the child and the child has for that family often with the kids once they meet the previous family see the previous place they see that their memories are validated but they also see that time has moved on and it seems that the emotional intensity from their standpoint lessens even though for the previous family of course it may get more intense as they see the child okay we won't add any more to this queue we'll go back to him and head after these we've done these gentlemen the blue stripes hi as someone that was raised in a fundamentalist family I'm someone that came from a history of you know blind belief I've gone back and forth between both sides I'm dealing with a lot of skepticism these days I have two questions I'm only gonna ask one and I was very I was very torn on which one I wanted to go with because one is very positive and I'm I would love to talk with you guys about that more later right now give you two mister please thank you you're my hero okay first well I I've been working with a theory for a long time and I just wonder I would love to hear your opinion on it that the idea for life if if reincarnation is true or if we are able to live many many lives is this idea that the only way human beings could ever live together in a perfect after after is if there was such a thing as perfect empathy and the only way you could ever experience perfect empathy is if you would actually experience what it was like to be everyone else and I love to think that it's possible that when we become who we are it's actually just an obligation of every single possible experience so we're still ourselves but we still know what it's like to be everyone else and I just wonder if you guys have talked about that or if you thought about that are you you time that should reincarnation I wasn't clear I'm sorry were you tying that um it could be reincarnation it could be parallel universes it could be all kinds of different ways that it would all come together well you may have a more positive point of view on life than I do per house but I I tend to think of it more it's just a naturalistic process where consciousness exists and it continues to exist after the physical body and brain die and it continues to have experiences but it is whether there's sort of an intention to it there there is hope that there is the potential for progress that even if we don't come back with intact memories hopefully our consciousness or whatever you want to call it is affected and that we do learn or like you say we have empathy because we experience different viewpoints so hopefully through all this course of different lives we do grow and make progress the white shirt mr. Cleese I've always wanted you to ask me my name so that I could respond by saying some call me Tim [Laughter] I know I know that the talk is only half way over and I don't mean to minimalize or generalize anything but I'm trying to get a certain grasp on certain sort of thematic intention for all of your studies it does it have some have something to do with closure a lot of what we've been talking about has kind of focused in on a way to close the book and all of what everyone else is talking about is kind of opening so that there is an opportunity to close the book and I just wanted some sort of elaboration on that I'd rather respond to that actually by talking about the two books sounds good lists there I look forward a little bit I will say though that science is not really about closing the book it's about opening it up and getting more and more better better questions I think Woody Allen said I don't believe in an afterlife but I am taking a change of underwear thank you very much gentlemen blew your negative I am unworthy but uh okay so what I've heard so far the thing that I feel most skeptical about and that's hardest for me to understand is this idea that there's some kind of physical carry over into the next life I had never heard that before the idea that something could mentally carry over it makes a lot of sense to me or emotionally but the idea that you were killed by a gunshot wound and then you're killed you're born with birth marks I can't even begin to imagine any kind of reason for that or a mechanism that would create that do you all have any theories for that or any explanation for that yeah no I will say that was sort of a big pill for me to swallow also when I got involved with this work and we know from other research that sometimes mental images can produce very specific changes in the bodies so for instance there are cases of in hypnosis where you tell someone you're burning them with a hot poker whatever and they'll develop as a burn purely from the mental image of being burned so in these cases I don't think it's literally the physical wound the shotgun to the head but it may well be the sort of the mental image of that the mental experience of being killed that is obviously a very strong experience that if the consciousness does continue it continues with it almost in a PTSD kind of way and then rather than like hypnosis producing a temporary mark in these cases the consciousness if it does in fact to enter a developing fetus it would then lead to a similar wound that would be permanent on the child so it wasn't literally the physical injury but more the mental aspect of it that produced the mark J made an interesting point to me couple of days ago when you pointed out that it was a very strange way for karma to work as someone who has been killed seems the you know they're continuing what do we say they're continuing experience seems like a punishment for having been killed yeah so you know a lot of these cases came from places for instance with with Hindu beliefs where karma is a big part of that and I'm a karma is certainly a a more subtle philosophy