Welcome to Duality Check, the podcast where two brothers embark on a journey through the
realms of scientific inquiry, the mysteries of the past, and the uncharted realms of spirituality.
Join us as we explore the wonders of our world and beyond, all while embracing the roles of
curious bystanders rather than experts. Together we'll unravel the tapestry of existence, blending
the dichotomies of knowledge and wonder. Get ready to question, ponder, and delve into the
dualities that shape our understanding of reality. on Duality Check. I'm Drew. And I'm Dean. And
welcome to episode 24. I think this is the last part of our reincarnation. The life before
life book coverage. Our first reincarnation little series. Yeah. Which seems like reincarnation
is gonna come up in a lot of other things too. It will reincarnate in our podcast multiple
times. For sure. It's gonna. And there's just a lot of, there's a lot of connections between
a lot of stuff we've been going over too, like the secret history of the world and, you know,
a lot of the different theories of the past and, you know, archeology and stuff that they're
finding. So it's all kind of cool. And reincarnation is just another aspect of it. The unknown knowledge
of our past. I think the topic is important not just because of reincarnation's sake, but
because of the implications it has. If reincarnation is real, then it essentially proves that there
is some sort of soul. Right. Or some continuation after death. It lends credence to all the other...
It lends to a lot of the different theories of religious theories and spiritual... ideas
throughout the world. Like, yeah, it kind of reaches all of it. There's a, it's an interesting
theory. I'm gonna show my nerd off here. But there's an interesting theory in the MCU, if
you follow all the MCU stuff, about how the afterlife works. Because throughout multiple
different MCU films, you've seen different takes on the afterlife.
Black Panther, you see him with a tree, with his ancestors and the Panthers, right? With
Thanos, after he snaps, he goes into a totally different looking realm. Kind of like a purgatory
little thing. You see his young Gamora. In Moon Knight, you see the Egyptian Duat. And I think
there's even more than that. But in... Like the people who are like theorizing about it
are essentially saying that like probably What is going on is that it just depends on what
your beliefs are as a human and like you will essentially have the afterlife Experience that
you kind of culturally expect sure to have So if you're raised a christian and you sort of
an expect a heaven in hell like maybe that kind of sets you up for that and if you're someone
who believes in Buddhism and just reincarnation, like maybe those are why some of those people
reincarnate right away. Right. And if you believe in that, then you believe that there's a soul
outside and that there's some sort of like soul purpose that keeps us incarnating to learn
something to grow, right? And even after you die, you know, here in this physical world
and you're going on to whatever middle place there is, that soul is not there. You're not
that yet. So even after you die, there's like there's still more to journey and learn. Like
your soul purpose is still outside of that and it's all part of a journey where in the reincarnation
cycle is part of that. Like you probably do other things. Like there might be a whole different
type of existence and time, you know, you could still pop back in and reincarnate at a certain
time and you could have lived however long in this middle realm unless like in the stories
we talk about, A lot of them are pretty close to when things happened. But also those are
traumatic cases a lot of times. Like you said, the average is like, I think you said, what,
18 months or so? Yeah, so that's pretty quick. Yeah. But some of them are longer. A lot of
those are like where they had some kind of quick instant out of the norm type of death, not
like dying on their deathbed or in their 80s or whatever. Usually it's a short life or something.
That answer. Or just abrupt. Abrupt, yeah. So maybe that has something to do with how quick
it happens or the turnaround might be. Could be. Or it's just their connection to their
family or whatever.
So how do you want to start this one? Well, let's, I guess, start off with some of the.
Well, should we start with some of the random things we brought or maybe just cover as much
of the book as possible? And if we get through it, then we can fill the rest with that. Yeah,
we can start a segment with something, too. We'll watch that later. Cool, let's get into
it. This is Reincarnation, Part 5. Heck yeah. OK, so I'm trying to recall exactly where we
left off. And for anybody who maybe clicked on this video before they went to another video,
even though they should stop this video and go back to the first reincarnation episode,
then come back. What book is this again? What's the name of this book? This is called Life
Before Life by Jimmie Tucker, MD. Gotcha. So we're in a chapter now, chapter nine called
Opposing Points of View. And he's talking. about the materialist view.
He spends some time on that. And he kind of argues it a bit. And then he goes into another
section called Other Pieces of Evidence.
And I think we went over this first little paragraph that I have highlighted, but why don't we start
there as a refresher and then continue. Okay. So he says. Does evidence exist to support
the idea of consciousness continuing after a patient dies? One area of research into this
question is the field of near-death experiences. Yeah, we did talk about this. Many people who
survive an incident in which they came very close to death or are clinically dead for a
short period of time report experiences that they had during that time. These often involve
an impression of leaving their bodies and witnessing events from above. than going to another realm
where they meet deceased relatives or religious beings. Much of this is subjective of course
and can't be proven, but some people have reported hearing and seeing events take place below
them during the near-death experience. that were later verified to have happened. One of
these, Pam Reynolds, accurately described medical equipment that was not visible while she was
awake and a conversation that took place in the operating room while she was unconscious
during surgery for a brain aneurysm in which her body was cooled to 60 degrees, her heart
was stopped, and the blood was drained from her body. Holy shit. In another example, Dr.
