The Basement: Jeffrey Mishlove | Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness. It Filters It

- For decades, a shadowy organization called the Lemonati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Look around, lemon-forward sodas, even lemon-forward songs. We ran the tracks, slowed them down, reversed them, and squeezed out the truth. ♪ All hail the lemon ♪ - That's lemon propaganda right there. But now, 7UP is fighting back with their new lime-lemon soda. Join the 7Uprising, flip the sip. - Now at Lowe's, faster quotes start at the Lowe's ProDesk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo? Perfect, bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in store or on Lowes.com, right from the Lowe's ProDesk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. - Just like that, at Lowe's. - Today, we're sitting down with Jeffrey Mishlove. On Christmas Eve, 1985, Jeffrey got a phone call from a man named Ted Owens. Owens was a former assistant to J.B. Rhine at Duke University. He claimed to control the weather and summon UFOs on command. - Summon UFOs on command, eh? Must be nice. I'm still waiting for an Uber Eats I ordered last Tuesday. - He told Jeffrey to call the U.S. government and warn them not to send up the next spade, eh? - His UFOs were gonna bring it down. And a month later, Challenger exploded. Now that's the kind of story you're gonna hear today. And Jeffrey spent 50 years as the most important interviewer in parapsychology. UC Berkeley gave him the only PhD in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited American university. In 2021, he won first prize and $500,000 from the Bigelow Institute for the best scientific case that consciousness survives death. - Gaffer Miller, he's gonna find out the IRS also survives death. Taxes are deft! - This one got emotional. Let's go down to the basement. Jeffrey, welcome to the basement. - Thank you. - I'm excited to have you here. - It's a pleasure to be here. - It's weird for me because there's so much research goes into my episodes on my stupid show. - You constantly come up as a primary source. So thank you for your contributions. This is like sitting in front of the encyclopedia. I don't even know where to start. - Well, let me just say, it's very gratifying to me to know that I'm having that kind of an impact. - Did you not realize that? - No. - Oh my goodness. - I did not. - When I told my audience you were coming in, they're blown away by it. No, you're. It's weird to be a living legend and not know it, I guess. - Well, I know that there's a reputation but I think you've built up a fabulous business here with a huge audience and I had no idea that you even knew I existed. - Oh, of course I did. My show is, I don't want to say silly and dismiss it because the topics are important, but your work is actually important. You know, I'm trying to entertain people. Your work is really important in educating people. But I want to get to the bottom of some of that stuff. So before we get too deep, I want to know your favorite, not the most famous, not the most well-reviewed, your favorite character that your mother ever played on stage. - Blanche DuBois. - Streetcar? - Yeah. - Oh my goodness. - Yeah. But it changed her life completely. She, my mother was an actress in local communities. She was very active in local community theater. And good, I imagine she could have had a career on Broadway if she hadn't married my father and moved from the East Coast to Wisconsin. So she was very active in local community theater and Blanche DuBois, the female character in "Streetcar Named Desire" possessed her. It was as if she was a different person after that. She became Blanche DuBois. 'cause you mentioned tapping, that's a real thing now. - Yeah. - Did they think, like, Why is this guy making them hit themselves in the head? What does he do? Were they? I don't think I fit in there very well. For whatever reason, I was destined to do something different with my life. I think we're going to see that as a threat is when you land into an institution, it doesn't work for you. I think we're going to see that. You know, it's really true. In fact, every time I was at a university, University of Wisconsin or even Berkeley, which was much more attuned with my way of thinking, my favorite professors would get fired or would leave. Because they were just too outside the mainstream? And I'll give you another example. After years of struggle, as you mentioned, I achieved a doctoral degree, a unique individual interdisciplinary. Doctoral degree in parapsychology, the only one ever awarded to this day, 40 years later. And what's the quick definition of parapsychology? Parapsychology is the scientific study of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis and the possibility of human survival after death. Mainstream doesn't like this. No. But the point is that I want to make just in the context of this conversation. I got the degree and I went to see my mentor at the time. I was so proud. My committee had just finalized everything. So I went to visit Arthur Young, who was a 70 year old man at the time or in his 70s. The bell helicopter? Yes. Was your mentor? Yes. Okay. This is going to get interesting. Yeah. Arthur was an amazing guy. And I have talked about him forever. He pulled out an astrology ephemeris and started looking at my chart. And he said to me, how long did you work on this degree? And I said, it's been about six years, little over six years since I entered the doctoral program that I created for myself in parapsychology. Okay. And he looked at me and he said, well, it's going to take you six years more to undo all the damage the university has done to you. Wow. So he saw that in you. Not just me. Well, how do you create a PhD? Yeah. Because it's accredited and you had to fight for that, didn't you? Yeah. Well, there was a program at Berkeley whereby if you're already a graduate student in good standing, you want to do a dissertation on a topic where you can't find three professors in your department who will sponsor you, but you can find three professors in a variety of different departments who will sponsor you, you can create your own program. And I took advantage of that very obscure rule. After I graduated from Berkeley, they canceled the whole thing. Oh, you can't do that anymore. They just reinstated it a few years ago. Okay. Finally. What was your dissertation about? Training ESP abilities. Wow. And so you got sponsors for that. Faculty. Faculty sponsored that. Yes. That's amazing. And I think it's interesting that there was, didn't they try to take that away from you and you fought? Well, there were organized skeptics. There still are. Oh, yes. Organized skeptics who were. Who were offended by the very idea that a major school, Berkeley's one of the best in the world, would grant a degree in parapsychology. This horrified them because they see it as the rising tide of superstition. Right. And so they put pressure on the university to cancel the degree after it had already been awarded. Right. The pressure was quite significant. The university tried to do that. I had to pull some strings. Fortunately, I had some support from people who believed in what I was doing. And those people failed in their effort to get the university to undo my degree. But it put me through hell at the time. Of course. And your doctorate stands. Yeah. So, criminology. Yeah. Take us back. What attracts you to criminals? You go from mental health to now criminals. I mean, are we talking serious? Well, as I say, I moved to California. Right. To the Bay Area. And I wanted to enroll at Berkeley. And I had studied when I was at Wisconsin with Seymour Halleck, who was a psychiatrist. Yeah. And who specialized in criminology. And I knew, frankly, that I could get in to criminology. There were openings in the School of Criminology at Berkeley. Psychology, they accepted, I think, 20 students every year. And they had, like, thousands of applicants. And even though I had a good grade point and so on, I didn't know that I would get admitted. But I knew I could be admitted in the school of criminology at Berkeley. And there were openings in the school of criminology at Berkeley. But I knew I could be admitted in criminology. So I went for that because they had a psychology track. I was interested in clinical work. And I could do that in the School of Criminology. And so if you had known me in 1972, for example, you would have seen me doing volunteer work at San Quentin Prison in the psychiatric unit conducting group therapy sessions with murderers and rapists. What were they like as people? You know, that's the interesting thing. I thought they were pretty much just like you and me. That's very interesting. Yeah. That makes me think that everyone maybe has a certain trigger or there's something in everybody. We all have a little larceny in our heart. Yes, we do. You might say. Because I'm pretty convinced, you know, that the whole human population shares the same thing. I think that's the interesting thing. religious mystics, whatever that is. It's undoubtedly a form of psychopathology. And I'm going to, that's what I'll write about. I'll talk about the psychopathologies that make people believe they're having psychic and mystical experiences. And I started digging into the literature. And the more I dug into the literature, the more I became convinced that it was just the opposite, that these people were some of the most creative, successful people on the planet. And at that point, and I became aware of the research of J.B. Rine and parapsychology and the studies of life after death going back to the 1880s. And at the same time, in my senior year as an undergraduate, I was exposed to LSD, and the whole psychedelic scene that was burgeoning at that time on college campuses. And it all fit together for me very naturally that LSD was a tool for exploring your own mind and that these mystical experiences were quite real. And you could have a taste of it and you could have a taste of it. you know, from drugs. But then, in 1972, I had a full-blown experience. Before we get to that, academia seems very comfortable with religious studies but uncomfortable with parapsychology, but there seems to be a lot of overlap in those fields. There is an enormous overlap also with what is now called transpersonal psychology, which pretty much didn't exist back when I was studying as an undergraduate, but. The Lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new lime-lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7-Up. Flip the sip. Most scholars in the field of religious studies, I'm told, are really atheists and skeptics. Really? Yeah. There are a handful who take it seriously, and I got to know Houston Smith very well, the author of The World's Religions, who was deeply involved in the mystical core of all religions. But for the most part, the scholars of religion, and I think even today, were under the influence of what was in those days called Marxist materialism, later on became known as deconstructionism and post-modernism. But they saw religions basically as power trips, as a way to manipulate people and to control society. That is an interesting take that I have. I hadn't considered. Yeah. But religion is a tool to do that. Yes, it is. It is. Not to dismiss any religious people, but it certainly has that. There's that side of it. There certainly is. Yeah. So your experience, it was your first paranormal experience, was life-changing. I don't know if it was my first paranormal experience, but it was life-changing. There's no question. So this is the dream. It's a dream. It's a dream. But you had, you had an experience before the dream, possibly? Well, I was doing ESP experiments and things like that. Where? As an undergraduate in Wisconsin in my experimental psychology class, as a matter of fact. On what? On other, on like undergrads coming? Well, it was informal. You know, I'd take a deck of playing cards and hold it up and I'd have my girlfriend try to guess, what the cards were. And, you know, the results were interesting, but. Did they base Dr. Peter Venkman and the Ghostbusters on you? When you saw that, you must have been like. Electroshock. Right, right. Well, when I first saw Ghostbusters, I did think, my goodness, they made the movie about me. Right. That's what it seems like with the cards. They all, they were all doctors. Yeah, that was a funny movie. It was. When it first came out, it was hilarious. So the dream. Tell me about the day leading up to the dream. What was going on in your life that, because when people have these experiences, often they're primed for it and maybe don't realize until after the fact. Well, yes, I was primed for it. I, in fact, as an undergraduate, I, in what they called the free university in Wisconsin, I offered a course on religious mysticism. I was teaching it as an undergraduate, but by the time I was a graduate student in criminology, I was kind of put all, all that behind me. And, and I can't say that I was primed at all. At that moment, I didn't know. But 2,000 miles away, I'm in Berkeley, California, waking up from the most powerful dream of my life. It's 730 in the morning in Wisconsin at 930 in the morning. My great uncle, Harry, who was about 85 years old, had died at that time. That moment. And as best I can piece it together, he came to me. He visited me and took me along partway for the ride. Well, what was the dream about? Take us through that. Well, because this is not a unique story. I cannot put it into words very well. It's beyond description. It's what they say. It's ineffable. Right. The classic mystical experiences. What I can tell you, is that Uncle Harry came to me in the dream and we had a deep conversation. He disagreed with some of the three ways I was living my life. What was some of the dialogue in that dream with her? Hello? Well, the dialogue in retrospect is trivial. The dialogue was he's telling me that you you treat your girlfriends like they're your equal. I don't know. Harry like that in real life. Well, I all I can say is he had four wives. Okay. And not at the same time. He wasn't a Mormon. He. And I don't think he treated women as an equal. He was a very religious man, highly Orthodox Jew, the president of the local Orthodox Jewish congregation in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And so that was part of it. And I'm saying no women are equal. And I we