SXSW Panel Discussion: Is There Life After Death? Featuring Jim Tucker, MD and Kim Penberthy, PhD.

the division of perceptual studies in the school of medicine at the university of virginia we are a group of psychiatrists psychologists and neuro-behavioral scientists who explore phenomena of consciousness for more than 50 years bring a rigorous scientific methodology to bear on the study of near-death experiences altered states of consciousness very young children who remember their past lives and related phenomena that they're on the question of the relationship between the mind and the physical brain between the near-death experiences and the past-life memory reports we have thousands of cases coded in databases this large collection of data allows us to look for trends and patterns within each type of phenomenon we've established a high quality eeg lab here we're interested in states of consciousness that have by and large been ignored by contemporary psychology and neuroscience i've seen the impact of people discovering a different way of thinking about their consciousness and it is transformational building on the past 50 years of research into these phenomena we're now asking new questions and diving deeper into the data we ask big questions is it possible that consciousness continues on after we die are there ways to alter consciousness that will improve your quality of life and if so what does that mean for us as human beings are certain personality types more likely to report these unusual experiences if we ignore these phenomena then we risk having an incomplete understanding not just of ourselves but of the ultimate nature of consciousness these are the questions that we're willing to tackle we're really just getting started [Music] [Music] we have here two distinguished professors of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences from the division of perceptual studies at the university of virginia uh dops is the one of the oldest and most established programs at an academic center like the university of virginia and they explore a wide range of issues looking at everything from near-death experiences to after death communication to what that tells us about the world we live in and this kind of work i think it makes the world a more interesting place in addition i want to say that jim is a child psychologist sorry psychiatrist and one of his longtime research interests is the past lives of children and he and dobs has studied thousands of cases of this and he and he i'm going to come back to him to talk about this and kim is a professor of and a clinical psychologist she works has an appointment in uva's cancer research center she works with dying patients and she also explores issues of things like after death communication how we access those are there techniques we can use to be more connected and how that helps us during the sort of passage of dying what i'd like to do now is ask jim to give us an overview of his research and then talk about not only his research but near-death experiences but that's such another fascinating part of this program all right thank you deborah um so as deborah said my area of interest involves young children who say that they have memories of a past life and we have been studying such cases from all over the world for over 50 years and what these typically involve is very young children are three or four years old who start saying that they remember things that they did in their last life um 70 of them will describe how they died which is often traumatically and they at times can give very specific details that then we try to verify match somebody who did actually live and die so there's a well-known american case of a little boy who said he had been a world war ii pilot and named the ship that his plane flew off of talked about where he died talked about a friend named jack larson who was on the ship with him and all these things matched with the pilot who was killed in world war ii so those are the kinds of cases that we focus on because they provide evidence that it's not just a child talking about all sorts of fanciful things but very specific details that again we can see all right is it really a past life that he or she is describing uh the children also have a lot of behaviors that will fit with their memories many of them um grieving being away from their previous families that they may cry and beg on a daily basis for their parents to take them to their previous family they'll also show behavior like phobias related to the the mode of death from the past life they'll show things in their play that seem connected so all this would suggest that it's not just sort of information that they're accessing but more that feelings and emotions seem to have carried over and that it it is not just information but memories that they seem to be bringing with them into this life so that's one area that we have focused on a lot looking at this question of life after death or in this case sort of life before this life and as deborah mentioned near-death experiences have also been a large focus of our work bruce grayson who you saw on the video is one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences for people who aren't familiar with those often when somebody has a heart attack or something that causes them to briefly their brains to shut down many of them will describe floating above their bodies they may witness the resuscitation efforts uh sometimes they will describe things that took place in other parts of the hospital that are then say conversations that are then verified to have actually taken place um then many of them will go through sort of a dark passage they may say it's a tunnel uh they will often encounter deceased loved ones um occasionally ones that they did not know had died so there are cases where say a sibling was killed in a car accident before word got back to the family somebody had a