All language subtitles for Is There Life After Death2

scientist down in the trenches for the

most part and

don't claim to have any kind of special

expertise about what it might all mean

and we're open to the possibility that

it is all about the hokey-pokey I mean

it occurs to me that when the founder of

physics room Niels Bohr said about

quantum physics that if as you approach

it you are not shocked then you haven't

understood it and trying to understand

this these these things in in terms of

any kind of physics after Einstein is

what why should this be easier to

understand why that's why there should

there be a simple explanation if the

main description of reality at the

moment seems to be quantum theory shows

[Music]

no relation at all to the life we lead

on on this planet you see what I mean

lady in the blue can you go through the

near-death experiences that you have

discussed tonight or seem rather

Pleasant do you have people reporting

near-death experiences that are not so

pleasant uh yes we do have unpleasant

near-death experiences the ones be

collected a very tiny minority less than

1% are unpleasant however it's very hard

for people to talk about unpleasant

experiences so there may be a lot more

than we're aware of but we have so few

that we've been able to study that we

can't say with any certainty why some

people have unpleasant ones and other

people don't it's certainly not the case

that nasty people have unpleasant

experiences I know some quite nasty

people who have blissful experiences

and there's certainly lots of reports

about Saints throughout the ages who

have unpleasant experiences so there's

no simple answer to it well we are

trying to look at that question now this

is a bit unfair but I did say earlier

that I wanted to come back to the panel

so you guys are in that order when we

restart do you see what I mean but I'm

gonna go now - Kim what what are you

interested in what are you working on

well I am the new kid on the block so I

have not been here as long as these

folks and I feel very fortunate to be

part of this group I'm a clinical

psychologist and a professor in the

Department of Psychiatry and as part of

my work I see patients and I do research

and I teach and a lot of the patients I

see that I'm doing psychotherapy on I

all stars started doing mindfulness

based therapies and recognizing the

impact of the meditation and the

mindfulness treatments that I was

providing and the the positive impact on

symptoms was wonderful however I kept

hearing over and over again from my

patients that they were experiencing

other things and so that's where I

really began exploring and getting

interested in what was actually

happening and I'll give you an example

very quickly I had a gentleman with very

severe depression an attorney

very bright 52 year old had just been

left by his wife very bad alcoholic he

had tried so many times to stop drinking

he had tried so many times to to stay on

his treatment for depression and he

couldn't and I worked with him to start

practicing mindfulness meditation to

help reduce the cravings for alcohol it

didn't work but he kept trying he kept

meditating and then one day he came to

me and he said I'm not going to drink

again and I said okay sure

all right that sounds good let's let's

let's keep an eye on this but I didn't

believe him and he is not how to drink

to this day I asked him what happened

and he had what we call Clara

clairaudience experience while he was

meditating a voice of a woman came and

said beat him up I mean talk about a

negative experience this this voice told

him to quit it what the hell was he

doing he was killing himself and he said

you know it sounded like my mother but I

am not sure if it was but he he said it

resonated with him and no one else heard

it it wasn't you know a real person

he wasn't delusional but it worked he

had he had perceived that this came from

somewhere and it worked and I saw this

over and over again in my patients with

personality disorders when they would

meditate when they would get in touch

with this this thing changed the state

of consciousness and what I began to

realize is that more and more of them

were reporting what many of you will

know as cities these are actually to be

expected sort of experiences that people

have when they're practicing some of

these what are now modern traditions but

come from ancient traditions where this

was to be expected that you would have

extraordinary experiences gifts and

powers these are things like

psychokinesis where you might be able to

influence the environment physical

environment or what we might call SCI

psycho a psyche psychic sort of

abilities where you might be able to

predict something in the future or

remember something that you couldn't

possibly remember from the distant past

and so the research I am moving into now

is really

more methodically exploring this and I'm

building on research with my colleague

who John also knows Cassie Beaton at the

noetic Sciences and she's in California

they did a study that looked at just a

survey of eleven hundred people or so

and they were meditators who had done

some significant meditating and they

asked him about these specific

experiences and it was absolutely

astounding they found over 50% endorsed

experiencing some of these things one or

more 50% reported experiencing some of