discussed the yin yang symbol, which has become my logo and comes out of that dream. Yes, in part. Okay. And and but the thing is, when I awoke from that dream, I was sobbing tears of joy of joy of joy. Did you know he had died? No, I had no idea he had died. What was so? Joyous about that message. Not only was I. I can't put it into words. It's as if he took me into heaven. That's what it was. And. Also, I was singing. I woke up singing. I woke up singing and crying in the song. I was singing for any of your viewers who were Jewish was a venue. Which is a song that is only sung. In the Jewish liturgy in the what we call the high holy holidays. And it's some of the most poignant spiritual moments of the religious service. And they sing of you knew what came to our our father, our king. It's a prayer to God. To forgive us. I was going to ask you about that. What that song is about and when it's song. Yeah, it's about forgiveness. It's about forgiveness. It's about asking God to forgive. Us for our sins. Why that song? Do you think? I don't know. When you woke up, you don't know why you were singing that song. No, I don't. But it was like coming out of my heart. And I had been so deeply touched. And I didn't know that Uncle Harry had died. I didn't know where I had been. I didn't know why I woke up from a dream singing and crying like that. But. I. I can never forget the experience. And even though I can't put it into words and make it intelligible, it was at that moment that I realized or shortly thereafter, as I'm digesting all of this, that I can no longer pursue a career studying the negative side of human deviance that I had to move away from psychopathology and crime and, and start. start focusing on the positive side of human deviance. It's interesting that you were working with criminals and woke up singing about forgiveness. Yeah. That's very interesting to me. Who was your first phone call? Well, I wrote home immediately to my parents and said, how's Uncle Harry? I had a dream about him. And my mother called as soon as she got the letter and said, how did you know that Uncle Harry had just died? And so I said, well, I didn't know. And could they arrange for me to have an object that Uncle Harry owned so I can keep it to remember him by? They sent me a book, a little book. And they told me, this is Uncle Harry's favorite book. What was it? It took me a while to figure it out because it was written in Hebrew. And I later learned, actually, it was in Yiddish, which is a German-Jewish slang language. I'm from New York City. I know what it is. So Yiddish, I had to get it translated. And it's the tales of the Baal Shem Tov, who was a mystical teacher of the Jewish Hasidic sect going back to the 18th century. Did your mother know you were into mysticism that she chose? She chose that book? These are a lot of synchronicities. No, I had no idea that my Uncle Harry was into mysticism or that anybody that I knew, any Jewish person, had anything to do with mysticism because in that era, Jewish people wanted to fit in. They wanted to be considered normal Americans, not some kind of weird cult-like people. Now they don't mind so much. Again, that's very strange to hear because I'm from New York, so Jewish is very much part of our local culture, and my family, so it's very part of our culture. It's always strange to hear friends talk about it. I never met a Jewish person until I was 30 years old. It's strange to me. It's a very different country. So you decided after the dream you had to make a change or after the book? After the dream. Well, around that time, it all happened within a few weeks. It took me months to figure out how to make this shift because I assumed, well, I could shift into a graduate program on creativity or intuition or mysticism, but they didn't exist. So I agonized about it for many, many months. Still working in criminology? Yes. You had to be completely distracted by then, no? I suppose, I suppose. I was, but I was, you know, still showing up at the psychiatric unit in San Quentin Prison and taking my courses and doing well. I got a master's degree in criminology, and eventually what happened was kind of interesting. Agony, and agony and agony. I was a stressed out, unhappy person after that beautiful, mystical experience because I knew I had to. I knew I had to change my life. And I think that happens a lot for people who have near-death experiences. And what I had today, we would call a shared-death experience. Yes, we would. I just did an episode on that. It's a very real phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah, and you had a remote shared-death experience, which I believe is the most common kind. Sixty percent of people who have those experiences are far, far away from that person. Because it was, you could also call it a visitation. Yes. Uncle Harry came to me. I didn't go to him. I didn't know he was dying. No, but he knew that you needed him. Did he visit anyone else? I'm touched by this story. Yeah. You know, I think so. I'm pretty sure there were some cousins who had some experiences along those lines. I wonder if he was telling everyone to make some changes. Is that how Harry was opinionated? No. I don't remember him that way. Here's what I remember about Uncle Harry is he ran a corner grocery store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And I'd be a young kid, 8, 9, 10 years old, and my father was very fond of him, and we'd often visit. And when we came to visit him, he lived in an apartment behind the grocery store. He'd go into the freezer where they had Eskimo pies, and he'd pull out Eskimo pies and hand them to all the kids. And I thought to myself, look, he's got a whole freezer full of Eskimo pies to a young child. That's wealth. Yes. And so I told this story once to a rabbi. I was friendly with Zalman Schachter, a mystical rabbi, and he said to me, well, your Uncle Harry had one more Eskimo pie for you. Oh, that's lovely. He did. That sounds like it must have been very difficult those months. They were. They were very difficult. But one morning, I woke up, and I knew beyond a doubt that I was going to have a dream that evening, and the answer to this whole search of how to reorient my life was going to come in a dream. So, everything is chaotic then, and then, and you felt like, tonight is the night. Tonight is the night. The dream is going to come, and the answer will be there. And? It was just a knowing. And it happened. It happened. What was that dream about? In that dream, I was visiting. I didn't expect to cry this soon, Jeffrey, but it's a good story. I had good friends in Berkeley who I used to live with, who were in married student housing at the time, and in the dream, I was visiting Peter and Marcy Hartman in married student housing. I knocked on the door of their apartment, and there was no answer. And in the dream, I found a key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room, and found in the middle of the living room floor a magazine called I, E-Y-E. And I picked up the magazine, began paging through it, and then I woke up with this feeling of exhilaration, like, I have the answer. What was in the magazine? Well, I didn't know. You didn't know? No. So I acted out the dream. I figured, I've got to find that magazine. Yeah. So I put on my tennis shoes, ran across town five miles from where I live to married student housing in Albany, California, and I was there. And knocked on the door of the apartment. What are you thinking during that run? Is it elation? Is it relief? It was elation. It was. You knew. I just knew I'm going to find the answer. I have to go to this apartment. And they weren't home, as I had dreamt. It turned out I did know exactly where they hid a key. They were good friends. So I took it, and I let myself into their apartment. Walked into the living room, and smack dab in the middle of the living room floor, exactly as I had dreamt, there was this magazine sitting sprawled, you know, pages open. iMagazine. It was called Focus. Oh. And Focus was the magazine of KQED, which was listener-sponsored radio and television in the San Francisco Bay Area. And as I'm paging through this magazine, it dawned on me for the first time in my life, I could pursue my interests by getting involved in the non-profit segment of the media. When you got into that apartment, did you know that magazine was going to be there? No. You weren't confident? You weren't, because everything was lining up. Well, everything was lining up, but I had no way of knowing. Well, then when you saw it, you had to go, "Oh my goodness." Yeah. So you have to follow where this leads. Yeah. Okay, so the magazine, Focus is there. Right. It's. It brought Focus into my life. Yes, it's all very clear. But, because I lived in Berkeley, I didn't have a car in those days, I don't think. No, I did not have a car. I went to KPFA, which is a Pacifica radio station in Berkeley. Actually, a very well-known Pacifica radio station. Nonprofit radio, and at the time, I had my master's degree, and I said to them, "I'd like to volunteer." And they said, "Sure, sit at this desk, "and when you hear the doorbell ring, "push this button and let people in the front door." That's how it all. That's it? That's how it started, and I was glad to do it. Yes, because, I mean, this is a mission now. Yeah. You're on a mission. Yeah. So. Within two, three weeks, I had learned how to produce radio program and i produced my first program which was um interviewing local friends of mine in berkeley who who were psychic and uh and the theme was you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic how did they did they let you create your own show yeah they they let me they showed me how and they broadcast it and after it was released the program director came to me and said i was only at the station for three weeks and he said you we have an opening every tuesday and thursday at noon for a program a regular program we call it the mind's ear and it's an interview program and you'll sit just as you and i are now across the table from each other with world-class experts in all the topics that you're going to be talking about and i'm going to be talking about a lot of the topics that interested me the most how long from that dream of the magazine to that show how much time passes maybe six weeks at the six weeks well let me think the dream of the magazine the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that hit song named after the color of lemons not a coincidence big lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years think about it but now seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda now lime comes first seven up flip the sip no maybe even three weeks somewhere just a few weeks you must be just coasting now on this feeling of this is meant to be because you're just i come from radio yeah i didn't get my own show in three weeks no i didn't get my own show in three weeks no i didn't get my own show in three weeks no it took a little longer than that well of course kpfa was staffed by all volunteers sure so there i was a volunteer who seemed to know something about psychology i was a kid i was 25 years old right at the time and that gave me the confidence to go back to the university where they offered no courses or programs in the topics that i was interested in but i did come to meet some professors who were supportive and i said i wanted you know create this interdisciplinary program would you sponsor it and be on my academic committee and i already had access to people like robert monroe and who writing his first book on out-of-body experiences and you know everyone on a book tour coming through the san francisco bay area would want to stop at kpfa what you're is that 1972 so robert i mean there's a lot of great characters coming through san francisco bay area during that time the 1970s in san francisco bay area i think of it as the psychic 70s yes it was an amazing time so robert monroe i've covered him quite a bit hemi-sync and was he able to achieve achieve out-of-body on command using hemi-sync i can't say that for sure i did go through the program i didn't have an out-of-body experience myself i didn't either what about the um the gateway project at monroe institute that was i think one of his last projects yes well i i certainly know monroe trainers and and people who have been through the program and i i think it's fair to say that a significant percentage of people found it worked very well for them so monroe trainers is an interesting segue because quite a few of those monroe trainers come from sri and project stargate was happening about the same time yes it's um yeah after stargate closed down right i'm talking like skip at water went over to monroe um but sri and 72 weren't targ and put off yes jacques filet was there yes did you spend any time with them yes oh sure we well what what what no one's been on the inside except we hear from the we hear from targ and put off all the time but yeah i haven't heard you talk much about what was going on sri what was going on well let me let me step back a little bit um when even as a criminology student there were graduate students that i knew friends of mine who were all interested in consciousness and we would meet and at the same time people like jacques filet and stanton friedman were occasionally coming on campus and lecturing on ufos and once i got started at kpfa i was sponsoring big symposiums on these topics as well taking advantage of the access that was available to me as a graduate student i could for example reserve zellerbach auditorium that held 2 000 people and we brought a regaler onto campus and and the like and one of the visiting speakers uh was arthur young the inventor of the bell helicopter is that how you met him through there yeah we'd have a small seminar and you know there would be 30 graduate students and arthur young would come and talk about his cosmologies and his theories and he was actually funding some of the research at sri and he was actually funding some of the research at sri and he was actually at at the time and he decided to set up a branch of his institute for the study of consciousness in berkeley he bought a house 2924 benvenu avenue in berkeley and he had an apartment in the back of this large house and he invited me to move in could you give everyone just the back of the baseball card uh biography of arthur young because it's very interesting he