Reincarnation Blues

talking about today. Reincarnation, which here in the Western world is kind of a slightly different animal than it is in the East, but it's but it's still an idea that you find pretty in worldviews around the world and uh and has a certain amount of uh, well, let's just say truthiness to it. To borrow word from Stephen Colbert. A lot of people find something in reincarnation that jives

with their worldview. Okay, I was thinking about this, and I was thinking that reincarnation, at least on a symbolic level, it couldn't help but work itself into the human psyche. Given that nature performs a sort of reincarnation at the molecular level every single day, right and at the most basic level, we are informed by nature in the physical world around us. And I was thinking about Berne Heinrich. He is the author from Life Everlasting, the Animal Way

of Death. He says, we come from life, and we are the conduit into other life. We come from and return to incomparably amazing plants and animals, even while we are alive, are wastes are recycled directly into beetles, grass and trees, which are further recycled into beef, butterflies, and onto flycatchers, finches and hawks, and back into grass and

on into deer, cows, goats, and us. And he even goes on to say that you could have a decaying elephant or an arctic poppies molecules which might have been released into the air the previous day, but they all came from plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. And he says all of life is linked through a physical exchange on the cellular level. So that is a that's a deep ancient trope being played out in the

drama of nature before our very eyes. So it makes sense that we would as humans look to that cyclical nature and and somehow involve it in our somewhat linear timelines that we have set out as humans. Yeah. In fact, that's one of the reasons that the Plato, the famous philosopher, looked around in the natural world and and and thought that the reincarnation jibe with what he was saying he saw. He saw cycles and opposites in nature as being one

of the the leading arguments for reincarnation. Like you say, you see these cycles all around you. And then if we were to try and imagine things, uh, the the unseen world, we can do attribute similar shapes and similar cycles to those energies as well. Yeah, and reincarnation And just to factrack a little bit too, immortality, it really does fulfill that um immortality narrative that is so important

for humans. It does three things. Helps to manage that terror we sometimes feel when we realize that our lives are ephemeral and fleeting. The second thing is it provides a blueprint for acceptable behavior, which we'll talk about more while on Earth. And three in extends that assurance of immortality that you live on in some way. Now, reincarnation goes by other names as well. You might know it as a transmigration of the soul or metal psychosis. Uh.

But the idea again is truly ancient. You look back to Africa, the birthplace of humanity, you'll find reincartercarnation traditions such as that of the West African vote in religion, and given the migrations of early Man that the next great homeland of the humanity is of course the Indian subcontinent. And that's where we see the most famous model of recurrent reincarnation emerge and come to dominate Eastern cultures. Uh So,

really you have to start with Hinduism. And just to give a quick refresher on Hinduism, it's the oldest of the dominant world religions and arguably the most difficult to summarize. Okay, It's it's roots stretch back a good five thousand years through human history, and along the way you find all of these. It's varied texts, poetic epics, different sets, different diversions. God's Goddess is religious rituals, and all of it comes into this. Uh, this, this form that is really difficult

to nail down. Hinduism is kind of a just a chasm that that that dives down through human history, a lot of ideas wrapped up in it. Yeah, at the at the very basic level, though, we're talking about something called some sorrow, which is a chain of birth and death linked by reincarnation, and controlling some sorrow is the

law of karma. So Hindus believe that all individuals accumulate karma over a given course of a lifetime, and then good actions create good karma and evil actions create negative karma. And by the way, we have a wonderful article by Sarah Dowdy called How Reincarnation Works and it goes a bit more into this. Yeah, and the wheel of Samsar is often used as a visual reminder of how of how this system works in Hinduism and Buddhism. We have a cool interactive version of that in the article about

Tibetan sky Burial on the website. But in essence, it's a big wheel, like a big pizza. It's gripped by a big monster uh generally called Yama, and Yama is the embodiment of impermanence and death, this big demon and he's he's holding this giant pizza chart that has a has these different states of being that a soul may travel through as it's reincarnated, and those include a human realm, the realm that we are in now. It includes an

animal realm. It includes lower realms where you'll see hungry ghosts, where you'll see raging demons as well. It's higher realms where you'll see demi gods and gods. It kind of reminds me of a board game like dice may land on you know, an angry god or or a creature. Yeah, it's kind of shoots and ladders, imagine it's really it is. It is shoots and ladders as a model of existence, except it's a game of shoots and ladders that never ends, all right, And even when a game of shoots and

