UVA DOPS Faculty Presentation: Do We Survive Death? A Look at the Evidence.

well officially hello everyone hello thanks for such a wonderful warm welcome to Boston I am Patrick bile and I am one of three Advisory board members today for the University of Virginia's division of perceptual studies uh you're going to hear from another one of my uh fellow board members Tracy Cohen in just a little bit who's also our host today let's give Tracy a little bit of love and appreciation and then Tom dingledine right here is another one of our board members so little love for Tom uh I I start off with the board members because um it is a brand new thing even though the division of perceptual studies which you'll be hearing us refer to as dopps throughout the day uh has been around for 50 years this is the first time that we've done anything like this a road show like this where we're trying to get out the word about the research that these guys are guys and gals these these folks are doing uh because uh the world needs this as you'll all know and understand if you don't already by the end of these presentations today and it was this board uh who really helped launch this Outreach phase so that's why I wanted to start with with gratitude to them uh today uh you're going to be hearing from uh from Jeff olon who uh Tracy is's going to introduce in just a minute about some experiences he had and then after Jeff uh we're going to go right to the UVA researchers for their perspective on the research uh that they're doing you're going to hear from uh Dr Bruce Grayson right here in the front about near-death experiences and the research he's been doing for many many years and then Dr Jim Tucker next to him about children who remember past lives uh and then Dr uh Kim penury uh about mindfulness and uh some research that she's involved with about meditation and the like and then Dr Ed Kelly at the end who runs our research lab uh at dopps uh any anybody who does uh psychic uh phenomena uh he's he's hooking them up to machines and and testing all that so that they can put it into the language of Science and uh get some good credibility in the academic world so you'll be hearing from all those folks uh I'm just going to uh a c take care of a couple uh what do you call them house not housewarming housekeeping thank you housekeeping details and then I'll I'll tell you why the world needs dots and pass it over to Tracy uh so bathrooms are just out here to the left if you haven't found those yet I see some of you with your Refreshments in hand so you might be needing that sooner rather than later we will not take it personally if you need to use the restroom uh in fact we encourage it we have Refreshments uh at the intermission and we'll also have Refreshments after the Q&A session at the end so you'll you'll have some time to connect with uh the researchers Andor each other I reminded some folks I was just talking to that that this is the place where you can talk about these things without having to worry about the Judgment that might come at your workplace or at your church or in your family life so please connect with each other as much as you can today so my last little U Point here is why the world needs dos and the research they're doing uh the current worldview of physical science does not seem to incorporate some of the things you're going to be hearing about today the nature of human consciousness and that Paradigm uh focuses on the way things they want things to be as opposed to really taking into consideration Human Experience how many of you have had experiences which maybe cannot be explained by the current physical science Paradigm exactly so you are not alone uh and I was the same way I had a mystical experience in India 20 years ago that uh I could not explain by any of the physics or science classes I had ever taken and so I went in search of scientific research to explain what it happened to me and how it was possible in this universe well guess who I came across the University of Virginia division of perceptual studies Dr Ian Stevenson and his research into children that remember past lives and then the rest of these guys from there it's it's really phenomenal the work that they're doing uh the world of science does not take into consideration each of our subjective experiences uh that are spontaneous science wants objective and repeatable experiences uh and what these folks are doing at dopps is painstakingly collecting evidence of all of our experiences and creating a body of evidence that science will actually sit up and listen to we hope they have been they will be but it's extremely important uh this work that you're about to hear about today so uh you are in for actual a very special treat today and uh you'll be hearing from me a little later on again but let me bring up Tracy Cohen thanks again for coming out today can you hear me okay great well thank you Pat and thank all of you for taking a time on a Saturday to join us in listening to subjects that are of particular interest to all of us and many of you as well I'd like to thank the researchers first of all and their families and the entire adops team for making the trip to Boston from Virginia for all of us I must finally thank my friend and colleague Dana faan I know she's in the hallway but for her tireless efforts working alongside of me Dana to make this event possible um so she won't come out okay so what a beautiful Gathering of family friends colleagues and like-minded people many of you who know me have been asking Trace what have you been doing since you sold your company of 20 years nearly three years ago I'm happy to report that I've been quietly doing research reading attending classes and weekend workshops at wonderful destinations like um The esselon Institute in Big Sir California the Omega Institute in Rybeck New York as well as the local and National um Association for um near-death experience studies um there's a local chapter here that gets together in Needum every other month and then there's a national program that goes on where the likes of um Dr Grayson who is one of the very own Founders nearly 50 years ago of this group um and it's still going strong this journey has led me to today where I stand before you with the distinct honor of having been invited to be on The Advisory board for the division of perceptual studies within the University of Virginia how about that I don't know if I said it out loud guys or it sounded so loud in my head that I thought it came out of my mouth but it went something like G total I don't think we're in Kansas anymore I'm honored to be included in the Revolutionary work that and all of you are doing to raise the collective consciousness of humanity through your SC scientific research why is this field of research so important and exciting for me you might ask you see ever since I was a child I always felt as though I was a spirit Simply Having a human experience while some of these experiences were good and some not so good I always intuitively knew that the purpose of all these Collective experiences was to teach me about unconditional love forgiveness and to be of meaningful service to others having said that I have been very grounded in the math and science of this life experience my prior 20y year career as owner and co-founder of an employee benefits consulting firm was steeped in negotiating with actuaries and Underwriters within various insurance companies for the best possible Health and Welfare plan insurance premium rates on behalf of my CFOs and their employees I come from a family of mathematicians and some some of them are here today my sister Nancy and I think I just saw my brother Bill come on in and uh nuclear Engineers uh in fact fact when my dad would come to visit from time to time all five of us me and my other four siblings would be crowded around a small kitchen table and inevitably my dad would reach for the napkin holder with one hand and with his pen from his shirt pocket with his other hand and inevitably he would begin to explain his interpretation of life through mathematical formula you can just imagine the five of us groaning saying oh come on dad is this going to be a three napkin problem a five napkin problem how long is this going to take to now be in a position to marry my interest in spirituality with math science and physics is like a dream come true to me and to be involved with these Exquisite researchers who are regarded globally as the greatest Minds in their respective Fields is a privilege for me Beyond imagination you're all in for a real treat this afternoon we hope you enjoy the refreshments and the ures we're going to begin the afternoon with a good friend and colleague of Mine Jeff Olsen while Jeff is not affiliated directly with DOs um Jeff is a best-selling author of two books explaining his own near-death experience 19 years ago and what followed he is an international inspirational speaker he is a um he is the executive director at Thomas Arts a national Market marketing firm serving Fortune 500 companies across the country I admire Jeff tremendously for his ability to overcome tragedy the magnitude of which I genuinely hope that none of us have to endure and still Jeff chooses Joy daily and is an inspiration for people all around the globe Jeff came all the way today from Utah Salt Lake City Utah to be with us so thank you very much for coming Jeff and I hope you all enjoy the afternoon thank you wow what an honor to uh to be here and as Tracy outlined I'm not associated to Dos um but I admire the research I admire the researchers I admire people who can hold the very Sacred Space of fact and the Integrity of what is and what can be duplicated and what can be recognized Tracy grew up in a family of mathematicians and scientists uh I grew up in a family of farmers came from a long line of Dairy Farmers my grandfather not only ran the farm he worked construction and he was in the Great Depression he was a prize fighter at night he'd go out and bare knuckle fight to pick up extra money to make ends meet until my grandmother found out and then that came to a rapid halt my uh my father who was also in the military and a a a cowboy he wouldn't pull out his napkin and Pen he would sit us around the breakfast table and he would count up the livestock well there's this many cows and this many calves and you've got that many horses out there and he used to refer to it as heartbeats he would look at his sons and I come from a family of all boys had two brothers quite Rough and Tumble he'd say you've got 142 heartbeats today to take care of and I expect you do that and that's how he would put us to work with this responsibility integrity that's what I love about the researchers they get that they know what responsibility and integrity is and they will hold that line so it's an honor for me to be here in this company to Simply share my experience Tracy mentioned I um have written a couple of books and became a bestselling author almost by accident I had no intention of being a writer I had no intention of being a speaker that was never on my radar I was an artist I loved art I was a creative director at an ad agency I loved Concepts and ideas but what happened to me uh many year ago years ago shifted everything and it has been almost 19 years since I had the accident and I was speaking to some folks uh before we got started here and the accident will become the Pinnacle of everything that shifted in my life my life will forever be before the accident and after the accident and I'm going to share a little bit about what happened but it's interesting in doing that the only reason I ever wrote a book is that I was approached by a publisher now I'll get a little personal I I I teach a little Sunday school class on a on a Sunday morning and I was even reluctant to share some of the things that had happened to me in that setting this was many years ago and I I mentioned just a little bit about it and there was a woman in the back that came up and said hey gosh I want to introduce you to a guy at the University at one of our universities there in Utah and she said he studies these things these outof body or unordinary experiences and uh I'd love to have you talk to him about what happened to you and I was reluctant after the accident I didn't speak about it to anybody I shared it with my closest immediate family members my brothers I had shared a little bit with my mom I hadn't even spoken to my father about it and I had held it very tight for a couple of reasons number one I didn't want people to think I was crazy number two I didn't know how to share it how do you articulate something that is UN speakable but I did reluctantly agree to meet with a fellow who was part of ions and Bruce is one of the founders you uh you started that whole thing and uh I shared with him what happened and he said gosh you've got to come speak to our group you've got to come speak we have a group that meets every week I said no no no no no I can't you know I don't I don't talk about these things publicly and where he got me is he said people are grieving people are hurting the world's aching for this come and and share your your your story with this group and I did so and there was a group about this size and there was a fellow in the back that came up that was a publisher and he says you've got to write a book and I thought oh goodness what have I started now you know and he was adamant about this and I went home still reluctant by Monday morning there was a contract on my desk of here's what it looks like if you'll tell your story and write a book and this was 10 years after the fact to be honest so it would had been some time now some of the details of the accident in the hospital stay I had to go back and do research and look at but the mystical things the spiritual things those out of body things were like they were yesterday it it was very fresh and and and and constant on my mind but when I saw this contract I um I went back to the scene of the accident which I had avoided for years it's a little lonely Place mile marker 80 outside of a little teeny town called peran about 2 hours north of Las Vegas and given my experience and where I had gone I I asked I asked the UN I asked God am I really supposed to share this story am I supposed to write this book and I got a profound answer now these are the unexplainable things it was an answer that came so strong I can quote what I was told and it wasn't a voice from Heaven it wasn't anything I heard with my ears it was a voice that speaks to the heart and I was told share your experience and if you do people will heal now it's interesting the power in those words nobody said to tell a story it was share your experience and that's simply all I do is share my experience I realize it's an experience unique unto me it was for me it may have been by me to bring me through a very difficult time and there's really no agenda in sharing it I want to be very clear about that there's no agenda I will share my experience and the conclusion is up to anybody but the experience happened with an automobile accident and I was happily married madly in love to a beautiful woman who was a school teacher we had two sons beautiful boys healthy and we had uh taken a little road trip for Easter vacation we were heading back from that now there was reports of cross winds that were blowing a 100 miles an hour there was reports of a red pickup truck that was driving erratically on the interstate I I had put the cruise control