than we often know about but in any case that the idea of of karmic retribution would lead you to think that if somebody's murdered than the murderer would then be reborn with the injury that he caused but in fact that's not what we see it's the victim that comes back with the wound so again it seems to be I would view it as a naturalistic mental trust experience that that leads to that gentleman in the white shirt just comment and a question the gentleman who first came up and asked what's the point of it all why bother being human and I'd like to offer that hmm maybe the hokey-pokey really is what it's all about so my question is where any of you non-believers or highly skeptical before you started this research and what one or two of you care to comment on what might have changed your minds I don't know that we've changed our minds I think we all are fairly skeptical about these things were experience we're investigating and it certainly opened our minds see these things in fact one of the most profound things that open my mind to seeing the way these experiences affect people hmm the profound and long-lasting after-effects of near-death experiences for example persuaded me that these are not a type of mental illness they're a real event that people are going through I still I'm very simple about how we understand them what their meaning of it is yeah and I would agree that I think we're still skeptics in the sense that every case that I approach I approach in some ways looking for the defects in the case so I mean obviously we're open to this stuff or we wouldn't be devoting much of our lives to it but as I think we do approach it with the scientific point of view that I could speaking for myself I'm trying to find out for myself what all this means I'm not trying to convince anyone of a particular religious belief or whatever but but just trying to see really put where the evidence takes me okay I was just gonna say I think we would all raise our hand and that that's a big part of the scientific approach to it that we don't come in with our mind already made up that we really are curious about this my dad that we're all just a poor empirical scientist down in the trenches for the most part and don't claim to have any kind of special expertise about what it might all mean and we're open to the possibility that it is all about the hokey-pokey I mean it occurs to me that when the founder of physics room Niels Bohr said about quantum physics that if as you approach it you are not shocked then you haven't understood it and trying to understand this these these things in in terms of any kind of physics after Einstein is what why should this be easier to understand why that's why there should there be a simple explanation if the main description of reality at the moment seems to be quantum theory shows [Music] no relation at all to the life we lead on on this planet you see what I mean lady in the blue can you go through the near-death experiences that you have discussed tonight or seem rather Pleasant do you have people reporting near-death experiences that are not so pleasant uh yes we do have unpleasant near-death experiences the ones be collected a very tiny minority less than 1% are unpleasant however it's very hard for people to talk about unpleasant experiences so there may be a lot more than we're aware of but we have so few that we've been able to study that we can't say with any certainty why some people have unpleasant ones and other people don't it's certainly not the case that nasty people have unpleasant experiences I know some quite nasty people who have blissful experiences and there's certainly lots of reports about Saints throughout the ages who have unpleasant experiences so there's no simple answer to it well we are trying to look at that question now this is a bit unfair but I did say earlier that I wanted to come back to the panel so you guys are in that order when we restart do you see what I mean but I'm gonna go now - Kim what what are you interested in what are you working on well I am the new kid on the block so I have not been here as long as these folks and I feel very fortunate to be part of this group I'm a clinical psychologist and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and as part of my work I see patients and I do research and I teach and a lot of the patients I see that I'm doing psychotherapy on I all stars started doing mindfulness based therapies and recognizing the impact of the meditation and the mindfulness treatments that I was providing and the the positive impact on symptoms was wonderful however I kept hearing over and over again from my patients that they were experiencing other things and so that's where I really began exploring and getting interested in what was actually happening and I'll give you an example very quickly I had a gentleman with very severe depression an attorney very bright 52 year old had just been left by his wife very bad alcoholic he had tried so many times to stop drinking he had tried so many times to to stay on his treatment for depression and he couldn't and I worked with him to start practicing mindfulness meditation to help reduce the cravings for alcohol it didn't work but he kept trying he kept meditating and then one day he came to me and he said I'm not going to drink again and I said okay sure all right that sounds good let's let's let's keep an eye on this but I didn't believe him and he is not how to drink to this day I asked him what happened and he had what we call Clara clairaudience experience while he was meditating a voice of a woman came and said beat him up I mean talk about a negative experience this this voice told him to quit it what the hell was he doing he was killing himself and he said you know it sounded like my mother