Bruce Grayson here at the University of Virginia investigated the report of a man named Al Sullivan
about his experience during an emergency coronary bypass operation. He said that when he looked
down on the scene during his near-death experience, he saw his surgeon flapping his elbows. The
surgeon and Mr. Sullivan's cardiologist confirmed to Dr. Grayson that the surgeon does have the
unusual habit of flapping his elbows after scrubbing in for surgery. So, it is possible to... sort
of test the near-death experiences as well to see if there's verifiable information. Yeah.
So one of the books in my queue is on near-death experiences, so look forward to that. Yeah,
that'll be a fun little continuation of these ideas. So then he goes on and he starts talking
about mediums.
Like... Mediums like yeah like psychic. No, it's okay
As far as what, like being able to actually tell, like give you some kind of reading into
your past lives? I'll read some of this then. Research with mediums, individuals who claim
to communicate with the dead also began in the late 1800s, though some mediums have either
been exposed as frauds or have been found to give no information that they couldn't have
inferred through normal means. Some gifted individuals who've been carefully studied have been able
to demonstrate specific and personal knowledge about sitters, those who come to them for readings,
and their deceased loved ones. I cannot speak today. One such medium, Mrs. Lenore Piper,
was first studied by William James, the early American psychologist in the 1880s. She was
also taken to England and studied by the Society for Psychical Research. Investigators went
to great lengths to guard against fraud by using such measures as having Detectives follower
for weeks to make sure she was not trying to find out information about the potential sitters
Huh in that context she produced intimate material in remarkable detail about the strangers who
came for readings Mrs. Osborne Leonard a British museum a British medium I read that as museum.
I was like museumist. Yeah A British medium in the early 20th century was similarly studied
and proved to be similarly impressive. She demonstrated a particular ability to provide information
that was unknown to sitters at the time and was later verified to be accurate. Hmm. In
recent times mediumship has practically become a cottage industry with a number of mediums
becoming television personalities. While this new group has hasn't been investigated with
the intensity that Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard We have some, some have participated in recent
studies, and other studies are ongoing. So that research is underway as the writing of the
book. So we need a new generation of people who are willing to test these people. But he's
also talking about, kind of the whole point here is trying to prove that like consciousness.
has an effect on the physical body and that consciousness somehow exists outside of the
physical body and can gather information about the world without the physical body being involved.
Right. So earlier in this, he's also talking about things like... people being able to have
health effects on each other through meditation and prayer. He's talking about Dean Radin's
research with random number generators. Okay. Have you heard about that research? No. Okay.
There's this guy, Dean Radin, who I believe I first saw in the... You remember What the
Bleep? Oh, yeah. Do you know? He was in there. He works for, or he's at the Institute for
Noetic Sciences. They're like a. almost like a counter science institution in the sense
that like they're like a renegade science institution like they fund research. Gotcha. They're not
pulling for that are not fully understood by science or accepted to even be possible. So
they research that stuff. One of the things they research is random number generators.
And so there's this phenomenon that he's been able to document in his research where if you
People like meditating or praying or like certain big world events can cause random number generators
to be less random. And they can actually document that with the statistics that the random number
generators push out. That's interesting. So just thought, just things like prayer can actually
change how often... you know, a random number generator goes heads or tails or whatever.
Whatever random numbers. It throws it off enough to be more or less than 50%. It throws it off
to change the, yeah, the standard statistics. Yeah. Wow. So, and it's unexplained why that's
the case. Are they focusing on it? Um, or are they just talking about random prayer and random
thought? I don't have a fill in details. I don't know if they're getting people to focus on
changing the random number generator or if it's other things. Or if they're just seeing a correlation
based on area and population, that would be weird. There's some big world events, big things,
like 9-11 type scale things where it causes random number generators to not be so random
as well. which is weird and not obvious why that should be the case. Anyway, we should
look into his stuff because I've never actually really followed up in detail. Somehow they're
attached. I've just heard people reference his work multiple times. And obviously, I saw his
little snippets on What the Bleep, but I'd like to follow up on that lead as well. Yeah, I'll
have to familiarize myself with it. Yeah, so he's talking about all this stuff, Most of
this is not, it's just flat out rejected by mainstream science, but like an open-minded,
like honest scientist will say, we don't know the answer to a lot of these things. Right.
