¶ Introduction to Buddha at the Gas Pump
[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.
Some of you have probably heard me say that hundreds of times, as well as the following, which is that if you haven't heard me say that hundreds of times and this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, this being interview number 700 today, go to bathgap.com and look under the past interviews menu where you'll find all the previous ones categorized in various ways.
I say that because it's easier to categorize them and provide various search tools on the website than it is to do so on the YouTube channel. So you can find things on the YouTube channel, but on the website you'll have all kinds of search tools, including a new thing which is relatively new, which is an AI chatbot into which I have uploaded over 50,000 files.
Not only the backgap interviews, but transcripts of other videos that people I've interviewed have made and all kinds of relevant stuff, books they've written, and it's really shaping up to be a powerful tool. So check that out. There's a menu for it on dotgap.com. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page that
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My guest today is Bob Davis, PhD. Bob received his doctorate in the sensory neurosciences from Ohio State University and served as a professor for the State University of New York for over 30 years, where he conducted research in the behavioral and neurosensory sciences, taught and held many high-level administrative roles.
He published his research in over 60 articles in scholarly journals and presented numerous lectures worldwide, which included invited lectures at Harvard, Cambridge, and Peking University. He was also awarded numerous grants by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to conduct research in sensory neuroscience.
Following his retirement, Bob published several articles in the Journal of Scientific Exploration and Edge Science, and presented lectures at national and international conferences on consciousness, spirituality, transformative experiences, and UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. Bob has also published three highly popular books, each of which was inspired by experiences he had, The UFO Phenomenon, Should I Believe?, Life After Death, An Analysis of the Evidence,
Unseen Forces, the integration of science, reality, and you. More recently, he's turned his recent book, Unseen Forces, into a planned documentary entitled The Consciousness Connection with Emmy Award winner Dave Beatty of Dreamtime Entertainment. And I'll be linking to Bob's website and also the website for his film from his page on ThatGap. So welcome Bob. Well it's a pleasure to be with you Rick. Good to have you here. We're going to talk about a number of
of topics. Let me just review some of the things we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about your personal experiences, such as UFO and shared death experience and Kundalini experience, each which led you to write a book, as I mentioned. We're going to talk about what an extraordinary human experience is and why the need for a paradigm shift and
scientific understanding is critical. We're going to talk about the rationale for your current book on extraordinary human experiences and that film that I mentioned, The Consciousness connection and we're going to talk about discussion of types and evidence to support the validity of extraordinary human experiences, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, end-of-life phenomena, ESP, UFOs, autistic savants, etc., and also spiritual emergencies.
And one of my favorite topics, we're going to talk about the need to integrate the science of the subjective with the science of the physical to better understand the nature of
¶ Types and Evidence of Extraordinary Human Experiences
reality and other things. So perhaps we should start with your experiences. You were kind of a nuts and bolts guy, as I gather, in your academic career and your life, but then you began to have experiences which precipitated your interest in these kinds of things. Yeah, indeed, Rick. You know, from the very beginning, you're taught to stay away from the brainstem because that affects consciousness.
more or less academically primed to be a materialist and follow that scientific paradigm, the scientific methodology, which I did for decades. But after happily retiring, I believe it was 2014 or so, I began to have some extraordinary experiences. Why, I'm not sure, but the first one... Were you meditating or taking drugs? Not at all. No, I do meditate daily, but they came rather spontaneously in different ways. The first one was an encounter with the UFO.
My wife and I visited Sedona, Arizona quite frequently, and one night I just look up and I see an orange orb. It was about half a mile away, 50 feet up, completely symmetrical. And as I'm observing it in stunned silence, I guess, a second one emanates from behind it or from within it, and they both say they're stationary. And as they immediately appeared, in a sense, they quickly disappeared.
So you think of all the possibilities, certainly more geothermal, atmospheric, of course, you go through that whole list, and obviously there's no answers. But that's more than spurred my curiosity. In fact, I was always interested in UFOs because I grew up in the 60s. And it's hard not to be, I guess, fascinated with the science fiction of the time. So I wrote the first book, UFO Phenomenon, should I believe more as an intro book and as a means for me to better understand the phenomenon.
You know Mark Gober? Yeah. He wrote a book on that. He writes books on all kinds of things. He seems to be able to write them in a weekend. The guy is like a maniac. He gets going on a book. I interviewed him about a year ago on this topic also, as well as Ray Hernandez, whom you know. I worked together on the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Research Foundation for a few years. We don't communicate, I don't know where he is anymore, but he's contributed much.
I think Ray's down in Florida someplace, he was when I interviewed him. No, he moved to South America. And maybe we'll get to that when we focus more on the UAP issue. But my second, call it extraordinary human experience, for lack of a better term, occurred while I was sleeping.
And I had this extraordinary, call it empathic, shared death experience, some people refer to it as a shared death experience that my good friend Raymond Moody called, where I had the sensation, realer than real, of suffocating. It was the worst feeling I've ever had. I was truly dying. Of course, it woke me up. But I was given a message that my colleague in the lab had died, my dear friend Ann.
I didn't think much of it, obviously writing it off to nothing more than a hypnagogic result, a dreamlike, illusionary aspect of the brain. I walk into the lab, I see the sulking faces and I knew right away she had passed, unexpectedly. That moved me. I could not dismiss that. I had to delve into that issue further and I wrote the book, Life After Death, an analysis
¶ A Profound Shared Death Experience
of the evidence, much more from an academic perspective rather than a public. Before that I was a 50/50, is your life after death, yes or no, flip a coin. Following my research into the matter, I guess I've become more 51/49 in belief of it. Yeah, I'm like 99 to 1 myself. Nothing conclusive. Then my third experience occurred after I gave a paper in Byron Bay, Australia. I was invited to have some wine with some people who attended and I did.
One of the people who were there, Dr. Marie Batchelor, retired obstetrician, just said, "Why don't we sit in a circle and have a healing session?" So she started to do that. her eyes, relaxed, and she began to talk about releasing your attachments, getting rid of engrams, cleaning out DNA, etc. Well, not so much it was the words as to maybe directing energy of some type. I don't know how to explain it, but I began to cough and feel beautiful.
I felt wonderful, energetic, but I couldn't stop coughing. Could not. 20 minutes I coughed, realizing I was pestering those in attendance, but I couldn't stop. That combined with the feeling of bliss forced me to ask her, "Hey, tomorrow afternoon, if you can, be here, let's do this one-on-one." We did. She did the same thing, and I had a full-blown Kundalini awakening. Which means what exactly? What did you experience?
It was an energetic effect and initially the autonomic nervous system wanted to overdrive and I essentially looked like the child. Was her name Reagan in the Exorcist? Right. You had this spinning on its axis. It could if it wasn't restricted by the fibers and musculature in the neck region, right? Right. So you're thrashing about? about head and chest region involuntarily, uncontrollably, while I looked like I'm suffering, I'm feeling ecstasy, bliss.
You weren't afraid that you were having some kind of epileptic seizure or something because the bliss was convincing enough that something good was happening? It was a mixed reaction. Obviously I was confused because I felt external to my body because I wasn't in control of my body. was doing its gyrations, head spinning, heavy breathing, asymmetric reactions, autonomic impulses that I could not control, resulting in ugly looking physiological sensations, I should say, or appearances.
To one who was observing me, they would think I'm in the process of dying or suffering. Right. Little. But I was a changed person from then on. How did your life change? Good question. I became a tree hugger. I felt connected with the universe. I can't put that into words, it was certainly ineffable. I felt bliss.
I didn't want to confront a psychiatrist for fear that I would be labeled as psychotic because when there's a spiritual emergency, you have anxiety because you can't explain it and I think there's a physiological reaction at some level given what happened to you, which I can't explain, but that alone I think is a basis for anxiety, let alone the other layer of emotion. Why am I observing the universe in a different way? Why do I feel the sense of interconnectedness? Why do I want to hug trees?
Why do I want to talk now about spirituality? Why do I feel closer to people? Why do I want to disengage from those who I sense negative emotions from, like I never have before? I'm different. beliefs, my attitude, I didn't fear death like I did, but I picked up Graf and Graf, their book on the... Stanislaw Graf, yeah. Stanislaw Graf. He's been on that. It hit home. It fit me to absolute, symptomatically, in terms of the aftermath and after effects.
I was full in a spiritual emergency, having kriyas thereafter.
¶ A Spiritual Awakening and Kundalini Awakening
when I meditated or talked about spirituality with people, my upper lip would automatically vibrate and I tried to suppress it for fear of embarrassment. But interestingly, when I meditated for about a year or so afterwards, when I got into deep meditation, I heard music, I heard spiritual bells. >> STEVE: Interesting. That's definitely a Kundalini symptom. >> WALTER: Always one of them. Again, I didn't have all of them, but that's one that is noted.