near-death experience and was surprised to see their sibling on the other side many of them will also have a life review and then they will often encounter a light or a being of light which which many people interpret as god um and then many of them will hit a sort of come to the point of no return either they um if they go further then they will die and they'll often even either be given a choice to come back or told they have to come back that their life is is not finished um so then those people do come back and tell us these stories and if you follow them along this experience is completely transformative for them uh they say that they have lost all fear of death because they know that life continues and and that for most of them has been a very pleasant experience um and it also transforms how they live this life you know which in some ways is is real key they become much more much less materialistic they often become sort of more caring in some ways less ambitious at times and they go on with their lives but they are often not the same people that they were before and that leads us directly to your research kim i wish you would uh talk a little bit about your work with after death communications which and also that also tends to affect the living after that experience so the stage is yours all right i want to be sure you can hear me well i've got a lapel mic can you hear me okay all right i could do the double duty if you want like belts and suspenders okay we're good i want to say first of all thank you for being here we had no idea this is a huge room and we had no idea if we'd have like two or three people uh it's wonderful to see everyone before i start i am just really curious um i'm assuming some of you might be here because you've had some sort of extraordinary experience so would you mind if you don't mind raising your hand if you've had some sort of extraordinary experience what you would call extraordinary and your death experience and after death communication an out-of-body experience okay so yeah good i'm glad you're here welcome you're with your people that's good um i am a clinical psychologist and really came to this work through my clinical work working with patients and families who are dying who are very uh or mentally really struggling and discovered things that i couldn't explain as a scientist from my traditional training and one that comes to mind that really got me interested in the after death communications was a woman with cancer i was i was treating she had very severe depression and then her mother passed away she had a very complicated relationship with her mother and literally got back to her native country to see her right before she died and was grieving terribly and was having what we call complicated bereavement really having a hard time letting go um everything i tried sort of failed she was really struggling i was very worried about her and then she had an experience that she reported to me of her mother coming to her stroking her cheek as she cried and telling her she was okay it was all okay she felt safe enough to share this with me i felt so honored i believed her it was obviously real to her and real enough to to make a significant change in her life her depression symptoms improved um and and stayed improved and she was able to work through um the grief of her of her mother and that complicated relationship very quickly and thoroughly and and to this day is still doing well so this got me very interested in what was going on and i began to get involved in studying after death communications so these are literally what i'm talking about when i say after death communications are spontaneous contact from people who are deceased so this is a little different than going to a medium or uh using a ouija board or something this is sort of someone contacting a living person who has just has passed away and what we when we started looking at this i started looking at the literature there's not a lot of literature the literature out there though shows that almost half of us have these experience experiences i mean that's a lot of people to not have much research on it and and so i i started collaborating with researchers worldwide and we just completed one of the biggest studies um asking people to report their after death communications so this was in three languages english spanish and french and people volunteered their um their stories about their after death communication and believe me these people were dedicated because they filled out about 200 questions about their information and what we discovered is exactly what deborah was talking about is not only do these happen pretty frequently so we're talking people feel the presence of the loved one who's passed on or or the deceased person it doesn't have to be a loved one it's just a deceased person they feel their presence they're touched by them physically they smell them they can sometimes see them they have this experience and it can be waking it can be um in a dreamlike state they're often happening when you're sort of like falling asleep or sort of starting to wake up very significantly though exactly what happened with my patient we see happening again and again with these people that this is very therapeutic that people come out of this experience um believing that this was real believing that their loved ones still existed on some plane or some realm and uniformly these experiences are reassuring they are a restorative for the individual and as jim was saying they also help people lose their fear of death and dying as you can imagine and um often what we found in our research people become more spiritual and they certainly increase their beliefs that the that we we live on after the death of our body so um this is the work that i'm doing and continue to do i've also done research in meditative states and contemplative practices because i'm very interested in the near-death