Just straight up. He's bringing all this up to show mysteries, mysteries. Give me answers
or don't deny the proof we do. All these things kind of point to consciousness. Yeah. Having
a different role than we normally think. Anyway, so he brings all that up to then go into this
section. where he says, each of these fields has weaknesses along with strengths. But when
you consider them as a group, you may wonder why mainstream science has ignored all the
evidence that this research has produced. Science is very conservative and its stability rests
on the idea that new understandings of the world must fit with the previous knowledge about
it. Biologist E.O. Wilson has used the term consilience to describe this. the jumping together
of knowledge when facts and theories from different areas link and form a common foundation of
knowledge. As he says, the explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those
that can be connected and proved consistent with one another. Do you see what he's saying
there? So, conciliance is the principle that if I am doing some sort of independent scientific
research and I... show evidence for a phenomena, right? If I can't link that phenomena into
the existing body of scientific knowledge, if it doesn't connect into it, then it's less
likely to be accepted. So it's not conciliant with our body of knowledge. With their box.
Right. With the box that they have themselves in. Though such a view is undoubtedly true,
it can lead mainstream science to favor strongly the status quo for as long as possible. So
you're requiring conciliance. So here's the problem with conciliance is, when someone comes
along with an earth shattering, you know, like a real big breakthrough, it will not be conciliant
because it will undermine a bunch of other scientific phenomena that's out there. Like when Einstein
came up with, you know, his stuff, a lot of science had to be, you know, redone to fit
with Einstein. Yeah, okay. Or even like Tesla stuff too, like Tesla would have taken down
all the... all the major corporations that were doing all the major things for major projects.
So Tesla wasn't conciliant and he got rejected, right? All of his stuff got pushed away. Hydrogen
car guy. This stuff got picked up from it. Obviously we got AC power from him and a bunch of other
stuff. But then the hydrogen car guy and all these other inventors that claim to have. All
this free, zero point energy stuff. If you come up with a way to make a car run off of water
and you don't have a theoretical framework to connect that to our modern materialistic scientific
state of the art worldview, then it's not conciliant. Because modern science says that's not possible
to our best understanding. Who cares if your experiment shows that it works and you have
it built and you can drive it. We don't have theory to connect to it so it's not conciliant.
One of those things has to go. And science is very conservative. So the last thing that they
want to do is throw out their previous theories. Especially because everything that they've
been doing is hinged on a lot of these major sticking points that they're so rigid on, you
know? Mm-hmm. The history of The history of the field is filled with unfortunate examples
in which mainstream science turned its back on large amounts of evidence that challenged
conventional wisdom. These go back at least as far as Galileo, who had to go before the
Inquisition in 1633 for advocating the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Other
particularly infamous examples include the failure of scientists to recognize the existence of
meteorites. despite reports by farmers of rocks falling from the sky into their fields, scientists
considered such an idea to be ridiculous. How could stones fall from the sky when there are
no stones in the sky? Then there was poor. Have you heard that story? I have, yeah, actually.
Yeah. I don't remember where I heard it, but it was pretty recent that I heard it. So that's
really similar to, like, UFO phenomena, right? Yeah. all over the world are having these sightings
of meteors falling into their fields. They're telling scientists, and scientists are like,
you guys, there's no rocks in the sky. Science gives us no reason to believe there's rocks
in the sky. So obviously, you're wrong. Right? So that's when something isn't conciliant,
then one thing or the other has to give. You either have to be open-minded and think, our
scientific theory may need to adjust, may need to change. Which never happened. Well, I wouldn't
say never, but it happens very little. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Then there was poor Ignaz Semmelweis, an obstetrician in the 1800s, who died in a
mental institution at the age of 47 after he was vilified for producing data that showed
that death rates during childbirth dropped significantly if doctors washed their hands before examining
patients. Yeah. Not conciliant. We don't have germ theory yet, so you're telling us to wash
our hands and you're inconveniencing us. We want to deliver babies without washing hands.
It's crazy. So crazy. In the 20th century, Alfred Wenger's idea of continental drift was initially
ridiculed despite considerable evidence to support it. Because as one geologist put it, if we
were to believe Wagner's hypothesis, We must forget everything which has been learned in
the last 70 years and start all over again. His theory languished for decades before it
came the premise of the currently accepted idea of plate tectonics. Mainstream science, of
course, has rightly rejected many kooky ideas. Determining which ideas should be considered
and which should be rejected can be difficult. The conservative nature of science has been
its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The basic understanding of the world tends
to change at a pace that is almost as slow as continental drift. But the reluctance to accept
new ideas too readily keeps that understanding from bouncing back and forth haphazardly. The
need for conciliance, the ability of new knowledge to be woven into the fabric of current understanding
helps to filter out erroneous beliefs. but it can also keep new insights from being accepted.
Yeah, it's like just a double-edged sword that they weren't either, like it could be that
they just didn't think that it would get to a point where they were rejecting good ideas.
And then their, I don't know, egos got the best of them over the time. And they were like,
well, now we can reject anything that is gonna undermine my life's work or whatever. Yeah.