But the most beautiful, I hate to use the term heavenly, but that's appropriate. And I mentioned this to Bruce Grayson when we spoke, I interviewed Bruce at the International Association for Near-Death Studies as part of our film. I mentioned it to him because he did write a paper on Kundalini and NDEs looking at the similarities between the two. And there are some, not completely, but there are, among all of these extraordinary human experiences.
And he said he doted that same information from others who've had not only near-death, but kundalini awakenings, not all. And he said the most similar music to that may be found in new music that's produced electronically. And I listened to some of that, and I can see why he says that.
>> Jeff: Well, you know, I think you did the right thing when you had this Kundalini awakening, which was you started to try to learn about it and read things and talk to people and stuff because some people, it happens to them, and they're all alone and they don't know what the heck is happening. They run to the doctor, they get put on some drug to suppress it, and they might go on for years thinking there's something wrong with them.
I bet you there are people in psychiatric institutions who had this and didn't run into anybody who knew what was going on. So that's one reason I think it's good for us to talk about these things publicly in shows like this so that if people have something like this, they don't freak out. They realize something good is happening and perhaps there are certain measures they need to take to make sure that they integrate and stabilize because it can be destabilizing.
But anyway, it's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, but it comes with major risks along those lines. And people are institutionalized, dumbed down with inappropriate medications. The last thing you want to hear when you're going through a spiritual emergency is that you have some symptoms of psychosis, which can be easily misdiagnosed because there are comorbidities between psychosis and spiritual awakenings.
But clear distinctions to any psychiatrist counselor who's well-versed in Kundalini, how many are. And that's a major problem because there aren't many that are aware of it. And it is in the DSM that Lukoff wrote about Kundalini awakenings, yet it's often ignored or not addressed sufficiently enough within the healthcare system for those people to recognize and make that clear distinction between the two.
And it's easy to do so if you know what Kundalini is and you wouldn't put them on these kinds of medications and misdiagnose and mistreat. aside, there's been studies done, Wollekot, Marjorie Wollekot, the neuroscience... She's been on that, yep. Yeah, we interviewed her. Almost everybody you
mentioned has been on that, Kev. Well, we have all these people in the film, because the point is, Rick, and you mentioned it earlier, wake people up, hate to use that expression, but there is a need for the paradigm shift, because people are not
¶ The Misdiagnosis of Spiritual Awakening
aware of these kinds of experiences, the implications of it, and materialism certainly isn't going to provide us any answers to any of this anytime soon. Yeah. So where we go to make the changes along all these lines and to the scientific community, medical community, that not only are Kundalini Awakenings real and you probably have millions of people running around on Quiz Street trying to figure out what's going on, running into books for answers, where do
they get them? They're from healthcare practitioners, psychologists by and large, and there are some certainly that are aware of it, but good luck finding them who you can trust to confide about it. Marjorie Wolokai, again, did a study with scientists, over 60 of them, who had Kundalini experiences, who talk about their illuminating light that they perceived while
they're having it. Many of the sensations that I experienced, many of them who changed careers and perspectives on life, we know about these transformative aspects to all of this. And James talked about a space and Maslow talked about all of this back then. And where is it? You know, it's largely ignored. Experienced by many millions and yet we're in this materialistic mindset not doing anything to really address it. There's progress though.
I mean, if we compare what's happening now with the 50s, for instance, now that we have the internet and there are thousands of videos about the kinds of things you and I are talking about, it's kind of unstoppable. It could be that 30, 40 years ago, someone was institutionalized. If they had this experience, now they get on YouTube and they find a thing and they think, "Oh, something good is happening." They find somebody who knows what they're talking about, they get help.
So I think we're making progress. Yes, we are. the social media standpoint, word is certainly spreading, no question about it. I wish scientists and again medical practitioners would also learn more about it and adopt it more importantly in their practices to the point where we do have more of a paradigm shift. Jeff Kriple addressed it in his book talking about 40 scientists who flipped from various types of extraordinary experiences, shifting careers and then some because of it.
Now how do you explain, talk about paradigm shift and this is a basis for my current book and the film, to inform, educate, provide hope to the public that these theories, these experiences exist, are real, are valid, these scientists help support that anecdotal evidence and unfortunately materialism only adopts quantitative data and ignores largely the anecdotal information where a lot of the valid information does exist that supports this kind of extraordinary experiences,
which vary considerably from near-death, to out-of-body, to you name it, to interactions with other beings, alternate realms, synchronicities, end-of-life phenomena, and all those manifestations, and much more, including again ESP, which indeed is valid, and that alone should cause a paradigm shift. Convince science of that, it's impossible. I forget who it was, it was a German physicist, one of Einstein's contemporaries, who said, "Science advances one funeral at
a time." Sometimes people just can't change, and the old ones have to die off, and the new ones come along, and they're able to think in a new way. Yeah, and people forget that
¶ The Unstoppable Spread of Information
Einstein had a lot more to contribute than his famous equation, equals mc squared, when he talked a great deal about spirituality and many of our former Nobel Prize laureates talked about consciousness and ESP as being valid theoretically.
You know, if we look at the collective evidence of all of these experiences that people have, I think it's very difficult to ignore the fact that medicine and psychiatry cannot come close to the beneficial effects that many of these experience induce in people who have them overnight, when again medicine cannot make any progress using the traditional standard techniques. And that's true for NDEs.
People have them and they're changed dramatically overnight to where their psychological problems prior to their NDE vanished. And that's a fact. I've had many psychiatrists tell me this, Bruce Greyson has, Raymond Moody has, etc. But you don't get that information unless you talk to these people like you have throughout these years or read their books certainly. You're not going to get it at the corner drugstore or your friendly scientist or medical physician that you see routinely.
And that alone, that immediate change in people's perspective for the good is ignored and it's anecdotal evidence, measure it. Can't do it. You can't measure qualia and use it as a basis for brain consciousness distinction. And because you can't, we're stuck in a materialist mindset. Materialism is not going to provide us an answer to that. You have to go, I guess, maybe to idealism, certainly some form of in-between, a dualistic model.
Well, you know, this whole paradigm shift idea, you've probably read the book by Thomas Kuhn, structure of scientific revolutions, and he talks about how paradigm shifts happen, which is that anomalies accumulate, meaning evidence that contradicts the established paradigm, to the point where finally the dam breaks, you know, finally the established paradigm can't hold anymore against the mass of anomalies that have accumulated, and then a shift takes place.
And it's good that you can't just overturn a paradigm on day one, because everything would would be unstable, we wouldn't have any solid footing in our scientific understanding. And so there is a tendency to resist paradigm shift, especially by the people who are embedded or invested in a particular paradigm, but eventually it gives way. It's inexorable, you know, once enough evidence accumulates.
And I think a lot of evidence has been accumulating, and these days tons of people are studying this kind of thing. I mean, psychedelics, I mean, look what's happening at Johns Hopkins and NYU and some of these other places, Robin Carhart Harris over in the UK, they're doing all this work with psilocybin, and like you said, with NDEs, very often there will be a huge change in worldview after one of these experiences.
People who are diehard atheists all of a sudden believe in some kind of deity or divine presence, and that kind of stuff is becoming more and more mainstream, and it's helping people so much with alcoholism or PTSD or end-of-life fears and things like that. There's no question about it. That alone, what we see, the evidence, based on some studies that are coming out of John Hopkins, as you mentioned, Griffiths, Timmerman, etc., David Luke, among
others. And look, we've come to the chase. FDA has approved the use of ketamine in forms of severe depression. We see other clear evidence of positive outcomes from many of these psychoactive agents on severe mental conditions that have been untreatable with standard approaches. And there's more to that aspect of DMT, not only in terms of mental health aspects, but yes, you know, a paradigm shift. It's a baseline of understanding, usually applied to science, however, you know, physics,
biology, to those disciplines. And we only have a shift when we get contradictory evidence of established theories. So what's it applied to? Germs, the orbit of orbits around the Sun, and quantum mechanics. I think you can make a case for even CO2 emissions as a basis for a paradigm shift now. Artificial intelligence is another case. The paranormal, however,
¶ The Need for a Paradigm Shift in Understanding Consciousness
is my case, and I'm not alone in making that case, because I think you need to understand the paranormal. I hate to use the old term, to understand the paranormal to better understand the normal. I think that's very true. I think you have to understand the paranormal in order to understand consciousness better. What's the expression, right? All you need is one white crow to disprove a theory. The theory that all crows are black. Right. Yeah, and in my mind we
have a whole flock of these white crows when it comes. We can add evidence insofar as this is concerned. Yeah, I don't know where the evidence is more strong, but you take each and every one, we could talk about each and every one for quite a bit of time as you have in the past with many of
your extraordinary guests. DMT, as you mentioned, is just one thing. Not only does it show these remarkable changes in symptomatology that's pathologic in nature in many cases, but you also of course see evidence of people being changed behaviorally in terms of being flipped, but also in terms of believing that even though they're wearing a suit and a tie, sitting at a beautiful desk on Fifth Avenue, based on their DMT experience two years ago,
they still believe that the beings that they interacted with, or the deity that they interacted with still exists. That experience causes them to have a major impact on their belief systems and everything that flows out of that, an alternate reality. Whatever feeling they may have had at the time, which was generally positive. So we're seeing remarkable results insofar as that goes. Interactions with beings and information they contain is also quite remarkable. You know there's an
organization over in the UK, you're probably familiar with it. In fact, Marjorie Wollekot is very involved. It's called the Galileo Commission, and David Lorimer heads it up. And it was so named because church authorities refused to look through Galileo's telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter because for some weird reason, Jupiter having moons would conflict with Church doctrine. I don't know why exactly, but they wouldn't look. And Dean
Radin and others have had the same experience. People say, "We don't want to look at your research because it couldn't be true. So we won't look. But again, it's like it's a lost cause, because as the anomalies grow, as the research gets more voluminous and rigorous and so on, it's going to be harder and harder to stick your head in the sand and ignore it. But as you said, we make progress one funeral at a time, and it takes a good 100 years or so,
indeed, before you do see a paradigm change. Maybe that'll occur more quickly. I think things are speeding up, you know? I really do. They're always saying the pace of change is increasing in this technological age exponentially. And I think that's happening with the kinds of things we're talking about, too. It took six or six years since the Wright brothers flew with Kitty Hawk to when we first landed on the moon. Yeah, isn't that amazing? I think six or six years, you know, from then.