ladders ends, it's a pretty tedious game to play. And that's sort of the whole point in Hinduism and Buddhism is that the game is tiresome. The game is just gonna be ups and downs just forever unless you stop playing it. And that's ultimately what what the goal of of Hinduism and Buddhism is. To free yourself from that, from that game altogether, to free yourself from the cycle,

uh the endless cycle of death. And rebirth and reincarnation into various forms, and that creates that blueprint of behavior for your time here on earth that we've talked about, which is so important to the immortality narrative. Yeah, we come back to this string of karma, this idea that that no matter what form you're in, there is something

there that that is immortal. There is this uh, this string, this thread that continues throughout it and you can just you know, think of it as the human soul, as some sort of soul energy. That's the general idea here. And it's uh, it's it's the piece on the board of shoots and ladders that's going up, that's going down, and eventually you want to remove from the board altogether. Now, in shoots and ladders, of course, it's just luck if you're going up or down. But in reincarnation, that's driven

by karma. Uh, there's the there is, of course a moral aspect to all of this. Um. How you act in this life depends on where you'll be in the next and the life after that and the life after that. Yeah, And this interpretation of reincarnation really varies widely depending on the philosophy or the religion In fact. In Native American culture,

it is a feature. Reincarnation is in it. It makes sense here if you ask me, because you really see that reincarnation is essential to the belief in the connectedness, the continuity, in the interdependence of all life. In some Native American cultures and for the Northern Arthur past candn a thought the soul. I think it's really interested interesting.

The soul is regarded as a dual entity. The soul is believed to remain in the after world and can be prayed to, and at the same time it exists in the human form of the reincarnate reincarnated individual also known as those made again. So you've got one foot here and the present and one foot in the past. Yes, reincarnation often sort of bleeds over into these other ideas

of say, for instance, the ancestor. Worship or or at least holding up the ancestor is an extremely important part of not only the past but the present, and in that you see some of these models of reincarnation are more of a family model of reincarnation. People are reincarnated within the bloodline, and of course that makes a lot of sense because we know how genetics work. We know how how genes are passed on from one generation to the next. So in a sense, there is something in

your grandfather that's living on in this bloodline. Now, on the same note, you also find uh mythic reincarnation, the idea that gods are reborn as kings and the other important you know, figures. And in this we see a

lot of cyclical time and archetypes. We've talked to a lot before about how when you look at this older model of time, before the linear time um, everything was a cycle and independent individual moments and even individuals were only important insofar as how they uh recaptured some sort of archetype from the past. Because in some ways these are delusions, right, So if you claim that a pharaoh is you are reincarnate of Pharaoh, then you are trying

to assume that Pharaoh's power. And I'm thinking about Sodom Hussein, who claimed to have been the reincarnation of a Babylonian king. And we see this, you know, not just in present day, but throughout history, people claiming to have the sort of powers of these um very important ancestors or historical figures throughout time. Yeah, and you always hear about the king

that somebody was in their past life. People tend not to focus on the uh, the you know, the the street bum or the or or the or some sort of a war criminal or anything of that nature, or does the common goatherd. But you know, that makes sense if you want to fasten your yourself to some you know, imagine figure in the past, you want to do something inspiring, I guess. But and that kind of falls into another

version of reincarnation. You find sort of, especially in the West, a kind of casual, feel good reincarnation where we just kind of just a quick path on the back to say, hey, maybe when I die, I'm gonna be reborn as an eagle. Maybe you don't die, maybe you're reincarnated as as this plant or this person. And it's just there's not even like any kind of real religion or world view or structure to the idea is just sort of a comforting

possible notion, a whimsical reincarnation. Yeah, but nothing could be further from the idea of karmic reincarnation that we've discussed so far. You know that, because this is serious business. This is about for the for the practitioner of Buddhism, or Hinduism. This is about where I'm going to land in the next life, avoiding some sort of hellish reincarnation and also eventually freeing myself from the cycle altogether. So it's not just a you know, a pad on the back.