invented the bell helicopter which was the first commercially licensed helicopter in the united states we think of it as the whirlybird the little helicopter with the glass bubble dome and the skids and uh that was used for example in korea what was that movie mash sure to do all the evacuations it was i remember as a young child four years old seeing a helicopter and people would point look at that nobody had ever seen such a thing before it was in 1947 it was invented that's right and i you have to correct me but he did he wasn't like an aviation nut right he just saw a problem to solve it was here here's this story he went to princeton he studied general relativity in the 1920s at princeton university as an undergraduate that's an interesting time to be there yeah and and he so einstein's around and at that time right at the institute for advanced studies yeah he he became uh familiar with einstein's work as an undergraduate in the 1920s at a time when very few people understood einstein at all right and he decided he was influenced i think by um alfred north whitehead amongst others who had what he called process philosophy he believed he he saw that what was going on in the world was going on in the world and he was influenced by what was going on in the world and he was influenced by what was going on in the world and he was influenced by what was going on wasn't about things it was about process and he wanted to develop his own process philosophy but he said to himself look what's going on in the world it's all about technology and philosophers seem to have missed the boat they don't understand technology they don't talk about technology he said to himself in order to be worthy of doing real philosophy of being a real process philosopher i have to prove to myself that i can master a technological problem so he went to the patent office in washington dc in 1926 to find an unsolved technical problem that he could solve what do you got just what do you got and and he learned that there had been i don't know something like 30 attempts unsuccessful to develop a vehicle that could hover in midair they were trying to do it since da vinci made that sketch and they couldn't figure it out right and and so he set himself to solve that problem in 1926 he his father was a landscape painter pretty well known and he owned a farm in pennsylvania with a big barn and he used the barn as his laboratory and he began building toy models and it took him decades he worked for years and years on problems on solutions that didn't work like propellers at the ends of the rotor blades things like that but by the 1940s he had he had a toy model something you could maybe two feet wide and and it would hover in midair he he had solved the problem and he took it to the bell aircraft company and he said look what i got we could make big ones we can make big ones and and they said okay let's let's do it and and The 19 Model 47 was the very first helicopter that the government licensed for commercial purposes. That's right. I think Operation High Jump down in Antarctica was the first time they were deployed on that famous mission in 46. So he made a bag of money. He did. And then no more in that industry, right? I said, now it's time to get serious about philosophy. The whole point of the helicopter was just to show that I was worthy to do philosophy. What an amazing man. Yeah. He's someone everyone should know his name. He was so incredible. He was a gift. A gift to me. You've had many gifts, Jeffrey. I mean, you really have. Talk about him. Well. I mean, what was he really like? He was the sweetest person. And he loved young people. people he this was of course during the vietnam war era and he would tell all of his older friends listen to the young people and of course the young people such as myself at the time were you know into anti-war and into things like mysticism and and also drugs how did he feel about his invention being used so heavily in that war it made him unhappy i bet it did he he didn't like it and he also felt personal pain every time a pilot crashed because sometimes i think at least on one occasion they lost a test pilot sure and uh it affected him deeply his wife ruth forbes young who came from a famous forbes family very wealthy new england family created what was called the international peace academy and they were training diplomats they offered seminars to young diplomats from all countries how to negotiate for peace instead of for personal or advantage only for your country have we learned nothing um did did arthur ever talk to you about that famous seance in 1952 with forbes and the asters and alan dulles and the council of nine and poor rich poor rich yes we we well not specifically that seance it i had many conversations with him i lived at the institute with him for about six or maybe nine months until um you lived with him for about six or maybe nine months until um i had a great time with him with arthur young he invited me to move into the house where he he and his wife were living and along with my best friend at the time saul paul sarag wow i can't uh you were too young to realize how important that was yeah i had no real appreciation uh for many of the people i knew at that time in terms of their depth and who they were i was young and naive um but i i you know i was a good learner and he had obviously noticed in the various seminars that saul paul and i were the ones who asked the most questions and he got really engaged in in his work so he he wanted us to be part of his institute and we were more than happy to do it what did he tell you about that seance and poharich and um really very little because it's become it's mythology at this point it has been i don't as i look back on what i now know about it all i i'm not sure what to make of it uh arthur he did a lot of things he was one of the early dianetics clears he and his wife that's right both were he he there was a lot of that at sri he well there was yeah what is it about dianetics and scientology that speaks to well they in dianetics and scientology they're very open to the paranormal sure and i don't think that um i can say much else of a positive nature about it um there's a dark side to every religion but there's certainly something maybe more so in dianetics that's appealing to i mean one of the most famous psychics who's my personal favorite is pat price i believe he was a scientologist how put off yeah bingo swan yeah scientologist that's all true but russell targ who was right in the middle of all of it was not right and so uh it hard to say what influence scientology actually had i think ed may who took over the program after hal put off left was also that's right so there there is that but i don't think any of those people maintained except for pat price maintained their connection with scientology it's something they went through they got what they could out of it and they moved on right they got clear and that was enough um we'll take a quick break but this is a good time to transition to sri and maybe we can talk a little bit about ted owens sure okay we'll be right back so how i heard it was you're you're a researcher you're around sri you're in the scene yeah russell and hal hand you a file and say we can't do anything what can you do right was that the ted owens file that was the ted owens file why couldn't they do anything with that well they were receiving funding from the cia yes they had already gone public with their research on erie geller it was published in nature magazine with one of the world's premier scientific magazines when is that around 75 74 as i recall um and they didn't want to have a flamboyant psychic they didn't want to be in the news erie geller at the time was incredibly controversial why why because well because he was being attacked by the skeptics because he was a public performer a stage magician and you had people like the amazing randy writing books about what a fraud he was and and going in fact going to scientific conferences and claiming that uh in public the people i knew who were in no way confederates with erie geller were helping him cheat and and so you know what people at sri wanted who were you know is largely a military industrial think tank they wanted to be low-key they didn't want to have any kind of public prominence of that sort and ted owens was uh doing everything he could to attract publicity to himself more so than ingo swan oh well i think so although ingo was probably much smarter yes about it but ted owens was kinder too i would guess uh well owens had his kind side he did sure okay yeah i mean he was kind to me i had a good relationship with him for many years but if you if you crossed him that was another matter i was i had learned by that point to because of my experience in san quentin to treat everybody with respect regardless of what they may have done or what other people think of them and so on i i believe every human being deserves respect just for being human sure you were the perfect person for that because he has a this sort of infamous situation for being a little bit cagey feisty feisty for sure feisty he was feisty he he was um you know a sailor he he had been a sailor in the second world war and uh then he went to duke university while he was in the navy he was doing psychic stuff right and left and he wrote a letter to j.b rhine at duke university and said you know here's what i'm doing i want to do experiments and do experiments and do experiments and do experiments and do experiments and do experiments and ryan was writing back and giving him pointers and after he got out of the navy ryan said come to duke and i'll we'll get you enrolled at duke university and he did he became j.b rhine's assistant wow i didn't know that yeah so what was special about ted what could he do well he claimed he could do psychokinesis okay so moving things moving things he he told many stories he had about things disappearing in his presence and he he said he did seances for the rhines and things of this sort and apparently when he was around girls their earrings would disappear and j.b rhine actually tried to investigate this according to ted and um but it he he got he eloped with another woman from duke and left and tried to set himself up as a healer he knew hypnosis and he was quite successful as a healer until i think in 1954 the the ama shut him down uh because they thought at the time hypnosis was not acceptable and they thought he you know he's practicing medicine he's a quack and so on and he became very bitter ama has been like that since its founding very against herbalists and natural remedies i'm not surprised i think it's changing slowly but in any case he began to think that he was working with nature and then working with a poltergeist he thought it was a poltergeist he called big lorna and finally it dawned on him that it could be extraterrestrials and he remembered having had some weird experiences that appeared to be of an extraterrestrial nature and finally he felt wait i'm in telepathic contact they're talking to me and they're giving me instructions how to interact with them and teaching me their language and he he held many different jobs he was a bullwhip artist at the circus and he had a knife throwing routine and he was a jazz musician and a high-speed typist and and and he worked at one time is what he called an idea man for a railroad company and he said that the aliens he called them the space intelligences had guided him since his childhood to have many different careers so that his mind would be flexible enough to understand their very complicated symbolic system and also he claimed that they had been searching since the days of moses for somebody with a nervous system he thought of himself as you know the first person since moses to be able to do these kinds of things messianic figure he was i think he's the first person to bring the insectoid aliens to the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that has been a part of his life for many decades he has been a part of his life for many decades and he has been a part of his life for many decades go on so he's halfway through his presentation or and the guy shows up oh and so they tell him okay ted you've got to leave the stage oh and so before he left the stage people the audience was already practically booing him really yes well just because of his attitude yes okay yeah he didn't sit well with the british public yeah and i got up and said well i happen to know about what happened in california firsthand and i just mentioned that and you know it was a way to kind of ameliorate things sure a calming presence yeah which you are so so we bonded over that and i began looking at the files and the thing that appealed to me was that he claimed he could produce ufos on demand and there were examples in the files where he'd go to police officers and he'd say i'll make a ufo and you will see it it'll be in the newspapers and you can tell them that i i said it would happen and then there would be so those files were real oh yeah did you see him produce ufos or anything like this i set up an experiment i said let's do it again yeah and and before i had any opportunity to really set up the experiment he was on it he said i'm gonna do this so there won't be one they're gonna be three and he called the number okay he said there'll be three big ufo sightings within um 100 miles of the san francisco bay area how skeptical are you well skeptical enough to realize that this wasn't the way you should be done right right so i scrambled i said we need a control group uh i have friends in san diego as california west coast city about the same population as san francisco i wrote to them and said we'll use san diego as a control group i sent letters out to every law enforcement agency within 100 miles of both cities said let me know if you get any ufo sightings in your area and waited to see what would happen and sure enough there was a fellow near san francisco a little town called concord california was out walking at four in the morning and claimed that he'd been abducted by at four in the morning perfectly sober person at the time with no background in ufos we interviewed him and it actually from all accounts seemed like he had reported it to the police was in the appeared to be the first legitimate sighting. And were there three of them? Well, after that, Owens called me up on the phone. He, at the