I mean, imagine you're a geologist when someone comes up with the idea of plate tectonics and
you're, you've got whatever old theories. Yeah. Like the idea of taking something that does
have evidence but requires redoing 70 years worth of work is pretty daunting. Right. And
so. And they're only human. Yeah, and he has a point that like, conciliance is a feature
of science too, right? Yeah, it definitely has its pros. It's putting people with some whackadoo
theories out there. You don't necessarily need to let in everything, but you need to be careful
not to just get rid of everything because it's inconvenient, or you don't have the funding,
or you don't have the time, or whatever it might be in your head. Yeah. You know? But now it's
like groups of people, so you get group think a lot. Yeah, I think part of the problem of
conciliance comes from the idea, or maybe it comes from like impatience, you know? Like,
it's being unwilling to just say, I don't know. Yeah, right. Or, you know, like... That's possible.
I don't know. Yeah. Well, let's fund some more research and figure it out. Let's find out.
Once we have a good understanding, then we'll publish something on it. You would hope that
if something gets presented to science that has enough work and evidence behind it that
is plausible but isn't conciliant, you would hope that the way of handling it is to fund
further research to then figure out. whether or not it is true. Something that doesn't fit
but has evidence should be a reason to actually fund more research instead of to defund people.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the downfalls of society, too. It's like you have different
levels and different people have different, you know, like a lot of these funding sources
are, you know. Ian Stevenson. His. funding came from a private donor. Oh really? Who funded
him to the tune of millions of dollars back in the day too, which is pretty good money.
Oh wow. And then he passed and he thought he was going to lose his funding, but it turned
out in his estate he left all that funding. But as soon as the dude passed, the university
started threatening to shut down his reincarnation research. But when the funding came back through.
then yeah, he was able to set up his own institution and all that. But had it not been for some
independently wealthy person funding reincarnation research at the university, the university
wasn't gonna fund it. They would have had to say no to all that money because he only wanted
that money to go towards reincarnation. So if the university wanted that money, it had to
be used for that. All right. So the funding continued, that's good. Yeah.
The question- Hold on, sorry. It's just some rich person who's like reincarnated and maybe
it's like a reincarnated person who like remembers. And then you're just like every life that come
back, like I'm just gonna- Just keep pushing it forward. Yep. Yeah. That's funny.
The question for us is whether the idea of reincarnation could ever be conciliant with what we know.
or think we know, about the world in general. One problem is that we do not have an adequate
theory to explain how reincarnation might work. We only have the outlines of a theory, based
on the notion that consciousness is not confined to the brain. The consciousness in a particular
individual continues to exist after that person dies and then can attach itself to a developing
fetus, bringing memories, emotions, and even traumas with it. Those such a concept... conflicts
with a materialistic view of the world. When we consider the evidence for a separate and
surviving consciousness, I've described along with recent ideas put forth by physicists,
we can see that a blanket statement that anything that conflicts with materialist view of the
universe must be false. We can see that a blanket statement that anything that conflicts with
the materialist view of the universe must be false risks becoming considered one day as
short-sighted as the past rejections by mainstream science of phenomena such as meteorites do
now The field of quantum mechanics may provide a model for how a world of consciousness Could
become conciliant with our knowledge the world of The universe's smallest particles has rules
that are very different from the larger world that is made up of those particles, leading
scientists to speak of quantum weirdness, but the field of quantum mechanics has been accepted
alongside our understandings of the larger universe. Similarly, the rules of the world of consciousness
may be very different from the rules of the material universe, but this would not preclude
its acceptance as part of the universe as a whole. we will need to understand more about
consciousness before most mainstream scientists would accept reincarnation. But the positions
of well-respected scientists suggest that conciliance might one day be possible. So that's kind of
the overarching goal is to. slowly and patiently continue to build and mount evidence, hoping
that it will lead to information that will help us make it conciliate with our current worldviews.
But if our current worldviews need to change, it can't be conciliate. I was gonna say, I
would think that our worldviews would probably change, then it would be kind of like grandfathered
in as being part of like an overall like. awakening to the way the world is actually working. Yeah.
You know? Yeah. So the gradualness of that would, I mean, I think things would shift to the point
where there is a point where people are just like, hey, let's revisit reincarnation now
that we have all this other understanding or whatever. Yeah. I don't think reincarnation
is going to be the sticking point that's going to push us over into like, you know? I think
there's other things that could be discovered about our humanity that could. Yeah. I mean.
We're barking up a number of trees that all tie to the idea of consciousness, right? So
we got reincarnation and near-death experiences. We got religion and comparative mythology.