It's it's considered serious business. That's right. It's very rich in rituals and steps are to be taken. It's not just as you say, the casual association with if I do this one good day, perhaps I will not be a cockroach in the next life. Yeah, I mean, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is all about the steps that one can take as this traveling soul, as the psychonaut, and the steps that your that the your survivors can take to help guide you through that gray area into

the next life. It's it's it's a dangerous voyage for the practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. And then there's one more version of reincarnation, one more take on it. That's uh, that that has a lot of Lusser to it, and that's kind of a metaphoric interpretation. Okay, this is the idea that that the idea that Buddhist reincarnation is not a literal model of rebirth through various forums and a karmic cycle, but rather a model for our moment to

moment reincarnation. And and I tend to really like this interpretation. It's the idea that instead of oh, if you leave a lead a peaceful human life, then maybe you'll have more peace in the next moment. Or if you have a sort of an out of controlled, lavish demi god life, uh, then your next life might see you cast down into the hells. But rather, what am I How do I

feel right now? Am I peaceful? Now? Well? Then that means in the next moment I may be peaceful as well if I am sort of if I'm on one end of the pendulum now, if I'm you know, angry, then maybe I'll swing back to something a little more reasonable in the next It's a about that moment to moment change in our our psyche and and in the way we're experiencing the world around us. I like that.

I like that sense that if you're tending your own garden at that very moment, then you're also converging on the all points of time past, present, in future, and that that tending of that garden now reaps its rewards metaphorically throughout this ripple of time. Yeah, Alan Watts put it really well. He said that, Okay, look at a flame. A flame is a process and not a thing. He said, said, every human being is also a process, just as a

flame is a conversion of wax into gas. Because who are you right the at any given moment, You're a different person than than who you were five minutes ago, a month ago, a year ago. We're perpetually changing where there We're just this this vast storm of ideas and memories and and uh and interpretations of the world around us, and so that that changes all the time. And we talked a little bit about that in the Problem of Immortality and as well as in our episodes on Hell,

like who who's judged when it comes to heaven? In hell? The person you are now the person you were when you die. It really gets problematic when you look at it. It gets problematic even when you look at it in terms of of crime and punishment here in the real world, like how what happens when you judge somebody for a crime they committed uh ten years ago? Is this the same person that committed that crime? I was thinking about

this the other day. I thought, you know, so much of life is about rutinization, about habits and about how you know, you do wake up and you do you feel maybe a little bit different from the person you were the day before. And the things that keep us the person that we are, or those uh cages of habit that we create around us, those cues that, oh, yeah, my name is Julie, I live in this house. These are the things that surround me. These are the associations

that I have in this world. If all of those cues fell away, would you be that same person? So so again, metaphoric interpretation of reincarnation is very much the idea that the person I am now is reincarnating into the person I'm going to be a second from now, and a second from from there, and and on and on through the course of your life. Let's take a quick break, and when we get back, where we're going to talk about a little bit more about ancestral reincarnation

is something called the persistence of personality. Reppy, all right, we're back, and indeed this is gonna be the segment of the episode where we get into a little more of the skeptical views of reincarnation and indeed what happens when science gets involved and science is involved. In fact, in two thou twelve, a five million dollar grant was awarded to you see, a University of California Riverside to study immortality, including reincarnation and resurrection by the John Templeton Foundation.

So that's really interesting and just a side note one of the things that they want to try to figure out our near death experiences because culturally, say, in the United States, it's very different from Japan because in the United States we have the little trope of you see a light at the end of the tunnel, whereas in Japan it's that people are seen tending a garden, huh, which plays into this idea of well, how much of it is just this mental construct that we play into.

Is there any sort of way that we can get to it scientifically and figure out if there's a basis to reincarnation. Yeah, because that that brings to mind episodes we've done about alien encounters and abduction experiences and ghosts, ghost encounters and any kind of paranormal experience one might have the the at the core of it there might be something similar, but a lot of it seems to be based on the cultural script you're bringing into the experience.