time, as I recall, was living in Oregon. He moved around a lot. And he said to me, I can tell the next one is going to be really big. He said, I feel it coming. He said, there's going to be a UFO. It's going to be one of the best sightings ever. He said, it's going to be seen by hundreds of people. It's going to be photographed. And the photograph will be published on the front page of one of your local newspapers, which is what happened four days later. Four days later it happened? Yes. At some point, are you starting to really believe this guy? Yes. And I'd be hoping, don't predict anything, don't predict anything bad. Well, there were. I know. Before we get to that, I know we both know Chris Bledsoe. Yes. I think we both agree he's a lovely man. Yes. He can summon something. Yes. I don't think that's a debate. He's studied by the government, CIA. He believes that he's summoning spiritual entities. Right. What do you think? Yes, you could call them orbs. Sure. And he believes and people, I think other people would agree that these orbs, they are either conscious themselves or they are inhabited by conscious beings. He calls the lady. It does indeed appear to be something not so different from angelic apparitions that occur in the Bible. He made predictions on this very show a few months ago that are coming true. Yeah. Was Ted summoning those same type of entities? I don't think so. It doesn't sound like it. No. It sounds like craft. Yes, it does seem like craft. The one that occurred that I just mentioned was seen both from the air and the ground. The California University, what's now called Sonoma State University at the time, it had a different name, Sonoma State College or something. And near San Francisco in Roanoke Park, California, the art department was sponsoring an artist named Stephen Pileski who had an airplane. He was a pilot and he had smoke trailing out the back of his airplane, colored smoke. He'd make designs in the sky. That was his art? That was his art. What a cool art project. He was an artist. And so the art department sponsored him and he's flying over the sky. He's flying over the campus, 3,000 feet altitude. Hundreds of students are outside with their cameras watching the whole thing, including video. And a UFO shows up right in his airspace. And so it's seen from the air and by hundreds of people on the ground simultaneously, photographed and videotaped. It got a lot of PR. The Berkeley Gazette ran a photo on the front page, as Ted Owens had said, would happen. Yep. And the video was shown on the Channel 9 KQED Evening News. Did your phone ring with an I told you so? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And I made a big mistake. What was that? I said, Ted, that's only two sightings. Oh, no. You promised me three. So what did he do? He slammed the phone down. Oh, okay. He slammed the phone down and I began to feel, feel sick. You know how you get a little scratchy feeling in your throat and you think, uh-oh, this is going to be a bad sore throat. Yes. And you can tell it's starting. Yes. That's what was happening. As soon as you. Yeah, right away, it happened. And then 45 minutes later, he called me back. And without saying anything about what had happened, he simply said, Jeffrey, I will never do that to you again. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. And the sore throat went away. You're well known for being very balanced. I've never seen you really fully commit without hearing all sides. You've got to be a full believer at that point. He can hurt people. Yeah. I would say by then I was definitely convinced, but it got worse. After that. Your relationship with him? Well, yeah, because he was, as I say, trying to get the attention of the CIA and the U.S. government. He was living on the edge of poverty. He was spending all of his money on Xeroxing all of the magazine articles and newspaper articles, validating the different demonstrations that he was doing and mailing it off to scientists who were trying, some of them were, you know, seriously following his work, but none of them had the resources. And he wanted the U.S. government to set him up as an institution and he would use his powers for the benefit of humanity and for the United States. And of course, they wanted to have nothing to do with him. I wonder why that is. Did they ever approach you? No. I mean, just to ask about him. No, no, I was never approached, but I was, you know, at the time, I was pretty well known, I suppose, as a long-haired hippie, psychedelic drug user, and the CIA would have no interest in a person like me. Right, the CIA doesn't want anything to do with drugs or psychedelics. Except if it's Puharich researching. But they weren't particularly interested in the type of person I was at the time. But Owens was desperate. For their help and attention. And he finally said, "I'm going to declare war against the U.S. government until they give me what I want." He told you that? Oh, yes. And this is after the sore throat? Yes. So you know he can do this. Well, he declared war. He said, "There are going to be poltergeist attacks on U.S. naval ships." And then he'd show me newspaper articles about mysterious fires and things that happened aboard naval vessels. And then he said, "I'm going to attack power plants." And they would send me newspaper clippings about uncanny accidents at nuclear power sites. But why would the CIA not bring this guy in? He sounds like exactly what I need. they wanted is just unstable well i first of all i think it was too unbelievable it's it's unbelievable unbelievable but but you've you've confirmed what about two-thirds of his i have but that was me right i've heard i get convened a meeting of scientists my wife janelle went jay allen heineck was in town in san francisco and she went and fetched him from his hotel room and brought him to the meeting and we had about a dozen scientists there i said look we've got to research this man yes and jay allen heineck said i wouldn't touch him with a 10-foot pole because the phenomena that he produces come from the unconscious and i don't want to have anything to do with that i think he had a point i think i think heineck had a point about ted there's something that scares me about him yeah after that sore throat and you hang up the phone you've got to be thinking i can't cross this guy again i know i wasn't i was naive i really well and i also trusted him i he said he wouldn't do it again and oh boy and and i had no intention to cross i didn't cross him just to say you know you promised me three and we only got two why did you say that were you teasing him i wanted the third one oh my goodness i it went and it never came there were only two and i can tell you in san diego there were zero right but uh so he didn't fulfill his promise exactly as he said he would and he never works out exactly quite the same way there's always some differences and these are large-scale phenomenon they're hard to assess statistically in any way and people figure well he's just fooling you somehow you don't know how but maybe he you know knows or he's predicting or he's in cahoots with the newspapers who knows there's always going to be that yeah so you continue to work with him for a number of years but it began i began to lose interest why because his war against the u.s government wasn't going too well and at some point he he made a big prediction you know they weren't paying attention to the poltergeist attacks and the nuclear power plant problems and and he said okay this is going to be a massive earthquake i'm going to really show him and it didn't happen it didn't happen no thank goodness it didn't happen and at that point i was moving on in my life i wasn't thinking about ted owens until propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes it would have been christmas eve 1985 and he called me up the big booming voice i had hadn't had much i was keeping the files i still have all the files you still have this research files we are putting them online they will eventually become searchable online we're making them all machine readable and even the handwritten ones and he said jeffrey this is the most important phone call you will ever receive he obviously wanted to get my attention you've got mine yeah he said it's up to you you've got to contact the u.s government and tell them not to send up the next space shuttle oh no because if they do my ufos are going to knock it out of the sky oh no that's what he said and i first of all had no leverage whatsoever with the u.s government i wasn't about to i didn't know who to call and i wouldn't have known what to say and they wouldn't have believed me in any case and so i did nothing and then it was about a month later when the challenger exploded that's one of those moments that uh i don't know if it is for you but where everyone says where they were when jfk they found a jfk was killed for me it's it's challenger i remember what the weather was i know what i was wearing i remember watching it on tv i was home from school do you remember that day that particularly i remember reading and learning about it of course but uh i don't remember the moment the way i do remember the assassination of kennedy right did you make the connection when when challenger exploded oh it shook me to my bones i would think so i i felt like horrified what about guilt like you should have done something no i don't think there was anything i could have i don't think there was but but guilt is an easy emotion but but i felt i should stop ignoring him yes and and what i arranged to do at that point was to take his training program to to try to learn to do what he does he had a training program and i felt i better learn about it it's this sounds like what you're training to defend yourself what would you well you could do whatever you want with it that's the thing and this is scary he said to me what do you want to do with these powers we arranged for him to come to san francisco i had some friends who had some money so we could afford to bring them out and so you called him please stop crashing shuttles come on down well he claimed it wasn't he who crashed the shuttle it was the it was the ufos in his behalf but but he he asked them to do it no he didn't say that okay because that would be evil to me he didn't say he never told me he asked them to do it but he said that they did it he did ask you to warn them so maybe he asked me to warn maybe he was trying to save them i'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt but but i there's such a darkness to there is a darkness to it and and and of course there's the other story it was the o-ring there's the o-ring there were there were warnings nasa should have known better there was all of that sure and not only that but he said to me i don't know what to do with this i don't know there were other people making predictions yes there were so i all i could say for myself was i better pay more attention yes to ted owens so i arranged to take his training program which was three days and it was mostly hypnotic hypnosis we we got a hotel room for him in san francisco and i had a couple of friends with me and for three days he hypnotized us what kind of what kind of hypnosis is this is he i mean it's not the he's not waggling a watch in front of your eyes right he's speaking he does a normal hypnotic induction and then he give you suggestions and it's i wrote a book called the pk man in which i because i recorded the entire thing i i still have the audio tape you have those of the entire training i mean i've read the transcripts in pk man i don't know he's had the tapes i have the tapes you need to have those available well maybe yeah i i could uh he warned me he said you shouldn't really share this with people without getting the permission of the space intelligences oh so the whole training is around these the space intelligence he he said that i asked him is this just hypnosis is that what you're doing he said no the hypnosis is only part of it he said it's psychokinesis and working on you on your brain the space intelligences will work on your brain he said what do you want to do with this power and i said to him i don't want to do what you're doing no i i have no interest in controlling the weather and calling down ufos said what i really want to do is become a spokesperson to the world at large to mainstream public the realities of the psychic world and that was my goal and uh it was six months i think i took the training and it must have been february and by june i had set up uh the original thinking aloud tv series we started out on cable local cable public access tv in marin county and within a year or two we were out on the satellite to public tv stations all over north america that show i think ran 16 years from 1986 to 2002 yeah yeah do you credit that training and the intelligences or i don't know how i could have done it myself what did they do that you couldn't you were already in media no well i had i kind of gave up my radio show why because i wanted to complete my dissertation and get a doctoral okay okay So I became a full-time graduate student and wrote a dissertation and wrote a couple of books. And it was only 1986, six years, and then I was fighting this lawsuit because the skeptics were trying to take my degree away from me and I was being libeled by them. And so I fought a libel suit for six years, which I won. Which you won. Yeah. And then I set up this program. And before we knew, you know, we started on a public access cable and not even in any of the mainstream San Francisco stations, but in a suburban station. And, you know, two years later, we're out on the satellite covered by 120 TV stations. It just happened. And you think that it was that training? And this, why couldn't you have done it yourself? Well, maybe I could have. Who knows? Right. I can't say for sure, but I can say that it seemed to happen without any effort. Because it seems like you forgot that you went from intern as a receptionist at a radio station to a hit radio show in three weeks. So clearly you know how to reach the public. I was a good interviewer. I understood that. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, this material hadn't. It had gone mainstream. And PBS stations were very hesitant. And even in the early days, we didn't cover a lot of parapsychology the way I'm more inclined to do now on YouTube, where I don't have. You know, in PBS, they're very conservative, actually. Yeah. And, for example, when our program went out on the satellite, we had some sponsors, the Institute of Noetic Science. Sponsored us. Well, and I think it was Nashville, Tennessee, the local PBS station went to a local psychologist and asked them, what's your opinion? Should we run and carry this program? And he said to them, the people of Tennessee are not ready for this. They really were. They were ready for it. Ted Owens died in 1987. How did that relationship wrap up for the two of you? Well, at that point, obviously, we were in touch. This was like a year after I had done the training with him. And our TV show was launched. I was getting what I had asked for. And I heard from him. He wrote to me from a farmhouse in Fort Ann, New York, where he had moved. And his letter was quite strange. He said, UFOs told me to come here. They're going to come for me. And then he sent me clippings of newspaper articles about UFO sightings in the area. And he said, actually, they're hovering right over this farmhouse where I'm living. And he died there. Did you keep those clippings? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I have them all. I had heard you say at one point that you almost warned him or told him, not that he was evil, but he was dangerous, to be careful. I did. I was very unhappy with the threats that he was making. And I asked him to stop doing it. I've always felt that he's his own worst enemy. It's what it sounds like. Yeah. I tried as much as I could to interest the scientific community. And we're still trying to do that. But it's like, for most people, it's a step too far. Although things are changing. Yes, they are. Chris Bledsoe, as you mentioned. And I asked Chris, I said, do you think people should learn how to do this? He said, no. He said, this is a gift and a curse. And he said, I wouldn't mess with it. I think he's probably right. Could Ted Owen's consciousness have existed past his death and contacted you? Well, in fact, it was, I think, 2020. 23, if I recall. 2022. I heard from a viewer of my YouTube show, some fellow in Germany wrote to me. And he said, I was meditating. I'm a deep meditator. And while I was in meditation, I experienced a presence. And the presence became more solid to me in my meditation. And I recognized it. It is Ted Owen's, because I'm a fan of your program. And I've seen some pictures of Ted Owen's that you've shown. And it was him. And he said to me, reach out to Jeffrey and tell him that if he wants to contact me, I'm available. Wow. And this is 35 years after his death, something like that. I guess that would have been 2022. So I endeavored. You did. Because at this point, you're well-known. You won the Bigelow Prize. Yeah. So you're working in death, afterlife experiences, all consciousness. Yeah. And it was quite clear to me at that point that there's a relationship between the afterlife and UFOs. Oh, yes. So how did you try to contact Ted? Well, what happened was I would try to meditate. Sure. Nothing happened. But one night. I was asleep. And, you know, you're kind of half awake, half asleep in a hypnagogic state. And I felt his presence. And I said to him, we had a conversation. I said to him, this is the early phases of the Ukraine war at the time. It would have been, I think, around December of 2020. And at the time, the Soviets, not the Soviets, the Russians, were bombing the power plants in Ukraine, trying to freeze them in the winter. And I felt for the people of Ukraine. I said, and I thought Ted would be sympathetic to that. And I said to him, and this just popped into my head in this altered state of consciousness, can we make it warm for the winter in Ukraine? So the people don't suffer. That was my concern. And I knew, of course, that he had done this sort of thing while he was alive. Exactly this sort of thing. Heat waves in the middle of winter, there were examples of. So he said to me, if the space intelligences agree, then we can do it. And so I created, I think. A monologue. I put it out on the video. This is what he says is going to happen. And again, it was just a few days later, I think on January 1st, if I recall correctly, 2023, there were a thousand temperature records broken all across Europe. Unbelievable. It was. And it was totally characteristic of the kinds of things. He had done in the past. And I recall, because I was now, the internet was very active. And there were meteorologists who specialize in rare weather patterns, absurd things. And they were posting on, they had blogs and things and saying, this is insane. We've never seen anything like this before. It came out of nowhere. It was unanticipated. And I endeavored to set up an. Okay. An experiment to see, you know, could we measure statistically? And I failed. Failed. Well, the reason is simply that a thousand records are all correlated with each other. So in effect, it's one record. Right. And you can't get good statistics out of a single example. And yes, it was a warm summer in Ukraine and they survived the Russian onslaught. In fact, they were exporting electricity. At the time. And, but it wasn't something I could say, here's statistical proof. I couldn't do that. But in every other regard, it would have been a success. Did you go back and talk to Ted again? Thank him? No, I never entered into that state again. And I've been reluctant since then, too. Excuse me. I felt some, maybe some of the same trepidation you spoke to. Like, I shouldn't be playing around with this. It works too well. And somebody wrote to me, a viewer wrote to me and said, do you realize that because of that heat wave, some people died from the heat? I didn't consider that. Yeah. And I thought, well, maybe there are unintended consequences. And I don't know entirely what I'm doing. And, but it wasn't as if. If I had ongoing communication, with him and i haven't felt that kind of contact and i haven't tried to cultivate it either and you initiated that so it's not like he invaded your consciousness right i was you know at that time hoping to have it and and when it happened and and when it worked i i began to think well maybe it's me maybe i'm the one doing it and i don't know but i i just felt like it's it's better left uh to other people or that my role is still as an educator and a communicator and i i don't need to try to win the war i totally agree even if it was you you probably don't want that responsibility yeah um you've been in this space for a long time and how do you handle i i know you handle criticism very well now because you've been doing it a long time were you ever angry sure you were i'm surprised to hear you say that so quickly well i don't get angry easily no you don't yeah i mean i mean nowadays i critics attack you and it just rolls off yeah but there was a time where you were frustrated with academia or mainstream well i made me sick literally they were trying to i had spent 10 years at berkeley i was a graduate student from 1970 to 1980 when i got my doctoral degree and they were trying to take it away from me i was very angry and and it affected my health of course as as well it never occurred to me to try to punish those people i was just struggling to uh protect my reputation because even parapsychologists in the parapsychology community they wanted to i was being attacked so heavily they didn't want to have anything to do with me at the time my my application for membership in the parapsychological association was rejected initially for on what ground because of the controversy that i got a doctoral degree at berkeley and and people were saying he's incompetent he shouldn't have gotten the degree the whole thing you know it was became a major point of focus i filed a libel suit so you have no do you have any allies at that point yes of course i had some allies like my professors oh right what about personal were their personal costs or their personal support well i you know it affects you inwardly when that happens i i felt mortified the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that hits song named after the color of lemons not a coincidence big lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years think about it but now seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda now lime comes first seven up flip the sip and i felt a little bit embarrassed to show myself in public and you know our young had predicted it will take you six years to undo all the damage and he was right it was six years later when i launched the thinking aloud television series arthur was right again yeah it's interesting that your mom was an actress yeah it's very outward then becomes a yoga instructor right and very inward yeah and you kind of had a similar path where the criminology and sociology is very outward and then parapsychology is very inward yeah did you get that from her well now that you mention it i i i think that um balance was very important my mother always used to say to me moderation in all things including moderation i just thought it was very interesting yeah um so you wrote a 95 page essay can you tell us what the bigelow prize is i mean in vegas everybody knows the name bigelow but can you tell us about that and why did you enter that contest it was very strange okay i'm ready i love strange well i i got the news robert bigelow is sponsoring a contest life after death and i thought to myself well there are a lot of smart people who will enter that competition people in the universe there are a lot of smart people who will enter that competition people in the universe who are studying like university of virginia where they do a lot of work in that area surely one of those people is bound to win and i knew leslie kane you did yeah i'd interviewed oh i guess you would have yeah because it's 2021 but this would have been 2020 2020 but i i launched the youtube channel in 2015 and leslie had been on as a guest and so i reached out to her i said leslie is perfect for you you should enter this contest and and she wrote back and said well i happen to be one of the judges oh and she said furthermore you should listen to this uh interview that robert bigelow did i think it was with george knapp on uh radio or tv she gave me a link and i listened to it and she said he's already predicting that you should enter the contest and i listened to it and she said he's already predicting that you should enter the and george knapp i think it was george knapp was saying who should enter your contest and he said well people like jeffrey mishlove should enter people who have been studying this their whole lives and i thought to myself um gosh you know that's um how can i uh enter because there's so many people who would be much better at it than me not sure but um how can i not how can you not so so i i did and and i struggled with it it wasn't an easy essay to to write i had help why was bigelow so interested in after death his wife had died and he'd been through a lot uh his you know he had set up this aerospace business and then an aids not aids covid covid came along and the governor in nevada had basically ruled that he had a non-essential business he had to let all of his employees go and the business the aerospace company to my knowledge has never recovered i used to drive by every day on the way to work and there's a ghost town it's just a big yellow building no one's there he still maintains a skeleton staff but uh but he had personal tragedy and then he had you know personal tragedies i think a grandchild had committed suicide and and his son his wife had died and he had earlier in his career launched the national institute of discovery science and they were big into ufos and an extraterrestrial intelligence but and then at this point he said he wanted to shift he wanted to he couldn't do both ufos and life after death so he wanted to study life after death and launching the competition would be his entry in into that arena and he asked for your help well he indirectly i didn't know him at that point but he knew you so now he knew of me yeah you were the name though yeah so you got to work yeah i think maybe we had spoken once or twice by that time and when when when did you make the decision to say okay i have to enter this well i talked it over with my wife right and she said of course you have to of course you have to yeah i was reluctant at first why because i felt there were other people who were far more qualified you don't give yourself enough credit you've you've you've been you've talked to every legend in this field it's true i i have in that regard who has interviewed more people than you well maybe you have for all i know this is episode 11 you've done 1500 well there are people who have done more but uh in any case doing interviews isn't the same as researching doing uh experiments publishing and scientific journals i was more of a popularizer than an original researcher it's not as if i have hundreds of scientific publications to my name i don't so you have a few peer-reviewed papers out there i have a few and and there are people who have hundreds and who know this field back and forth and uh some of them entered the competition and some of the people i thought were sure to win didn't even enter i guess they felt maybe they were too old or something so um so janelle says you got to do it i got to do it and you what's your approach to the essay well i decided if i'm going to do it i'm going to do it to win win attaboy and so i i cut back on my other projects including the youtube channel we noticed and and i focused myself nearly full time uh for six months to work on it and i had some good friends who would read over my drafts my first draft was terrible and i completely had to discard it and and start over uh but i finally you know got into the groove and i realized also that i wrote to the bigelow institute and said can i include video segments in the interview because i had a big video library sure about it they said yes you can so i think i was the only person who did that and and of course the the ground rules for the competition fit me very well because they said what they wanted was an essay that would be as if you're taking a case to a jury in a courtroom so i had my criminology background right and i could approach it that way as a criminologist and they said you know firsthand testimony and i had a big library of firsthand testimony and in particular i realized i had i'd done