Past life regressions. We got past life regressions. We got the whole field of AI and trying to
make AI conscious has big implications on what consciousness even is, how it might work. Yeah,
I mean, if we figure out how to make artificial intelligence, maybe that's the point that we
understand our own consciousness. Yeah. But you can see a world where, like, everyone sticks
stubbornly to the materialist view and they keep doing this AI research in the materialist
view. And like, end up spending so much time trying to crack the idea of making it conscious
never to be able to succeed, you know? Yeah. But the other fields, too, is like... like
Neuralink, cloning. All of these things have implications on consciousness and we'll have
something to say about whether or not the conscious aspect of us is the same as the physical aspect
of us or is generated by it. Well, and that reminds me, we're right at our first break,
but I wanna talk about Joe Rogan's episode with Rizwan. Oh yeah, let's do that when we get
back here. Cool, we'll be right back.
Bye!
you
Welcome back to Duality Check. Yay, yay, yay. Dude, I went and saw Jacob Collier last night.
Have you seen any of his stuff? No, I haven't. Oh, my god. I will be showing Drew some Jacob
Collier during the next break. For any of you who haven't seen him, he is amazing. And you
should check out. First thing I'd recommend checking out, like my favorite thing he's got
out right now is a song called Little Blue. But specifically the Mahogany Sessions, yeah
right there. That is incredible. What was it? His? So he's a musician. He's one of these
freaking music prodigies. Both of his parents have spent their whole life as professional
musicians. His mom's like a first chair freaking violinist who teaches violin. And they're like
super. I don't know. Anyway, he just grew up immersed in music. Yeah, they just got like
a multi-talented. You know how kids who grow up in multilingual households pick up multiple
languages just like nothing? Easy, yeah. Essentially music was that for him, was his second language
that he just grew up with. And he's got perfect pitch hearing. He's got, he's contributed to
music theory, like new ideas that people haven't. How old is he? He's like, he's pretty young.
He's maybe 26 or something right now. Wow. But he's already got six Grammys. He's ridiculous.
Herbie Hancock kicks it with him and talks music theory, speaks him up highly. He's like, he's
got like access to all the greats. Even Hans Zimmer, you know, like the famous composer.
He's like, he's like Jacob Collier can do stuff I don't even understand. Yeah, he's nuts. I
have to give this a listen now. Yeah, so he's been doing this thing for the last couple of
years that he discovered. like experimenting around at his shows, like with crowd participation,
where he gets people to sing a note and then he'll get like different sections of the crowd,
like the center, he'll set them with a note, he'll set the left with a different note and
the right with a different note and he'll direct them up and down. Yeah, yeah. And he'll like
sing and harmonize with them. I've seen that. Yeah. I didn't know who it was or what it was,
but I watched the whole video and I was like, oh cool. And I was just scrolling through,
you know. That's why it looked a little. Looks like it's played there on your YouTube, that
one, little blue. Oh yeah, yeah. That's the one. It's incredible. He's nuts. I have. So
I do know this, okay. I just didn't know I knew. Yeah, so we saw him last night. And the whole
time, like ahead of time. Where'd you guys go for that? We went to Bill Graham's Civic Auditorium
in San Francisco. Oh, okay. And Kimbera opened for him and she's amazing too, so. It's super
cool. That's sick. Who'd you go with? I went with John and TJ and D-Trix Dom. Came out.
That's sick. Came out. Sick. He's also a huge Jacob fan. Yeah. Watching him direct those
choirs like that, in this one, it's easy to look like you might think these are professional
musicians, actual professional choir. Right. These are just. These are people he just put
out a call to on social media and they just showed up for the day. So I'm sure obviously
some of them probably have like choir experience and stuff, but like all of them, their first
time experiencing the song was that day and he coached them through like learning the chorus
and then he just riffed off of the orchestra part. It's amazing. He's also got this freaking
five string guitar that he got custom made by Taylor. Because he's like, I only have five
fingers. Why do I want six strings? But he's also got his own unique tuning for it and everything.
Wow, so it's not even a traditional guitar. It's a six string neck with five strings on
it. So he's actually got more space on it. So he can do longer bends and stuff. He's got
more space to work with on the fretboard. Dude, it's so cool. Highly recommend. But yeah, start
with the little blue mahogany sessions. Check that out, see if you like it. If you do, dive
into his stuff, because it's amazing. Hell yeah, I know I am. So that was a fun night last night.
I didn't get a lot of sleep, though. Well, you're not getting any sleep tonight, unless you can
sleep in tomorrow. Right.
All right, let me finish off this section, and then we'll go into the clip that you brought.