And geometric progression, who the heck knows what's next? But I think what should be next is what we're talking about, certainly among other things. But the science of the self, another unique idea, call it what you will, a deeper exploration of this nature of these experiences and consciousness, integrating this objective with the objective going beyond our conventional scientific boundaries.
And I think this shift has to acknowledge that consciousness is an active participant in understanding reality. It has to go beyond the traditional views of science, reducing consciousness to biochemical
¶ The Evidence of White Crows in DMT Experiences
processes within a hundred billion neurons within the brain. And I don't think you can do that. Neuroscientists continually try to find consciousness in the brain, and the best they can do is to categorize consciousness in terms of states of wakefulness. In terms of psychological perspectives, it's viewed as predictive processing models. In terms of Eastern philosophy, you're going to get the complete opposite, more of a certainly an idealistic model. So you don't get a consensus reality.
And yeah, as more of this evidence of the paranormal accumulates, I don't know who, what and where is going to take the ball forward, but maybe the Galileo Project, maybe organizations like the Gary Nolans of the Sole Foundation who we interviewed at Stanford University about the UAP phenomenon. You know, we went to the International Association for Noetic Sciences that... IONS, right. IONS, who Dean Radin is the chief scientist of, to interview some of the scientists there.
Now, that's an organization at the forefront of research in ESP and related matters. And then we went to the Ryan Center, another well-established center for this type of investigation, and interviewed John Croth, the executive director. Went to the Near-Death Studies Conference in Washington, D.C. And went to the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. Talked to many people there, including Edmund Alexander, the neurosurgeon who has famous NDE that he popularized in his book, The Proof of Heaven.
But more importantly than just capturing the information that these leading scholars in their respective fields share with us, which is extraordinarily important, is capturing the subjective information by those who have these kinds of experiences, which we mainly got at the Monroe Institute and the Conference on Near-Death Studies. Integrating again, both, makes for a much more holistic, better picture of what we're trying
to understand here. That's what the film The Conscious Connection is about at consciousnessfilm.info and again Dave Beatty of Dreamtime Entertainment and Wilson Hawthorne of Telemedia, I forget the
name, excuse me, are co-producing that. But that's the essence of the content of the combination of both aspects of reality I think are what's missing and we keep talking about that and how that is integrated into a coherent whole and applied meaning to an application of, because application means this. When you talk to experiencers, they talk about an evolution of society. They talk about the world as it should be in my mind.
They talk about the end of a collective destruction, one that is only for the enhancement of survival, good and peace and all of that, all that stuff that we want. If everybody had a kundalini awakening, I certainly think we'd be much better off.
I think that's a very important point because we're talking about paradigm shifts and it might sound kind of intellectual or abstract or philosophical, but it's really kind of critical and practical because the world is going to hell in a handbasket with pollution and climate change and species extinction and potential for thermonuclear war and all these other things, and all those things are manifestations of the predominant paradigm,
which is, as you said, materialistic and reductionistic. And I think that we've seen, and it's more obvious than ever, that that paradigm has been inadequate and that it needs to be revised.
¶ Exploring Consciousness Beyond Traditional Science
Which is not to say we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm always interested in the juxtaposition of science and spirituality. Spirituality is ancient, goes back thousands of years, science is relatively new, but each of them has something to offer, not only to all of us, but to each other. Spirituality can enable science to explore all kinds of realities that scientific methodologies so far haven't considered even exist, much less
could be explored. And vice versa, I think a scientific empirical attitude can help spiritual seekers avoid magical thinking and fruitless imagination and to be rigorous in their pursuit of spiritual experience. And also, of course, all the tools of science, such as Dean Radin and various neurophysiologists are employing, can help to measure, to some extent, these
inner states that people are experiencing. Perhaps, eventually, we'll be able to identify by a brain signature for higher states of consciousness or other such things, and just as we have for ordinary states of consciousness, such as waking, dreaming, and sleeping. So I think we're moving toward a merger of these discrete disciplines of science and spirituality, and perhaps 100, 200 years from now, maybe even sooner, it'll seem absurd to isolate them
from each other. They will have conjoined into a single methodology of gaining knowledge with naturally different facets as science and spirituality both have now, but they'll be partners, collaborators in helping us understand the nature of life and of reality. I agree with you completely. A symbiotic kind of relationship in a sense. And I see consciousness having that kind of relationship with the brain in a sense. The question is, of course,
does consciousness persist at the bodily depth? It's something we all want to know. But getting to your point too, you know, neuroscientists look for spirituality in the brain, looking for that God spot. Andrew Newberg, I'm looking for that and I don't want to go into great detail about it, but if you say God, God, God, God, in my ear, you're going to see a little area in the ipsilateral parietal lobe light up a great deal on the left side as
opposed to other areas. Does that mean we have an area, a signature, as you mentioned, spirituality. No, that's a bold leap to go there, but we do see, however, we do see certain manipulations of the brain, we see tumors in certain areas of the brain, electrical stimulation in certain areas that do make it difficult for people to
distinguish internal from external reality. You remove the lesion, I forget where in the brain, in the brainstem, periaqueduct, doesn't matter, periaqueduct gray, removing a lesion for instance, tumor from that area, for some reason some people become more spiritual, some become less spiritual or religious. The point is it alters... You probably know Jill Bolte Taylor's story, right? My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor. Oh, yeah. Oh, indeed.
Yes. A neuroanatomist who had a stroke, she was more than aware, unfortunately, that the left side of her brain was slowly shutting down and lives in a right hemisphere world, which she craves and loves, thought everybody should experience it. It was like an epiphany for her, more of a spiritual side as her left brain egoic literal sense of viewing the world was essentially dissolved literally before her eyes.
- Yeah. Just to interject again, I'll try not to do this too often, but I interviewed her about a year ago and she has a new book called "Whole Brain Living" and what you just said reminded me of that because my assumption, and she's kind of arguing this in this book, that full spiritual development is going to not involve just some little spot in the brain that can be identified, but rather a holistic development of all aspects of the brain and correspondingly all aspects of the personality.
So it'll be a global thing throughout the whole brain, a global transformation. Again, we have yet to even begin to fully understand, we don't even understand the ordinary brain. Talking about the brain though, you can't ignore the work, as controversial as it is, by Hamerhoff and Penrose, orchestrated reduction theory. That's interesting, looking at microtubules and cells of the brain, the cytoskeletons of the neurons, they give it structure.
¶ The Relationship Between Science and Spirituality
They're considered, according to them and others, to be acting like quantum computers. And they serve in the act of creating, I think, Hamerhoff said, a conscious moment. He goes on further to say that based on that, consciousness will persist after bodily death. It's a bold leap, but he may be in the right direction. I was going to ask you about that actually, because I've seen this speak, but I couldn't remember.