studies as well as the children who remember past lives but not all of us have those experiences in fact four more of us have after death communications but even more of us may be able to achieve some sort of altered state of consciousness through contemplative practices by this i mean meditation psychedelic assisted sort of altered consciousness so there are other ways we may be able to learn more about what happens when our body dies and i'm very excited about those for the future so i'm going to jump in i mentioned that i'm a science journalist who wrote a book about ghost hunting and and i'm going to jump in and tell you the experience from not mine but from my family that kind of got me interested in this topic which was my father-in-law who is a small businessman in california and is norwegian-american very grounded guy um at least that's his persona but he uh one night he wakes up it's about two o'clock in the morning sits up in bed so abruptly that he wakes my mother-in-law up and says to her my cousin bob's out in the yard and she sits up they both listen it's silent right they he she says to me you're just dreaming he lies back down and about 10 minutes later he's back up again and he says no i can hear him calling my name and he goes out in the dark in the middle of the night and there's no one there he you know he's like disturbed a few very unhappy birds but there's no one there and so he gets back in bed and they have one of those was that the chili conversations and he goes back to sleep and then the next morning he goes to work and he's still just off and about 11 o'clock in the morning the son of his cousin bob called him bob lived in santa cruz about several hundred miles away and bob had committed suicide almost to the minute that he was out in the yard looking for his cousin and that kind of experience if you asked my father-in-law and said what do you think that was he would say i don't know right he was mostly just freaked rather than comforted and so one of the things i want to raise by also telling that story which is a slightly different version of these kind of experiences is in either case in the story that kim told in the story that i could hauled in the way that jim looks at children who may interact with in some way with people who previously lived we're talking about a consciousness that appears to be separate from your brain right or a communication that is not just i'm telling you this because i'm standing next to you and i'm wondering if both of you could address that issue a little you know there's mind there's brain there's consciousness do we see them as separate things when you are doing these studies what do you think you're finding essentially well i think we're finding that yes they can function separately and the kind of experience that your father-in-law has called a crisis apparition i mean there are score hundreds of those cases reported um so it's not just a one-off i mean that it happens and um you know that's when the person who is dying their consciousness is separated from their brain and then also somehow it's conveyed to the living person um and do we think of that as a kind of telepathy gym or do we think of it as something more well it's more in the sense that it's a it's coming from a non-functioning brain whereas with the telepathy and there have been a lot of studies with telepathy i mean there's something going on beyond the brain from brain to brain in some sort of link we don't know but at least both brains are functioning whereas this is even more evidence that mind is happening while the brain has ceased to function and do you agree with that kim well i mean this gets into all kinds of metaphysical theories and that's part of what we are exploring so we consider ourselves scientists and we go in with an open mind looking at what what are the implications of the work we do i think jim would agree with that as well we we really come in um looking for evidence and then follow the evidence where it takes us and from my point of view um i might not have said this you know 20 or 30 years ago after the research i've done though it's very clear to me that the mind and the brain are not the same and i i think also it's quite clear to me that the brain does not just produce the mind and when i say mind i mean the consciousness that we're talking about you can think of it as a soul or as your essence um so what exactly is the relationship we're still we're still trying to find out i'm very excited about the developments in more theoretical and applied physics looking at quantum and physics and exploring that i wish i could go back and get a phd in in physics um i don't i don't want to tell my husband's in the room so he might be like no so i think there is a lot more research to do and that's um that's good for for my career i have a long way to go in the work i've done so far my hunch is that um there's two ways to sort of think of where we are now um that maybe they're separate mind and body and they're sort of two entities sort of working um there's also something called the filter theory where whatever that consciousness is is sort of entering into our body and our brain is sort of like the filter so there's a way more out there but we just can't see it just like some people who color blind can't see certain colors our brain is filtering out things there's also um something called pan psychism which is that really mind is everywhere and so i i don't have the answer i mean we've been struggling for thousands of years with this question i'm just excited to do the work follow the evidence and see where we go no that's really helpful well i was just gonna with the filters here william james of course that was the star of your book um had this idea which is now called the filter theory but where consciousness exists elsewhere and it it our brains serve as filters or as he said like prism where it comes through into this