on 75 and was headed back towards Salt Lake City from a little town called St George down in the Red Rock District of Southern Utah and the most difficult part about the story is I believe I may have dozed off at the will for just a moment now when I say that those words are important too there's things I believe and I realize that's just a belief there's things I hope for and I also realize that's just hope but then there's things I know based in fact I believe I may have dozed off at the will just briefly swerved and overcorrected the car and lost control it began to roll not off the road but down the road at 75 miles an hour I blacked out for most of that but when the car came to a stop I was completely conscious super conscious I mean it was probably the worst situation of Mayhem the first thing I heard was my seven-year-old son crying in the backseat of the car and as a father I thought well I've got to get to him I have got to get to my son that's when I realized I could not move I was pinned either to the floorboard of the seat I was struggling to breathe I couldn't see very well and I did feel like I was going to pass out now what had actually happened is that both of my legs had been crushed and shattered um my left leg was eventually amputated above the knee my right leg was a mess and still is pinned together my back had been broken in a couple of places but ironically the spinal commum not damaged my rib cage had been crushed my lungs were collapsing my right arm had almost been torn off there was no muscle through the rotator cuff or anything still attaching it and then the seat belt had cut through my midsection and ruptured my intestines I was a mess I was unaware of that all I knew is I had a little boy crying in that back seat and I wanted to get to him and that's when things shifted in that absolute Mayhem I realized no one else was crying it was in that moment that I knew that my beloved wife and my youngest son were were deceased and it was more than recognizing it was Fe feeling it there was a feeling that oh my goodness they're gone now that's the worst hell a man could ever be in you know I'm pinned I can't breathe I've got a child crying I know half the family's gone and I was driving the car in that horror and Mayhem suddenly there was calmness and I thought Have I Lost Consciousness what has happened here I I I felt this calmness and it didn't feel like everything going black like you see in the cartoon it was as if everything became light it felt as if I was surrounded by light it was tangible and it's it's as if this light was alive like it was comforting me and I began to rise above the scene of this accident now there was beautiful experiences there um at I Rose above it and realized I was okay suddenly my wife who I knew was deceased at the scene was there with me and that was confusing except it felt so good to say wow we're okay except she was saying you've got to go back you've got to go back you can't no no no you've got to go back now that was a moment of choice and it was a difficult Choice here I was looking at the woman I loved more than life yet I knew I had a little boy crying in the backseat of that car and that was a conscious Choice here's where I learned the power of our thoughts thoughts become things in my experience and and and as soon as I made the conscious thought that I'm going back I found myself wandering around a hospital and that was interesting too as I wandered I encountered all the doctors nurses the patients the families the people around them and there was a new knowing about everyone I looked at I knew them I knew them perfectly I knew their love their hate their Joy their peace their decisions their motivations it was as if I was connected to them there was a Oneness I was them I had grown up in a Christian home and read biblical verse in fact as I was having this experience the famous verse it said in as Le in as much as you've done it unto the least of these you've done it unto me which I used to think was a nice verse about being kind to people well I was experiencing something different they were me they were me and I thought well boy the wise teacher and master that said that may have known this that perhaps he saw himself no better as the person in prison or the naked beggar in the street this connection was unbelievable now this has nothing to do with religion that was my upbringing and I realized that our Consciousness is affected by our up ringing but I was having this profound connection to everyone I saw until I came to a bed where a man was laying and I felt nothing from that and in the waves of all this unconditional love I was experiencing and connection I found that odd so I stepped closer and looked to realize that was me or what was my body I was me I was here having this profound experience but there was the skin suit that I had gone through my life into that point well again thoughts are powerful and I had the thought to get back in the body and as soon as I had the conscious thought I was back in but then back to all the pain the grief the regret the guilt the trauma I was ventilated I couldn't speak um they had a you know a respirator down doing the work for my lungs my legs were obviously immobile my right arm was immobile they eventually tied down my left arm because I kept grabbing at all the medical equipment but I learned the meaning of be still I had nowhere to go there's nothing I could do and Consciousness became a whole new thing I would experience my Consciousness being in the body out of the body in this room in that room it was as if I had one foot in this realm and one foot in another realm for many months I was in ICU for 3 months I was in the hospital for almost six months they did 18 surgeries in total putting me back together I had profound experiences even in one holding my deceased son my little toddler son that passed away in the accident in those other Realms holding him and kissing him and saying goodbye when I felt as if the whole universe embraced me and in that moment everything made sense even though it was Mayhem on this realm it's as if heaven was there it was as if I was in heaven holding my little boy and getting to say goodbye I hesitate to share that cuz I know how many people lose loved ones and don't get to say goodbye but I eventually healed I got well I was able to come home I was in a wheelchair you know my left leg was lopped off my right leg was in a brace my right arm was bound up but I could drive an electric wheelchair with my left hand and my surviving son the little guy that was crying in the backseat of the car he had been taken into the home of my younger brother and his wife and looked after he had visited me in the hospital but I worried about him you know the Rough and Tumble father that could run up the stairs and tickle him and toss him in the air now all of the sudden it was going to be different and my brothers who were very supportive they brought me home they were lifting me out of the car to put me in the wheelchair I couldn't transfer with one arm and still two legs that weren't working one was gone on but I saw my son looking out the window of the house as they were lifting me out of the car and putting me in the chair and he came running out as I situated myself and headed toward the ramp my brothers had put together and he ran toward me then he ran right past me and I thought well I knew this was going to be hard I knew this would be rough on him and I made my way toward the front door and turned to the chair navigating up the ramp and that's when I looked to see where he'd went and I noticed my little son had run across the street and was knocking on all the neighbors doors he was saying come out come out my dad has made it home come see my dad in all my shame and grief and guilt here he was championing my return and he eventually made his way to me and he threw himself on my lap which just about killed me because I still had all the sutures and everything from the from the abdominal reconstruction and I wept and he hugged me and I I said are you going to be okay with this I mean I'm going to be like this for a while I'll get better they're going to make me a really cool robot leg and they'll teach me how to walk again and but for now it's going to look like this and he he said Dad if you were nothing but a puddle of blood I would still love you and I held him and I I realized an interesting shift in Consciousness everything I had experienced in that other realm holding my deceased son and saying goodbye in arms that felt so divine Vine and all that perfect love suddenly it was right there in a wheelchair holding my living son and I realized heaven was right here perhaps there wasn't a where to go or anything to be but to open myself up to a higher consciousness of recognizing that perhaps we're more than human and that by being open to a higher Consciousness Perhaps Love can flow in a way that shifts everything now I didn't heal immediately I had years of grief bereavement homesickness I kept looking for all the love I had felt up there and I expected people like my son to just love me enough to make it okay just you know be there I learned to walk I learned to go back to work I actually fell in love again remarried beautiful woman who is an Earth Angel really I mean they come and put the pieces all back together again somehow we adopted two boys and things appeared to be rolling along normally but there was still that big empty hole in me saying what happened how do I make sense of all that took place now it sustained me my outof body or you know near-death experiences and I I've realized I may have experienced many of that I mean I had the near-death experience I had the shared death experience in saying goodbye to my deceased son and my deceased wife I certainly had after-death communication through the process cuz I would feel them I would feel them I would I would get messages again unspoken but I knew that they were there in fact when I fell in love again that was interesting because I found myself um on my wife who had passed grave sobbing my eyes out saying I don't know what to do I'm I'm having feelings for another woman what am I going to do where are you how could you leave me all of that and I failed her as if she was right there now I'm sure you could say well you made that up it was your imagination but for me it was very real my experience was she said of course you are and I want you to I can't heal and move on until you do so live your life be happy and choose Joy these things had happened I would write them down I would jot them and journal them down but I would never forget them they were beyond the common place and that brings me to you know today and what an honor it is to be here where there's research on these things I was a farm boy I didn't know what that all meant I didn't know how to make sense of it I didn't even know how to align it with my belief system because it didn't some of the things I believed were completely turned upside down I had been taught that there was a God and that God would judge me and I life was a test and you know and I was probably in trouble based B on how things were going what I experienced was that there was nothing but pure unconditional love what I experienced is that we're all different we all come from different backgrounds different cultures different beliefs different races but they were connected I also experienced that life is a gift there's no test about it it's a gift every moment is sacred and we get to choose how to experience that moment what to do and how to be in that moment so beliefs kind of shifted My Hope shifted to an absolute trust just trusting that everything's in perfect order no matter what it looks like here and there are still questions I know what I experience but there are still questions how does it work how does that all happen you know how do we bring it together how do we make sense of it how do we talk about it in a way that anybody could understand it but that's what we're here for today and that's what I'm so thrilled and honored to be here for if we have Consciousness that is not our brain if we are not necessarily our bodies and if there's something more the importance of the research is to embrace that as humankind and embrace the parts of it that's aren't necessarily human to to raise the consciousness of the planet to take a stronger stand for love for connection for Oneness for Brotherhood for sisterhood for Humanity to shift the world that's what I see the important of the research it's to change the world it's not just about perceptions it's about creating perceptions into reality where there's more peace there's more love there's more unity and um I'm thrilled I'm honored to be with you I'm honored to hear what's going to go on today I'm Giddy and I'm going to sit down quickly so that we can get to it but thank you for your time and thank you for coming and supporting God bless thank you thank you Jeff for sharing that beautiful powerful intense story it's uh no doubt life-changing for you and all those people in your life there there are times when I meet someone on this Earth and I think I wish I could give them a near-death experience not wishing them death you got to take that the right way but to get that kind of perspective on the Oneness U so it would be a beautiful thing but but nobody wants to have to suffer like Jeff did uh to get that well so Jeff mentioned the word shift uh we're going to shift uh from one person's amazing near-death experience to hearing from the man who's probably heard more stories like Jeffs than anyone on this planet uh that is not scientifically verifiable but it's a pretty good guest Dr Bruce Grayson the world expert on near-death experiences come on up here Bruce is it true it's got to be true thank you Pat as Pat mentioned one of the phenomena that we've been studying at the division of perceptual studies at UVA University of Virginia for the past 50 years is near-death experiences or ndes which are similar to the one that you've just heard from Jeff the concept of near-death experiences has become quite well known in in our culture but not all experiences are like Jeffs and they're not all the same same there's a core that is similar in all ndes but each one is different each individual is different to make it even harder to study near-death experiences when you ask an experience of what happened to them they often start by saying well it's it can't be put into words there are no words for this and we researchers say great tell me all about it so we know that by making them put into words we're distorting the situation and we're not studying the experience we're studying what they tell us about the experience which is not the same thing so let me start by giving you a general guideline of how we manage to understand these ndes in studying hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these we've come up with four different groups of features in near-death experiences I should also say first that what an experience what near experience is not a near death experience is not just a close brush with death many people when they come close to death as Jeff did report profound experiences in which they seem to leave their physical bodies and move beyond the boundaries of time and space ndes have been reported by many diverse ancient cultures they appear in the writings of Plato in the Bible in the writings of Tibet India Egypt China Japan in the folklore of the South Pacific and of