So you're experiencing sleep paralysis of very real condition. But then, what kind of myth do you lay on top of, what kind of religion do you lay on top of, what kind of uh, you know, cultural sci fi reference do you lay on top of it? To interpret the the this other worldly experience. Right, you're you're sleeping, you're in a dream, you're paralyzed, and you're starting to wake and your your brain is confused about what state to

be in. Maybe there's some sort of green light emanating from the hallway, you know, that becomes interpreted into, as you say, the cultural script that's put before us. Yeah, and so that's very much a part of the scientific analysis of reincarnation as well. Now, when we talk about studying reincarnation, obviously there's very little that science can do to study reincarnation. Reincarnation largely exists as an idea outside

of the observable universe, outside of of science. It's uh, it's like trying to scientifically prove the existence of God. It can't be done. It's not a provable thing. It's a matter of faith and worldview and all that. Uh So, it's the same thing with reincarnation. The studies that we look at tend to be based in interviews with children with their parents, rigorous note taking, and then trying to to compare different experiences in different accounts of of not

only this life but the life before. Yeah. Dr Ian Stevenson, an academic psychiatrist, led the study of reincarnation in the US until his death in two thousand and seven, and he founded the Division of Personality Studies under the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences. He conducted

thousands of interviews. As you say, he took rigorous notes, um, and his studies focused really on young children, usually between the ages of two and five, who had inexplicable phobias or detailed memories about a previous life as reported by the parent. Yeah, and these cases generally, generally they broke down about like this, like, here's the kid again, some sort of weird phobia. They're afraid of busses or something, you know, or they're suddenly talking about Ron all the time. Well,

who's wrong. There's no Ron in the immediate family. Why is Ron such a character in this three year old's life. And then you start to you start comparing notes, and you find out, oh, well, there's a family in the next town and uh and and this uh, this woman died and her husband's name was Ron. Or here's this uh, this case just like a few streets over where somebody was hit by a car. And so maybe that explains

the phobia. It's the idea that the soul has moved on from one body to another, and in doing so, has brought over at least some aspect of that previous personality enough to carry over a severe phobia or a severe or a or a significant attachment to another person. You know, we're doing our next podcast episode on the

illusion of continuity. And I just realized the overlap here, because if you have all of these details, and we already know that our brains are pattern recognition machines, it can't help but sees on these details and say, oh, yeah, four or five kilometers away, there was a girl who died in a rice patty when she was eight years old, And perhaps it's that girl's soul reincarnated into this other little girl who's having these very serious phobias of water

and drowning. Yeah, Stevenson studied about different cases over the course about four decades. He published several books and articles about it. Really, it's a it's an intimidating amount of information that he put together and and it's and it's all all of it is coming down to individual cases where they went out and analyzed that, they talked to

the parents, they talked to the child, and uh. At the end of it, though, you ultimately have this this huge, massive information that science largely rejects because again it's it's just based in it's it's more like a police case really than anything. It's more about about the just asking people when pairing accounts of the situation, rather than than any kind of actual scientific investigation. And we'll get to why that process has flawed in a moment. But I

wanted to mention someone named Jim Techer. He is a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia who really picked up where Stevenson left off and he and I believe this was an interview with PDS. He he said this about reincarnation. He said, some leading scientists in the past, like Max Plank, who's the father quantum theory, said that he viewed consciousness as fundamental and

that matter was derived from it. So in that case, it would mean that consciousness would not necessarily be dependent on a physical brain in order to survive, and could continue after the physical brain and after the body dies. In these cases it seems, at least on the face of it, that a consciousness has then become attached to a new brain and has shown up as past life memories.

And then he goes on to say, I think these cases can tr ribute to the body of evidence that consciousness, at least in some circumstances, can survive the death of the body, that life after death isn't necessarily just a fantasy or something to be considered on faith, but can be approached in an analytical way, and the idea can be judged on its own merits. That's pretty that's a heavy statement. That is that it goes right into the mind body problem that we discussed in some past episodes.

The idea that we have this physical brain and then we have this mind, and when we compare the two, they don't seem to match up, uh, you know, one to one. So we come into to all these various theories, these philosophical models for what the relationship is. Is the is the mind merely the shadow cast by the brain, or does the does the mind exist independently of the brain. And that's the case that Tucker is making here, the idea that that the mind doesn't need a physical brain

in order to exist. But perhaps uh is like this sort of psychic energy ghost that merely haunts and inhabits physical brains, like the physical brain is a little hotel room that nature has prepared for this visiting neugget of soul energy, if you will. The problem, of course, is just runs counter to Acam's razer. Right. This is not the simplest explanation, Right, You're building an increasingly elaborate explanation for the metaphysics of of an immortal soul. And it's fascinating,

it's it's it's it's very cool. I I really like the idea. But but yeah, you're creating something that's more complex than the than the immediate answer. And again, it's nothing you can prove, it's nothing that can be scientifically studied. It is ultimately Tucker is having to accept this as an article of personal faith and just like any other model that one might assume of what happens to an