So Hameroff is arguing then that the brain is more like a receiver transmitter than a creator of consciousness. Is that what he's saying with his microtubules, that that's just like the electronic, so to speak, of the radio that we call the brain? saying that neurons interact non-locally with other neurons? Within the brain. Yes. In the brain, which is entanglement in action, quantum mechanics in action, also analogous to ESP in action, but he considers that as a facilitating event
which he calls the consciousness. So non-locally, so let's say I have a neuron in my right hemisphere and another one totally separate from it, not touching it in my left stemosphere. Is he saying that those two neurons and others like them can all communicate without actually physically touching? Yes, exactly. They're entangled. That explains how does the brain compute all that it's capable of doing so unless it is a quantum process. And we now know that quantum processes can
exist in warm, wet environments like the brain. This has been realized not long ago. And that's That's why this theory also has implications for phenomena like the NDE or the OBE and for consciousness persisting after death because you can't even go beyond the microtubules because we have to talk about bio photons. That's the ultra-v photon emissions generated by microtubules. So basically an electromagnetic field. That can be picked up by instruments, yes? Yes, it can be.
people can actually alter the emissions, and I'd like to mention that when we talk maybe about ESP, but it serves in a sense as a form of information exchange, like entanglement between neurons, and potentially it may serve as the basis for exchanging information between individuals at a distance, again, as a foundation for ESP, among other things.
But you can make the case here, and this is where I'm going, talking about the Orr-Corr theory and microtubules, you can make the case that we are essentially light beings. Humans are light beings. In the sense that we emit light? Microtubules... Is that what you're saying? Huh? In the sense that we emit light? Yeah. Bio-photons? Literally, literally light beings. Yes. Photons are light energy. And what we know about light is that it can transmit information. So we have...
I'm on a fiber optic cable right now. ...information being transmitted in the brain. brain, yeah, via light, you know, the Big Bang is allowing me to see everything I'm seeing, you know, the light's just coming into my retina from 4.3 billion years ago, just now
entering my retina, bouncing off it, the brain's doing its thing, allowing me to see. So in a sense, we're connected with our universe in that very strange way, if you want to look at it like that, but getting back to the brain, more specifically, we don't know about these glial cells. Nobody talks about glial cells, and they are something that acts very much like quantum computers, and they comprise over 90% of the brain. Those are neurons then, a certain kind of neuron?
Yeah, and it's called, sort of like a triparite neuron. We have a synapse that, where we have two connections. cells allow three connections, but we don't hear about that. But the point is that there's a lot that's going on in this picture of our brain, at least in my mind, that is poorly understood, that has a lot to do with the transmission of light energy surrounding glial cells, also magnetite, an unusual element that also exists
¶ Brain Development and Spiritual Transformation
in the brain that's highly responsive in the electromagnetic process and yet little attention is also given to that. So you have the microtubules, you have magnetite, you have glial cells and you can make the case initially that we are light beings. But that aside, the point is we do not understand the brain and its role as a quantum computer. Yet we probably exist as many physical quantum systems interacting with a quantum mechanic world.
And when we see these, when we have these extraordinary human experiences and all this varying range in detail and diversity, we're seeing, I think, possibly evidence of quantum mechanics in action in everyday life. Maybe that's a stretch. But at this level of understanding, we don't have the ability to use science other than what exists.
And the thing that only exists in my mind is not traditional scientific theories, although certainly some are applicable without question, but more so in the area of quantum physics. As controversial some theories within it are, much of it is well accepted and valid. But you hate to use that as always the answer because it isn't. Like false memories and illusions and imagery, you could use it as a basis for reality.
Now I hate to keep running to quantum mechanics as the answer, you have to be very careful particularly since we don't understand quantum mechanics. I mean I think it was... Well yes. That's exactly right. One of the founders of quantum mechanics says if you think you understand it, you don't. Well some people say that. And spiritual people like us tend to reference it as if we knew what it actually was. we're talking theoretical physics but we see quantum processes, quantum computers
and we see quantum processes in the brain. Yeah. And we're moving in that direction but we can't use it as a basis to explain everything away without
question. Veridical perceptions in near-death experiences it's probably one of the most important lines of evidence in my mind you know for a paradigm shift probably one of the most critical ways in which we can say that we here we have subjective evidence that clearly contradicts established scientific principles and thus we should move on and have a paradigm shift. Define veridical perceptions.
Sure. Veridical perception is one who obtains information during near-death or out-of-body experience that's later are found to be true, accurate, and detailed by an independent third party. Yeah, can you give me a couple of examples from people I've interviewed?
You made an interesting point about philosophy and spirituality, and it ties in here, because that's the argument at hand here, the science and philosophy, and where we integrate it, and how do we balance each and come to some understanding. Nevertheless, when we interviewed Bruce Grayson, he's a, for those who don't know, a psychiatrist, one of the leading researchers in the field of near-death studies, he told us a story and Dave Bady and I at the conference and it went something like this.
One person he interviewed at the time of that person's near-death experience, I forget the person's name, he's about 25 years of age, he's from South Africa. He was hospitalized with severe pneumonia and couldn't catch his breath, had to be resuscitated many times and there was a primary nurse who worked with him every day. She had to take some time off for a few days going on vacation. And she told him that another nurse would be taking care of him.
While she was away, I believe her name was Anita, he had another respiratory problem. He had a near death experience. While he had this near death experience, he saw Anita. Anita came to him and said, "Jack, I want you to go back. I want you to find my parents, tell them I love them very much, and I'm sorry I wrecked
¶ Humans as Light Beings and Quantum Mechanics
their red MGB." Now that was back in the 1970s in South Africa when she wrecked the red MGB. So when Jack woke in the hospital, he started to tell the nurse about his experience. And when he talked about Anita, the nurse began crying and rushed out of the room. Well, it turned out that Anita took the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday and her parents surprised her with a gift, a red MGB.
She got so excited, jumped in her car, took her for a test drive, ran into a telephone pole and died a few hours before his near-death experience. So there's no way, in Bruce Graveson's mind at least, that he could have known at the time that she had died or certainly how she had died and yet he did. There's many cases like that. There are dozens of cases like this, yeah, probably more than dozens. It happens all the time.
And I can go on and on and besides, I've been telling the story about the woman on the beautiful butterfly. Got the picture after his NDE and that was his sister who he saw who he never met because she died before he was born. His parents had never told him about her and then he said, "Hey, I had this experience. Do I have a sister?" and they said, "Yeah." Yeah, I could elaborate more. It goes on and on about, certainly, individuals blind from birth
who have an NDE and for the first time they experience sight and see their world. They're describing this to Jeff Long, founder of the Near-Death Experiencer Research Foundation. We interviewed medical oncologists. He interviewed a woman named Vicky, blind from birth, And she describes a visual field as being to the left, to the right, up, down, back, and front. And Jeff said, "What do you mean, back?" And she said, "Yeah, I can see 360. I can see all around
me." And I said, "No, we who have sight from birth, we have eye sockets. We can only see in front of us." There are many cases, people who are blind from birth who describe that circular view. So what would you conjecture might be the mechanics through which a person could have that kind of experience? Either they're blind and they can see or they're under anesthesia
and they can see what's going on? Rich, some of it we haven't yet fully clearly defined death clinically and I think we're just seeing now that the brain certainly survives a lot longer than we expected. It certainly survives much longer than 10 to 20 seconds after cardiac arrest. It could last for hours under ideal conditions and very possibly longer than that,
especially the auditory nerve. Thus, people may be able to hear for quite a bit of time when they are declared dead and then for some reason they're resuscitated and come back, But they're never really dead dead, that's why we call it near death experience. But the point is we don't have a clear definition of that.
So some of this recall that we may be considering as a juridical perception may be related to that, but it doesn't account for the nuances, the accuracy and detail of these kinds of experiences unless we're independent of the body.
And once the filter mechanism is reduced, this inhibition occurs and we see evidence of this inhibition during NDE states in the brain as well as during DMT states in the brain where we see this filtering process, a quieting of brain states, the default mode network goes into a very relaxed state as if we're in a meditative state of calm.
¶ Veridical Perceptions in Near-Death Experiences
Yes, so we're using the word filter here. This is important because what you're saying is that the brain actually blots out a lot of what we could potentially be experiencing, and that's to our advantage, because if it didn't, it would be like being on a heavy LSD trip all the time. There's just too much TMI, as they say, too much information.
But a lot of times what happens in these various states is those filters get thinned or removed, and all of a sudden we're open to perceptions that have been there all along, potentially, that we were oblivious to because the brain's doing its job, filtering things out.
Well, yeah, exactly. And in some ways you can look at it in reverse. You could say that the brain actually impedes one's ability to perceive true reality. You can look at it that way as well. Once the brain is gone, it's not necessarily dust and dust, ash and ashes. I'm doing something else in another alternate reality, as some people believe, or for reasons of worship,
religion, culture, or they experience it directly. Or, because of this reduction in filtering, and not just filtering, but also ego-centered processing, you're kind of allowing for more novel interactions in other brain areas that could facilitate what we can describe as self-transcendence, a sense of unity, getting back to what Maslow and James talked about many, many decades ago,
this interconnected hole, if you will, once you do this to the brain. So, are we impeding the brain's ability for us to perceive reality, true reality in this way, or is it a pure physiologic reaction? Like getting rid of the left hemisphere in Jill Botello's experience while she had just the right hemisphere to use as a basis for her perceptual reality.