All right. So this is falling off right from the last bit, but it's a new section called
Unknown Mechanisms. He says, an argument along lines similar to the materialist one is that
we should not consider reincarnation as a possibility because we do not know of a mechanism that
could explain it. We do not know how a consciousness might how it could affect a developing fetus
and so on. The weakness of this argument is fairly obvious on the face of it, but even
more so when we consider it in other contexts. We are fortunate that the field of medicine
has not waited for mechanisms to be uncovered before taking advantage of effective treatments,
since physicians have successfully used numerous medications before knowing their mechanism
of action. The mechanism of gravity was a complete mystery at the time that Isaac Newton proposed
the concept but people accepted its existence nonetheless. We did not have a mechanism to
explain it until Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity that gravity is
the warping of space and time. This case demonstrates that even arguing that no mechanism is conceivable
is not enough to reject an idea since the warping of space and time was certainly not or was
certainly an inconceivable idea when Newton proposed the concept of gravity. Unless we
are willing to say that we know that no mechanism is even possible, we should not dismiss a concept
simply because we don't know its mechanism. Yeah. And I super agree with that. Should we
play that video that you brought us? Yeah. This is Rizwan Virk on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Yeah. Episode 21 to 51. Yeah, this guy, Dean kind of talked about it on the previous podcast
and a little bit of his background. He kind of does his own little introduction in this
clip. But his theory. is still in progress, you could tell. He's still working it, and
he's still playing with new ideas because he's open-minded, and he is investigating this to
the best of his ability. Right, but his theory is essentially a, like a simu- I would call
it, like, almost a variation on simulation theory. It's like a video game version of simulation
theory where it's specifically designed like we design video games because of his background,
he's able to see it. And- And he kind of uses the metaphor of video games for all of his
ideas. He uses it as a useful metaphor. But he doesn't necessarily think it is a video
game, per se. It's just a really good metaphor for kind of what he's talking about. Yeah,
and it honestly sounds like it's like a reincarnation thing, too. Imagine the ability. If you're
actually outside. Like when you play a video game, and you freaking lose a life, and you
start over. Right. But then. the ability to have your character themselves be able to remember
their previous... Well, you as the person in control of the video game who's piloting the
controller, you are the quote unquote soul and the avatar in your game would be the... The
analogy would be the physical body here in this world, right? No, yeah. So when that body dies...
You as the player don't die. And you can start a new game. You can boot up a new game in a
whole new universe and go from playing Call of Duty to playing Harry Potter. You know,
like maybe you can incarnate into a different one of the multiverses, you know? I guess my
point is like connecting it to this topic, the reincarnation on this, on the evidence that
they're presenting. And like, it's just the idea of like... if this is like a video game
and you're, and that's the type of reincarnation like,
then like what's the mechanism for like remembering? And like, like if the, if the idea outside
of this is that you're a player who's just sitting there playing games, opening programs, or is
it more of like, there's like a sole purpose? that's like outside of all the different types
of existence you can be plugged into. And when you die, you go into a void where you can pick
and choose the different types of existences. I mean, you gotta remember to keep the context,
right? So let's zoom back in on the video game. We're playing Call of Duty. That soldier doesn't
know anything about Drew Glover's life, right? drew Glover's existence outside of Call of
Duty. All it knows is what's happening in Call of Duty if it knows anything, right? But, and
you could even go so far as to say that you had a sole purpose, that Call of Duty character
has a sole purpose for doing what it's doing. And that sole purpose is that you wanna play
Call of Duty. You as the sole wanted to do something and it's just there to fulfill that. It's just
a vessel to fulfill the need. Right, right. So I was just trying to blend it in with this
reincarnation a bit because they don't mesh all that well. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's
hear this little clip. So he's got to say here, there's a lot more in this episode. And I recommend
you guys check it out. Yeah, definitely check it out. We're only going to play a little bit.
We'll link to it. But we're just going to give him his intro to the topic here. Yeah, well,
so first question, how did I get involved in this, right? So, you know, I was a video game
developer in Silicon Valley, and then I became an investor in the video game industry, in
my backgrounds in computer science. And what happened was after I sold my last video game
company back in 2016, so we're talking like, you know, seven years ago now, eight years
ago now, and I put on a virtual reality headset and started playing a VR ping pong game. Now
these headsets were even bigger than they are now, and they were wired, so there's no mistaking
you're in virtual reality. But what happened was that the ping pong game was so realistic
that for a moment my brain forgot that this wasn't a real game of table tennis, so much
so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table, and I tried to lean against the table,
but of course there was no table, so the controller fell to the floor, and I almost fell over.
I had to do one of these double takes, like, oh wait, I'm just in VR. So I started to...
think about how long would it take us to build something like the matrix, something that's
so immersive that you would forget, right, that you were inside a video game. And so that led
me to this idea of the simulation point, which is a kind of technological singularity. But
then I started to research things like quantum physics and some of the mysteries around, you
know, the observer effect and quantum mechanics. And then I started to look at all the world's
religions and I realized that they're all kind of saying the same thing. which is that there
is no physical universe. And so that led me to the conclusion that we are most likely inside
some kind of a computer simulation or a massively multiplayer video game, depending on how you
look at it. So he does say that we could be in some kind of multi- Like an MMORPG type
of massive multiplayer online game in the universe. Yeah. Yeah, and this is just one aspect of
the different runs you can do of the simulation, where there's parallel simulations going on.