reality but is also existing outside of this reality yes one of the arguments he made was that our brains do filter out a lot of you know free-floating information because you just don't want to be constantly bombarded it's adapted and that something like the experience that i mentioned with my the blast of energy is so much stronger that it kind of gets through your natural defenses which i've always thought was a really interesting argument i i would not like to be i thought about this with telepathy like i really do not want to read the minds of everyone in this room and i doubt that you want to read the minds of everyone in this room either it could be a really traumatic experience or wonderful everyone may love me but you know i think that there is some sense to this which leads me to the next question i wanted to ask you was if what we're talking about with life after death is kind of a continuance of mind or consciousness what is life after death then is it just these sort of free-floating wisps of consciousness that we occasionally connect with is it something more coherent does your research actually let you say here is my picture of what life after death might be and going back to some of your research that can does it comfort you well you know there's another theory we didn't talk about which is idealism which is that mind is everything this is all the material world is just created by our consciousness so there is the the idea could be that our uh our afterlife as we're calling it is really the the real life and it's it's the main show and being in these physical bodies is just sort of part of it so i from my research like i said i'm still searching i don't have the answer if if anyone in the audience does i would love to talk to you afterwards or you can speak up now um what does comfort me is that as i said i'm fairly certain um from the research i've done from the data that exists in the literature and all the people that did the research before me the folks adopts people thousands of years before that that there is more than the idea that we just live in this body and die and that's it our bodies disintegrate back to the earth and we're done in fact i think i've thought that ever since i was a little girl uh i remember hearing like hearing about that and thinking that seems a waste doesn't it you know darn you know so um my research really to me indicates that there is some we exist in some way we don't know quite yet exactly how that works maybe it's complicated physics maybe it's the creation of the universe maybe we'll never know and i'm okay with that as well i just love the search and to me it brings comfort into the people that i work with the patients the colleagues the majority of them it brings comfort as well to understand life this way yeah and i would say for looking at near-death experiences and then looking at our cases of past lives it seems that there is an individual survival that it's not just sort of entering the cosmic consciousness or whatever but there is a fairly intact something uh that that continues on at least at the time of death and then with our past life cases it seems to continue um i didn't mention that 20 percent of these kids also talk about time between lives experiences that they have after they died in the past life before they're born in this one so again there is this continuation this individualized continuation that is certainly suggested by our work i have a couple more questions and then we hope that you also have questions there's a microphone in the center aisle here if you do want to ask jim and kim every anything at all i know they'd be happy to answer them one of my questions is if you take these experiences um in the in the what i think of is the institutional structure of science uh theory replication confirmation it seems to me that these are uh events that are very difficult to fit into that structure i have no idea if i wanted to prove for instance that my father-in-law really was connecting in some way with his dead cousin how would i prove that what is there about the way science works that would allow me to establish that that was valid and so i wonder as you guys you know situated as you are at a major research university if you run into the fact that sometimes the work you do does not fit the sort of normal paradigms of science and how you try to overcome that yeah i mean in a way it may be slightly quixotic in the sense that we're trying to take a scientific approach to material that may not lend itself to to scientific approaches but if if we do things carefully which we certainly try to do then then there is this empirical evidence that accumulates so you know with our 2000 cases of past life memories and our thousand-plus cases and near-death experiences and everything else there are patterns that um develop that we can study and it's not controlled laboratory ex studies but it's something that needs an explanation and it's it yes it doesn't fit into the mainstream materialist paradigm so that means the paradigm may need to evolve or need to gray there you go kim yes and uh well some of my research i can do randomized control studies uh looking at you know you can teach people different meditative states you can try to alter their states of consciousness in different ways and then explore the experiences they have and so i think jim is right that that we are sort of skirting the edge of some of this um and uh some of our work is more uh qualitative sort of collecting the stories again science is an evolution and it's changing and in my world i see it changing um to include more expansive approaches to things more individualized research studies certainly in some of the bypoc research that we do we know we have to change the way we're doing science we have to be more inclusive we have to expand our methods not everything's going to fit into a randomized control trial and that has been our