Native Americans the interpretation of the experience may vary from one culture to another but the basic experience is the same over the centuries and around the globe these transcendental or mystical experiences that occur near death were written about in the medical literature from the 19 century on they were described as a discreet syndrome in 1892 by Albert Heim a Swiss geologist who had one when he fell in the Alps and in the 1890s there was a flurry of literature about them in French philosophy journals in which the term near-death experience was first coined the term NE experience in English was popularized by Raymond Moody who wrote a book in 1975 called Life After Life which you may have read and before that book virtually no one in the Western Hemisphere had heard of a near-death experience but Moody described about 50 such cases and outlined what he thought were the common features and that was essentially the model we have there's been a lot of controversy since then about the interpretation of ndes which is partly due to the confusion over the criteria for death and in fact it's often very hard to tell when someone is close to death or how close to death they are however studies at the University of Virginia in the United Kingdom and in Holland have shown that among people who have had documented BL brushes with death for example with a cardiac arrest between 10 and 20% will report near-death experiences that doesn't mean 10 to 20% have them that means 10 to 20% have them and can remember them and can put them into words words and choose to do so so we have categorized the phenomena of near-death experiences into four components changes in thinking in thought processes changes in emotions or feeling the so-called paranormal features and the other worldly features the first group the changes in thinking process include your sense of time being grossly distorted or missing entirely your thoughts going faster than ever before and often clearer than ever before a sense of Life review or panoramic memory where your whole life may come back to you in a Flash and a sense of sudden understanding or Revelation let me give you a brief example a 44 year old man standing on a ladder leaning against his house suddenly fell backward he described this changes in his thinking as follows and snared in the backward sliding ladder the actual fall slowed way down almost like a series of camera still pictures being taken a click click sort of visual progression during the next few se SE seconds or fractions thereof I was unaware of any bodily Sensations but rather saw my life flash before me in a series of typical scenes and this slowing up dramatically increased my thinking speed lead so that I was able to size up how I could maneuver the ladder and not end up on the flagstones from two stories up not only did the fall slow way down but my thinking became very very clear in Split seconds I remember wanting to head for the shrubs which though they might pierce my skin would break my fall so those are the changes in thinking that are typical of a near-death experience there are also changes in feeling or emot emotion which included an overwhelming sense of peace or well-being feelings of Joy a sense of cosmic Unity or Oneness with everything and an encounter with the bright light which often is characterized by this unconditional love that Jeff mentioned a 74 year-old woman described the emotional changes in her nde during a heart attack in this way she said I seem to be floating in a more or less fine space but there were no walls as we know them I was moving in and out of a billowing soft dark purple velvety substance it was beautiful sensual voluptuous sort of like falling into a great mass of soft satin and down feathers I was completely surrounded by this substance and I floated up and down restfully each time I got near the bottom I could see a great brightness at the end this space the brightness was warm soft and so welcoming I didn't seem to have a body or a mind I didn't seem to be a person or even a thing I was peaceful happy contented I didn't seem to care about anything anymore it was not a feeling you can put into words no mind no body No Boundaries only contentment sort of like an amoeba that had gotten into the ocean mistake so those are the typical changes in feeling in addition there are what seem to be paranormal features during the nde your normal physical senses of vision hearing smell touch are much more Vivid and much more acute than they ever were before you may see colors that you've never seen on Earth hear sounds that you've never heard they have Frank extrasensory perception visions of the future and a sense of of leaving the physical body a 26-year-old woman who had a pulmonary embolism described her paranormal features as follows I drifted out of the body and hovered near the ceiling I view the activity in the room from this vantage point it confused me that the doctors and nurses in the room were so concerned about the body they had lifted on the bed I tried to tell them I was not in the body obviously they didn't hear one of the most outstanding things about this experience is that my hearing became extremely acute I heard many things about the gravity of my situation some of them coming from the nurses station many yards away I watched the hospital Personnel at work I listened to their comments and I began to feel sorry for them because they were working so hard when I felt so happy and I was feeling no pain where I was so those are the paranormal features in addition there are what seem to be other worldly features of the nde finding yourself in some type of mystical or unearthly realm of existence encountering some mystical being or presence seeing deceased Spirits or religious spirits and finally coming to a border or point of no return Beyond which you can't return to life a 26-year-old woman who had an emergency cesarian section reported her other worldly features in this way she said I heard my doctor say I've lost her she's gone then an angel was carrying me through a huge great Auditorium the two large doors of the auditorium opened and we went out and up through space I saw a beautiful white city with a wall around it and a set of gates facing me as we got closer I heard excited voices they were questioning why the angel was was bringing me now she was unperturbed by the excitement and continued to approach the gates I heard one of them say she knows it is not her time why is she bringing her here now and another one said to the angel it's not her time she can't come in all of a sudden I found myself back on the operating table my doctor said I'm so glad you're back I was crying as if my heart would break telling him I didn't want to come back I begged him to let me go again it was so beautiful it was the saddest time of my life and yet it was the most beautiful I've described these four four Snippets of nde to illustrate the changes in thinking changes in feeling the Paranormal and the other worldly features but in fact most ndes have some of all of these features in them and not all ndes have one or two of these they're all different one of the problems we have in studying near-death experiences is that all our research is retrospective that as we start with someone now today who's telling us about an experience they had in the past so we have to reconstruct what happened now end years will typically say as you may have heard Jeff say is like it happened yesterday the vividness has not gone away at all but we know that our memories are faulty and we distort things over time so how do we know that the memories of ndes are accurate some Skeptics claim that these are all embellishments that the longer time time passes after the nde the more elaborate it gets and particularly the more Blissful it gets with retelling over time because we've been studying these ndes for five decades now we're able to address this question starting in 2002 I began tracking down people whom I had interviewed about their ndes in the early 1980s and asking them to again describe to me their ndes just as they had 20 years earlier and we found something very interesting these are scores the green scores are what people told me in the 1980s and the red bars are what they told me in the 2000s and the First Column there there's there the First Column is the total depth of the nde on a scale that we use and as you can see it's virtually the same 20 years later certainly not embellished it may be slightly less less but statistically the same the next bars are for changes in thinking changes in feeling paranormal phenomena and the transcendental aspects and in each case the the reports are the same after 20 years so what this means is that nde memories are reliable over time and therefore retrospective research is reliable another important question about these retrospective research studies is that all our experiences are influenced by our cultural beliefs and how do we know whether these nde reports are just determined by what you expect is going to happen to you we know that most of our experiences are influenced by culture for example many people in the west will talk about going through a tunnel people in third world countries where there aren't a lot of tunnels don't talk about that but they will say it went into a cave or into a well one neth experience who I interviewed who was a truck driver talked about being sucked into a tailpipe so the phenomenon is the same of going through a long dark enclosed space to get to this other realm but you describe it with whatever cultural metaphor is available to you so our Indie ears just reporting what they expect to have happen the dominant model in the West for the past 40 years has been Raymond Moody but at UVA University of Virginia we've been collecting these reports from the early 1960s many years before Moody wrote his book telling us what we're supposed to have happen in the nde we compared 24 of the best cases we had from before 1975 when Moody wrote his book with 24 cases from the last decade matched in terms of age race gender religion religiosity how they came close to death and how close to death they came and what we found was again essentially no difference the green bars are the reports we collected before Moody wrote his book and the red bars are accounts we collected in the last decade and you can see with out of body experiences feelings of Peace meeting other entities being of light hearing music or noise Life review all statistically the same before Moody wrote his book telling us what we're supposed to experience and after Moody also wrote about the after effects so we asked about those as well and again the green bar is before Moody wrote his book and the red bar is after every experiencer in both samples 100% of them reported dramatic attitude changes they also reported all the bars aren't labal there they also reported less fear of death having difficulty telling other people increased belief in survival and people corroborating what they experienced out of body if they said I saw this happen people said yes that really happened with equal frequency after Moody wrote his book and before Moody wrote his book so the nde reports are not influenced by the widespread public knowledge of Moody's model although the interpretation of ndes may be influenced by your culture what metaphors you use to describe it the basic experience is not determined by your culture so how do we explain these experiences no variables that we've studied yet are able to predict whether you're going to have an nde or what kind you're going to have we've looked at age gender race religion religion religiosity history of mental illness and none of those things are associated with ndes or a specific type of nde there's been a lot of speculation about physiological causes that may be related to the nde lack of oxygen endorphins temporal Lo seizures the bottom line with all these explanations though is that you can't reconcile the enhanced mental functioning the heightened perceptions the height the faster thinking the clearer thinking the Deep detailed memories with the fact that the brain is not functioning so why should we care about these ndes one reason is that they usually lead to a consistent pattern of changes in attitudes beliefs and values and we've studied these and confirmed them with long-term studies of nde years over decades and also by interviews with their significant others so it's not just the end to ear telling us that it's their husbands and their wives and their children telling us as well and we find that there are a lot of attitudes that are consistently increased after our near-death experiences we see dramatic increases in spirituality in compassion and concern for other people in appreciation for life in a sense of meaning or purpose in life in confidence and flexibility in your being able to cope with stressors in belief in survival after death now some of these things will happen to anybody who comes close to death for example an appreciation of life is usually enhanced no matter who they are if they've come close to death but others such as the con confidence in being able to cope and belief in postor survival are unique to ners people who come close to death but don't have ndes don't have these things in addition to these attitudes that are increased there are attitudes that are decreased consistently after an nde and ear consistently report decreased or totally absent fear of death they report decreased interest in material possessions in physical things decreased interest in personal status power Prestige Fame and decreased interest in competition more interest in collaboration and altruistic activities than in competitive activities sometimes these changes are so marked that the experiences seem to be different people than they were before the nde a second reason that we should be interested in ndes is for what they tell us about the possibility of survival after death as Pat mentioned the division of perceptual studies was founded in part to explore the possibility that something about us survives bodily death and near-death experiences do provide some evidence bearing on that is death the end of existence or is death just a change of state so what about the near-death experience Bears on the question of whether we survive death first there was the enhanced mental functioning thinking faster and clearer than ever before when your brain is not functioning and one example of this is Pam Reynolds who had a huge aneurysm at the base of her brain that couldn't be operated on because to get to that would destroy the would would burst it and she would bleed to death so they did an experimental procedure with her experimental then now it's it's it's more commonly used where they cooled her body down to 60° and drained all the blood out of her body so he can go in and cut the aneurysm without risking her bleeding to death so she was without any blood going to her brain no blood in her body at all for about an hour it took longer than they thought to do this procedure for various reasons so they had to cool their body and replace the blood faster than than they wanted to and as a result her heart stopped twice as they were trying to uh bring her back her brain was being monitored for the whole procedure and there was no Electric electrical activity in her brain so we know she was having no brain function and yet she reported a very detailed near-death experience reporting accurately things going on in the the