but I am not sure if it was but he he said it resonated with him and no one else heard it it wasn't you know a real person he wasn't delusional but it worked he had he had perceived that this came from somewhere and it worked and I saw this over and over again in my patients with personality disorders when they would meditate when they would get in touch with this this thing changed the state of consciousness and what I began to realize is that more and more of them were reporting what many of you will know as cities these are actually to be expected sort of experiences that people have when they're practicing some of these what are now modern traditions but come from ancient traditions where this was to be expected that you would have extraordinary experiences gifts and powers these are things like psychokinesis where you might be able to influence the environment physical environment or what we might call SCI psycho a psyche psychic sort of abilities where you might be able to predict something in the future or remember something that you couldn't possibly remember from the distant past and so the research I am moving into now is really more methodically exploring this and I'm building on research with my colleague who John also knows Cassie Beaton at the noetic Sciences and she's in California they did a study that looked at just a survey of eleven hundred people or so and they were meditators who had done some significant meditating and they asked him about these specific experiences and it was absolutely astounding they found over 50% endorsed experiencing some of these things one or more 50% reported experiencing some of these cities some of these extraordinary experiences things like precognition I mean I don't know about you but that is mind-blowing to me and and so they followed up with some additional research looking at this most of the people 60% were significantly impacted by this in a positive way which again is pretty profound so they didn't say wow it's no big deal it was very significant to them psychologically emotionally spiritually so we're building on that research now and looking at can all the things we've talked about here can we make this happen on purpose and and what will that look like how many people will experience these things and who experiences them or it are they certain kinds of personalities are they people that need special training do you need to be a monk I hope not and the idea is can we access these out-of-body experiences these phenomenal experiences and learn from them what we see that these other people have learned on purpose and what would that look like to tap into that human ability that level of consciousness if we all did that Wow I think we we might have some hope I just wanted to comment on one thing before we come to add which is that I was reading something a week ago that suggested that if we could all part now - to the required extent we could all do this now obviously maybe the difference is that some of us can quiet our minds better than others and I tie-dyed him with another idea which is years ago I read the the William James lectures at Edinburgh and we was talking about religious conversion experiences and they all seem to come at moments when people's lives was so bad that they kind of gave up right it's it's suddenly you stop relying on your brain and then something comes in that makes it Edie you can take a lot of laughs tonight in what do you want you I want to tell you a bit about two parts of my own career in psychical research and I I've been in it since the early 1970s but I've only been a top since 2003 and the kinds of things that I have been involved in kind of bracket the main part of the dops research portfolio you know most of the OPS's work has been focused on very detailed case studies and field investigations of various kinds that you've heard about but I'm like him an experimental psychologist by training and I actually got started in this direction late in graduate school because of some personal experiences I encountered the literature of Experimental Psychology and while I was working on my dissertation read enough of it to become convinced that there really seemed to be something there I mean these people were using the same kind of methods that I was being taught to study paranormal phenomena and the other thing was that it was clear that if these things existed it was extremely important because I mean the whole point about these phenomena is that they challenge widely held views about what's possible you know all of we use a generic term sigh for things like ESP extrasensory perception which has several subcategories psychokinesis or mind over matter direct influence on the environment not using your motor system and all that and the whole point of both kinds of phenomena is that a person or an organism is exchanging information with the environment despite the presence of some kind of a barrier that conventional classical physical principles would say should prevent that from happening and it's very easy it turns out to set up experiments to test whether these things can't happen and of course at that time the main Center for experimental parapsychology in the US was Durham North Carolina where JB Ryan had set up a unit in the psych department at Duke and so I began corresponding with Ryan and decided after a while that I throw caution to the wind I had friends who were telling me you're ruining your life here but nonetheless I went down and I began working for Ryan at the usual the usual terms $400 a month six-month trial period a steady stream of idealistic volunteers most of whom didn't survive very long anyway I also had the great good fortune after I'd been there for about a month a guy showed up who turned out to be probably one of