these cities some of these extraordinary

experiences things like precognition I

mean I don't know about you but that is

mind-blowing to me and and so they

followed up with some additional

research looking at this most of the

people 60% were significantly impacted

by this in a positive way which again is

pretty profound so they didn't say wow

it's no big deal

it was very significant to them

psychologically emotionally spiritually

so we're building on that research now

and looking at can all the things we've

talked about here can we make this

happen on purpose and and what will that

look like how many people will

experience these things and who

experiences them or it

are they certain kinds of personalities

are they people that need special

training do you need to be a monk I hope

not

and the idea is can we access these

out-of-body experiences these phenomenal

experiences and learn from them what we

see that these other people have learned

on purpose and what would that look like

to tap

into that human ability that level of

consciousness if we all did that Wow I

think we we might have some hope

I just wanted to comment on one thing

before we come to add which is that I

was reading something a week ago that

suggested that if we could all part now

- to the required extent we could all do

this now obviously maybe the difference

is that some of us can quiet our minds

better than others and I tie-dyed him

with another idea which is years ago I

read the the William James lectures at

Edinburgh and we was talking about

religious conversion experiences and

they all seem to come at moments when

people's lives was so bad that they kind

of gave up right it's it's suddenly you

stop relying on your brain and then

something comes in that makes it Edie

you can take a lot of laughs tonight in

what do you want you I want to tell you

a bit about two parts of my own career

in psychical research and I I've been in

it since the early 1970s but I've only

been a top since 2003 and the kinds of

things that I have been involved in kind

of bracket the main part of the dops

research portfolio you know most of the

OPS's work has been focused on very

detailed case studies and field

investigations of various kinds that

you've heard about but I'm like him an

experimental psychologist by training

and I actually got started in this

direction late in graduate school

because of some personal experiences I

encountered the literature of

Experimental Psychology and while I was

working on my dissertation read enough

of it to become convinced that there

really seemed to be something there I

mean these people were using the same

kind of methods that I was being taught

to study paranormal phenomena

and the other thing was that it was

clear that if these things existed it

was extremely important because I mean

the whole point about these phenomena is

that they challenge widely held views

about what's possible you know all of we

use a generic term sigh for things like

ESP extrasensory perception which has

several subcategories

psychokinesis or mind over matter direct

influence on the environment not using

your motor system and all that and the

whole point of both kinds of phenomena

is that a person or an organism is

exchanging information with the

environment despite the presence of some

kind of a barrier that conventional

classical physical principles would say

should prevent that from happening and

it's very easy it turns out to set up

experiments to test whether these things

can't happen and of course at that time

the main Center for experimental

parapsychology in the US was Durham

North Carolina where JB Ryan had set up

a unit in the psych department at Duke

and so I began corresponding with Ryan

and decided after a while that I throw

caution to the wind I had friends who

were telling me you're ruining your life

here but nonetheless I went down and I

began working for Ryan at the usual the

usual terms $400 a month six-month trial

period a steady stream of idealistic

volunteers most of whom didn't survive

very long anyway I also had the great

good fortune after I'd been there for

about a month a guy showed up who turned

out to be probably one of the best

subjects ever to walk into an

experimental parapsychology laboratory

this guy could do essentially anything

we asked him to do they worked with him

for over a year just to give a couple of

examples we had a special electronic

sight testing machine it involved he had

four targets for lights the machine

would pick one you're supposed to guess

which it would be the Machine and

absence of the subject instantiated the

laws of probability to perfection same

with most persons but the guy who built

this thing had spent a couple of years

looking for people who could do

systematically better had found a couple

of people who could do a couple of

percent better on demand ok well this

new guy who came down came into the main

meeting room of the Ryan lab sat down

with this machine who was telling us his

life story would occasionally reach over

and push a button and in the course of

an hour he had over 35% hits and over

500 trials which would happen something

of that sort or better by chance

something like 1 in 10,000,000 times so

we might have sat there for something

like 10 million hours waiting for that

to happen by chance and the inventor of