Just one quick point to throw in here while we're on the topic of OBEs and NDEs is that in Eastern thought, it's understood that we have a subtle body, they call it "shukshma sharira," and that when the physical gross body dies, the subtle body isn't affected
in the least, it carries on and is responsible for reincarnation and all that. But I think that one possible explanation for the mechanics of out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences is that despite the fact that the physical body may be incapacitated, the subtle body is still functioning and it can actually see without physical eyes or hear without physical ears. It can see something that's happening a mile away.
There's a lady named Ingrid Honkola who had this experience where she was a little girl, she fell into a tank of water and she was drowning and first she left her body and looked at her nanny who was watching television in the house, that wasn't going to help, and then she went down the street and encountered her mother waiting at a bus stop and she basically in her subtle body said, "Hi, mom," and her mother dropped everything she was holding, raced to the house,
went straight to the tank, pulled her out, saved her life. You know, you're saying the same thing I am, only given my background in this sense, I'm going to have a little bit of a physiologic spin on it.
I think the essence of what we're saying is essentially the same about the brain and consciousness, And yeah, you reduce the brain's influence, that subtle body or whatever you want to call it, consciousness or whatever term it is, it is not restricted, it is not imputed, it can do its own thing. And I got that sense in my Kundalini awakening. I truly did and words can't get that across to the audience, certainly, but I wouldn't be talking to you, Rick, if I didn't have the Kundalini.
I'd be doing something normal. I would be spending my time daily writing about it, reading about it, working on the film about it. Consciousnessfilm.info is with the leading participants in scholarly areas and maybe more importantly the people who experience it themselves. And that's the issue at hand, how do we integrate the two, the subjective with the science of
¶ Near-Death Experiences and Perception
the physical to understand what we call reality. we look to Ken Wilber, look at his work, a physicist David Baum, what did Baum say? Consciousness is just a byproduct of physical processes and he goes into that. And some would say the opposite, that physical processes in the entire universe is a byproduct or epiphenomenon of consciousness. That was Mark Gober's first book. It was called "The End to Upside-Down Thinking."
Excuse me, I may have misspoken. Consciousness, Baum believed, is not the byproduct of physical properties. It plays, what's the book? "Wholeness and the Implicit Order" that he wrote. And he proposed that reality and used the Niels Dohr use of complementarity principle. But in Baum's work, he looked at the theory of reality of an information field. And he's not alone. That goes beyond locality and causality, the integration of the subjective and the objective.
So he asked deeply for the need for a paradigm shift, and he combined that with Niels Bohr, who brought in the mix of complementary principle and quantum mechanics and the observer effect, that underscores the notion that the wave, not a particle, alone fully represents the atomic scale of physical matter. So just as the subjective and the objective are in describing the essence of our reality, we see it on the subatomic scale in Bohr's principle.
Question is, can that be extended to an aspect of human consciousness? What we see at the macroscopic level is seen at the microscopic level. Possibly, but I don't think it can be proven unless you start looking at the evidence completely. Unfortunately, there is a growing acknowledgement in various fields that we're addressing by scholars, at least open-minded ones, unbiased ones, as the funerals progress slowly over time. Collectively, I'm seeing this in the people I'm talking to.
I'm not talking to ego-centered, highly-driven individuals that walk the halls of academia anymore. Maybe I fit those shoes a long time ago. I try not to anymore and I feel like I don't, especially when I talk to people in our field that address these issues from an experiential basis as well as theoretically. And I'll tell you, I'm more than impressed by what I hear out there and influenced by what I hear from both the scholars as well as those who experience it. And I am an experiencer.
And I'll tell you, I never before talked about my Kundalini, Rick, until now. I hinted at it. You mean until today? In this detail with you, I hinted at it in a few others, but only a few others, because I remain in the closet for fear of stigma, as thousands, probably millions do have these subjective experiences, like seeing a UFO and we're seeing some of that paradigm shift in UFOs, UAPs change, given recent circumstances. And that too, I think, is part of the equation as well.
Mark Gober wrote an interesting book about that. By the way, he was going to be in our film, but that didn't work out. It would have been nice to have him participate. But he wrote a recent book, I believe. I know, I interviewed him about that. On interactions with non-human entities. That's right. And when I was a member of the Dr. Regina Mitchell Research Foundation, we did a study with over 3,000 individuals who claimed to have interacted with non-human entities
associated with or without these structured craft. And we wrote a paper that was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration with a few of other people, mainly scientists, Ray Hernandez included, and basically said that 80% of them came away from their interactions with positive
¶ Novel Interactions in the Brain
after-effects that range in varying ways psychosocially and in ways that were consistent with the characteristics of positive changes that we see in near-death experiences, spiritual awakenings, etc. So the point is we're also seeing this ego dissolution which may be the crux of the issue here and people who interact with these kinds of phenomena which may be triggered differently, UFOs, near-death, ESP-related issues, Kundalini, spiritual awakening, past life recall, etc., etc.
Whatever those triggers for that ego dissolution may be, it seems that that ego dissolution gives rise to many similar outcomes. And you certainly see this. I'm not unique in saying this, Rich. You understand that. Oh, no. But it comes clear to me, you see, in my own personal experience, subjectively and objectively, in terms of my research and interactions with scholars in the field. So for me, Rick, it's a revelation.
And it only took me six, seven years to make that bold leap, that evolution down the, I hate to use the term again, rabbit hole, to change that mindset from academia to whatever you want to call this. So it's been quite a journey for me. I wouldn't change it in the least. It has not been smooth in the least. We know, for instance, near-death experiences, 70% have a divorce after seven years following their near-death experience. Because they change so much and their spouse doesn't. Exactly.
Much more so than the normal instance would be for that given age group. We see statistics like that. kind of dramatic change in people occurring again overnight that medicine, psychiatry can't do, that may not necessarily be good all the time, but the people who experience it say that in the long term at least, it's positive. It may rock my world for a year or two with anxiety, confusion. I may have a negative NDE that may be hellish. I may regret it. It's not 100% positive in every case.
Don't let me put a beautiful spin on this. It can wreak havoc in people's lives, let me underscore that. But in general, the majority come away with a very positive outcome. There are so many stories in spiritual literature going back thousands of years of people going through the ringer after they have some initial awakening and having their whole life kind of restructured, quite chaotically in some cases, before they come out the other side being a happy camper.
It happened to St. Francis and St. Paul and so many yogis and it's kind of necessary because we're ensconced in our particular mode of conditioned behavior and so on and that type of conditioning is completely inappropriate to an enlightened way of functioning. So somehow we've got to get from here to there and it often involves a lot of turmoil and purification and periods of instability sometimes and all kinds of stuff.
And there are various methods that can help you get through it all, various spiritual practices and physiological treatments such as Ayurveda or other things that can smooth the transition.
Yeah, and you're well aware of that for personal reasons.
Oh yeah, I've been through all kinds of things.
But why should I be learning how to deal with this chaotic psychological stress following a Kundalini or something else extraordinary in my life? should I be getting the answers from you or Stanislav Grof or other material in that are so few people in number who understand it as opposed to somebody... Why were you taught that in school? ...who you think would know. So people mistakenly and maybe not in all cases mistakenly go for seeking that help as
we alluded to earlier and regretting it in the long run. Being mislabeled, mistreated, mishandled, making it worse. Maybe the solution will meet the demand And, you know, as more and more people start having spiritual awakenings, the help will
¶ Consciousness and the Bohmian Paradigm Shift
have to come to meet them. When we were kids in the 50s and 60s and so on, not a lot of this was going on, and so it wasn't taught to us in school or in any kind of training that we went through. But these days, such topics are actually studied in universities, and more and more so, because it's in the air, it's in the water. having experiences and they want to know what they are.
Again, moving forward 50, 100 years, it could be that spiritual practice and all kinds of understanding about it and physiological, neurophysiological correlations to it and all could be a standard part of academic training from preschool on. And there are changes to medical curriculums where there are more integrative approaches that are incorporated, more holistic approaches.
But you know what's interesting, studies have shown that about 80% of all physiological problems have stress contributing either to their complete cause or exacerbating the symptomatology. We all understand mind-body connection, but the point is what percent of doctors give appropriate advice with regard to reducing their patient's stress?
studies out of John Hopkins and Harvard did extensive work in this area and found that based on their research less than 5% of general practitioners provide advice in that area where people can potentially benefit and of course they're more prone to managing it with medication or out on the head or some placebo comment. These days as compared to 50 years ago you know you hear on Good Morning America Some doctor gets up and says, "You should meditate."
And, of course, exercise is advocated much more than it used to be, and how important that is for managing stress. So, it doesn't happen overnight, but like many of these things, it's creeping into the mainstream. Well, what creeps into the mainstream is, I think, the consistency of the kinds of experiences that people are having in terms of the essence of this objective experience.