the best subjects ever to walk into an experimental parapsychology laboratory this guy could do essentially anything we asked him to do they worked with him for over a year just to give a couple of examples we had a special electronic sight testing machine it involved he had four targets for lights the machine would pick one you're supposed to guess which it would be the Machine and absence of the subject instantiated the laws of probability to perfection same with most persons but the guy who built this thing had spent a couple of years looking for people who could do systematically better had found a couple of people who could do a couple of percent better on demand ok well this new guy who came down came into the main meeting room of the Ryan lab sat down with this machine who was telling us his life story would occasionally reach over and push a button and in the course of an hour he had over 35% hits and over 500 trials which would happen something of that sort or better by chance something like 1 in 10,000,000 times so we might have sat there for something like 10 million hours waiting for that to happen by chance and the inventor of the devices eyes were getting very big as this process wore on anyway the same person I've seen him do as well as 50% on that machine for hundreds of trials at a time he could also guess playing cards it's something like three times the expected rate with large numbers of excess number hits as well and there were things well let me just stop there and give you one of the what I hope will be a primary take-home point of this talk these phenomena the SCI phenomena in my opinion and I'm talking now not just in terms of my personal experience with this guy but the whole accumulated literature of case studies and experimental studies of which there are now thousands published in peer-reviewed journals these phenomena exist as facts of nature and science is going to have to accommodate to their existence it's going to have to expand in some way to accommodate them now at that time I like most parapsychologists I think hoped that the changes would be kind of small what has time has gone on I'd become more and more convinced that the changes are going to have to be much more radical than I had imagined at the beginning and I'll get back to that in just a moment but to continue on with the experimental part one of the big things that happened during that period I work I worked at the Rhine lab for about a year and a half but then migrated over to the Department of Electrical Engineering at Duke the reason being that I had become convinced particularly because of experiences with this guy that it would be productive to study SCI phenomena in a from a psychobiological kind of point of view and in particular what we wanted to do was to measure brain waves while people like him were performing in these tasks in hopes of learning something about what state the brain was in when he was about to make a good guess because if we had that kind of information we could do all sorts of useful things with it and so we started this program and went at it diligently for almost 10 years poorly funded the whole time made enough progress the feel we were on a good track but eventually the funds ran out and I had to abandon ship basically started working in conventional neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill all the enemies but I'm happy to report that since coming here together with some colleagues we've managed to create a really good neuro imaging lab where we can do the kind of studies we could only dream about years ago and one of the things I hope to do in talking to you is to encourage some bright undergraduates or early graduate students who working in areas like psychology or neuroscience or biomedical engineering maybe to come visit because we can provide you with lots of interesting opportunities and we're also interested of course and hearing about people who either have skills themselves or know people who do because that's really the main obstacle to carry in this program forward is finding people with the appropriate kinds of skills anyway that's maybe enough on that front now shift years and they're not here now but the two books at the far end of the book list there those were the major products of a project that went on for about 15 years through esslyn John talked about it a little bit last night that's where we met John actually in the early early 2000s and I have to give you a little bit of background to this and in talking about all this stuff what I hope to do is to situate the work that we do at DAPs right at the center of a very big something that is just now taking shape it's what I believe will prove to be a major inflection point in Western intellectual history that's a big mouthful let me try to explain what I'm talking about the background to this whole project is that a great majority of mainstream American scientists today Western scientists really in general particularly in areas like the behavioral sciences psychology neuroscience and also areas like philosophy of mind hold either explicitly or implicitly a view that's a kind of a modern sanitised philosophical version of what used to be called materialism in previous centuries it's called physicalism now and it's I mean it comes in a lot of subtly different variants but the the basic common idea is pretty straightforward and easy to state the basic idea is that all facts are determined in the end by physical facts alone reality consists at bottom of some kind of ultimate stuff little bits of that stuff flying around and fields of force in accordance with mathematical laws everything else has to come from that we human beings are nothing more than exceedingly complicated biological machines everything in mine and