Because even now, he talks about our abilities, like some laptops and computers have split
processing abilities. And that's just us. And now, imagine having the ability to... Yeah.
make multiple simulations and run them. Once quantum computing really takes off, the simulation
abilities will be pretty crazy. Unreal. Pretty crazy. And video games are going to be the
pioneer of that in space because of the interactiveness. Obviously, you're going to have a lot of companies
that are going to push onto that too, that are outside of video games, that want to advertise,
sell things. You'll have. Like what you already have with the metaverse starting up with Mark
Zuckerberg and the metaverse that they have. Like they're selling real estate in there and
like people are buying land and like I guess if you can call it land. Last time I checked
in on that, it's been a couple of years, but last time I checked in on that, like no one
was really embracing it. I don't know if it's kind of taking off. It's probably just clunky
and. It's probably going to like, like this will be like the funny thing that happened
where they tried it and it didn't work But then some new company will pop up and they'll do
it really well Yeah Cuz like the long-standing idea of the metaverse before Mark Zuckerberg
stole the term It already existed and the idea was like a like the internet, right? I mean
where it's a decentralized thing that is multiple connected, you know And Mark Zuckerberg is
like, now I'm just going to call my meta, my company meta, and then I'm going to create
the metaverse. Oh, yeah, that thing. Now it's just a branded term. So every time everyone
talks about it, now you're talking about Facebook, which I don't like. We'll stick to multiverse,
and we'll stick to, I don't know, what do they call it in Ready Player One? Did you see that
movie? I think they called it the metaverse, didn't they? Yeah, something like that. No,
Oasis. Oh, right, right. It was the Oasis. That's what it was. Yeah. I mean, simulation theory.
Like when you hear him describe it like that, it's essentially just sounds like a deeper,
like a better.
What am I trying to say? It just sounds like a variation on religious ideas. Yeah. Like
the idea of having a soul that exists outside of the physical reality. Yeah, it's a different
spin on it. It's more of a modern spin on the same kind of ideas. But why I think it's an
important theory is because for some reason, couching it in those words allows scientists
to take it seriously. Yeah. Whereas when you essentially have the identical theory couched
in the terms of religion, then science is like, no, that's a bunch of BS. Exactly. We have
no proof of heaven or hell. And then they think about the meta, then they think about simulation
theory and they're like, well, it's almost for sure that we're in a simulation. But they're
just using tech terms. I don't know how many of them realize that they're essentially arguing
for heaven and for spirituality and they're essentially arguing that all of these spiritual
concepts that have come down through the ages are true but just in different language. Right.
Yeah, wasn't it George Howard? I don't know. It was a story he told. I don't can't remember
if it was him or if he was talking about somebody else, but that found the religious side of
Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, yeah, yeah. What's it called? Al. Alatart. Yeah, Alhalal or something.
Oh, dang it. What is it? Sodom.
spell that.
He talked about it in that Danny Jones episode that he was on.
Tall El Hamam. There it is. It was a bronze age city in the Jordan Valley that was discovered.
And it appears to have been the victim of an air burst. And yeah, George Howard talked about
it. Some of the Comet research people, I think, were involved. Yeah. In the room. discovery.
Yeah.
I was also looking into George Havard since our last conversation too, and a lot of stuff
he was talking about. Yeah. And how he came into the research and stuff and- Yeah, you
watched his Danny Jones video? Yeah, the way he talks about the Carolina Bays with the video,
with the pictures up and stuff. Yeah, I mean, the only thing that I'm, I wanna see the evidence
and just look at it is like- why there's such a gap. And they claim that it's the sandy bottom.
It's the difference between the types of soil. Yeah. So if you're in a sandy ground area versus
a clay ground area. Yeah. It shows up differently. Yeah. Or it doesn't show up at all in certain
areas. Yeah. Sand can take an impact, and it will keep it preserved unless something else
comes and changes it. Whereas clay, it will kind of, it's squishy, you know, so like the
pressure above it will cause it to like filling gaps. So like the crater and clay won't necessarily
last. Yeah, and then he described it as the anybody listening you should go look it up
and look at pictures of this too, but I'll link a picture here. In the sandy soil he described
it as like because if you have sand and water mixture and then you vibrate it violently it
turns into quicksand. And because those soil types are like that, the impact would have
liquefied the ground. Yes. And it would have created the divot in the crater and it kind
of like swallowed the comet in a sense. Obviously it impacted, but then it would solidify and
that's what they have now. A lot of those are lakes. A lot of those are- Yeah, some of them
are lakes, some of them are just fields, swamps. But there are, but there are. Many of them
were not, were not even like noticed until we had aircraft to fly over and see them. And
some of them were noticed until we could like scan the ground because some of them, like
for some of them, the evidence is like under whatever the topsoil is. But once we finally
had airplanes and were able to fly around and survey the area, there was just literally thousands
of them that were found. Yeah. They all orient, they all have these ellipse patterns that he
describes and they all orient to basically where the Great Lakes are. Yes. That's where they
meet is like in that area of the Great Lakes. That's their idea is that the impact happened
up there on the North Atlantic, the Northern Ice Sheet because it was down pretty far. There
it is. So it almost looks like there's two impacts on that image. Well, this is the area, like
this is, oh, yeah, you're right. Which, I mean, it is what their theory is, is that there was
multiple impacts. Yeah, because a lot of them were dated, because they kind of put the, this
is a newer photo I can tell, because a lot of the data, what they were describing was a lot
of the data was fragmented, so it was a wider area that a lot of them were pointing to, so
I think they just narrowed it down. and showed two impacts instead of just one large area
where multiple impacts could have happened. So this is a cleaner map because it shows the
two impacts and it shows their trajectories towards the impact sites. Yeah. Yeah, which
is crazy. I mean, that plus like a lot of the microspherals and nanodiamonds and a lot of
that evidence and the evidence of floods, like, it's so obvious. Let's get back to that was
a tangent. Do you have anything do you want to end this segment with? Yeah, let's cover
the next section here. All right. And I'll just paraphrase this one before we go to break here.