surgery room some things that she found interesting some things she found offensive in the room and she reported meeting to See's loved ones who told her she had to go back so this is something that you can't explain in a materialistic model that the mind is what the brain does you have no brain function and you have enhanced mind function secondly you have accurate perceptions from an outof body perspective if you're in your body how can you see things accurately from outside one of my favorite examples is Al Sullivan from Harford Connecticut was a truck driver who had quadruple bypass surgery and in the surgery he left his body and looked down and as he described it his surgeon was flapping his arms as if he was trying to fly that's not something you'd think of a surgeon doing during surgery not something they show you in television shows about surgery so Al asked the surgeon when he recovered about that and the surgeon got very angry and said who told you about that Al said well I I was watching you the surgeon got very defensive and said well I must must have done something right because you're here aren't you I then I interviewed the surgeon myself because I in my medical career I'd never seen a surgeon do anything like that and he explained that he would let his interns start the procedure and then he would scrub in get his hands sterile put on the sterile gloves and then go to supervise them and he didn't want to risk touching anything that was not in the sterile field with his sterile gloves so he put them where he knew they wouldn't get into trouble and then he would supervise no pull over there more little more cut over here a little more so we have lots of examples of these accurate antibody Perceptions in fact Jan hton at the University of North Texas looked up I think she found 17 in cases published cases of outof body perceptions that were potentially corroborator and more than 90% were entirely accurate No mistakes at all including 90% of those that were corroborated by someone else other than the experiencer so we definitely have accurate perceptions when you're not in the body third we have information that was given to people during a near-death experience from deceased loved ones that they see often when neic expences say I saw my grandmother the Skeptics say that's just wishful thinking of course you would but sometimes they tell us information we couldn't have gotten in any other way for example there are several cases of the deceased people telling the neth experiencer where something was hidden an important document an important treasure there's a great case from plny the Elder in something like 30 BC describing a case like this where someone told his brother who was having a near-death experience where the money was hidden in some cases the deceased person that the neod experien or sees is someone who was not known to be dead and these are cases that cannot be dismissed easily as wishful thinking in one typical case from our files an elderly woman was surrounded on her desk bed by her grandchildren and she seemed to be slipping away but then she suddenly opened her eyes and became very alert and said excitedly oh will are you here and then she died there was no one named will in the room and the family was trying to figure out who is she talking about the only will they could think of was their great uncle her brother who lived in England not long after after her death they received word that he had dieded two days earlier Elizabeth K Ross told a story about a young girl who was an only child who almost died during heart surgery and she said that in her near-death experiences she met someone who identified himself as her brother when she told her father about this he was so moved that he confessed to her that she had in fact had a son who died before she was born and she was never told about him we've identified dozens of cases of these type again dating back to ancient Greece that just can't be explained in terms of a materialistic model the bottom line is that near-death experiences suggest that mind and brain are not the same thing that mind seems to function quite well when the brain is not in fact may be better when the brain is not functioning and then we need to question some of our basic assumptions about not only mind and brain but the universe and our role in it well it's about time for our break now so we will stick around for questions after the break but uh thank you how how did you enjoy the first half of the the program so far so good now you understand a little bit more about U why it's important to get this body of evidence going Jeff's story is so powerful and yet it's just one story when you put the collective together into a body of evidence and you see the patterns that start to form and what it can do uh in terms of telling us about gend generally what what it means for Consciousness and the whole Shifting the whole Paradigm it's a whole new field when you when you look at the research so the gentleman standing next to me uh runs the division of perceptual studies uh and uh just like I said about Dr Grayson being the guy that knows more about near-death experiences than anybody in the world I think Dr Jim Tucker it is safe to say knows just about more than anybody who's ever lived about children who remember past lives so let's give a warm welcome to Dr Jim Tucker thank you very much so before I talk about children's past lives I want to tell just for a second uh talk about how our division and how all this work got started it it started as Pat had mentioned with Ian Stevenson um Ian came to the university to be chairman of the Department of psychiatry in 1957 and uh at that point he was in the middle of a perfectly successful mainstream career in fact he was still in his late 30s when he came to be chairman and when he interviewed he told people that he had an interest in parapsychology uh but he had a lot of other interests as well and and nobody seemed to mind um and then a couple of years later later he wrote a paper uh about previous reports of people uh describing memories of a past life and after that paper was published he started hearing about cases uh of children who were reporting memories of past life and um he decided to start investigating them and went around the world uh investigating these cases he was able to fund the trip because of the financial help of Chester Carlson uh Carlson invented the xeroxing process so he was quite wealthy obviously and he read Ian's first paper U became interested in it and started offering financial support and uh Ian actually initially turned him down because he was so busy running the department but eventually got more and more interested in these cases and then stepped down as chairman of the department Department in 1967 and started uh this division of processual studies or dos and uh with the help of of other donations and and bequests uh over the years we've been going ever since uh so next year will'll be 50 years um for Ian he spent the bulk of the next 40 years uh the last 40 Years of his life investigating these cases and he published numerous papers and books about them uh one of his books was reviewed in uh jamama the Journal of the American Medical Association and the reviewer who was the actually the book review editor uh wrote in regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds he has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored now the latter part of that turned out not really to be true in the sense that many people did ignore it um but that did not deter Ian and he continued with the work and he also worked to get other researchers involved one of the criticisms of his work was that he was the only one finding these cases and that was certainly not his fault but then he eventually got several psychologists in an anthropology ol is involved in studying them independently uh then I came on later as a child psychiatrist um I I got intrigued and eventually called up the division and asked to volunteer some time and kind of one thing led to another and and I've been full-time at at UVA since 2000 so now that we've been studying these cases actually for over 50 years uh we have collected over 2500 cases from around the world and um here's the the list of countries where we have the most cases and it's cultures with the belief in reincarnation but the reason these particular countries stand out is because we've had Associates looking for them there and in fact cases have been found wherever anyone has looked uh they've been found on all the continents except Antarctica um where we have not yet looked um and they're also found here in the west and and they they may be less common here they're certainly harder to find but it may just be that families don't tell anyone when their children are saying these things like they they might in in other places um and I'm going to tell you about an American case in a little bit uh that that is quite interesting so as far as these cases go looking at the features of them uh these are very young children who spontaneously start talking about a past life uh this work does not involve hypnotic regression uh but rather young children when I say young uh the average age when they start talking about a past life is 35 months so it's usually a two or three-year-old who starts coming out with these things and usually by the time they're six or seven they stop uh but in the meantime they will uh sometimes every day uh talk about a life typically a recent ordinary life uh they are not talking about being Kings or Queens they almost talk about never talk about being a famous person but instead somebody perfectly ordinary who lived uh usually in the same country and often even fairly close by and when I say a recent life uh the average interval between the death of the previous person and the birth of the child is four and a half years uh the median interval meaning half or shorter and half or longer is only 16 months so there are typically extremely recent lives now there are exceptions to that and the example I'm going to give you is an exception um some of them talk about being a deceased family member but others describe being strangers in other locations and if they give enough details like the name of that location then people have often gone there and found that in fact somebody did live and die whose life matches the details of the child gave in that situation we say it's a solved case uh if a child talks about our past life but no one can verify that the details match anyone who actually lived then it's unsolved we have plenty of both kinds in our collection but 2third of of our cases are solved and of course they tend to be the more interesting ones um the one part of the past life that's often out of the ordinary is how the previous person died in 70% of the cases the previous person died by unnatural means meaning murder suicide combat Act acents those sorts of things that certainly seems to be an important factor in this phenomenon now for the kids who die uh violently uh many of them have are born with birth marks or birth defects that match wounds usually the fatal wound on the body of the previous person and uh Ian who was uh before he got involved in any of this was interested in psychosomatic medicine so the connection between mind and body and he was really fascinated by these cases where somehow an injury uh from a past life shows up on on the a new baby's body U so he spent years collecting these cases and then years more writing them up and he eventually published this book called reincarnation in biology uh it's a two volume set that's over 2,000 pages long and it uh describes over 200 such cases um I will now review all 200 with you I may run over my 20 minute time alotment now I'll tell you about a couple of them there's a a girl who remember the life of a man who got his fingers chopped off as he was being murdered uh and the girl was born uh with her hands looking like that uh there was a case of a boy who remembered the life of of a boy in another Village who had lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder chopping machine and the second boy was born with his hands looking like that um there was a boy who remembered the life of a man who had been killed by a shotgun blast to the side of his head uh and this boy was born with a stump for an ear and actually half of his face was was underdeveloped um Ian also lists 18 cases in which children are born of two Mar uh two birth marks on that match both the entrance wound and the exit wound on on the body of gunshot victims um so I eventually decided to focus on American cases I took several trips to Asia but I decided to focus on the American ones for a couple of reasons one they don't have the potential cultural influences that might impact the the cases from Asia and two I felt like that they could have more impact on people that they could be harder to dismiss if you realize that it could be happening uh to the kid down the street um so one in particular that I want to tell you about is is one that has gotten a fair amount of press you may have heard about it a little boy named James lier uh the case has been on TV some his parents eventually wrote a book about their experiences he's a boy who talks about being a pilot who was killed during World War II and it's believed that that pilot has now been identified so his parents are this Christian couple in Louisiana and uh his dad in particular was quite opposed to the idea of past lives before uh this case began uh it began when James is 22 months old and he and his dad took a trip to a flight Museum and James was fascinated by by the exhibit of World War II planes uh to the point that he kept insisting that they go back to it and he and his dad ended up spending three hours at the Museum uh when he was 22 months old and then a couple months later around the time of his second birthday he started having horrible nightmares multiple times a week in which he would be kicking his legs up in the air and screaming airplane crash on fire little man can't get out and after I spent a weekend with the family going over all the details of the case and then afterwards I talked with his aunt who spent a lot of time with the family she said you cannot believe how horrible these things were to witness that it really looked like somebody fighting for his life and then during the day he would take his Tory airplanes and he would say airplane crash on fire and he would slam them nose first bam into the coffee table uh he would do this over and over again and his parents are apparently tolerant people um because this is a picture of their coffee table I don't know how well you can see it but there are dozens of scratches in dents where he would say airplane crash on fire bam so that looks very similar to what we and Children's Mental Health call post-traumatic play where a child who is experienced or witnessed something traumatic then reenacts the scene over and over again in their play and when you combine that with his nightmares he really looks like a child who had been traumatized U but he had not been at least in this life um and he didn't but uh many of the children who who describe violent lives show phobias uh as well in the um unnatural death cases over 35% of the kids will have an intense fear toward the mode of death um and the other thing that a lot of the kids will do in their play they will also rein out compulsively uh the occupation of the previous person uh and in James's case not only