the devices eyes were getting very big

as this process wore on anyway the same

person I've seen him do as well as 50%

on that machine for hundreds of trials

at a time he could also guess playing

cards it's something like three times

the expected rate with large numbers of

excess number hits as well and there

were things well let me just stop there

and give you one of the what I hope will

be a primary take-home point of this

talk these phenomena the SCI phenomena

in my opinion and I'm talking now not

just in terms of my personal experience

with this guy but the whole accumulated

literature of case studies and

experimental studies of which there are

now thousands published in peer-reviewed

journals

these phenomena exist as facts of nature

and science is going to have to

accommodate to their existence it's

going to have to expand in some way to

accommodate them now at that time I like

most parapsychologists I think hoped

that the changes would be kind of small

what has time has gone on I'd become

more and more convinced that the changes

are going to have to be much more

radical than I had imagined at the

beginning

and I'll get back to that in just a

moment but to continue on with the

experimental part one of the big things

that happened during that period I work

I worked at the Rhine lab for about a

year and a half but then migrated over

to the Department of Electrical

Engineering at Duke the reason being

that I had become convinced particularly

because of experiences with this guy

that it would be productive to study SCI

phenomena in a from a psychobiological

kind of point of view and in particular

what we wanted to do was to measure

brain waves while people like him were

performing in these tasks in hopes of

learning something about what state the

brain was in when he was about to make a

good guess because if we had that kind

of information we could do all sorts of

useful things with it and so we started

this program and went at it diligently

for almost 10 years

poorly funded the whole time made enough

progress the feel we were on a good

track but eventually the funds ran out

and I had to abandon ship basically

started working in conventional

neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill all the

enemies

but I'm happy to report that since

coming here together with some

colleagues we've managed to create a

really good neuro imaging lab where we

can do the kind of studies we could only

dream about years ago and one of the

things I hope to do in talking to you is

to encourage some bright undergraduates

or early graduate students who working

in areas like psychology or neuroscience

or biomedical engineering maybe to come

visit because we can provide you with

lots of interesting opportunities and

we're also interested of course and

hearing about people who either have

skills themselves or know people who do

because that's really the main obstacle

to carry in this program forward is

finding people with the appropriate

kinds of skills anyway that's maybe

enough on that front now shift years and

they're not here now but the two books

at the far end of the book list there

those were the major products of a

project that went on for about 15 years

through esslyn John talked about it a

little bit last night that's where we

met John actually in the early early

2000s and I have to give you a little

bit of background to this and in talking

about all this stuff what I hope to do

is to situate the work that we do at

DAPs

right at the center of a very big

something that is just now taking shape

it's what I believe will prove to be a

major inflection point in Western

intellectual history that's a big

mouthful let me try to explain what I'm

talking about the background to this

whole project is that a great majority

of mainstream American scientists today

Western scientists really in general

particularly in areas like the

behavioral sciences psychology

neuroscience and also areas like

philosophy of mind hold either

explicitly or implicitly a view that's a

kind of a modern

sanitised philosophical version of what

used to be called materialism in

previous centuries

it's called physicalism now and it's I

mean it comes in a lot of subtly

different variants but the the basic

common idea is pretty straightforward

and easy to state the basic idea is that

all facts are determined in the end by

physical facts alone reality consists at

bottom of some kind of ultimate stuff

little bits of that stuff flying around

and fields of force in accordance with

mathematical laws everything else has to

come from that we human beings are

nothing more than exceedingly

complicated biological machines

everything in mine and consciousness is

generated by physiological events and

processes in our brains it's an

absolutely inescapable corollary of that

picture if it were true that there

cannot be any such thing as post-mortem

survival because when you die the

machinery that generates you disappears

on a more cosmic scale people who hold

these views see no sign of any kind of

final causes or teleology in nature

nothing transcendental no spiritual

realm the whole scheme of things is

without meaning or purpose and that's

literally what probably 95% of

mainstream scientists currently believe

at least while doing their day jobs

it's a bit surprising that a sizeable