immortal soul after death or before it. Yeah, I mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it's just not showing up. There's compelling the interesting evidence. I guess if you can call that with you know, those interviews. Um, but I believe that those interviews, only twenty of them have written

accounts by the parents immediately afterwards. Now what's the problem with that, Because because when you have only twenty cases where the parents wrote the record before the match was made, that means you only have twenty cases where the where the information was not yet corrupted by the match. And he discussed right to the fouible nature of memory, uh and our our tendency to to rewrite and reinterpret our memories in light of new evidence. UM. For instance, UH,

that the child is talking about an imaginary friend named Ron. Um. If if you are telling the investigator about Ron after you found out about the uh, the Ron whose wife died in a neighboring city, then that potentially colors the story that you give the the interrogator not to mention that child might have been watching parks and rec and then watching Ron, I do keep imagining Ron Swanson and all I do to the mustache hero of parks and rec Now, these ideas were explored a little bit more

in Mary Rich's Spook. She has a chapter on this, I believe the chapter is called You Again, and she goes to India, where, um, these sort of narratives, these reincarnation narratives are somewhat common, I mean, at least uh in comparison to the United States. And she says that by the time the researcher arrives on the scene, the family has usually found a likely candidate for the child's

former incarnation. Most Indian villagers accept reincarnation is fact, and word of a child remembering a past like travels quickly to neighboring villages. Yeah. So, on one hand, you have the pre existing cultural script for what is happening and

why the child is talking about Ron. And then by the time the investigator gets there, they've already begun to uh, to piece together the story to form their own answer of what's happening and UH and and where this particular soul has come from and UH, and that's just gonna color everything that they pass on to to the to the interrogator. Yeah, and even if it was written down, we know that memory is fallible, and I will tell

you just as completely anecdotal. But you know, I write down a lot of things that my daughter says, and even right that split second after she says that, I go and I grab a pen. I will write it down and then I will read it back to her and say did you say this? And she'll say, no, I said this because I have inadvertently rearranged from the words you know, or in it. And when you once you do that, you know that you have changed the context of a sentence. So that's in a split second.

Can you imagine trying to get that trickle of babble that comes out of toddler's and makes sense of it, you know, five minutes after the fact. Yeah, Like, uh, my son will suddenly start off singing this little song and he's kind of going a mingo, mingo, mingo, But we eventually started interpreting it is mango mango, and now

it's the mango mango song. Uh, which is all pointless, but again where you just instantly start forming, taking what they've given you and forming it into something that makes a little more narrative sense and as Dr Kiri S. Robert, that's the director of International Center for Survival and Reincarnation Researches that Mary Roach spoke with in in her research for Spook, that the parents will latch onto almost anything, like any little little bit. Again, we we we crave

synchronicity in life. We look for our pattern recognizing brains, look for those little uh you know, one or two uh bits of light that match up, not all the other ones that are out of place. So, you know, the mention of the name ron, the mention of fear of automobiles. Whatever, they'll take that, they'll run with it. They'll shape that without even really having without having any kind of mischief in mind. Uh, They'll they'll form the uh,

they'll form a story that fits everything. They'll they'll edit it into a shape that that works with reincarnation. Which makes sense again if culturally this is a part of the fabric. And if your kid is is reincarnated, does that make your child special? You know? Is this this something that in a family that feels very special. Oh, my child is reincarnated, he or she is an old soul. Yeah,

does that give you a higher position among your neighbors. Well, I mean, as apparent, one of the things you inevitably fear and think about is what happens if my child dies? Right, and you're by by strengthening their bond to a a life before this one, you're of course also strengthening the existence of a life beyond this one. So you're kind

of answering one question with another one. You know. You know, that's kind of interesting because that terror management system that we talked about in the immortality problem, really I think writes that those ages between two and five, at least it did for me as a parent, where you get to age two with your child and you've gotten past that.

I have a baby, and I'm kind of you've got sleep deprivation, but now I have a toddler, and it almost feels like you have to create an even bigger swaddle around your your child to protect him or her. And this idea that it's not just getting your child to age two and aged five and age seven, you're gonna be worrying about your child age forty, age eighty, especially if you're I don't know, a hundred and twenty at that point um for the rest of your life.