an interview long ago but i had the video with one of the world's great scientists francis crick the the man who invented or discovered the the helix property dna yes we know he sort of you interviewed him yeah okay and i and he had written a book called the astonishing hypothesis in which he said i'm going to set out to prove that uh consciousness is generated by the neurons of the brain he said it hasn't yet been proven and i have him on tape saying you know the religious people might be correct the consciousness might exist outside the brain completely and we might actually survive the death of the physical body so i was able to include that video clip in in the essay i thought that was one of the strong points plus all the testimony that i had from many many people who had had personal experiences plus my own story that's why those scientists didn't go in the contest they saw you were going to be there with francis crick they said oh shit we get we got nothing we can't compete with that they didn't know come on so it's 95 pages which i which i read it's brilliant can you break down the thesis then the nine categories well the basic idea is that there are many independent lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction it could be out of body experiences it could be near death experiences it could be the reincarnation research it could be mental mediumship or physical mediumship which is really extraordinary trumpets flying around the room yep it could be what is called instrumental trans communication or sometimes called electronic voice phenomena people who are in the middle of the room and they're in the middle of the room who communicate with their deceased relatives using a computer or a radio or they have these devices what are they called now voice spirit boxes spirit boxes and and the like of course there are lots of tv programs that feature these sure things and some of it's legitimate some of moses bunk but some is legitimate edison and tesla are both trying to build one of those yeah that's right some but not all some but not all yeah and so but but there's the white crow theory i think for will wasn't william james william james white white crow who is my intellectual hero is he yeah so do you remember his saying about the white crow oh yes please well william james put it this way he said if you want to disprove the claim that all crows are black you only need to find one white crow that's right and then he said mrs piper the medium he was working with is my white crow and he took a lot of heat for that too because the scientific establishment uh was in no way interested in and here he is a harvard professor sure saying this medium can really do it she's talking to the dead and and coming up with information that she couldn't possibly have known and people were attacking him viciously for that but he stuck to his guns he did i think i remember reading about him saying you know what about these other mediums and he said there's no stick big enough to not you know to knock them around but he didn't like them in this space but he liked his particular his white crow well you know i think if i remember the quote about no stick big yes it was it was this that he he was this is in the pages of science the main american scientific publication the main american scientific publication of the where he's arguing about mediumship and the people are calling him a crank yes and and and all sorts of insults and he wrote responded by saying the quality of the criticism is so poor their arguments are are so beneath the dignity of of a scientist to argue the way they're arguing that any stick will do you can this dog is is is such a vile creature that any stick you can find is is you can beat the dog with it doesn't matter you you hold mediumship in such contempt i wouldn't want to debate william james on anything he's one of the great thinkers of our time yeah i i would agree so in your paper um we've got all these things pointing in the same direction i'd like to know what happened when you found out you won you won well i got a phone call from the bigelow institute and they said robert bigelow would like to speak with you uh he will call you tomorrow morning at 9 30 so i'm sitting by the phone i'm sitting by the phone 28 and and it was 10 o'clock finally i hadn't heard from him that was a long half hour so so i called them oh you did i called them there i said robert bigelow was going to call me at 9 30 what happened and they said oh he hasn't come into the office yet he'll call you when he gets in this is killing you so is is you're right is janelle home janelle was at home it's just telling you to calm down he's gonna it's gonna be calmed down yeah and and so i'm finally he calls and we're talking and he says well you won first prize and janelle is peeking her head in the door she says well and so i hold my finger up like this one finger i held it up and and she goes to tell my stepson lewis who lives with us she says jeff won first prize and lewis says well how do you know and she said well he held up one finger and lewis says well maybe that doesn't mean i know but but it was wives no yeah she knew so how did you feel though i mean talk about validation it was validating but i can tell you this i knew you did i knew you were so humble going in and so but by that time i it was the way i knew i was going to have a dream that night when i had the dream of the magazine that changed my life i had absolute certainty at that point that i was going to win i went and looked up um how many judges voted for your paper do you remember how many all of them unanimous all six yeah yes what did you do when you hung up the phone um well i was elated obviously it was i i think the first thing i did was write to the people who had helped me and and to even to my professors back in the course and thanking them this is five decades of work yeah it was a uh a validation for me for taking a huge risk yes it was and a lot of personal cost yeah health to your health litigation yeah is this one of those proudest moments is this a victory is this triumphant moment for you i do it sure yeah and and of course the financial benefit was uh appreciated how much did you win it was half a million dollars that's real that's that's green money yeah yeah it was i think if there was no money it would have felt just as good probably it probably would have many people get awards with no money attached yes they do and they feel good you were further attacked by mainstream when you won that prize um a little bit it i i guess it didn't matter at that point I mean, because I followed it. I'm not aware of really any serious attacks. The Bigelow competition was seriously attacked. That's really what it was. It was about, but I noticed that the critics, for the most part, focused not on my essay but on some of the others because there were 29 different prizes awarded. The judges said that there were so many good essays that were contributed that they urged him to award more prizes than he had originally agreed, and he did. Are those available to the public to read? Oh, that's going to be really good. They are all online. How comfortable were you with the life after death going into that? Were you convinced it's a real phenomenon? It gave me a chance to look back. And remember how this all started for me. I had kind of almost forgotten about my dream of Uncle Harry, but as I look back on it, I could see from the benefit of decades that my whole life turned around after that dream. And I thought, that's the power of the afterlife. You can find it in examples of people who have been deeply touched by these experiences. They changed their life permanently. And there were many other examples. Bishop Pike in California, who was the Episcopalian Bishop of California, resigned. That's right. As a result of his communications with his son, who had died. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross became one of the most influential people in America as a result of communications. She had had with a former patient of hers who had deceased at that point. These things are life-changing. And that, to me, was more proof than you would ever find in a scientific experiment if you look at how it's touched the lives of people. Do you think Uncle Harry would have been proud of you for winning that prize? Well, he sure had a lot to do with it. He certainly did. Yeah. I can't say that I've felt much contact with Uncle Harry since that dream. I think the important lesson for me is you don't have to have psychic experiences all the time. They come when they come. They're really not under our conscious control very much. A little bit. A little bit. But you only need one or two good ones in your life, and it can put you on a path. Where you can appreciate, you know, they're all around us. It's happening all the time to millions of people every day. But it's not that important for a human being. It's important to know that they're real. But, you know, we have other responsibilities in our life than to be psychic. At Harmony Bank, we believe that better happens together. We're a locally owned bank built on relationships and personally committed to helping people. to your success. Our community bankers are ready to make quick decisions. No big bank bureaucracy, just a custom approach to help you thrive. From business loans to mortgages and everyday banking needs, Harmony Bank provides a secure, modern experience with a touch of Texas hospitality. We're Harmony Bank, where better happens together. Well, when those messages come, it's important to listen, I think. Yeah. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, talk about synchronicity and what's on the other side. Okay. All right, we'll be right back. Well, let's light the mood and talk about death. You spend a lot of time documenting and talking about other people's paranormal experiences, and then you had one of your own that fascinates me, and I think it's the archetypal synchronicity. Synchronistic resonance, which sounds like a mouthful, but those words are meaningful. Yeah. What is that, and what happened? Well, it wasn't a single event. It was a whole series of events, and it all started for me. As I recall, I was traveling. I was visiting Europe, and I was on my way to the city of Cordoba, Spain. Which happened to be the city, a very unusual city, because it was at one time Muslim, and there still is a huge 14th century mosque still there, in which after the Christians took over and expelled the Muslims and the Jews from Spain, they built a huge cathedral in the middle of the mosque. They did that. But also, it was an ancient Roman city. There still exists a bridge from Roman times. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Okay. And there is a statue in the city of the Roman philosopher, playwright, Seneca, and scholar, Seneca. And I wanted to visit for that reason. Why? What is it about Seneca? I don't know. Yeah. If he's that well-known, I mean, he is to me, because I love that part of history. Is the statue you're talking about of one man or two? One. Just Seneca? One man. And it doesn't look, there are other statues of Seneca that look very different. They do. And sometimes there's two men in those. Yeah. Well, there was Seneca the elder and Seneca the younger. And some are Seneca and Nero. Mm-hmm. Some are Seneca and Nero. And Nero. Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, he was Nero's tutor. And Nero's advisor. And I knew nothing about Seneca back in my early days of the TV program when I did an interview with Dr. Marty Rossman. Wow. Who was a hypnotherapist, medical doctor, hypnotherapist. And he was going to demonstrate the hypnotic technique. At that point, we did a half-hour interview. And then we did another hour for the DVD, or not even DVD, videotape, VHS market in those days. And so in that session, he hypnotized me. And he told me, you are going to experience your inner healing advisor. Inner healing advisor. That's what he said. He said it could be anything. It might be a chipmunk. Okay. It might be some figure will come to you. Just let it come, whatever. And I'm already at that point. I've been inducted. I'm in a light hypnotic trance. And I experienced this person walking toward me wearing a toga. And I thought to myself, oh, good. I want to improve my public speaking abilities. So I want you to be. The famous orator, the Greek orator, not Democritus, but. Demosthenes? Demosthenes, that's right. You be Demosthenes. And help me with my public speaking. And he said to me, I'm not Demosthenes. I'm Seneca. And that took me. Did you say who? Well, I remembered when I was an undergraduate. At the University of Wisconsin in the library building, they had emblazoned in the actual, in the concrete of the building, the names of famous people from ancient times. And Seneca's name was up there. So I knew there was a famous person from the ancient world named Seneca. I was that much. I knew very little else. I think I probably knew that a few other minor details. And at that point in my hypnotic state, silently, I said, well, since you're Seneca, and since you're here, what do you want me to do? And he said, study my life. Oh, beautiful. And then I came out of the hypnotic state. I had this silly grin on my face. It's all captured on video. This is captured on video? The whole thing. Roman historian. Roman historian. Roman historians right now are very excited about what you just said. Well, I reported to him my experience was. And then I began studying the life of Seneca and realized what an amazing historical figure he was. He was not only a playwright and a philosopher and had scientific writings as well, but. He literally ran the Roman Empire for five years. Yes, he did. And it was. considered, I think they called it the Silver Age of Rome. He was considered a very good administrator. Yes, when he was tutoring Nero. Yeah. So here I am traveling to Seneca's birthplace, and I get an email from a fellow named Engen. Now, his first name is, he became the co-author with me. Sure. And I'm stumbling over his first name, but it'll come. Yep. Brendan Engen. Yes. Brendan Engen wrote to me out of the blue. I had no idea who he was, and he said, I'm writing to you because my girlfriend bought me a psychic reading for my birthday, and it happened to be with Kevin Ryerson, who was a good friend of mine, a trans-channeler featured by Shirley MacLaine in her