fraction estimated on the order 30 to 40

percent also have some kind of a

spiritual practice going and how they

reconcile these two things might be a

little difficult anyway Mike Murphy

how did Esalen Institute was acutely

aware of this and he also was aware of

various groups including in particular

US adopts who have been doing research

on post-mortem survival and developing

what appears to be evidence suggestive

of its existence as a fact of nature so

he convened this group and we began

reviewing all this evidence and we

gradually the project kind of morphed

whether we we became convinced early on

we were all convinced that we are not

physicalist and hatched this plot to

destroy it and find something better to

replace it with

so to summarize to summarize the whole

process all too quickly we developed

these two books the first and they're

not there they're not showing up at the

exact moment anyway irreducible mind was

intended to be our version of an assault

on physicalism and in it we basically

pulled together from a wide variety of

sources a whole lot of empirical

phenomena well established that we feel

are difficult or in some cases

absolutely impossible to explain in

classical physical terms you know the

size phenomena and evidence of survival

right at the top of that list but that's

not the only they are not the only

things that point in this direction a

lot of mainstream scientists of course

they hate all this stuff and hope that

it can be sort of quarantined to put in

a room somewhere by itself because we're

succeeding at everything else and

therefore we can do that but it's not

true there are plenty of phenomena and

we catalog a bunch of them in

irreducible mind that are equally hard

to explain including things like

geometrically shaped hypnotic blisters

emily has a great chapter on extreme

physiological phenomena of that sort

aspects of human memory that are totally

explain that present despite a huge

literature about it wanted to me one of

the most important parts of the evidence

is the stuff that Bruce is working on

near-death experiences and in particular

those that occur under these extreme

physiological conditions we also talked

about stuff like extreme forms of genius

and mystical experiences which have been

widely ignored by contemporary science

but which we argue cannot be ignored

because they're telling us important

things about how things are anyway just

to summarize that whole exercise and I

have to tell you this book is like eight

hundred and thirty pages long so it's

not easily summarized but from a

psychological point of view the really

crucial thing about it is for me anyhow

it established as a viable possibility a

suggestion that William James had made

over a century ago talking about the

correlation which everybody admits

between mental things and physical

things you know we know you get hit on

the head or drink too much and something

mental changes you might think well I

decide to raise my arm and the damn

thing goes up in the air isn't that

mental causation well physical it says

you've just misunderstood because ideas

in your mind are really just patterns of

activity in your brain physical causes

physical no problem well the way to

attack that point of view is to show

things that cannot possibly be

accomplished by the brain itself and

that's what irreducible mind tries to do

James pointed out that even though most

mainstream scientists interpret the

correlations between mental and physical

as evidence of their production point of

view mental produced by physical period

you can think of it the other way that

the mental and the physical sort of

coexist the mind operates in connection

with the brain the stuff in it is not

produced by brains processes but its

activity is conditioned by the state of

the brain

to me the arguments and evidence that we

develop an irreducible mind were

sufficient to show that that point of

view is viable and it totally changed my

personal attitude toward survival it

provides an opening to overcome this

biological objection to the possibility

of survival if the way the system really

works is the way I described that a mind

can be something somehow independent of

the brain but operating together with it

I believe we can explain all the

conventional evidence used by physical

is to support their point of view and in

addition some of these things that we

study adopts just as James had argued

over a century ago okay well that was

stage one that was the easy that was the

easy part I mean it was just a huge

clerical job basically to pull all this

stuff together from a vastly dispersed

mostly biomedical literature there's all

kinds of stuff out there that challenges

the physicalist point of view but has

never been really assembled in a way to

show that clearly okay but now comes the

hard part what can possibly replace the

physicalist point of view ah right on

time beyond physicalism that's part two

that was published in 2015 and the basic

strategy in in trying to put that

together was we looked around for a

whole bunch of systems that we had

access to through our membership so it's

somewhat selective in that regard but we

specifically wanted to look at people

and systems that had deliberately tried

to figure out how the world must have to

be in order for the kinds of phenomena

we had cataloged in irreducible mind