did he play with his Tory Plains a lot but he he took an old car seat and created a cockpit in the closet of his dad's home office so his dad would being there working and James had come tumbling out of the closet as he was parachuting out of his plane um and then uh his parents were able to have several conversations with him after his second birthday in which he could talk about this stuff while he was awake what he described was that his plane had crashed on fire uh that he had been shot down by the Japanese and that he flew a Corsair now I'd never heard of a Corsair but it was a u special plane that was developed during World War II and after this uh case got some publicity Skeptics said well he just saw a Corsair at the Museum and the name stuck with him and in fact if you go to the website of the Flight Museum you see that in fact there is a Corsair there now James's dad said there was not one there when he and James visited so I looked into it and found that in fact his dad was correct uh they had had a Corsair it had crashed at a public Air Show uh the year before they visited and then they didn't get a replacement for three more years so that is not where he he learned about corsairs he also said that he flew off of a boat and his parents asked him the name of the boat and he said Nom which I think we can all agree would be quite an unusual name to guess for a US aircraft carrier and in fact his dad responded well that sounds Japanese to me and James said uh no it was American um so after that conversation Dad went and did an online search and eventually came across information on the the USS Noma Bay he printed out the information and the phoo shows the date right here uh when he printed it out 827 2000 James was born in April of 988 so this documents that by the time he was 28 months old that Noma was part of the story and it turned out that the USS Noma Bay was an escort carrier that was in fact stationed in the specific during World War II his parents would also ask him who he was during all this and he always just said me or James which they didn't make anything of at the time uh they also asked him one time who else was there and he said Jack Jack Larson this is all when he was two now when he turned uh not when he turned when he was two and a half uh his dad bought a book on eima to give to his dad James's granddad and he was looking through it one day and James came and got it in his lap and they were thumbing through it when they came to a page with a picture of eima on it and James pointed at it and said that's where my plane was shot down and his dad said what and he said my airplane got shot down there daddy and his dad was just floor that his 2 and a half-year-old was talking like this and then he learned that in fact the Noma Bay did take part in the uima operation then when James got old enough to draw he drew according to his parents dozens if not hundreds of pictures of airplanes and battle scenes and he would always sign them James 3 now I thought that might be because he was three years old but his parents said no they asked him and he said I'm the third James I'm James three and in fact he continued to sign them that way even after he turned four so with all the this going on his parents did begin to wonder if he could be remembering the past life um so when he was four and a half his dad attended an ATA Bay reunion and he learned that there had been a jack lson there he had been looking for a jack Larsson among the war dead but in fact this Jack Larson had survived the war and was even still alive so um James's dad went and visited him and he learned that he was on the ship on the Noma Bay during the eima operation he also learned that one and only one pilot from the ship was killed during the eim operation this was a 21-year-old pilot from Pennsylvania named James Houston so this means if James lier was in fact remembering the past life it had to be Houston's life because he was the only pilot from the Noma Bay killed at inima so what we can do is compare what what James said with Houston's life now his parents say that he also talked about family life before the war U but we don't have any documentation of those statements that was made before Houston was identified uh but what I can do is list all the items where we have definite documentation that was made before anyone uh knew anything about James Houston much of it comes from an interview that the lingers did with ABC News again before anyone knew if if james' statements actually matched an actual pilot so James signed his drawings James 3 Houston was James Jr which would make James linger the third James uh James said that he flew off the Noma Houston was a pilot on the USS Noma Bay James said he flew a coair Houston had flown a coair he was actually flying a different plane when he was killed but he was part of the Squadron uh that had tested the the Corsair for the Navy uh James said he was shot down by the Japanese and Houston was shot down by the Japanese James said he died at eima Houston was the W Nom Bay pilot killed during the eima operation James said One Day quote my airplane got shot in the engine and crashed in the water and that's how I died eyewitnesses reported that Houston's planee was quote hit head on right on the middle of the engine James had nightmares of a plane crashing and sinking in the water Houston's plane crashed in the water and quickly sank and James said that Jack Larsson was there and Jack Larsson was the pilot of the plane next to Houston on the day that he was killed uh James is now 18 years old uh he became an eagle scout and he graduated from high school this spring and he has recently joined the Navy with that I will stop and I will turn it over to Dr piny Dr penberth thank you thank you it is going to be hard to follow these two gentlemen but I'm going to do my best so I'm Kim penberthy and I am the newest person to join the division of perceptual studies and I want to thank you all very much for having me here and um our our hosts for for putting this together it is absolutely amazing what I feel in the room um just the energy and and the connection and I wanted to say thank you um so yes I have been fortunate enough to join this amazing group and I'll spend this time telling you a little bit about what I do um I have been fortunate forunate enough also to um be named the Chester F Carlson professor at the University of Virginia and so I'm a professor there with these gentlemen and what I'm going to be talking about today is um how I got here and the work that I'm currently doing that I'm I'm really passionate about um very similar to Tracy I had a very academic and sort of science-minded family that I grew up in my father was a cardiovascular surgeon and just recently retired hred my mother was a nurse who worked in the O along with him um and so we came from that background although we did hear a lot of stories I mean surgeons and nurses in the O see a lot of what we're talking about and and we hear that all the time now I had early exposure to Raymond Moody his ears must be ringing we're talking about him um when I read his book um and uh as a as a sort of a child who stumbled across it in the in the library and thought this is interesting and became really fascinated and so my mother was generous enough to pay for me to learn how to do Transcendental Meditation when I was very young um which I've carried with me and sort of grown and transformed that and um because of my own experiences growing up I became more and more interested in things interpersonal relationships our connectedness with each other and and how that impacts us and things that we've been talking about here um past lives Consciousness what happens um when our body does die so with that Curiosity I went on and and what else do you do you become a psychologist um and so I I got formal training and a lot of the training I've received I've been fortunate enough that in our Western culture now we have a accommodated more of these Eastern philosophies more of the spirituality and components that have existed in most of our religions for since they were created so we are more open to that and we even have divisions in our psych us in our American Psychological society that that include spirituality and and psychology and so I was able to study these things and a lot of what I do is um clinical work so I do work with patients individually I also teach and then the majority of my work is researching these components so a lot of the research I do is um focused on mindfulness and can I sort of see who's heard of mindfulness or mindfulness meditation all right wonderful right so if I had done that though probably 15 20 years ago I'm not sure I would see everyone's hands go up so we have John kabat Zin uh to thank for really bringing this into our curriculum in medical schools and our knowledge uh in academics so I do a lot of research in this area and I'd like to start off by just sort of explaining what mindfulness is and how I'm using it so John kabat zin's terms here are that it means paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally that's typically how it's defined when we use it in mindfulness-based stress reduction and other strategies that are sort of developed from that interestingly there's sort of a debate about taxonomy and how you call these different things but it's sort of generally in an academic setting considered to be a form of meditation so meditation is sort of the broader View and meditation can take a lot of forms um yoga different kinds of uh of practices even in Christian religions other religions are are very meditative and can be very mindful I even had one of my patients convince me that golf is a meditation he convinced me I believe him not all golfers maybe but and um it's a little bit of the background of so mindfulness has become popular through John kabat Z in but it's existed for a long time in multiple cultures and multiple religions where we think of it from John kabin because this is sort of where he pulled it from is from some of this Buddhism U found in Southeast Asia in this particular kind um theravada and in the terminology even comes from a translation of those words of of establishing mindfulness the important thing with respect to this conversation here is what practicing mindfulness in its various forms meditation other kinds of contemplative practices what it can do for you so what we've heard about are things sort of spontaneously happening or Happening by accident or having to take a horrible tragedy to happen and what I'm focusing on is can we access that that on purpose and draw the goodness from that the benefits from that intentionally and wow just let that sink in if we could have a million Jeff Olsen's without the tragedy without the pain if people could wake up every morning and know this know that we are more than just what our bodies are and if everyone could join in that our world would be tremendously different and I would vote that it would be tremendously better so that's where my research is going I didn't get there immediately I didn't wake up out of high school and say this is it but slowly over time this has occurred to me and happened I started with um with studying how it arrived here and looking at the strategies that were brought out by John kiten by others you see here pictures of Jack cornfield many of you may know or have read his books Sharon salsburg Joseph Goldstein so I I learned from the research that was already being done some before my time some while I was coming up through graduate school and some of which I'm now participating myself in by conducting it as you can see see mindfulness research has increased dramatically I mean almost exponentially um since they began uh sort of documenting it back in the 80s and you can see the rise so this is this is good news it also demonstrates the interest and the acceptance that we're beginning to see uh sort of like a ground swell and I was talking with someone in the restroom about this ground swell um it's things like this people like you coming out and talking about it that help keep that movement going so thank you as you may know there are some three sort of core skills that we talk about when we're practicing specifically mindfulness but this could be said of many of the meditative sort of components that we learn concentration this ability to focus stabilize your attention sensory Clarity sort of keeping track of components of your sensory experience Moment by moment in the present moment and this wonderful equinity this sort of just ability to be with this gentle curiosity that they sometimes speak about when they're walking you through a meditation this openness and willingness and in my pursuit of learning and studying I found what has come to be fairly well known is this these sorts of mindfulness practices are associated with amazing healthy wonderful things so enhanced self-awareness increased attentional control reductions in your stress greater self-regulation of your emotions and improved physical and health and Immunity and these are these um are becoming like I said fairly well established and we have people in the audience I've spoken to who are conducting and continuing this research in in very wellestablished academic universities and and medical centers around the country and we're finding more and more that um both in mental health which is listed here and also in physical health these practices can have an enormous impact so these is these are sort of a list of some of the components um that have been impacted by mindfulness research so John kabit Zin started out by working with chronic pain patients where nothing else could be done for them um and and helped them depression is another one that's been um used and studied quite well emotional liability or liability or disregulation so these are often folks that I work a lot with uh people with personality disorders where their emotional regulation is really difficult um they often have come from a very traumatic developmental history they don't want to be this way but they are just very emotionally out of control and um we have found that this form of sort of therapy helps them tremendously this mindfulness component it's been used extensively with addiction both smoking alcohol substance uh alcohol abuse or a dependence and they're expanding it every day um to to try and work with other addictions and um of course anxiety and stress it really does help psychologically reduce those components that's a big part of it more recently it's been used in children with attention disorders as you can imagine a big component is augmenting that ability to focus attention so I myself have done research in these areas um specifically alcohol dependence and um and the the personal disorders and uh I find it to be incredibly gratifying and and fulfilling to see people literally literally change their lives in positive ways through the use of these strategies I um I've also begun to do more research looking at the physical components so this is sort of the gold standard as you can imagine in medical school I work in a medical school so they say that's great and everything that people are feeling better blah blah blah um but what about the physical changes and so we are stepping up and looking at that um I was sharing with some of you that I recently received a large amount of funding to do research on developing a mindfulness-based intervention for people with lupus this is extremely important