consciousness is generated by physiological events and processes in our brains it's an absolutely inescapable corollary of that picture if it were true that there cannot be any such thing as post-mortem survival because when you die the machinery that generates you disappears on a more cosmic scale people who hold these views see no sign of any kind of final causes or teleology in nature nothing transcendental no spiritual realm the whole scheme of things is without meaning or purpose and that's literally what probably 95% of mainstream scientists currently believe at least while doing their day jobs it's a bit surprising that a sizeable fraction estimated on the order 30 to 40 percent also have some kind of a spiritual practice going and how they reconcile these two things might be a little difficult anyway Mike Murphy how did Esalen Institute was acutely aware of this and he also was aware of various groups including in particular US adopts who have been doing research on post-mortem survival and developing what appears to be evidence suggestive of its existence as a fact of nature so he convened this group and we began reviewing all this evidence and we gradually the project kind of morphed whether we we became convinced early on we were all convinced that we are not physicalist and hatched this plot to destroy it and find something better to replace it with so to summarize to summarize the whole process all too quickly we developed these two books the first and they're not there they're not showing up at the exact moment anyway irreducible mind was intended to be our version of an assault on physicalism and in it we basically pulled together from a wide variety of sources a whole lot of empirical phenomena well established that we feel are difficult or in some cases absolutely impossible to explain in classical physical terms you know the size phenomena and evidence of survival right at the top of that list but that's not the only they are not the only things that point in this direction a lot of mainstream scientists of course they hate all this stuff and hope that it can be sort of quarantined to put in a room somewhere by itself because we're succeeding at everything else and therefore we can do that but it's not true there are plenty of phenomena and we catalog a bunch of them in irreducible mind that are equally hard to explain including things like geometrically shaped hypnotic blisters emily has a great chapter on extreme physiological phenomena of that sort aspects of human memory that are totally explain that present despite a huge literature about it wanted to me one of the most important parts of the evidence is the stuff that Bruce is working on near-death experiences and in particular those that occur under these extreme physiological conditions we also talked about stuff like extreme forms of genius and mystical experiences which have been widely ignored by contemporary science but which we argue cannot be ignored because they're telling us important things about how things are anyway just to summarize that whole exercise and I have to tell you this book is like eight hundred and thirty pages long so it's not easily summarized but from a psychological point of view the really crucial thing about it is for me anyhow it established as a viable possibility a suggestion that William James had made over a century ago talking about the correlation which everybody admits between mental things and physical things you know we know you get hit on the head or drink too much and something mental changes you might think well I decide to raise my arm and the damn thing goes up in the air isn't that mental causation well physical it says you've just misunderstood because ideas in your mind are really just patterns of activity in your brain physical causes physical no problem well the way to attack that point of view is to show things that cannot possibly be accomplished by the brain itself and that's what irreducible mind tries to do James pointed out that even though most mainstream scientists interpret the correlations between mental and physical as evidence of their production point of view mental produced by physical period you can think of it the other way that the mental and the physical sort of coexist the mind operates in connection with the brain the stuff in it is not produced by brains processes but its activity is conditioned by the state of the brain to me the arguments and evidence that we develop an irreducible mind were sufficient to show that that point of view is viable and it totally changed my personal attitude toward survival it provides an opening to overcome this biological objection to the possibility of survival if the way the system really works is the way I described that a mind can be something somehow independent of the brain but operating together with it I believe we can explain all the conventional evidence used by physical is to support their point of view and in addition some of these things that we study adopts just as James had argued over a century ago okay well that was stage one that was the easy that was the easy part I mean it was just a huge clerical job basically to pull all this stuff together from a vastly dispersed mostly biomedical literature there's all kinds of stuff out there that challenges the physicalist point of view but has never been really assembled in a way to show that clearly okay but now comes the hard part what can possibly replace the physicalist point of view ah right on time beyond physicalism that's part two that was published in 2015 and the basic strategy in in trying to put that together was we looked around for a whole bunch of systems that we had access to through our membership so it's somewhat selective in that regard but we specifically wanted to look