book, Out on a Limb. Yep. And Kevin and I were good buddies. And this psychic reader told me that in a past lifetime, I was a good friend of Seneca's, I think, Lucretius. Seneca wrote his epistles to Lucretius, and he said that you were Seneca in a past life. And so I'm reaching out to you because maybe we were together in a past life. And I thought, how interesting. Here I am about to visit the birthplace of Seneca. How could he know this? Could he know this? No. No, he just knew my email. He found my email address. So you hadn't gone public about the Seneca vision yet. Well, now let me think. No, I hadn't gone public, but Kevin Ryerson, the trans-channel who gave him the psychic reading, had also done readings with me. Okay. And I think that's the connection. That's it. I've had many readings from Kevin because he was a friend. And that was his thing. Nice to have access to that. Yeah. Well, as a parapsychologist, I've had a lot of psychic friends along the way, and they helped me from time to time. They've been very instrumental in crucial moments. But I didn't have any reason to. To think I had been Seneca in a past lifetime. And I wrote back to Brendan and said, well, it's quite an interesting synchronicity you would write to me about Seneca right when I am about to visit the city where he was born. And that's an example. I said, this is all synchronistic. And are you talking about like Jungian synchronicity? Yes. Just things that just, how would you describe it? He had the scarab story. Well, and there are some Jungians. There are some Jungians who have taken real issue with me over my use of the term synchronicity because I was using it in a kind of vague, generic sense. Like, I'm on my way to see Seneca, and I get the email from you. And I had a Jungian who wrote back and said, no, it must be at the very precise second. I don't know. I think that's debatable. I think so, too. But in any case, I suggested that there's something Jungian, something synchronistic. And Seneca is obviously a psychic influence on me. It doesn't mean I was him. But I thought it was interesting. And Brendan and I stayed in touch. And eventually, other synchronicities began to occur between Brendan and myself. For example, when I was doing radio interviews on KPFA long ago, I interviewed. I interviewed a fellow who had written a book called The Looking Glass God, all about Taoism, the yin-yang symbol. And he had this book, The Looking Glass God, and I owned it. And I must have sold it at one point or another because Brendan told me he was in a bookstore in Walnut Creek, California. And this book, as he's walking along the aisles of the bookstore, fell on his head. And he opened it up and it's The Looking Glass God. And he saw my signature in it that I had once owned that book. Your book? Yeah. And you were already in touch? Yeah. Does he see this as a sign or? Yes. Yeah. He said, this is significant. He said, we need to write an article. Or you need. He said, you need to write an article about what you just told me about the synchronistic connections that occur. And I said, I don't know. And I related to possible past life influences of this sort. And I said, well, we could write it together. And we did. And I think 2007 or so, we published a jointly written article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance, in which we talked about the idea that people who lived in the ancient past, can influence us, and we can have a whole series of synchronicities that support that influence. It doesn't necessarily mean it was a past life. It was an alternative to thinking about reincarnation, actually. I thought it was a very interesting take, is that it's not necessarily reincarnation, it's just influence. Yeah. Something about vibration in the universe, consciousness, something deeper. And I've subsequently met other people who have. And I've felt the same way about different historical figures. Jean Houston, who was another mentor of mine, a person I greatly admired, who said, for her, it was Proclus. Oh, that's amazing. Proclus, who was another Neoplatonic philosopher, the last of the Neoplatonic philosophers. And she said, I would be, as a child, just this phrase would come into my head, hocus pocus. I am Proclus. I think if, I have a few of those myself. I haven't really spoken about them, but I think we all do. We find ourselves sketching a name, writing a word, saying a phrase. I think it's coming from somewhere. Yeah. I think I have a similar relationship with William James. Do you? Well, Kevin Ryerson would maintain that I was William James in a past life, and I've even had regressions to try and explore. So far, nothing has convinced me that I was William James, but Walter Semkew, who got a lot of his information from Kevin Ryerson and wrote the book, Return of the Revolutionaries, about people's past lives that he had identified as a chapter in which he describes why he believes I was William James, and I gave him permission to do that, provided he state that I don't accept that. Why don't you accept it? Because I don't have any concrete memories of having been William James. Okay. But that doesn't mean you weren't. No. It doesn't mean I wasn't, and it just doesn't mean I was, that's all. What's his argument? What's his chapter about? Well, he talks about, you know, how my career follows William James. From science to mysticism and so forth? You know, and I can see there's a kind of logic. There, I can see why I might have been. I'll go that far, and I'm curious, you know, because he's my hero, and that's why I think I couldn't have possibly been him, because he's my hero. I don't know. The establishment attacked him. He fought back and won. Yeah. There's a lot of similarities. There are similarities. How do you think William James would think about you today? Well, if I asked myself about that, I would say, he'd probably say that he's definitely doing things that I would like to do, but he's a more shallow person. That you're a more shallow person? Yeah, yeah. William James was a deep thinker. I don't purport to be. I don't think you give yourself enough credit. William James famously said there's a problem with the scientific method where a personal experience is just as valid as any type of science. Yes, he did. Any objective reality is fact, is part of science. Right. I subscribe to that wholeheartedly. You're continuing his project. Yes, I would say that I am, and I would say that he was a sickly man his whole life. He was always visiting health spas because he had stomach problems and the like, and the one thing that, I did experience under hypnotic regression, I began to have stomach pains, and so I would come out. I didn't want to go any further with the regressions. And one other little piece of information that came to me, I've never had it validated. If you can find anything that validates it, then I would regard that as evidential, is that when he was younger, people called him Billiam instead of William. I didn't know that. know if it's true it's just something that came to me that would be interesting yeah to find that out yeah someone would know that if if there's any evidence that he was ever called billiam instead of william i i would say that that would count in favor of that i might have been william james or at least had access to that piece of information somehow have you had any regressions that convince you you were someone no none no uh you had an interesting theory about soul energy which i kind of agree with is that maybe william james maybe you are a little bit william james and he's he's spread out across a few people yeah there are many people who have said and including people today who say he speaks to them from the afterlife even now so i i'm inclined to think that we all have access to what william james called the cosmic reservoir of consciousness or the akashic records we all have access to all knowledge so are we all one consciousness and these bodies are just a small expression of the same i'm in favor of that perspective so what happens when we die and i don't i don't mean the tunnel and the all of that just yet i mean at that moment when the lights go out what's going on inside well consciousness persists but i've experienced the total loss of consciousness in deep sleep it could be like that you might go into a deep unconscious state until at some point you're awakened and maybe you're in another body or in another plane of existence or maybe you're conscious all the way through george james you're in another plane of existence or maybe you're conscious all the way through george harrison made a point of saying he wanted to be conscious through the death process and there's a you know that he really worked toward that so there's and his wife olivia at the time said if you had been in the room at the moment he died there was such light you could have photographed it that's i mean that's another shared death experience that um that there's a there's a lot of documentation for that specifically the light the room changing yeah seeing figures um i'm specifically thinking about raymond moody's work who studied the shared death experience for a while and then had one with his siblings when his mother passed away i didn't know that his father arrived and they all saw him they said dad's here they all saw it they said the room changed shape yeah so i think there's something to that you're not afraid no absolutely not i'm totally comfortable with the idea that i'll die and i'm going to be 80 this year so it could happen soon for all i know and i'm uh i'm sure as i get closer there will be trepidations i was in the hospital earlier this year and was told i might have to undergo a very dangerous procedure and i i was nervous about it it turned out that they didn't need to do it at the end of the day but you know i'm sure i'll approach actual death with a certain amount of trepidation but at the moment i can say i look forward to it check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan today i don't know if janelle would be as optimistic but when did you when did that switch happen for you we're all afraid of it yeah it's sort of biological it is and survival instinct you know i just i just wrote an episode where i called it a curse that we know that we're going to die but it can also be a gift because you can seize the moment when did you stop being afraid at some point um as i began thinking about probably while i was writing my first book the roots of consciousness i began to appreciate the idea it's called um how does it go ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny i'm stumped well it means the development of the embryo recapitulates the entire evolutionary history of the species it kind of does yeah we start out as a single-celled organism an embryo and and then we gradually evolve the early stages of the embryo we begin to look a little bit like a fish or a reptile and until we become fully human and it dawned on me if i just think of my whole body the entire history of evolution exists in effect even this body even this physical form is the product of a billion years of evolution yes and i began to perceive of myself as actually a being who has been around at least a billion years you can feel that yeah there's all these stories about famous people dying and seeing something saying oh my god or i can't believe it um my brother was with my father when he passed a few years ago and he said dad got up and saw something yeah and there are stories another episode i'm working on of people who are near death or close to brain death or dementia that suddenly sit up yes and are perfectly terminal lucidity terminal lucidity it happened to my mother it happened to your mother yes well i don't want to get i don't want to pry what how well i wasn't there at the time my wife janelle was with her in the hospital uh very close to her death maybe two weeks before and my mother had alzheimer's she was out of it completely you couldn't have an intelligible conversation she was always very sweet i will say that and a pleasure to be around but she sat up and she said up with janelle she was bright she was lucid she had a lengthy conversation with janelle talking about the family and many many other uh detailed things how long was the conversation maybe an hour or two that's a long one yeah did she call you well she told me afterwards i i don't know where i was at the time but you know i got a complete rundown of it and i don't know where i was um two weeks later she was dead what do you think is happening there what are we seeing why are we lucid well it seems to be a way of um or reinforcing it's evidence that i would say reinforces william james theory of consciousness which is that the brain doesn't generate consciousness the brain functions more like a radio or television receiver the signal is coming from elsewhere consciousness i i would say is actually everywhere it's uh it's like a filter yeah that were it were filtered into these individual consciousnesses but and at some point when the brain starts breaking down just enough if the larger consciousness can kind of come through the brain is no longer keeping it out because if we were in a state of cosmic unconsciousness where you have 360 degree vision and you know everything everywhere all the time you couldn't survive you know you couldn't pay the rent no pay the mortgage or feed the family you have we we have to filter it out this answers the hard consciousness question this makes sense yeah um terminal lucidity happens to people where their brains are damaged beyond repair right but there's tumors there's no way it could work someone who's never spoken their whole life could get gets up and start singing yeah it's i don't think there's an explanation for that just yet it's the william james is as close as i think it's as close as we can come as to my knowledge how do you um what is your take on soul groups life between lives i don't know if you've ever read michael newton's work has michael newton's work is quite interesting i i haven't really studied it and i don't know if you've ever read michael newton's work i don't know if you've ever read in in depth i ought to um but what i can say is um f w h meyer uh frederick william henry meyers who wrote uh the classic book on life after death and nine published in 1903 posthumously called human personality and its survival of bodily death is a classic a massive book