to me because a lot of the mindfulness research that we've done so far has been as you might expect on white upper middle class people many people with lupus are not like that they are usually African-American females underrepresented there have been no significant developments in the treatment of Lupus in over two decades because no one will fund it we've finally got some funding for this so I'm very excited about this we're also looking at so we're going to be looking at improving their quality of life reducing their symptoms but we're going to be looking at the big one changing their markers for Lupus changing the physiology this is a little bit of a s side step but I'm really excited about it because it's very meaningful and Powerful if we can find some some significant Improvement there so these are the things that I'm excited about but there's something I'm even more excited about if you can believe it and I get really excited so watch out um and that is the fact that not so much these I'm going to skip through these These are great um and and it does change our our our our neuroplasticity um when we're looking at physiologically brains change we see this we see this on functional um fmis which are measures of your brain in action we see that people who meditate have changes there for the positive they're um able to to change their brain in positive ways and as as was said earlier by you Jeff you know you the things you think they they do happen and we see this here that this is powerful it does change actually not just not just things like how you feel but literally physical physical changes we also see changes in pro-social behavior and this is a big one that we haven't talked about um it's been alluded to but there is our own mindfulness our own awareness of our Consciousness and then there is the group and I pointed out the feeling of the group earlier because I think that is a component we also need to acknowledge that we may all be part of this larger Consciousness that has an impact as well in our lupus intervention for example we're doing something which seems probably like very common sense to every single one of you but believe it or not it's not been done in mindfulness research we're bringing in the Lupus patients loved ones the people they live with who care for them and we're going to train them as well so that they can practice together and you know what we think that will make a really big difference so we're very excited about that um because we know it does it does affect people in in a group in a pack and we know that it also impacts pro-social Behavior it helps balance our what's called our relaxation response we respond to stress more effectively and our Rel our our regulation so what's called our resilience Zone um physiologically our mindfulness helps deepen this resilience R sort of widen that so we can accommodate more both psychological and physical stress it's been expanded to be used in the society you know you're big time when Tim Ryan um the congressman from Ohio promotes us um meditation on the Capitol Hill this is what I wanted to make sure I got to so this is what I'm really excited about the research I've spoken about already that I've been doing I'm going to continue to do looking at this impact of Consciousness uh expanding mindfulness practices on on our our psychological well-being and our health is wonderful and it's important and I'll continue to do that the the one thing that is also not studied is this larger area of other effects that the mindfulness has on people and these are these sort of um other things the extraordinary experiences that for most researchers they first of all never ask about we don't ask people these sorts of questions when we do research with them and if people spontaneously mention them we ignore it so there are um a few of us now who are beginning to wake up to this and say we need to collect this information if you go back to some of the original um sort of literature in this and the grounded in the spiritual sort of context in which it started these are to be expected and in some cases this would be the whole point of your mindfulness meditation so why are we ignoring it so these are the sort of things that we might want to promote these destruction of the defiling impulses those the nastiness of humanity um psychokinesis Clare audience Clare audience for those who don't know is where you you pick up you hear you hear things and this is a wakeup call for some of you you might already have this if you've everever heard maybe your voice called and there was no one there or you are laying in bed at night and you hear what sounds like a radio planing somewhere if that's Clare audience that's us tuning into something something Beyond here telepathic knowledge retrocognition from the past and Clairvoyance of course knowing something in the future so the way we're going to be looking at this is first of all it's also uh I wanted to not skip over this it's interesting that although this is not like I said we typically don't study this there's a very popular therapy that's done now called dialectical behavior therapy I don't know how many of you have heard of it psychologists have heard of it a lot um it's done quite a bit for people with personality disorders or emotional disregulation problems um and one of the strategies that's used a predominant strategy is mindfulness so it's one of these mindfulness-based interventions that I was talking about and they use mindfulness in this I do this practice a lot with patients to attain um achieve this place called the wise mind and in the development of this therapy it was developed by a wonderful woman named Mara linahan who's out in Seattle um she talks about the wise mind being this balance between The Logical rational mind and the emotional mind sort of that vend diagram where they overlay that's the meditative place that mindfulness place that we're trying to get to that I've described before what's also interesting though is that she sort of as a side note explained that if people can acheve achieve that wise mind number one they use all their other skills more effectively interpersonal communication regulating their mood but also they seem to have this unusual increase in intuition and some other things she she sort of talks about unusual other things so they're exactly these things that she's talking about that she sort of stumbled upon and didn't expect so what what we found then I I collaborated with a wonderful woman Cassie Von um and we've developed some projects but in doing so she shared with me what they had already collected there at um their facility out in Petaluma and she said that they did primarily retrospective data all retrospective in fact and looking at the relationship between meditation and S performance and there seemed to be a significant relation relationship there of people meditating and having reports when you ask again um of this uh increased side performance on on tasks that they actually did also they got this large number of meditators um retrospectively asked them uh about these s these sort of experiences and 50% said that they many times or almost always had these extra extraordinary experiences when they were medita in and over 50% of them endorsed Clairvoyance or telepathy 60% endorsed that these were very meaningful or important so not only are they having them that they're profound they mean something significant to them in a positive way these I don't know if you realize it these are huge numbers and maybe you're sitting there calmly cuz you go yes it's seems obvious to outside scientists it's these are these are mind-boggling um I'm glad they're not mindboggling to you so what what we are doing for my part in in DOS is really trying to move forward to the next steps of really looking at these sort of practices and using them on purpose intentionally to see if we can generate these sort of qualities so also looking at SCI abilities um in very scientific ways um as as my colleagues do looking at prospective some more prospective research can we plan this ahead of time instead of asking about it in the past and see if we can create this and expand the methods for achievement of this mindfulness State and accessing these abilities and exploring the impact of that if we can increase this in a group of people what does that do to the community what does that do to the individual can we take this to another level of of not just sort of stumbling across it accidentally but creating it intentionally and it is it's imp it's it's impressive to think about what we could harness um with these increasing abilities if we if we put our mind to it and do it intentionally and I want to end with a beautiful picture of our our home community and thank you very much for listening to me as I stumbled through this and got very excited I really appreciate it and I will end with the words from Thomas Jefferson the glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money so thank you very much thank you Dr penberthy and I'm glad you ended with the Sai research because that's a good segue for our next presenter who has been doing running the research lab at dopps for many many years and uh come on up Ed and uh got his start uh educationwise right here in Boston just up the river at Cambridge he's a Harvard Man and uh has been doing research ever since the days of JB Ryan down at Duke University for some of you who know that so again a warm Round of Applause if you please for Dr Ed Kelly these are your copy so I want well I've got about two or three hours worth of stuff I'd like to tell you in the next 15 minutes okay all right sensitive um I can talk about lots of things but the thing I think is most important for this meeting is to try to put the kind of work that we do ad dos into a bigger perspective uh clearly the question what happens when we die is a rather big one most of us would like to know the answer to that and a lot of our work has been focused on that subject uh but our work is really part of a much bigger thing that is uh Gathering momentum as we sit here and talk and it has to do with a kind of worldview that has emerged over the last several centuries particularly in the past Century or so and really kind of taken over and in particular taken over Central parts of the scientific establishment in particular the kind of folks I work I'm I'm a psychologist by training experimental psychologists also have done a lot in Neuroscience psychologists and Neuroscience are totally committed with few exceptions to this kind of picture that I'm about to describe to you and we think that picture is basically false FSE and we're trying to overturn it so what is that picture physicalism is the word that's used to describe it in its sort of philosophical form and it's a kind of modern descendant of what used to be called materialism over the past several centuries uh the basic idea is that I mean it comes in several different flavors but they they share in common some really crucial ideas uh basically all facts are determined by physical facts alone reality consists at bottom of little bits of self-existent stuff flying around in fields of force according to mathematical laws everything in Consciousness mind and Consciousness Consciousness and its contents are generated by physiological events and processes in your brain uh your sense of yourself as an an effective conscious agent having impact acts on the world it's all kind of an illusion byproducts of the grinding of your neural machinery and since everything in mind and Consciousness is generated by the brain when you die and your brain stops working that's it end of the game it's all over on a more Cosmic sort of scale we see no signs of any final causes in nature uh no sign of anything Transcendent uh in the grand scheme it looks as though everything is devoid of meaning or purpose that's pretty Grim don't you think and yet that's what the great majority of working scientists particularly non-physicists believe today and in particular psychologists and neuroscientists and most philosophers of Mind well uh I have to say also this is pretty much what I believe when I started in graduate school up the river there um it wasn't that we you know graduate students were sitting around talking about these things and coming to some rational decision that that that really is how things are you know don't like it but that's just how it is so get used to it instead it was just you it was kind of part of the the furniture of the place almost the atmosphere you just kind of absorbed it passively it was just kind of in the background of everything we did you know the everyday sort of experimental stuff all kind of relied upon that as background but nobody really talked about it very much anyway so I swallowed the whole thing Hook Line and Sinker pretty much you know lapsed Catholic gave up my Catholicism about first week in college and all that had never thought about any of that stuff since then uh but then sort of late in my graduate school career I had two uh sort of shocks the first one was that a project that I was working on it had to do with computer recognition of uh the most important sense es of high frequency words in context uh and I worked on that diligently for a number of years and it turned out to be a whole lot harder than anybody had led me to believe it would be in fact it's uh led me to be very skeptical in general about the computational theory of the mind this was the big new thing at that time you know taking over from behaviorism I mean you have to appreciate that back in the 1960s this was a big step forward because starting in 1913 shortly after William James's death it had become unfashionable even to use the word Consciousness in polite company scientifically speaking so this was kind of a step forward we're at least willing to talk about mind and things going on inside anyway so that was a kind of a shock to me and a disappointment and right about the same time uh for personal reasons I won't go into I started getting interested in experimental parisy and the reason was basically as uh Kim just indicated that the the the property that really defines all these phenomena is that if the physical story were true they couldn't happen so if you get information about some physically remote State of Affairs or something that's going to happen tomorrow or something that happened yesterday without reading a newspaper or something like that or if you can have an effect on your environment without using your muscles then those things just should not happen and that's theoretically interesting right I mean there are two ways to react to this you say oh that's horrible if let's put it aside and that's the most common reaction in the scientific world but uh for people who have their sort of antenna eye up for important developments wow that makes the stuff really interesting that's why we should study it that's why William James was interested in I mean I learned that early on in my exploration of these things and I hadn't learned it from many of my colleagues and William James Hall in fact I don't think half a dozen of them knew about it he spent half his adult life studying these things amazing okay so I decided throw caution to the winds I went to work for JB Ryan pretty much right out of graduate school after postto and uh I had been at his place for about a month when a guy came in who was undoubtedly one of the best subjects ever to come into a parapsychology laboratory um and I