at people and systems that had deliberately tried to figure out how the world must have to be in order for the kinds of phenomena we had cataloged in irreducible mind could occur we found quite a few of these things a very strange set of bedfellows for one book we've got chapters in there by several physicists for example contemporary physicists quantum theorists cosmologists several from the we had a big membership of scholars of religion and some of the old mystically informed religious philosophical systems have also taken the existence of these fun phenomena for granted and tried to explain them and there were several Western philosophical traditions also like lightness for example and Charles Sanders purse and Alfred North Whitehead so we pulled all these things together and tried to sort of inter animate them and we have a final part of the book in which we try to figure out where is this all headed and the basic what I want want to convey to you is that even though we don't have any sort of final position that we're all agreed upon by any means there is a definite central tendency of all this stuff and it's a tendency toward what amounts to the exact opposite of contemporary physicalism which takes the view that consciousness far from being an ineffectual by-product that things going on in the brain is in fact at the source of everything and we're going to have to somehow figure out how our experience of ourselves as being in a shared external world comes into being and I will tell you also that at at this very moment I know of at least three books being generated by people who are deeply familiar with developments in modern physics all driven by mystical experiences of their own who are attempting to formulate their particular systems of that sort and I firmly personally believe that something of this sort will emerge in the not distant future as the new sort of received wisdom the new generally accepted scientifically based worldview and I also would echo Kim in saying to John that this may be our best and perhaps only hope to save ourselves from the very katastrophe cigarette described let's let's just take a few seconds for people who need to leave who have planes to catch or children to punish what do you have to pass all right the very patient lady there the front of them is it working okay so in my extremely imperfect understanding or dalliance at all in in like Eastern philosophies I've always thought of like communal consciousness as something that either pre-existed our corporal like being and and maybe existed afterwards maybe that's why babies do have that lack of a sense of separation between themselves and others that they then kind of grow into and get the ego and then you go kind of you know caps out somewhere in whatever the 40s 50s and then towards death the ego is is dropped and that's sort of from what I've understood a lot of times with mindfulness and whatnot at the key to avoiding psychic pain is the dropping of the ego but a lot of what you've explained in the near-death experiences and other things seem to maintain a very individualistic existence post our bodies and I'm just curious if you have any thoughts about that or do you think that that's almost because they're so close to a earthly life or do you really or do and you you sort of had you gave an example of like a dialogue between two souls or whatever you want to refer to them as is it in your minds or maybe think separately is it a communal consciousness or do you think it continues as a single standing consciousness thank you this is a very complicated question if you ask a near-death experience they're just set to tell you what happened in their experience they will often start by saying I can't put it into words there are no words to explain this we say great tell me about it so they forced it into English words knowing that it's a distortion to do that so when they say I saw my body it's not like they were seeing with eyes they knew where the body was they knew things about the body and the only way they can convey to me is by saying I saw it so when they talked about personal things we know they're using a metaphor to explain it to us maybe that will say that in their near-death experience there was a cup of a dual consciousness they were aware of themselves and also we're being part of something much greater than themselves and they can't explain it to us because it doesn't go into English words I think it's also true that there's a lot in the mystical literature about this about people who have mystical experiences and retain that sense of self but conversely are also losing that sense of self and again like print like the near-death experiencers say they can't really explain it although they try but that that sort of paradoxical maintaining and losing the sense of self happens in mystical experiences oh yes it's true when do we have to finish we have to finish in five minutes so let's talk there is a resource that would be very quick the children who remember previous lives they obviously had adult skills in those lives language music smells any of that carry through sometimes there are cases where children seem to learn things more quickly than other children do there are occasional very few but occasional prodigy type cases I've got one where a it's a bit of a long story and we've only got five minutes but he basically remembered being the life of remember the life as a golfer a professional golfer Bobby Jones people they know this kid was definitely a golfing prodigy I mean from the age of three on he was winning golf tournaments so there do seem to be times for skills do carry over I have two things to say one I did have an I think it would be a mystical experience you might say and you and the blonde pretty girl I want