could occur we found quite a few of

these things

a very strange set of bedfellows for one

book we've got chapters in there by

several physicists for example

contemporary physicists quantum

theorists cosmologists several

from the we had a big membership of

scholars of religion and some of the old

mystically informed religious

philosophical systems have also taken

the existence of these fun phenomena for

granted and tried to explain them and

there were several Western philosophical

traditions also like lightness for

example and Charles Sanders purse and

Alfred North Whitehead so we pulled all

these things together and tried to sort

of inter animate them and we have a

final part of the book in which we try

to figure out where is this all headed

and the basic what I want want to convey

to you is that even though we don't have

any sort of final position that we're

all agreed upon by any means there is a

definite central tendency of all this

stuff and it's a tendency toward what

amounts to the exact opposite of

contemporary physicalism which takes the

view that consciousness far from being

an ineffectual by-product that things

going on in the brain is in fact at the

source of everything and we're going to

have to somehow figure out how our

experience of ourselves as being in a

shared external world comes into being

and I will tell you also that at at this

very moment I know of at least three

books being generated by people who are

deeply familiar with developments in

modern physics all driven by mystical

experiences of their own who are

attempting to formulate their particular

systems of that sort and I firmly

personally believe that something of

this sort will emerge in the not distant

future as the new sort of received

wisdom the new generally accepted

scientifically based worldview and I

also would echo Kim in saying to John

that this may be our best and perhaps

only hope to save ourselves from the

very

katastrophe cigarette described

let's let's just take a few seconds for

people who need to leave who have planes

to catch or children to punish

what do you have to pass

all right the very patient lady there

the front of them is it working okay so

in my extremely imperfect understanding

or dalliance at all in in like Eastern

philosophies I've always thought of like

communal consciousness as something that

either pre-existed our corporal like

being and and maybe existed afterwards

maybe that's why babies do have that

lack of a sense of separation between

themselves and others that they then

kind of grow into and get the ego and

then you go kind of you know caps out

somewhere in whatever the 40s 50s and

then towards death the ego is is dropped

and that's sort of from what I've

understood a lot of times with

mindfulness and whatnot at the key to

avoiding psychic pain is the dropping of

the ego but a lot of what you've

explained in the near-death experiences

and other things seem to maintain a very

individualistic existence post our

bodies and I'm just curious if you have

any thoughts about that or do you think

that that's almost because they're so

close to a earthly life or do you really

or do and you you sort of had you gave

an example of like a dialogue between

two souls or whatever you want to refer

to them as is it in your minds or maybe

think separately is it a communal

consciousness or do you think it

continues as a single standing

consciousness thank you this is a very

complicated question

if you ask a near-death experience

they're just set to tell you what

happened in their experience they will

often start by saying I can't put it

into words there are no words to explain

this we say great tell me about it

so they forced it into English words

knowing that it's a distortion to do

that so when they say I saw my body it's

not like they were seeing with eyes they

knew where the body was they knew things

about the body and the only way they can

convey to me is by saying I saw it so

when they talked about personal things

we know they're using a metaphor to

explain it to us

maybe that will say that in their

near-death experience there was a cup of

a dual consciousness they were aware of

themselves and also we're being part of

something much greater than themselves

and they can't explain it to us because

it doesn't go into English words I think

it's also true that there's a lot in the

mystical literature about this about

people who have mystical experiences and

retain that sense of self but conversely

are also losing that sense of self and

again like print like the near-death

experiencers say they can't really

explain it although they try but that

that sort of paradoxical maintaining and

losing the sense of self happens in

mystical experiences

oh yes it's true when do we have to

finish we have to finish in five minutes

so let's talk there is a resource that

would be very quick

the children who remember previous lives

they obviously had adult skills in those

lives language music smells any of that

carry through sometimes there are cases

where children seem to learn things more

quickly than other children do there are

occasional very few but occasional

prodigy type cases I've got one where a

it's a bit of a long story and we've

only got five minutes but he basically

remembered being the life of remember

the life as a golfer a professional

golfer Bobby Jones people they know this