incorporating all the findings developed by the society for psychical research since it was founded in 1882 so 20 years worth of scientific investigation and brilliantly put together. He maintained that, where did we start? What was your initial? Soul groups. Soul groups. Well, okay, thank you for getting me back on track. After he died, as I say, the book was published posthumously. Some 30 years after he died, he communicated entire books from the other side through a medium named Geraldine Cummins, who did automatic writing. Oh, I've got to look into this. And he wrote a book called, he wrote two books through her. And now the title is on the tip of my tongue. It'll come again. But in those books, he's describing what the afterlife is like. That's his? Yes. Okay. And I think of it as one of our best descriptions because he's the guy who spent his adult life pioneering the study of the afterlife. And even before he died, he wrote that, you know, things are going on in the other side. They are doing their experiments. And then he came back. There was something called the cross correspondences that the Society for Psychical Research studied for decades in which Myers and others, other deceased members of the Society for Psychical Research were coming back and proving that it was them because what they would do is create very unique messages that were poetic. Myers was a poet and a Greek scholar, among other things. And he was a poet and a Greek scholar, among other things. And so they create these complex messages, but they would deliver part of it through a medium, let's say, in North America, part of it through a different medium in Europe, and part of it through another medium in India. And all of the mediums were instructed, send your peculiar messages that make no sense whatsoever to the Society for Psychical Research, and they would put the messages together and see that they interacted with each other. grow up and run a furniture store sure and then somehow uh you know what can i say lsd must have had something to do with it because i was i you do have a kind of mystical experience under lsd you begin to experience other realities you see colors swirling around you and you can look at another person and and you begin to see their face change as if you're looking at their past lives and all of these things made me very curious what's going on here and i after having had in 1968 my first lsd experience i was incredibly curious about all of this and began exploring mysticism and my best friend as i got into berkeley was a guy who thought he could explain how lsd worked in the brain and how it imitated the serotonin molecule and took the place of serotonin in the nerve synapses of the brain but didn't do what serotonin did did other things that's right i guess a lot of psychedelics are serotonin just kind of flipped yeah so psychedelics could be allowing us to tap into the universal consciousness in in a way yes what did terence mckinnon think about that check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan today well i hate to speak for terence i understand because he was so eloquent and he could put things into such beautiful phrases that he could that i can't do but how do you how do you feel i think he would be in agreement is that when i hear dmt stories yeah even across cultures they're all seeing the same entities wood l's all this stuff yeah it sound kind of silly until you line up all the cases together and it's it's all pointing to one thing and then there's that there's a field around us that we can tap into and and you know david j brown wrote the book on dmt entities i interviewed him and he had an experience reminiscent to ted owens the uh mantis being appeared to him when i was under ls under dmt and he says operated on his brain which is the same claim ted owens made and he's told me i have it on video he said there isn't a day in his life when he doesn't think about that experience you haven't been interested in a dmt experience i haven't had one i have had ayahuasca so i suppose yeah i have had ayahuasca but not these days people inject dmt right right pure dmt i haven't done that what did you see during your ayahuasca journey well now that you mention it i had a quite unusual experience i it was as if i was in ancient egypt and i was singing praises to the god horus that horus is the most beautiful of gods and it was a very profound connection to to horus who was an amazing deity oh yeah if you look at the history of all deities horus is in many ways you could say the predecessor of jesus christ you certainly could yeah so didn't you have a a sort of a flashing image of ancient rome i have had that i don't know if it was on that occasion of ayahuasca i think it might have been just i think maybe even in a normal state of consciousness for a split second for just a split second i felt like i was in nero's palace did you see it or did you feel it it was more of a feeling and it was so fast that it's hard to to capture it all but it felt real it felt like i was there what what was the emotional feeling there's a reason i'm asking uh-huh is because at the end of seneca's life he they he was bickering with nero yeah because nero was building the big palace then when uh when uh seneca had to kill himself so i'm just wondering oh if you appeared there and you were annoyed like look at all this it was so quick it was only simply that i was there i was really there and then it ended so lucky so ancient egypt were there entities or guides there during that journey i can't say that there was it was just a deep sense of a connection with how magnificent horus was as a deity and and subsequently i have uh felt that connection with with horus in fact i happen to own a sarcophagus a tiny little sarcophagus about two three feet and it was used it's from ancient egypt it goes back to the time of moses and it was a sarcophagus for a falcon wow where did you get that in israel and my first trip to israel in a little arab shop they you know was interested in the antiquities and they pulled it out of the back room and said look at this it was very expensive but i bet i had to have it and i've had it looked at by archaeologists who have told me this is the real thing. Did you feel any energy, any motion from that object? Well, something must have gotten me to pay many thousands of dollars for it. Because I think there's something to that, to a residual energy with objects or locations. Did you visit Seneca's villa, his death place outside Rome? No, I have not. Is it still in existence? It is. It's about three, it's mile marker three on the Ipian Way outside Rome. Oh my. It's pretty remarkable. Have you been there? I have. Wow. Yeah, that's where he was killed. Oh my. There's so many, he's a great story. It never occurred to me to go there or to visit William James' grave either. Oh, I bet you'd feel something at those places. I imagine, I might, yeah. But I would always doubt myself. I think I would say, you know, you're making this up because of the history that you have and things that people have said. That's okay. Even if you are, that's okay to make it up. It would be. But on the other hand, I've thought, you know, I'm here, I'm living this life. I don't have to revisit those lives. So what was your mission when you came back? Your soul sent you here to achieve something. Have you done it? I think so. I think, you know, when I experienced. I was very impressed to Ted Owens when he said, "What do you want to do with this power?" And I said, "I want to be a communicator to the public at large, the mainstream culture about the realities of esoteric, paranormal, mystical world." And that's been, certainly for the last 10, 12 years since I launched the YouTube channel, I've been doing it, and even long before that, in the radio and television work I did. That's been my career as an adult with some detours along the way. Some fun detours. Yeah. We normally end with plugs, but we'll link to those, but this is too important. For people listening who are having experiences or fear of death or things like that, do you have any message for them? What should they do? How should they think about it? Well, normally when I tell people about my life, I think if there's a lesson in it that I can share with people, it's that if you decide that you want to become the best version of yourself, which would be, you know, being in touch with your purpose, your entelechy, that the idea being that we are born each with a deep purpose, and it's going to be different for everyone, but I think if you decide that you want to become the best version of yourself, which would be, you know, being in touch with your purpose, your entelechy, that the idea being that we are born each with a deep purpose, and it's going to be different for everyone. But if you want to get in touch with that part of yourself and live it, the universe wants you to do that, and the universe will help. The universe will open doors for you so that you can do that. So just be open to the messages and follow the signs? Yeah. That seems to be what happened for me, and I think it's largely true. Some but not all will be able to do that. Anything else that you want to say or impart before we go? Well, I would like to say that if among your viewers, if there are people who think they like to dedicate their lives to the study of the paranormal, we've created a new program at the California Institute for Human Science where you can get, for the first time since the program at John F. Kennedy University shut down in the 1980s, for the first time in the United States, you can get a doctoral degree or a master's degree with a concentration or specialization in parapsychology. And I'm one of the directors of that program and I'm currently actually teaching. You are? I'm teaching a course right now on the practical applications of psi, which is the word parapsychologists use for ESP and psychokinesis. Well, we'll link to all of that. We'll put it all on screen. So people can find you. Jeffrey Mishlove, thank you so much for coming in. This has been a joy. Thank you. It's been a joy for me too. Bye everybody. That was the great Jeffrey Mishlove. 50 years of research and 1500 interviews in parapsychology. He's a legend. Now here's what we know. Jeffrey's PhD in parapsychology from UC Berkeley is real. He earned it in 1980, the first and only parapsychology degree ever awarded by an American university. Skeptics try to revoke it. Jeffrey filed a lawsuit and won. Twice. The Bigelow Institute Prize is also real. Robert Bigelow funded a $500,000 reward for the best scientific essay arguing consciousness survives death. Jeffrey's six judges voted unanimously. Now for the bold stuff. Jeffrey told us he reached out in a hypnagogic state in late 2022 to the consciousness of Ted Owens, who died in 1987. He asked Ted to keep Ukraine warm so civilians, could survive Russia's attacks on the power grid. He says a thousand temperature records broke across Europe in early January, 2023. That is documented. And whether Ted Owens caused it from wherever Ted is now, that's a different question. The challenger warning claim. Jeffrey's 2000 book, The PK Man, documents the Christmas Eve call in detail. The O-ring failure that actually, or allegedly caused the challenger to crash is well-documented. The call is something only Jeffrey owns. But if that call is true, then it's a good thing. If it's not, then it's a good thing. If it's all happened, and I believe it did, I think Jeffrey's still carrying some guilt about it, which is only natural. And here's what I keep coming back to. Terminal lucidity. People with completely destroyed brains from late-stage Alzheimer's sit up hours before death and have a final, clear, fully present conversation. Jeffrey's mother didn't, as sharp as she'd ever been. She talked to his wife two weeks before she died for about two hours. This is a real phenomenon, and nobody has a good explanation for it. William James argued in 1898 that the brain doesn't generate consciousness. It filters it, like a radio receives a signal it didn't produce. Terminal lucidity looks a lot like the filter breaking down just before it goes dark. Jeffrey Mishlove is the most credible living archivist of 50 years of paranormal research, full stop. He knew the players, Targ, Putoff, Valet, Owens, McKenna, Monroe, everyone. Whatever you make of his claims, he's a primary source for a part of science that the mainstream would like to ignore. And when the mainstream pushes back on something, it's worth taking seriously. Jeffrey's full archive is at New Thinking Aloud on YouTube. His book on Ted Owens is The PK Man on Amazon, and the Bigelow essay is free. Search Bigelow Institute Consciousness Studies and you'll find it. Now on the channel, I've covered SRI and Project Stargate in a bunch of episodes, as well as the afterlife in the episode about the Skoll Experiments. Links will be down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you, are appreciated. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun, as well as music, so I'm singing it like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends, and it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crab cat and I got stuck inside Mel's home, where there's no way I can get out. MKUltra being only two away. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told, and his name was cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes, and the fish are Thursday nights with AJ2, and the werewolves love to beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth, so the werewolves love to beat all through the night. The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets are both two, Project Stargate and where the Dark Watchers found. We're in a simulation phase. Don't you worry though, the Black Knight said a lot, it told me so. Can't go fish on Thursday, next Wednesday, J2 And the wild boars have to beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the wild boars have to beat all through the night Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor, because she is a camel And camels love to dance when the feeling is right on wasting time Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance At Harmony Bank, we believe that better happens together. We're a locally owned bank, built on relationships and personally committed to your success. 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