standard um and and and that's fine i'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but i think we need to look beyond that as jim said and really be more inclusive one of the things i want to honor is that none of this stuff we're talking about is new and i don't want you to think that we're acting like we discovered it this has been around in ancient cultures in indigenous communities forever so we also are i feel strongly are obligated to reach out to those people who have done this work the shamans the the medicine men the people who um have this long history and include them and that's one of my goals as well in the work i'm doing is to be more expansive in not just the scientific approach but the people we include if you think about it we're living through oh my god i'm going to get tearful here i mean we're living through a period of time where people are dying rapidly coveted the ukraine i would be remiss if i don't mention these things and other genocides occurring we need to work on how to help these people that you know i read a statistic that for every person who died from covid they're leaving an average of nine people behind who will grieve them so i feel very strongly that we've got a lot of work to do in this area not just to understand what we're dealing with and explore that but also to help the people that are left here to cope and deal and heal and to honor the people that have done this work for centuries and include them and their wisdom that's a great note to end this part of the program with i'm a journalist so i could actually fill this entire hour with my questions but i'm hoping some of you would like to come forward and ask a question that's terrific thank you thank you so much for this i really appreciate this conversation this morning i have two questions i guess the first one is um there's been some some research that's been done on how things get encoded in our dna specifically um grandchildren of people that went through the holocaust or world war ii that were starving and then and typically it's through the grandmother then their uh there it changes how they look at food question number one have you correlated that question number two on the conversations you've had with people that are having these experiences of which i've had but is it people that have died currently or do people have things that can be 10 years later 15 years later 20 years later with that kind of um whether it's a moment that you like you're triggered you see something that's that's the moniker or whatever so two different questions thank you well i will try to answer the them uh so the first one i am not an expert in that area of the sort of passing on the changes from trauma yeah but there is some science there but absolutely yes our colleague at the university of virginia marisa pray has done a lot of that work looking at african americans and the trauma passed down through their lineage and and the effect on biology so that is there i think it would be fascinating jim might have done some of that with the children of um who remember past lives but i've not looked at that yet and would love to and then the second question you had was um the experiences that people are saying that they're feeling something or having evidence of is it something that a person that passed recently or can this linger and be decades later years later decades later yes it can be that is the short answer absolutely um people report you know seeing um a grandfather who they never even met um who died you know 40 years earlier so yes absolutely yeah and we've even had people who see pets um so absolutely to get back to the first part um there have been studies not just with human trauma but there have been studies with rodents where the uh they'll associate say um a shock with a fragrance and what they find is that in the next generation the rat show of fear and even the generation after that and it's thought to be what's called epigenetic where it doesn't change the genes but it changes which genes get turned on and that sort of thing yeah um that is not connected with our past life memory cases in the sense that most of the children are remembering a life where uh it's not an ancestor but it's it's somebody separate there's no genetic and most of them recall a a recall the death and of course people have passed on their genes obviously before they die so it would not be that genetic connection come on up this is fascinating thank you very much good presentation i wanted to ask a perhaps controversial question i wanted to ask if you have an opinion on organized religion a lot of things that you've mentioned might be described by many people as a heaven you know i know that this is the scientific approach you're taking but i just wondered if the religious perspective influenced any of your research well i think um as far as the nation as far as the near-death experiences go often afterwards the people are more spiritual but not necessarily more religious some of them will talk with religious figures in their near-death experiences but many do not so i mean it doesn't confirm religion but it's consistent with it so there is more than that just this physical reality and and you know people have conceptualized that in different ways and again many of the near-death experience folks do talk about seeing god or something like god uh with our cases of past life memories uh those cases are certainly easiest to find in cultures with a belief in reincarnation so there would be sort of a religious thing but they're found wherever anyone looks and with the american cases most of the families are christian uh they did not believe in reincarnation and yet their children start talking about these past lives so it's sort of tran if i may say this it kind of transcends religion in a way and it's speaking sort to we might say a higher truth kim yes i would i would say the same we always ask about