won't bore you with the details of what happened but basically any doubts that I had about the reality of Sci phenomen were blown away by this guy in the first day that he was there and it kind of went on and on from there um we can say that I think without a moment's hesitation take it to the bank s phenomena are real they happen and we're going to have to come to grips with that fact in our scientific thinking period now survival is a more complicated subject uh because uh let's say in the case well I'll mention a couple of other kinds of research that we have been involved in adops uh related to survival one involves uh what are called crisis apparitions uh and they go way back to the beginnings of the society for psychical research a typical kind of situation is where a uh in the old days a a woman in her kitchen in London suddenly sees her brother come in you know sort of out of the corner of her eye which surprises her because as far as he knows he's over in India with some British regiment or something well then it turns out he he's appears he looks like hell he disappears and a week later they get the news that he was just killed in a in a battle over there and there are hundreds well they really thousands of these cases many of them very well documented as to what the experience was often the person would tell somebody else who wrote it down you know dates of events could be documented with affidavits and things of that sort uh so there's a lot of those and another big area which William James again was involved in is mediumship James discovered one of the great trans mediums of all time Mrs Piper everybody know about Mrs Piper well I mean she's typical of good mediums who can appear to deliver information from persons who are deceased in her case uh it got to really quite extraordinary uh Heights of development there was one personality for example GP was a uh a communicator through Mrs Piper two sitters uh who represented himself as being the deceased George pelo as he was known uh during the time that he was studied by James and Richard Hodson an Australian lawyer who was hired really for this purpose uh she was inter uh 150 different sitters were introduced Anon anonymously to her during her trans of whom 30 had been acquaintances of the real GP in his lifetime and the GP Persona speaking through Mrs Piper or writing sometimes automatic writing identified all and only those 30 and for many of them gave so much personal information in such a characteristically GP way that they were convinced that they were really interacting directly with a deceased person now turns out to be not so simple to decide whether that does or doesn't establish survival because how do you check whether the information delivered is true well either someone tells you yeah that was true or you find some record and hence in principle it's open to the possibility of some sort of a sigh process involving only living persons and that debate goes on and on still there are people equally knowledgeable about the evidence who take one side or the other so it's a tough problem but i' like to point out that either Horn of this dilemma is really fatal to the prevailing physicalism because both sigh and survival shouldn't happen according to the prevailing view now this became a an important part of a project that I got involved in well let me just say very briefly because I don't have enough time um that uh I continue my own work experimental work first at ry's place then moved over to the School of Engineering at Duke because we wanted to develop a psychophysiological approach to the study of sigh measure brain ways for example while people are doing tasks and see if we can predict when they're making good responses versus bad ones and things like that so we worked at that diligently for about 10 years but kind of ran out of cash I had two kids had to put food on the table so I did about another 15 years worth of neuroscience at UNCC Chapel Hill developing EEG methods and validating them in a different context so that was all going on in the background anyway moved to uh Charlottesville in 2002 in order to live with my wife who was uh one of Ian's colleagues and also intensify work on a project that had begun in 1998 this was under the offices of esselin Institute out in California the co-founder of ESS and Mike Murphy is a really extraordinary character in many ways one of which is that he knew a good bit about the history of psychical research he's very interested in this question of survival and so and he knew that there were some people actually working on it from a scientific point of view so he convened a group including a bunch of us from dos tried to get Ian but Ian wouldn't go um and uh got us together to present and discuss uh survival research back thank you so we did that for a couple years we went through a lot of the existing evidence and so on but then we began to realize that we really had a much bigger task that we wanted to carry out we were all convinced that physicalism is false uh and we wanted to try and demonstrate that and also begin to try and figure out if it's wrong what different kind of worldview might be better so we spent actually uh uh almost nine years on the first part of that problem and that resulted in this book Tracy's copy irreducible mind and what we tried to do in there was to assemble in one place a lot of the kinds of evidence that we think show empirically that physicalism is false uh first and foremost of course Sai and survival all that research uh we didn't really discuss it in this book but we provide a extensive annotated bibliography pointers into the literature you know a lot of science scientists would like to say think that these things are kind of some isolated anomaly you can just kind of quarantine them somewhere and ignore them basically uh but that's not at all the case because there are plenty of other empirical phenomena that point in the same kind of Direction and so we uh systematically inventoried a number of those phenomena in this book I'll give you just a couple of examples of the kind of things that we looked at and by the way we're in doing this we were really um re-evaluating a wonderful book that had been published in 1903 by one of William James's colleagues fwh Meyers it was called human personality and its survival of bodily death if only he had left off that and its survival of bodily death it would be much better known today than it is uh but we Revisited a lot of the topics that Meyers had uh brought out in his book in light of the intervening Century of addition research and the the net of this whole effort was to show that Myers's thesis was actually much stronger now in light of all that additional evidence than it had seemed even back then so we covered things for example like extreme psychophysiological influence turns out that people some a few people in hypnotic states can generate for example geometrically shaped blisters corresponding to a say cool po poker that's been touched to their skin uh there are things like Stigmata you know uh fervently believing Catholics sometimes are capable of reproducing the wounds of Christ as they imagine them to have been on their own bodies and these are things in terms of their sort of uh Precision go beyond the known capacities of the nervous system to account for uh another well we we have chapters on things like multiple personality sometimes they a personality of much greater capacity than the everyday personality suddenly appears takes over may know about personality a while personality a doesn't know anything about personality B again very hard to account for in neurophysiological terms we've got a big chapter on memory uh I personally think one of the most important areas that we touched upon is what Bruce was talking about near-death experiences and in particular those that occur under extreme physiological conditions such as cardiac arrest and deep general anesthesia and that's because there is a very strong consensus in contemporary Neuroscience about what the conditions are that are required for conscious experience and here we have cases in which those conditions have been abolished or very seriously degraded and yet people are not only having experiences but the most intense and important experiences they ever had in their whole lives Sai even figures into some of this work because a key feature is the ability to show that the experience was occurring at the time the person was out because the person can report something that happened during that time that it would have no means of knowing about we also talk about stuff like extreme forms of genius and mystical experiences mystical experiences you know they're hardly talked about at all in the Contemporary science literature and to the extent they are it's mostly to be pathologized or you know ignored U now all these things together lead to a picture of how mind and brain work together we're not denying that the brain has a lot to do with ordinary experience but we're rethinking the way it works and this is again along lines that William James announced over a c century ago you know the the conventional View looks at the correlation everybody agrees there's a strong correlation between properties of mental experience and what goes on in the brain the question is how do you interpret these correlations the conventional view is to say well they show that the brain produces Consciousness you get hit on the head your Consciousness gets weaker you know drink too much whatever now you might say well but wait I I take a thought to raise my arm and the damn thing goes up in the air isn't that mental influence on the physical well the tricky answer from the physicalist side is that thought you had was just a pattern of activity in your brain physical on physical no problem but we found a number of places where that argument can be overcome and so the picture that arises is one in which the mind is inherently something much bigger than we customarily know about our everyday Consciousness arises from the interaction of that larger something with the brain as it's going through its ordinary activities so the brain is a kind of device for anchoring this larger Consciousness to the Here and Now for biological purposes and that sort of thing uh it brain conditions mind but not does not generate it now for me that was a huge thing in relation to the whole survival issue if conventional physicalism is true there can't be survival period it's absolutely inescapable and even scientists who have some kind of religious practice can only manage that by sort of ignoring the conflict William James had it best he said uh good good uh good materialist scientists by day good Christian husbands and fathers By Night holding thus Loosely the two ends of a chain they are careless of the intermediate connection so if you're not careless you have to just recognize that fact but with this different picture of how the mind brain thing works there's an opening for survival for me that was personally decisive I had never been able to take the possibility of survival seriously until we finished this book basically and I became convinced that Myers and James really had it right way back when all right now I got just a few minutes left I guess how are we doing I'm not paying any attention five minutes okay okay that was the easy part irreducible mind then we went on to consider the question this is we're about year 10 at this point we we met once a year out at essin for these five day things and had lots of interactions for the rest of the year various kinds okay but the second part of this problem is much much harder and that is accepting that all these different kinds of phenomena are for real how can can we conceive of reality in such a way that it becomes plausible that these things happen how must reality be constituted in order that these various kinds of phenomena cataloged in irreducible mind can occur well the basic strategy that we pursued in trying to grope toward an answer and I let me just start by saying we do not have an absolutely definitive answer by any means we feel like we're kind of going in the right direction what we did was to revisit a number of systems big systems of thought both ancient and modern that have taken the reality of at least some of these phenomena for granted and gone through that exercise we trying to figure out well how how are things so that you can you know have Sai phenomena and survival and so on uh so we looked at things like u pangel in yoga uh the neop platinus uh later developments in Hindu philosophy Kashmir shiism extending down even to a guy like orindo and I see you nodding back there you know about this stuff um uh we also inventoried several modern physical uh systems we had a couple of quantum theorists and a cosmologist who have their own ideas about you know developments of physics that would accommodate stuff uh we visited a number of modern Western philosophers including uh Alfred North Whitehead uh well we went back as far as liess we got a chapter on liveness in our book what I'm driving to is our second book beyond physicalism subtitled toward reconciliation of Science and spirituality and that really is the punchline of the whole exercise because uh I mean chapters 14 and 15 in this book are the kind of summary of where we have gotten to so far and this process and the bottom line is that if you take the existence of these various Rogue phenomena seriously and attempt to figure out how things must be in order for them to happen uh we believe you are driven inexorably into metaphysical territory shared with the world's great traditional faith that doesn't mean it endorses any particular one of them in all details but that they have certain things in common and in particular the idea that seems to be emerging most forcefully is that contrary to the recent Spade of attacks on all things religious from representatives of classical physicalism there is at the heart of reality some kind of enormous conscious something that we are somehow connected with in the deepest parts of our being that is expressing itself through the evolution of the whole world as we experience it it has a name I won't even quote it but I recommend that you look at that if you're interested the uh the bottom line really is that I personally believe that we are at or very close to a major inflection point in Western intellectual history it's going to happen whether it happens next year or next Century who knows it's hard to tell about these things the great social forces flying around out there potential for good and evil that we see on the news each day uh um but it will happen and the kind of work that we do at dops I think has a lot to do with making it happen and I think uh you know we have 50 years of accomplishment behind ourselves we've got our conceptual and Technical and practical situation pretty well in hand and uh we hope you'll all be with us as we try to carry the whole subject further in whatever ways you can thank you well that's your call to action people you are the army that that Dr Kelly and others have been waiting for to help us get this word out about how we are all connected how we are all one in this Consciousness and you were wondering why Tracy was PL you with wine this whole time we got you nice and deep in these Altered States Of Consciousness uh we're going to have uh some question and answer here for the next 15 minutes or so and then uh we're all going to stick around till about 4:30 so I