to say I do have a key because of the first 43 years of my life were a living hell I couldn't figure out how to do life so I I lost my children I did get them back but I came to the end of myself I didn't know what to do and I said [ __ ] it I don't care if there's a hell I'll go there I don't care because I can't do it anymore so I had this encounter and I'm not going to tell you all of it you can look on my website or whatever but here's the key the first thing I heard when I went into the trance on that day in my own in my in the house that I was being evicted from when I went into the trance the first thing I heard was because the guy told me I had to go to church and I said I've already tried and then he said ma'am you already know about God and as soon that's when I went into the trance as soon as he said that and then I went into the trance and the very first thing I heard was going back to the altar because he told me I had to go back to the altar and the first thing I heard was going back to the altar means starting all over with everything that you think that you know about life and I said I won't know anything I mean I'll really be stupid right and but there was this flutter of fairies around me going yes yes yes so I made an agreement that I would surrender everything that I thought that I knew that obviously wasn't working today I'm a successful business owner eight years in the home healthcare field alive and healthy and I have the keys to life I know exactly what you're talking about and for you and here the reason I'm up here I didn't want to come up here but I felt pushed and I said give me a sign like give me something bright yellow because that's my favorite color and I look around the room and I see bright yellow and the light bulbs which they're usually white but these are bright yellow so I said I've got to come up but here's for your fundraising you're talking about are they using drugs for people that are crossing over patient after patient they all have an encounter before they cross over so for your fundraising I would say single a find out people that own home care agencies which I'm one and let us give you a report for free so that you can know what these people are actually experiencing would you not say that that is a really good first hand way of knowing is I would never like it's a very good idea and we have people here will be able to say you have 4 seconds o matter yeah what are your thoughts on and do you have any studies regarding mediumship medium here well we yes I did a study of mediums several years ago I I since we have so little time I won't go into any details about it I did a study with a number of mediums did we did two blind readings with the mediums and again I can't great details but it was it was one of the mediums protected was which was it was extremely successful and then ed and Kim are now they've got a proposal for a mediumship study to to be done here also so yes we are interested in that yeah last one thank you thank you it's release Dobbs thank you for this evening my question is in your research have you run into any cases with children in which they have taken on the personalities of the past lives of apes name a head or like as they have grown older have they grown older have they taken on those personalities well it's seen with each case we we coded on a bunch of different variables and put it in the database and that includes some personality features and what we see is that there is a correlation between personality features in the previous person and the child it's certainly not one-to-one I mean they are different individuals and of course we know personality is affected by genes and environment and everything else but there's a correlation there so it seems that there is is some carryover but it's also subject to be changed by the other aspects of life okay well I just wrap this up with something I found this also this book which Dean Radin engaged to me a couple of weeks ago real magic he justs at the end sorry at the beginning of the chapter on scientific evidence which seems to be really the 101 of this stuff he talks about a woman who was the chair of the Statistics Department of the University of California at Irvine and in a presidential address to that to the aasa' speaker the meeting attended by successful statisticians she said something she said for many years I've worked with researchers doing very careful work in parapsychology including a year that I spent working full-time on a classified project for the United States government to see if we could use these abilities for intelligence gathering during the Cold War and then she concludes at the end of that project I wrote a report for Congress staging what I still think is true the data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena is quite strong statistically it would be widely accepted if it pertains to something more mundane I think that's really interesting Thank You Charlotte [Applause]

Channel: Tom Tom Foundation

Views: 1,841,934

Rating: 4.674643 out of 5

Keywords: Tom, Founders, Festival, Life After Death, UVA, DOPS, Division of Perceptual Studies, Monty Python, John Cleese, Jim Tucker, Bruce Greyson, Chester Carlson, Kim Penberthy, Edward Kelly, Emily Kelly, Neurobehavioral Sciences, Psychiatry, NDEs, Near-Death Experiences, Near Death Experiences, Cleese, Life after death, After life, afterlife

Id: 4RGizqsLumo

Length: 101min 26sec (6086 seconds)

Published: Wed May 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

After watching a decade or so of NDE on YouTube pretty much no doubt remains that “life” after death exists.

[u/OmniVersalNexus]

Probably one of the best videos covering NDEs and other afterlife evidence I've ever seen. Thank you to OP, UVA and John Cleese!