religion if if they are religious what religion they are and most of my studies in meditation and in after death communication we ask that and find the same thing that jim's talking about um many people endorse changes significant changes in their level of spirituality what they describe as spirituality and not necessarily in their religiosity even if they endorsed that they were religious at the beginning that doesn't seem to change significantly either become more religious or less religious it sort of stays the same the spirituality increases i'm curious for the children who recall past lives if you have any more if you have information on follow-up studies with them as they age become adults does does that fade or anything of that nature uh well we are currently doing that study we are interviewing adults who we originally studied as kids since we've been doing this for so long uh one thing we find is that the memories do tend to fade so by the time the kids really are six or seven most of them have stopped talking about this stuff and kind of gone on with their lives but when you interview them as adults a substantial minority say that they do still have some of those memories they've just kind of stopped talking about them and gotten wrapped up in this life and they seem to be doing fine i mean they're not psychotic or anything like that um you know they're just developing like the rest of us just to jump in on that jim why would the memories fade do you think well it's the same age when we all lose our memories of early childhood and the brain is undergoing a lot of changes during that time pruning uh which is sort of a long story but the um we let a lot of the early stuff go so you know for any of us if there's a say a family friend that at age two or three would the child definitely knows i mean it's in long-term memory but if that person moves away by the time the child is five or six they've usually forgotten them so it makes sense that these memories have stayed at the same time makes sense come on up hi um i presume you have very heated discussions with materialistic skeptical colleagues and um i would like to hear what are your top three arguments that you give these these colleagues typically that are the essence of your of your work and if there are experiences which are not hundred percent uh subjective but there's also an objective part to it which can be kind of proven by outsiders um and if you have such experiences or thank you good question first you can go first well you know it depends on the skeptical argument depends on the area of work uh so with the near-death experiences the idea ideas oh it's just the dying brain that is producing these experiences um but as far as we can tell the i mean it may you may get an endorphin release of the sense of calm but these kinds of experiences when the uh the cortex uh that produces thought is completely shut down and yet they're having the most profound experiences of their lives um it's people keep trying to come up with physical ways of of uh explaining them away but no one's come up with a convincing one yet um with the past life cases the idea is that the kids are just kind of fantasizing and then maybe the families make too much of it uh so what we've got in many or a number of these cases people have written down everything that the child said about the past life before anyone went to look to try to verify it so if that's just all fantasy it is one heck of a coincidence with some of the specifics they come up with yes and i would agree it really depends on what topic we're talking about when i started doing meditation research um there i got a lot of flack from colleagues and now you know i many of you may be aware it's it's fairly mainstream and there's a lot of uh it's exponentially risen the number of articles and manuscripts on that so i'm waiting for some of this honestly to become mainstream over time the arguments uh with respect to after death communication um again are very similar it's a fantasy it's not real and um the reality is that for some of these experiences we will never be able to prove them and for some of them there are these experiences that can be validated so there's about 20 percent of the after death communications there's information passed that we can verify so things like information about i don't know um the password for a computer uh that someone needs to get into and um of course information like that that someone has passed on that you didn't know had died and you're seeing them um in the next world and so there are some areas where we can um challenge those questions i think it's you know it we're always going to run into that that's that's what makes science so i i welcome that and it makes us our science stronger um to be challenged that way frankly thank you that's a good question yes come on up uh first um giant fan girl jim in particular so welcome to austin i've been following your work for decades i read return to life and carol bowman's book about children's past life memories long time ago and uh just in terms of personal effect it made me less afraid of death for sure so i live life much more calmly about all this so thank you if nothing else it produced that um but i also read extraordinary knowing by elizabeth mayer if you guys are familiar with that work ucsf it was all about the skeptics guide to all of this um and what she found is that she was doing research among her own academic peers because she had had her own kind of extraordinary experience and that almost all of the not all of them many many of them had had some sort of experience like this but then they really hit it because it would be completely shunned and they were neurosurgeons and they were highly highly credentialed people that if they told anybody about this would be left out of their work and i remember thinking about a dramatic loss of capacity right that there's this way in which we'd