want to invite you to track down your favorite researcher and talk to them about your ideas uh you you heard doctors Tucker and penury mentioned that University of Virginia division of perceptual studies uh early on got some endowment funds from Chester Carlson and some other folks which has been fantastic and it's the reason the only reason honestly that the division has survived for 50 years it has maintained everything that they've done up till now that said it does not take care of our current uh Ambitions let's just say to expand these programs do more of this kind of research do more of these kind of Road shows uh public lecture series um you know more research in the labs so that's where we're coming to you asking for your help now it's not just financial help although that's definitely necessary as well but if you have intellectual energy if you have physical energy that you want to put toward helping these folks we're going to be in Philadelphia in the spring uh we're hoping to be in North Carolina in the spring uh so if you know people if you have folks if you have some way that you want to help please talk to me talk to Tom or Tracy or any of the doops folks we we we want your help we need your help please all right so if you'd be up for it Tracy's going to grab a microphone and uh go around uh so if you have a question please raise your hand and she'll come out to you uh again we have 15 20 minutes so we have we have some time for questions Tracy there's a question right over here in the front surprised not at all and by the way I'm just goingon to invite you because we do have limited time to to focus your question uh we have a lot of people in this audience who have had amazing experiences that might want to share experiences but please hold that for afterwards let's just focus on the question sir a good segue into my question for the doctors is um have any of you or all of you had any mystical or out of ordinary experiences that you would like to share with us on a personal basis no I I feel myself to be a little bit like William James this way you know he had a tremendous uh affinity for the subject he spoke to himself as having a mystical germ but never had any kind of mystical experience himself and yet he had a you know kind of openness to the subject that I think benefited him and us both so I hope to emulate his good example there's anybody else on the panel okay sorry um anybody can answer this but I think it's maybe geared towards Dr Kelly do we know exactly what's happening in the brain um when uh with people who are able to communicate with those who have have passed well these questions are easy no okay will you talk about some of the research you've done Ed will you talk about some of the research you've done in the lab on mediums and that sort of thing well we haven't done it I mean we've mainly been getting ready to do it uh we we now have actually a uh a state-of-the-art EEG Lab at dos thanks to a generous Grant we received some years ago and mediums are among the kinds of people we really want to study uh we learned during our Duke phase that uh you know sigh doesn't happen haphazardly in space and time it congregates very conspicuously around certain kinds of people and states of Consciousness and uh in particular things like deep States of meditation or hypnosis or trans mediumship we're also interested in people who can leave their bodies voluntarily go to some pre-agreed location report what they find there so if any of you are or know of such persons please let us know because we'd love to study them Dr Kelly have you heard of Suzanne geesman she was is a former Navy Commander served 20 years in the military uh and now is full-blown full-time me medium she was the personal aid for the uh head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff she used to fly on Air Force One if you want to study somebody you really ought to talk to Suzanne I know Suzanne she's down in Florida she's wonderful and what's your question sir do you have a question oh you just wanted to get Suzanne do a little plug for Suzanne okay Kim I'd like to talk to you after I've got something great thank you so much and if I may share Tony is it had his own uh experience that I hope that uh both Dr Kelly and uh Dr Grayson should hear it is really fascinating and amazing thank you for sharing that people who have got the ability of Clairvoyance or uh something Beyond or rational um is that part of the makeup the brain makeup or when people are under tremendous stress they go beyond the logic it's like you have nothing to lose so you're are more in touch with something else I'm not sure if I made the question uh clear that's okay they'll they can take vague questions too who's up for Dr Grayson we can give you vague answers to your vague questions but there's been some research done with looking at what's going on in the brain when different things happen whether it's out of body experiences near-death experiences mediumship the the danger is that that doesn't mean what's going on in the brain is causing the experiences to happen the brain changes may be a reflection of what's going on for example Kim talked about meditation causing changes in the brain if you just look at meditators and brain effects you might assume that it's the brain effects that are causing the meditation it's not true at all look give me the let me give you the example of a television set you can change the channel or the volume by by changing the dials on the set or by pushing your remote control control and it looks as if if you didn't know how televisions work that the television that was producing a show for you to see you press the button the show disappears press another button show appears again obviously the TV is creating this show but we know because we made televisions that's not what's going on at all the show is created somewhere thousand miles away and it's being transmitted to your television set which receives it from outside and it maybe that's what the brain is doing as well the mind is somewhere outside and the function of the brain is to receive that and to translate it into a way that the body can understand brains were evolved in order to help us function in this world to find food to find shelter to find mates to escape danger and that's what it's limited to these spiritual things are not part of what the brain was created to do so when you have spiritual experiences the brain does not handle this so what we find is that when you study what's going on in the brain brain when these spiritual experiences happen we don't get concrete answers people have looked at what's going on in the brain when H when people are talking about their new death experiences and you see virtually the whole brain is involved that's what you'd expect there's thinking there's perceiving there's memory there's remembering so the whole brain is involved with it but that doesn't mean that the J brain changes are causing the experiences this is the way for example if as I'm talking to you right now your left temporal lobe is very active because you're processing the sound of my voice that doesn't mean your brain is creating my voice it's just reflecting your experience Dr Grayson since you have the mic will you let folks know about that gentleman who who had an unusual brain let's just say that was studied um actually there was a a British pediatric neurologist uh um John lber who studied people who had um hydris which is basically water on the brain and he studied people who had extreme hydr in some cases they had just a tiny fraction of brain matter and yet they had normal mental functioning and often these people would discovered by accident uh there was one person who was a graduate student in mathematics a brilliant man who had headaches and because of that had a brain scan and they found he had virtually no brain at all this is a guy in his 20s with with a family and uh a normal life and virally no brain so how do we explain this we don't we can't explain it it's those kind of things do we have another question up here Tracy in the meantime I'm going to ask Dr Tucker a question that somebody El asked me at the break which is why focus on children that remember past lives and not adults who have regressions or dreams well the main reason we focus on children is because they are the ones who have spontaneous memories from past lives um there's also the advantage that they haven't been exposed to a lot of material a two or threey old so you can be sure that they didn't see a movie on the Middle Ages or whatever um hypnotic regression is something that to be honest we're quite skeptical of as far as it producing valid past life memories uh but with the children who do it spontaneously then we have a lot more confidence in that work very good thank you yes sir Dr penury um what's uh your experience or about um hemisync and binaural beats and medit how do you find that work Hemy sink is through the Monroe Institute just outside of Charlottesville Virginia yeah yes thank you for the question I have not done research in that area so I really don't have anything um to offer you you may in fact be more knowledgeable than me on on that regard so sorry okay does it it does speak to how the the the the brain uh functions through oh okay Ed's got okay yeah um I need to be careful how I uh say this um the kind of work that we did at UNCC for many years is very closely related to the possibility of detecting EEG responses produced by binaural beats and we've done a couple of little studies in which we did not see any such responses so my suspicion is I don't know this for a fact um I mean I'm convinced that all kinds of odd stuff goes on down at the Monroe Institute and you know Boral beats are part of what they do but not all of what they do there's a lot of things going on there including you know group effects and stuff like that a lot of expectations uh so I'm a little doubtful that binaural beats are a physiological explanation for the things that happen but uh it's part of a an effective procedure those of you who don't know um uh Mr Monroe who created the Monroe Institute was an engineer who had spontaneous aob body experiences and uh was curious enough to and wanting to share it with other people to the point where he tried to find out why why this was happening to him and how he could give this experience to other people and so that's what they're doing that wild stuff at Monroe Institute yes another question right here sure actually before I ask my question um I want to mention to Dr Kelly that um are you familiar with the work of Dr Julie Bell uh with mediumship you were saying that you were interested in um you know researching mediumship and and getting all that kind of stuff in she's done a lot of work with um quintuple and in quadruple blind studies on mediums and uh has done a lot of good work there um my question though has to do with what are your thoughts on what would constitute scientific proof uh I know it's a tough question to answer but since we are interested in getting this out to the masses and and proving or convincing I should say that there really is something beyond the physical how do we do it in such a way that would convince the scientific Community that's looking for reproducible experiments and and so forth Beyond how do we go beyond anecdote well there's a lot to be said here for sure um number one there's already a whole lot more than anecdote in fact even a lot of the field investigations are way more than just anecdotes they involve a lot of careful documentation of things that happen uh there are things that happen repeatedly in different places in the world like the cases of The Reincarnation type uh science is never a matter of absolute proof it's a matter of piling up evidence in favor of or against competing hypotheses and there are going to be people out there we know for sure who will never believe in the existence of sici phenomena even if they happen right in front of their face yeah I mean it's just the fact there are some people are so committed to defense of the prevailing physicalism that no evidence will ever be enough to convince them otherwise so what we do is the best we can we produce the best field studies the best experimental studies we can and let the chips fall where they may I just like to add to that uh that that Max plank said 100 years ago that science makes progress funeral by funeral and people who are who are wed at a certain worldview are not likely to change it but we hope that as we accumulate more and more of this evidence that physicalism does not explain what we're experiencing every day and as scientists who are wedded to the materialistic Viewpoint keep sweeping it under the rug eventually be so much that the furniture will just fall over we're right at four o'cl we have time for one more question and then I'm going to wrap things up I marish shall speak fast two questions BR bradette um so do you see opportunities for adults to collaborate with people like Dr Selman who in the field of Applied positive psychology I see a lot of synergies there so that's first question and then the second question maybe because I've just finished reading the art of racing in the rain um do you see Consciousness expanding and research expanding to animals Beyond human beings two questions Jim you have a story about animals in your book yeah but I'll let you take either question I mean I think as far as the positive psychology part goes um I was suggesting Kim take it because I think there's a tie in with meditation and with psychological States and how they may improve uh Health but also may make people more open to the kinds of things that we're exploring now as far as the Animals part go uh I don't see us expanding into that U but I will say that there's a uh professor at UVA who has had some contact with us who wrote a book about I believe I'm right about this being a horse whisper right or something to that effect so there are people with extraordinary experiences and if they include animals you know then that would be great and she would be someone who could be studied but as far as us instigating um studies of you know SCI abilities among horses or dogs or whatever I think that's probably unlikely well did everybody enjoy the today's presentation everybody sufficiently expanded so I want to thank each one of you for taking thaning your Saturday afternoon for being here please visit UV ads.org to learn more Andor to contact us or or for the next 30 minutes while you're helping yourself to the last of the refreshments uh contact any one of us from the University of Virginia so one more time let's please thank our panelist and our presenters the dots research and one more time let's thank our host the inevitable Tracy Cohen thank you Tracy for hosting us beautifully done all right everybody thanks again you take care

Channel: UVA Division of Perceptual Studies

Views: 151,308

Keywords: Division of Perceptual Studies, Near death experiences, Past life memories, Tracy Coen, Jeff Olsen, Bruce Greyson, Jim Tucker, Ian Stevenson, Kim Penberthy, Mindfulness, Mindfullness and Altered States, consciousness, Pat Belisle, Evidence of Life after death, Life After Death, scientific materialism, Mind, Mind and Brain, Consciousness more than brain activity, scientific paradigm, Irreducuble Mind, Beyond Physicalism, Return to Life, Science Museum of Boston

Id: ZoqNe-U53wA

Length: 150min 33sec (9033 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2016