Because when you look at these extraordinary experiences that we're addressing, we're talking about issues of non-locality, a sense of interconnectedness, of course, entering these ultimate dimensions, coherence, again aligning with principles in quantum mechanics, the sensation of timelessness, absence of past, present and future, which is a common theme in these experiences that again aligns with what quantum mechanics is about. The atomic particle is non-local, has no past,
present future. We see this instantaneous information exchange at the atomic level, at the neuronal level, in terms of ESP. You know, we see ESP experiments whereby before, and Dean Radin did this, before one is shown an erotic image, the brain unconsciously registers it about 0.2 milliseconds before it is shown, and and about 2-4 milliseconds before it comes into your conscious awareness. So there's something going on, unconsciously, that enters our brain-mind system that we aren't aware of.
Yet that moment of delay between the unconscious and conscious event could have an influence on our behavior, on our expectation of what's going to happen, and it does. So in other words, Dean is verifying that premonition is a real thing, that people can predict what's going to happen. Yeah, yeah. We operate in a sense in a quantum-like fashion, and you see it physiologically, you see it subjectively. In a group experiment, you see it on an individual basis.
But the thing is, the major results, the significant results, are based on group statistics. So when When you talk about statistics, you bring up controversies. And people are going to rip that apart alone. When you're talking about results that might lie six, seven standard deviations beyond the
¶ Ego Dissolution and Positive After-Effects
mean, well, that's odds against chance maybe of 10 million to one. But the fact that you use statistics to demonstrate that would still not be convincing enough to allow the skeptics to come up with excuses for those results not being valid.
People have their lives and their professions and their specialties and so on, and they hear about something that completely clashes with their understanding of what's possible, and oh, there's some statistics he claims to have verification to seven decimal points, and they think, well, maybe, but I don't have time to look into it, and he could have fudged the numbers, so they brush it off. Right, exactly.
Well, the method used in statistics, it's an open avenue for critique, yet it's been independently documented, demonstrated by independent labs routinely, providing evidence according to Dean, providing evidence that's much more valid, more convincing than many of the drugs that people take on a daily basis. And that's been well established. So here again, do we need a paradigm shift? Well look, do we need a
paradigm shift? Diane Powell, you know Diane. We just interviewed Diane, polymath in my mind, a good friend, a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist. She's the one who studies autistic savants? Yes. Talk about polymaths. I think you have a story here for us. She wrote a book called the ESP Enigma based on her research with autistic savants and she conducted an experiment with a five-year-old autistic savant named Haley. You talk about ESP,
the brain and consciousness, you know, kind of ties it in in a sense. And cutting to the chase, Haley worked with a therapist who had a partition in front of her. Very simply, the therapist would hold up pictures or equations or sign symbols on the card outside Haley's view. There's no way Haley could know. A triple, quadruple blind, all that sort of stuff. And remarkably, Haley was consistently accurate, accuracy of 90%.
Diane concluded that in all of the series of experiments that were done on her that is highly suggestive of some kind of latent communication mechanism, sometimes she couldn't explain it, but it was a form, pull it what you will, of ESP, accessing information that is beyond our five senses, simple as that.
She talks about in the book a two-year-old that can speak five different languages, a year old, again maybe the age is wrong, but it doesn't matter, but it seems like a five year old never exposed to math, yet when given the question, solve the cube root for this four-digit number, the answer is provided to the point zero zero decimal point. We hear these stories, the Rain Man was based on Kim Peek, and you can read a
separate book, one was H.I., independent of the other, and memorize it all. Remember each word and recite each word in each book back to you, front, you know, forward and backwards. And despite the fact he didn't have a corpus callosum, that band of white connective tissue that allow for the right and left hemispheres to communicate with each other. That's probably a brain glitch, that's not necessarily an example of ESP, but the others are. Will we see evidence of
psychokinesis? Certainly ESP, but enough so that the American Psychological Institute Association, I think it was back in 2018, they reviewed all the data that was conducted, thousands of experiments done on ESP, and they made a major conclusion that basically ESP is valid, cannot be interpreted as being performed under poor conditions,
¶ Spiritual Practices and Physiological Treatments
under experimental bias, but there is no basis to not believe that ESP, precognition, telepathy, and psychokinesis are indeed valid. What that means, I'm not sure. I can go on and on giving you examples. Again, the brainwave states that are changed based on telesymmetric effects between twins separated in Faraday cages. Closes one eye, we see corresponding changes in the brain state of another, based on eye closure alone.
But you see these kinds of remarkable examples globally in a global consciousness project to individual cases, each essentially saying the same thing. And here again, where do we go with this? At the Rhein Center, when we interviewed John Kroth, the executive director, he introduced us to Ed Edwards, who had a unique ability in doing this. He was able to modify these photo electrons emitted by a photomultiplier inside an electrically shielded environment.
He was able to modify them using attention alone, which I saw via a computer. And John Crother has done this with thousands of people, never was able to see anybody to do this, where he can willingly, using attention again, make emission levels, these photonic emissions from the photoamplifier, change in accordance with will. Dean Radin saw this with individuals who were able to modify the pH in a distant interferometer, maybe in a similar fashion as Ed was able to do with this.
He also extended this to, as he contends at least, to medical healing. He also says he can move people and demonstrates this, where he can move them forward and back. There could be some power of suggestion here, I don't know. But the evidence is convincing enough to me to the point where, you know, it gets ridiculous, actually, to keep rehashing it, to keep writing it, because it's only going to be convincing to those who truly want to believe it to be real.
The question that I have with all this is, even if like 75 or 50% of all this stuff is actually valid and verifiable, and I think the percentage is higher, and we've talked about half a dozen different areas of this kind of phenomenon today, the next question is, okay, let's assume that a lot of this is valid, what are the implications of it? What does it actually say about the nature of the human mind, the human consciousness, reality itself, our relationship to the universe?
If Uri Geller can bend spoons, or if Jesus could walk on water, or if some contemporary person could do something like that, it would be impressive. But what does that say about the relationship between human consciousness and the laws of nature? Because obviously, if a spoon bends, there are certain laws of nature involved, there's certain manipulation taking place in physical reality. If Jesus could walk on water, he's
got some kind of special relationship with the law of gravity or something. So, what is human consciousness such that it could have that kind of influence which is ordinarily outside the realm of possibility? Do we all possess such capabilities inherently, and could there be, or actually is there, some place in the universe of society in which such things are the norm. And everybody's walking on water and ruining the cutlery.
Oh, I have an easy answer for that question, Rick. I wish I did. It's getting to the bottom
¶ Quantum Mechanics and Premonition
line. All of my bullshit baffling brain, so to speak, what good is it really if you don't press it and say, what's the big deal? What's it all mean? Put it in perspective. You talk a good line, Davis, but what are you really saying here? a practical implication for us all. Exactly. Well, one, it calls for a need for a paradigm shift, but that means I don't know. That's something else. Get more people involved at
the scientific, medical, and societal level. Wake them up at some level. I think it means that in terms of making people more aware of the concepts that we're discussing. You've done this for many years, and you're to be certainly commended for that without question.
But you know we don't have an answer because we don't fully understand its potential implications because the potential for consciousness, its ability to interact with physical reality, which I do believe it does and it does so subtly, not convincingly, bending spoons may be all we can do at best.
There may be other ways too that we're not aware of emotionally among people, behaviorally that we're not aware of, karmatic ways, karma, but we don't truly understand the potential because that potential has never been cultivated from early on in life, which might be required for that potential for consciousness to fully develop so that we can fully realize its true potential down the road. What does that mean? I don't know. Teach meditation from age four on? Engage in spiritual practice?
Indeed. Let's modify our education in many ways that incorporate spirituality, consciousness studies. One huge implication is if everybody in the world, let's say 90% of them or whatever, had the kind of experience you had of this Kundalini thing and then you were so much happier afterwards, would we still have wars? Would we still have huge wealth inequities resulting in poverty? Would we still be trashing the environment? I think not.
I think that development of consciousness is the ultimate leverage point through which change can take place in the world because I think the world as we see it is a manifestation of the ambient level of consciousness of everyone living here. And so obviously there's something amiss or lacking in the ambient level of consciousness. If you want a forest to be green, you have to make every tree green in the forest.
If this enlightenment phenomenon or whatever you want to call it, spreads as it seems to be doing slowly but surely, then I think that could ultimately bring about a much more ideal world which manipulating politics and economics and so on has never been able to do. I can't say it better than that, Rick. I think that is the ultimate goal, and I may have alluded to it earlier because what we hear from people who are having these experiences
is just that. All the reasons why you think that would be the case, why there would be peace, this evolution of society towards peaceful ways and the end to war and suffering in all of its crazy manifestations only because of these positive outcomes that you hear from people and the love expressed and the oneness and the connectedness and the things we talked about. The thing is, how do we make it real now for people?