kid was definitely a golfing prodigy I

mean from the age of three on he was

winning golf tournaments so there do

seem to be times for skills do carry

over I have two things to say one I did

have an I think it would be a mystical

experience you might say and you and the

blonde pretty girl I want to say I do

have a key because of the first 43 years

of my life were a living hell I couldn't

figure out how to do life so I I lost my

children I did get them back but I came

to the end of myself I didn't know what

to do and I said [ __ ] it I don't care if

there's a hell I'll go there I don't

care because I can't do it anymore so I

had this encounter and I'm not going to

tell you all of it you can look on my

website or whatever but here's the key

the first thing I heard when I went into

the trance on that day in my own in my

in the house that I was being evicted

from when I went into the trance the

first thing I heard was because the guy

told me I had to go to church and I said

I've already tried

and then he said ma'am you already know

about God and as soon that's when I went

into the trance as soon as he said that

and then I went into the trance and the

very first thing I heard was going back

to the altar because he told me I had to

go back to the altar and the first thing

I heard was going back to the altar

means starting all over with everything

that you think that you know about life

and I said I won't know anything I mean

I'll really be stupid right and but

there was this flutter of fairies around

me going yes yes yes so I made an

agreement that I would surrender

everything that I thought that I knew

that obviously wasn't working today I'm

a successful business owner eight years

in the home healthcare field

alive and healthy and I have the keys to

life I know exactly what you're talking

about

and for you and here the reason I'm up

here I didn't want to come up here but I

felt pushed and I said give me a sign

like give me something bright yellow

because that's my favorite color and I

look around the room and I see bright

yellow and the light bulbs which they're

usually white but these are bright

yellow so I said I've got to come up but

here's for your fundraising you're

talking about are they using drugs for

people that are crossing over patient

after patient they all have an encounter

before they cross over so for your

fundraising I would say single a find

out people that own home care agencies

which I'm one and let us give you a

report for free so that you can know

what these people are actually

experiencing would you not say that that

is a really good first hand way of

knowing is I would never like it's a

very good idea and we have people here

will be able to say you have 4 seconds o

matter yeah what are your thoughts on

and do you have any studies regarding

mediumship medium here

well we yes I did a study of mediums

several years ago I

I since we have so little time I won't

go into any details about it I did a

study with a number of mediums did we

did two blind readings with the mediums

and again I can't great details but it

was it was one of the mediums protected

was which was it was extremely

successful and then ed and Kim are now

they've got a proposal for a mediumship

study to to be done here also so yes we

are interested in that yeah last one

thank you thank you it's release Dobbs

thank you for this evening my question

is in your research have you run into

any cases with children in which they

have taken on the personalities of the

past lives of apes name a head or like

as they have grown older have they grown

older have they taken on those

personalities well it's seen with each

case we we coded on a bunch of different

variables and put it in the database and

that includes some personality features

and what we see is that there is a

correlation between personality features

in the previous person and the child

it's certainly not one-to-one I mean

they are different individuals and of

course we know personality is affected

by genes and environment and everything

else but there's a correlation there so

it seems that there is is some carryover

but it's also subject to be changed by

the other aspects of life okay well I

just wrap this up with something I found

this also this book which Dean Radin

engaged to me a couple of weeks ago

real magic he justs at the end

sorry at the beginning of the chapter on

scientific evidence which seems to be

really the 101 of this stuff he talks

about a woman who was the chair of the

Statistics Department of the University

of California at Irvine and in a

presidential address to that to the

aasa' speaker the meeting attended by

successful statisticians

she said something she said for many

years I've worked with researchers doing

very careful work in parapsychology

including a year that I spent working

full-time on a classified project for

the United States government to see if

we could use these abilities for

intelligence gathering during the Cold

War and then she concludes at the end of

that project I wrote a report for

Congress staging what I still think is

true the data in support of precognition

and possibly other related phenomena is

quite strong statistically it would be

widely accepted if it pertains to

something more mundane I think that's

really interesting Thank You Charlotte

[Applause]