be able to solve so much more complex problems be able to have a much more open conversation so i guess my question is over all this period of time have we shifted that needle are we opening up those doors more are we able to have much warming i'm also excited there's this many people here but in academia in particular that thing there's another movie called the um the man who knew infinity if you guys have seen that maybe anyway but mathematician roman juju who knew and was able to decode you know math in a way that and then the lock between logic and provability and scientific method versus we just know yeah right and someday quantum we can figure it out so i guess i'm just wondering you've been doing this work for a long time so much of what you're talking about is familiar to me are we moving the needle and we'll be able to upload our consciousness someday well i think we are although like you say is hard to tell because people may not um we've moved the needle for them but they won't admit it um but you never know who's open to this stuff and you never know who's had these experiences so you know we're on committees in the hospital and so forth and i will be shocked sometimes when this basic science person on the committee with me says boy i really enjoy your work and the work that ian stevenson did at uva a long time ago before we got involved so yeah i think we're doing it sort of one person at a time um so it you know it's kind of baby steps but but i think there is more open openness to it than there was 50 years ago it was impacting their current work in such profound ways they couldn't tell anybody about it they couldn't teach their students about it they couldn't pass it on it's all i'm saying this work you guys are doing is really important in the ability to again open up cognitive capacity for people to be able to solve much much bigger yeah oh thank you yes thank you and to that point there is a study that's now published that looked it's uh cassie beaton and a group out at the institute of noetic sciences and petaluma and they looked at uh this was meditation and extraordinary experiences when you're meditating and they had done an original study sort of looking at meditators out there versus non-meditators and showed this extraordinary number of of experiences that people were having and and people pooh-poohed oh there's a california folks whatever and so they said no okay we're going to look and um at a larger group and they actually elicited scientists specifically so scientists engineers and now it was all anonymous and maybe that's the key they had um very similar reports um of these extraordinary experiences so i think you're absolutely right that they are happening to people and when you know that's why i said earlier when i introduced it you have to feel safe with the person you're disclosing to i have to help my patients my colleagues feel safe to disclose and they do now do they make it public no and and okay that's fine you know people can live their lives the way they want i think it's exciting though that to even hear that that people are reporting it more and i think we are moving the needle and um so that is exciting that would be wonderful and you know to the uh the gentleman who asked about religiosity and spirituality i mean it would be interesting to see how those fold in do people who identify as more religious feel more comfortable or less comfortable sharing um you know what is that role so i look at moderating factors too yeah thank you that's been a fascinating discussion coming up okay uh for those of us who are interested in this unique intersection of this work and the scientific method who else should we be reading you just mentioned one study out of petaluma but what else well um dean rayden at ions at noetic sciences he publishes a lot of very interesting stuff um that sam parnea who's at columbia has published interesting stuff on on uh time the moment of death and how we even define death as well as looking at near-death experiences and i think daryl bem who has done a lot of work not necessarily on near-death experiences but on on precognition and he's a well-respected psychological scientist who um has published in mainstream journals on the fact that um if you look at the statistics and these are randomized controlled trials good old science uh humans have precognition we absolutely do um and so he's someone out there really putting his career on the line to publish in that arena is he still at cornell i believe so yeah thank you thank you come on up hi i'm andrew i was very curious to see if there were any commonalities or any through lines that you've discovered from the after death communication as well as your work in in past life experiences and then secondarily i had a question about contemplative methods anything i can kind of begin to work on now that you might recommend wonderful so i will address that first and then we'll go to the first question i think any kind of contemplative practice is going to help set you up to sort of access more of these abilities we did a study where we looked at undergraduates at the university of virginia about 500 of them and it was an introductory class to zen buddhism uh no any buddhism so they did a it was like a survey class they learned about the ancient aspects and then they learned modern day applications and practices and just during that survey course we assessed um changes in and the things we've been talking about extraordinary experiences compassion for others that's another big one that is huge and what we found is that just being exposed to it and practicing sort of minimally they were meant to practice a couple days a week and keep track of it and they they shifted significantly i was astounded i didn't think they would i mean they're doing this as a course they're not there to you know get enlightened or anything and yet they seem to have improved in these really