We can't induce it like it was induced in me because that would be the ultimate. Maybe we can find an answer to that and give it in the pill or some other form to be incorporated in one's perspective. >>Rick: Well, people can start spiritual practices and they might not have a big transformation overnight but it definitely gets the ball rolling and more and more people are doing that.
>>David: Well, meditating is a beautiful thing for a variety of mental and physical reasons but people spend their time with shamans meditating hours a day, decades on end, doing whatever
¶ ESP and Autistic Savants
they can to achieve that state of enlightenment, like Kundalini, like going to the crown chakra, I don't have all the terms, something like that. You educate me, whatever it is, I get it. And people spend all this time and effort trying to achieve that state in meditative yogic practices, most of them fail. I don't know, you know, seeking you shall find. I don't know the statistics.
I find that if you have a sincere intention and if you put that intention into some sort of action, doing something that you think might work, you usually get an effect. And sometimes those effects are very profound. My life turned around, certainly, when I first learned to meditate. I was a high school dropout, arrested a couple of times, a total mess. And within a few months I was back in school and had a job and things were a lot better. I think you're more the exception to the rule.
some reason you found your way and there are many other paths one could have taken. You took the obvious correct one, but nevertheless it was risky at that time in your life which path you were going to take. I don't think I would have lived unless I'd made that turnabout. But how many people can do that on their own and how many people now can't come to that realization on their own and it's a necessary one and they're certainly not going to get it from anybody other than from within.
But that's why you and I do what we're doing. That's why you write your books. That's why I do this You know you want to spread the word That's part of the symptom and for some reason I don't know why you feel this drive and that's part of it And don't ask me why? You understand I now understand you better. I know you've had these experiences. I've heard you talk about it through the years
But I get it now. I didn't Several years before uh for some reason you just got to do it with fierce determination don't get in my way, don't get in my way. Not surprisingly, we have to question this three-dimensional perception of reality that we have and come to the realization that there are alternative viewpoints and practices that we could integrate. We don't know which are successful, how best to achieve it in each and every case, like prescribing a medication for a particular
disease. We're not at that level by far. Eventually, yeah, we'll get there. And part of that paradigm shift eventually will incorporate that where everybody will be running around having more of a maybe a spiritual awakening mindset, that sense of unity and connectedness. I think it's happening. You hear gallop polls and things like that of the number of people
who have had some kind of extraordinary spiritual experience. And there's a high dropout rate in terms of institutionalized religion, but on the other hand, more and more people are identifying themselves as spiritual but not religious. They're enthused about spirituality, they're just not so into doctrines and religion beliefs. Pete We see that too with these transformations. People who are into organized religion will give that up and become more spiritual. Pete Ironically. Pete Huh?
Pete Ironically, yes. Pete Yeah, we see that a great deal. And we also see hardcore materialists who denounce people who wouldn't dare listen to this show, a variety of personal and philosophical and scientific reasons that they go worshipping non-human entity in the form of a god every Sunday, which is a contradiction
greatly. But getting back to your point about surveys, I think there was a Gallup survey early 2000s, about 80 million, 40-50% of Americans said that they've had, I think it was a religious but spiritual experiences that altered their life. That's what I was alluding to. It's your impact on their life. Now, to me, I wouldn't go so far as to say a paradigm shift. Let's not go crazy with that term, but I'd like to know more about that. That is significant.
And that's why, again, the science of the self has to be explored more seriously. The essence of true experiences, the hard problem of consciousness, as we call it, we're not going to find it in the brain, going to find it with a materialistic approach, nor are we going to find it talking to people who have these kinds of experiences, whether or not we find it integrating the two or it's not resolvable. It just is. And that's not the question. The question is its application and how do we
¶ Photonic Emissions and Healing Abilities
transform people and modify individuals and in turn society collectively for the good of humanity. and that's the bottom line. That's why I'm here, Rick. I wouldn't be here and I wouldn't be here blowing your audience unless I had these experiences. So what am I doing? I'm not promoting my book. I get a weak cup of coffee for every book I sell. You know what I mean. For every book I sell. It's not the point. I'm promoting the film, ConsciousnessFilm.info,
co-produced by Dave Beatty and Wilson Hawthorne. Why? I'm not going to make a dollar on it. That's not the point. We understand that. We'll be spending money. I can't tell you the effort we had traveling across country to these places with my painful back, working off of Go Save Me funds, and thank you very much for everybody that contributed out of the goodness of their heart. But you see, we've had a lot of people who get it, who've had these kinds of either awakenings,
or they understand the importance of it, that are willing to give. And I'm not asking for money here. That's not my point. I'm saying there's a consciousness connection. How's the film coming along? We're done with the interviews. We're now in the editing phase, editing process of the transcripts, the video, etc. So you see like a potential release within two years? Yeah, and we'll hope to stream it, of course. And you know, we're not going to make
money. We want to wake people up. Sorry for that expression, but share the views that we have. You share the thoughts that you share and the guests that you have about the reasons behind the film. Give people hope that there possibly is life after death. That there is reason to believe that these experiences exist for whatever it might be worth for that individual. I think it's really important. I think... Make them curious. Truth seekers.
Our understanding of the way things work has a big impact on our life. If you think that when you die that's it, lights out, that has a major impact on how you see the world and feel about your life and so on. Whereas if you feel the opposite, that this is one chapter in a much longer story, that has a huge impact. For me, spiritual development is a two-legged thing. One leg is actual subjective experience, the other leg is understanding, and you have to have two legs to
walk. It's a tough balance, it really is, and we all need to integrate that. But for most people, They've fallen to the materialist camp. There's so few people, Rick, that I run into that are like me. Not that they're bad, not that they're wrong. I could be the oddball. I'm not saying I'm right in this. Not at all. This is just the path I'm on. I probably could use psychiatric help, all I know.
I don't know. But the point is, there's very few people, and you might relate to this, very few people that I can talk to about this.
which has meant that this film has been such a source of intellectual stimulation for me and reward because it allowed me to speak to people as I've mentioned like Long and Mishlobe and you now is a thrill for me having been a fan of yours for many years Raymond Moody a friend of mine up here in Sarasota going out for a cup of coffee Diane Powell, these kinds of experiences which you take for granted because you talk to them weekly. For somebody like me, it's a treat.
It's what I call, excuse the expression, cognitive orgasm. Like Tom Campbell talking to him about his simulation theory, who's in the film. Now, if you want to go five standard deviations out, you start getting to theoretical physics about simulation theory. But you know something, Diane Powell describes to it.
In fact, she will explain, maybe not convincingly to herself, but she'll throw this possibility out there, and she has to me, that maybe autistics advance how to rationalize, in other words, how this five-year-old can solve these complex math equations without prior exposure to the math, is that they're tapping into some external field, semantic field, as some people call them, information field.
- You and I were talking about the podcast Put Closer to Truth earlier, and a lot of his episodes, He speaks to people like Roger Penrose who say that mathematics seems to be the language of nature. That it took mathematics to create a universe. So the mathematics was around a long time before human beings came along to become aware of it or to understand it.
So somebody like that little kid who can, you know, solve cube roots of long numbers might just be tapped into the language of nature in a way which is beyond intellectualizing.
¶ The Power of Spiritual Practice
There's another guy I saw a video of who could sit there for eight hours and read out all the numbers of pi which are totally non-repetitive and there's no way he could memorize that much but he was able to tap in and just do that. Yeah and you can't explain it using traditional rules that we're taught. No you can't. Newtonian physics doesn't work, it doesn't apply. So what do we do? Research.
And we come up with alternative ideas that may be meaningful. It sounds plausible It's highly suggestive maybe but obviously you can't prove it So it turns a lot of people on who like these these ideas and it could be right Maybe there's an avatar that's playing a game and we're part of the computer, you know That's not my idea, but you have people ascribing to this I have a few questions that I want to be sure to ask you before we run out of time
A couple of them are from the audience. One is, here's Donna Rebidao, whom you know. You interviewed her at the Monroe Institute and she just wanted to say hi and ask how you're doing. Donna, it's a pleasure to have you chime in and thank you for contributing to the film. It's very thoughtful. Thank you. Here's one from Tanta Dadleni in Bombay and she wonders, "Do you believe that parallel universes exist?"
It's something I can't believe with certainty. I'm not one to argue with Stephen Hawking and his multiverse theory or Everett and all of that. They're branches to a string. Are there alternatives and possibilities that coexist with ours? Maybe at the same time and space, but maybe at a slightly different phase to ours that makes it imperceivable, but does exist? I don't know.
If you may be ascribed to that universe is constructed mathematically, I think you come to that kind of conclusion. That's how they did So it depends on your basis for your perspective given your discipline from where you come from I have no basis to come to any firm conclusion about that Sexy idea though. Yeah, and speaking of universes. I haven't read your UFO book, but I wanted to ask you while we still had time
What conclusions have reached about that? For instance, do you feel that the whole UFO phenomenon has a spiritual implication?