So I wonder if psychologically it's fertile ground those ages two to five to ascribe the sort of reincarnation narrative to a child in that culture. Yeah. And the the other big thing too, is, of course that you know I've already alluded to this, but young children age two to five here in the in the in the in the West, tend to have a proclivity for imaginary friends.

We did a whole episode on imaginary ends in the past, and I'll try and push that back up back out on social media and on the website when this episode publishes. But kids are already bringing in unreal personalities into their imaginative play. They're bringing in ron or they're bringing in Uh didn't you said that your daughter had an image?

I stopped counting after eight. But she has a couple now, twins that terrorize the house, um that show up, and then one that she dropped about six months ago, and her name was Delta, and she could see her in the mirror. And Delta lived in an abandoned house and on our street, and so that of course would kind of freak me out sometimes. But then I realized that our faucet is a Delta faucet um, and that was

the mirror that she was looking in. You know, she was looking at the faucet was she was looking at the mirror. So anyway, again you can it's very easy for us to start to throw some of the stuff together and create these narratives. Yeah, and as Dr Rowitt points out, in any roaches spook uh in the West were likely to just look at these cases, to hear about Ron or delta and and just see it for what it is, right to say, oh, it's just imaginary

friend and dismiss it. But in the East, where there is especially in India, where there's this cultural script of reincarnation, parents are more likely to not only say, hey, that's reincarnation, clearly,

that's a sign of a past life. They're likely to encourage it to to nurture the child's story into something that that fits the reincarnation script even more, to say, oh, did you say Ron or do you mean Wren, because we know a wren died, a wren had a wife die in then the neighboring city or what have you. You know, they'll they'll begin to mold it, begin to

edit it again into something that fits the story. Mingo mingo becomes mango mango because they have mango mango, and then it becomes mango for him, exactly right, the mingo mango. So these are just all examples of the problems with any kind of quote unquote scientific exploration of reincarnation. There's nothing about it you can actually prove in terms of the transfer of soul energy from one being to another. And when it comes to these interviews with parents and children,

they're they're they're just flawed at several different levels. Yeah, information gathering, the perception of that information. UM. I wanted to go back real quickly to molecular reincarnation because Enrico Uvo, who was writing for Science to point oh, has a really interesting bit to say about it, just to kind of close out some of our thoughts on this. He says, we sit to eat molecules that were once part of fish and plants. We become the reincarnation of transient beings.

When we drink ions and uncharged atoms, we borrow them and enrich them with nitrogenous compounds. Rivers then flow in ocean's ebb with parts of ourselves that will soon become parts of others. As thinking animals are molecules orchestrate into neurons and neurotransmitters. Strongly interwoven assemblies of neurons known as ideas, occasionally emerge. The best of these reincarnate themselves in the minds of others, and like the molecules that make them possible,

they outlive the temporary shelters of individuals. Death is simply the final and largest repayment of a molecular debt, but a fair amount of caring and weaving can be done before then. Yeah, there you go. Or you know, another way to put it is the energy cannot be created or destroyed, and mass, uh, you and me included are just energy and energy transposed into matter, so on, you know,

on varying levels. Reincarnation makes a lot of sense and and feels very solid and and is something that appeals to us because we see these cycles in the world around us. But when you shine the light of scientific inquiry on it, most of of of the structure doesn't show up, and what does show up is highly suspect.

And I think it's a homage to how incredibly artistic our brains are and what great storytellers we are, and how we survive in this world which is so complex and through so many things at us um that we can weave these sort of narratives together which are actually kind of lovely and give us a lot of solace. Yeah. Yeah, I think reincarnation is is a beautiful idea, and I do want to stress even though we're saying, you know, when when you shine science on it, mostly nothing shows up.

I don't want anyone to take that the wrong way because I think an idea like reincarnation, like like various metaphysical ideas about you know, what happens to the soul after death, you don't need science to prove that to you. That that should be a matter, in my opinion, that should be a matter uh, completely outside of science. Let's

science prove the things that science can prove. Let science be your guide for the observable universe in the natural world, and in terms of anything that exists outside of that natural world for you, anything else in that worldview U you know, let that sort of float free. Indeed, all right, well, speaking of floating, if you want to float us any ideas or comments about this podcast or any other podcasts that we've done or podcast that we may do in

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