extraordinary ways so um i would i would offer that i mean often what i encourage people to do is start with sort of a mindfulness meditation there's so many apps out there now that you can access and just really begin to it's a sort of a standard attention focused and then you can move into what we would call more of a pasana really sort of accessing that state of consciousness there's just so many ways to get there you're really looking for that that state of consciousness though um yeah and we can talk later there's just so many options it's wonderful thank you and the first question well as far as through lines i mean i think sort of what i was saying earlier that with all of these there's this idea of an individual continuation um so with the after death communications it is the deceased individual who seems to be connecting and the same with the past lives remembering an individual moving through from one life to the next so i would say that's the primary connection thank you hi my name is sophia when i was a little girl like really young maybe around four i had this really intense fear of dying and i would have these moments where my parents would say let's go on a walk and i was like no we can't because we're gonna die if we do and it was like really strong but i felt like i couldn't tell them that like i was aware enough that i was like if i say that they're gonna be like no no no you know they just aren't gonna get it um and i think as i grew up i kind of like pushed that to the back of my head i was like that's not something i need to worry about right now but it was really still just like an underlying feeling that i had the whole time and then when i was in college i had a really intense psychedelic experience that kind of answered that it was like an overlying question i didn't go into the experience um wondering oh maybe this will fix that fear or like answer my question about like the state of consciousness but it really did like completely absolve that fear that i had carried with me since i was a small child which might have come from the fact that i had three surgeries before i was two years old really intensive um so i think that was just like a very early stage of being close to that space um and i know that psychedelics are finally coming back kind of ins to more of a bit of a mainstream form of research so i was wondering what your thoughts and perspectives are on that and how that might ultimately be useful because i know that my experience was just like i didn't walk into that and it certainly wasn't moderated you know but that's what what i got from it and i'm glad i was in a safe space to in order to go through that and had people with me who provided that space but um yeah i'm just very curious to hear your perspective on what you think might be possible with that and that's a great question we're almost out of time so if you could be concise then we can get to the last question i will i will just say yes we are at the beginning of looking at that um i'm very interested in looking at the uh mostly the clinical applications to be quite honest because that does seem to be so promising for some of these intractable illnesses that people have and the other aspect very similar to meditative states into contemplative practices is looking at not only healing illness but also augmenting wellness and um and both if we can and so yes i hope to move into that area right now we are not doing research with psychedelics but there has been a study done not by us but a study done looking at death anxiety among cancer patients and one dose of psilocybin removes their death anxiety so yeah that as kim said that work is coming psychedelics in psychiatry are exploding thank you good question okay the beauty of coming to south by southwest is that you get involved into all sorts of discussions and it's a convergence of minds three years ago or so i was attending a session that talked about that we were living in a simulation and for the materialists in the room the engineers right suddenly they are moving into this environment that is about religion that is about consciousness and psychism are you seeing types like engineering geeky types engage with you guys on a conversation that usually historically they wouldn't well we have an engineer at dops so um absolutely and i think as as i said as we grow in sophistication of our knowledge of physics especially and some of these components and and biology also that we are getting into really interesting conversations and as jim indicated you know we are with mainstream scientists and researchers all the time and we're very well tolerated i have to say some some of them even like us so um that i think helps having colleagues having relationships to do that work and bridge those gaps absolutely yeah so perhaps this is a conversation about the metaverse after all right thank you yeah and as far as conversation goes i'm going to put in a plug for us so with with the website uh you can sign up we have an e-newsletter that people can sign up for if they want to learn about our work going on and also um um we have we're on facebook and what else maybe that's it i think twitter all of those things if you go if you go to the website you will find um you'll find that information and uh it's up here on the big screens for you so we would love to have you contact us and uh we really do appreciate you being here thank you and thank you so much jim and kim this has been fascinating you guys have been a wonderful group and if you have any unanswered questions i'm sure that jim and kim would be happy to stay for a few minutes and talk to you directly thank you again for coming thank you you

Channel: UVA Division of Perceptual Studies

Views: 17,002

Keywords: Division of Perceptual Studies, Near death experiences, Past life memories

Id: wq9herZmZps

Length: 57min 33sec (3453 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022