Sometimes spiritually oriented people think okay. These folks must be very highly evolved spiritually and they have a paternal attitude toward humanity and they're gonna prevent us from blowing ourselves up and they will Help us when we reach a sufficient level of maturity not to try to blow them up if they reveal themselves and so on What were your conclusions studying this whole thing enough to write a book about it?
Definitely reptilians from the Pleiades I thought those are the real handsome Aryan looking ones, you know, there's them too Billy Meyer would talked about Look, we could spend obviously hours discussing this and you open up a whole can of worms with me and many others on the topic UFOs are real people claim certainly that they interact with non-human entities associated with them I know many well-balanced people who tell me that these little four-foot creatures with the big heads big eyes
Come right through the walls in the bedroom and interact with them. I hear that many times You think they're coming from a galaxy far far away or do you think they actually are just other dimensional?
¶ Personal Transformation and Spreading the Word
They're just popping into our dimension without actually having to travel from someplace. There's no basis to know Based on the science I hear it's unlikely from elsewhere and more likely from here or interdimensional versus Extraterrestrial they've got some kind of wormhole or something Yeah, you know the trim virtual wormholes that Stephen Hawking getting here from there in a blink of an eye it kind of makes sense certainly
Express bus kind of thing, but the phenomenon obviously is valid the questions We don't know what it is. Do we have non-human entities, you know back-engineered craft? I don't want to go there. It may do. People say they're changed consciously. They certainly are when they interact with the phenomenon. We see this in a study that I participated in. That's a form of spirituality. It alters their level of curiosity, their level of truth-seeking.
They interact with the UFO, something I can't explain in the sky. They become, at some level, a truth-seeker. That's more of a spiritual mindset. I kind of went down that path when I saw that unusual two objects in the sky. So it had a spiritual impact on me as well as a scientific one, as you alluded to, looking at both, but the Kundalini was the cherry on top. I don't know what to make of the UFO phenomena.
I could say a lot of firm things about it, yet there's more questions obviously than answers. And we spoke to Gary Nolan about that at Stanford University. in the film as well, and we got some very interesting answers regarding the phenomenon. He's leading research in the field, for those of you who might not know, and I think, can you tie consciousness into that phenomena? At some level, yes, you can. I think you can, indeed.
You know, one conclusion I would reach to our whole conversation and also our respective endeavors in life, investigating all this stuff, is to quote, I forget who it was, maybe you'll know, he said, "The universe is not only curiouser than we can imagine, but curiouser than we can
imagine." There is so much going on that is so anomalous and so unusual by contrast with regular mundane so-called reality that people could suddenly be aware of it all, they'd be blown away, freaked out, so perhaps we're protected by our filters in not being aware of it all. It's just fascinating to consider that the realities that we swim in contain so much mystery and wonder and incredible possibilities that all of us, regardless of our level of
spiritual realization, are largely oblivious of. It's just interesting, isn't it? it is interesting. Not only are people not fully aware of it all, people who experience some of this aren't fully aware of it all, and people who experience it all become more curious about it, more spiritual over it, and try to make the most sense of it, I think. The more open you are, the more you want, the more
¶ Transformation in Beliefs and Experiences
answers you quest. It's almost a byproduct of spirituality. You truly do become a truth seeker and that's something that Einstein I think always
talked about. Never stop being curious about the world and put everything you have into it and that's spirituality and that's what he was certainly alluding to and that's where you come from and I'm applying that finally where I'm not curious about one specific thing in my academic discipline that nobody cares about except for a few people in that academic discipline which has little implication, maybe some, in that specific area of study, which doesn't compare in
comparison in every way to the essence of the issue that you just summarized. And that what I'm trying to get across, it's all the complex, it's way more important than what I've ever done. And I thought to experience these things, to come to that realization, as many people do, and I'm glad I did. And I'm glad for opportunity to share that with your audience and you too, Rick. And again, I want to thank you for all you've done to help many, many people better understand us all.
Rick Well, you know, we're all just playing different positions on the same team. One of us is on first base and others in the outfield, whatever. The team needs all the positions. I'm just reminded of the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna, the warrior, is talking to Krishna, who is supposed to be God incarnate. And he says, I want to know who you really are. I want to sort of see your true nature." And Krishna,
who's supposed to be God incarnate, says, "Sorry, you couldn't handle it. It's too much for a human being to actually experience." But Arjuna sort of pleads with him for a while, and finally Krishna says, "Okay, here you go," and shows it to him, and the rest of the chapter is Arjuna begging to have it taken away. It's indeed too much for a human being to actually experience the full magnitude of the intelligence that pervades and orchestrates the universe.
>> RICK It's overwhelming, let alone having one of these experiences that's very real, profound and vivid in the form of Kundalini, like you know. That's a game changer, a life changer from that moment forward. And it pales in comparison to understanding the bigger questions that we can't handle. That's right. Maybe we do need to filter it out. And maybe the brain does purposely impede that information from us so that we don't freak out in the process. Right.
And that's why spiritual development is a long-term enterprise. You're not gonna pop some pill and get enlightened next weekend, and if you could, you wouldn't be able to function. It's really a long-term thing where the mind, the nervous system, the personality, all aspects of our life have to be cultured and integrated and refined as we go along. And there are many instances of people sort of going a little bit too fast and becoming incapacitated in various ways.
Yes, and I'm not sure if this is a case in point, but how about people who microdose quite a bit or do a lot of psychedelics? Well, if they're doing micro, sometimes that's okay and it works out well, but macro can be... And you can get too much... ...alphobic and also be dangerous. Too much. Exactly. can create major psychological problems. People must, must be very cautious about that. I'm
¶ The Importance of Spiritual Development
not de-emphasizing the importance of it, nor its use. I've done it in the 60s in Central Park, Grateful Dead concert, and that's very different. I'm tempted now to try mushrooms. I know many people who do, and they say it's wonderful. It opens up their awareness. It gives them that level of spirituality that they were unable to attain beforehand. I don't know if that's putting the cart before the horse. I don't know if it should come
about naturally as opposed to chemically. I don't know if that's a false imagery, that's biologic in nature. So I don't know what they're believing in but I believe they're benefiting in some way because they say they are. But I know many people aren't and again those that aren't maybe aren't careful or under the right guidance to begin with and maybe under the right guidance you can be very successful in the right hands. And I was offered the opportunity to go to some
place for my film down in South America to film somebody on ayahuasca. You know, put a microphone to the camera while having somebody ingest the ayahuasca and following them around for a day and getting their reactions of that experience. Again, not a novel idea, but that's something that would be very
interesting to incorporate, especially their perspective of the event. We know it is a pronounced event, but it does have pronounced changes on people's psychosocial religiosity, whatever you want to call it. That alone is dicey, unless the person thinks it's beneficial. Should everybody start microdosing? You know, people on Wall Street do it all the time. Should I trust that person making the trade for me on Wall Street to be doing DMT?
To be picking it up from cow manure and saying, "Here, Bob, chew on this." I'm tempted. I've had the opportunity. Tempted.
But at seven years of age, I don't want to play around with brain chemistry, and I want to finish the film first Rick I have that attitude - it's like I don't want to play Russian roulette with my brain like you I did that in the 60s and it was an eye-opener, you know I realized whoa The main takeaway from my first experience with it was just to recognize that everyone sees the world so differently
I thought we all saw the same world and all sudden I'm seeing such a different world and I kind of realized I think it was Gandhi who said, you know, it's easier to wear shoes than to pave the earth with leather. I realized, oh, if I change my own perspective, that would be really significant. So I kind
of got onto that kick. But I think once you have that realization, perhaps through psychedelics, if that's how you have it, it's important to embark on a kind of a systematic path and not think that more and more and more psychedelics are going to do it for you, because generally speaking, that has not panned out to be true.
¶ Tapping into the Language of Nature
Yet some people would advocate for that. Yeah, but then look at their lives. How's it going for him? Right exactly By the way, my battery is running low. Oh, I should let you go. So let me wrap it up before your battery dies I've really enjoyed talking to you and listening to you in other interviews as I prepared for this Appreciate the work you're doing and I hope you keep it up I'm sure you will you're having fun with it and I appreciate all those who've been listening or watching and
and I hope you stay tuned for the next one. Any final thoughts? I just want to thank you for the opportunity to share what I did, for whatever it's worth. As I've said maybe too many times, thank you again for all you've contributed and for your guest's contributions. But again, let me just emphasize that the film is Consciousness Connection. The website is consciousnessfilm.info and please take a look at it and if you can provide any
support to it, and if not, we understand. Any questions, don't hesitate to email me at davisri57@yahoo.com, and my website is bobdavisspeaks.com. That's bobdavisspeaks.com. Okay, and I'll put all that stuff on your Bath Gap page, including your email address since you have just made it public. Great. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks, Bob. Thank you, everybody. Talk to you next time.
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Thank you.