So this section is talking about the population explosion. So this is an argument that people
put forth against reincarnation. So some have argued that population growth rules out reincarnation
as a possibility. The reasoning goes that the increase in the numbers of humans. in modern
times means that all the individuals currently alive could not have been reincarnating through
multiple past lives because the modern population is so much larger than the populations in the
past. It's a simulation. A number of objections undercut this argument. In the first place,
reincarnation does not have to happen to everyone. Some might get reborn because of unfinished
business from their previous life or because of the manner. of their deaths or some other
factor, but others might not get reborn. The modern individuals would possess previous lives,
even if most would not, or some would while even if most don't. We also have no reason
to think that new individuals could not be created. So again, even if all individuals have multiple
lifetimes, some people who are currently alive could have had past lives while others could
be here for the first time. Right. In either of these situations, the number of individuals
living at a given time would be irrelevant. You can't disprove reincarnation just based
off of population numbers. No. And what it does do is give me what I like to, like, just like
all the, like the back-to-secret history of the world and like the creation, you know,
story and like from that point of view and stuff. Like... It's almost like the story of new souls
being born and, you know, like they talk about, like, the transformation of the vegetable life
to animal life. And it's like, right. And they talk about, like, you know, the souls of the
identity or souls of humans being implanted in. Yeah. In that sense, it could be that,
yeah, like the reincarnation is essentially like, it's like a mountain that you climb.
Like you're, you as a soul have to go through the process of all the lower animals to like
build up to being human maybe. I don't know. Or to the next level, right? Then there might
be something outside of this. type of physical, where you're still conscious and you're still
like, you have like a physical representation, but it's out of the materialist world where
it's like, you can live. I don't know, I guess that's just my hope. But you know. There's
another argument against it too. So he shows Dr. Beshay quotes a calculation using a start
date for human existence of 50,000 BCE. That estimated, or. that estimated that 105 billion
human beings have lived on Earth. 105 billion? Since population growth is predicted to max
out around 10 billion people later this century, the number of humans in the past is certainly
big enough to allow for reincarnation, even if everyone does reincarnate. Way more, yeah.
Definitely. Yeah. And I would imagine there would be some sort of... I mean, I guess we
could just be all eternal souls and there would be no born, like the souls itself never die,
but. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe they move on. Maybe some of them have fulfilled their life
purpose and they're moving on to other things. And maybe there's something you can, you have
an option to incarnate into after humans, once your human purpose is done. Right. Well, something
to ponder while we take a break. Adios.
Thanks for watching!
Welcome back. So weird we're listening to a song called harmonics right after I showed
Drew The Jacob Collier video. Yeah, that was making the audience harmonize with him. There's
a yeah. So you went to that show? Yeah, someone had actually uploaded a video from the show
I was at yesterday And I showed him that but then I showed him this one. That's like just
super special, which is called, it's on the PBS YouTube channel. It's called Laufey, Dodie
and Jacob Collier perform wild mountain time with NSO. I think that's the orchestra. Um,
yeah. Watch it and I'll leave a link to it. It's on PBS. Yeah, it's on PBS. But yeah, they
do the audience choir, but they also have like Dodie and I think you. Bafi. I don't think
that's actually her name. I think it's Laove. She's from Iceland. Anyway, but yeah, like
getting the freaking orchestra involved too. So like they're singing this song. And then
they bring the crowd in. And then they bring the orchestra in with the crowd. And then they
come back in with it. And it's just. It's a lot and it's amazing. Yeah, and it's like a
10 minute long video, but it's a worth watch. And you know what? I want to just play This
little snippet. This is the conductor of the orchestra. He says a little word here at the
end All right, and check this out
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your future. I think it's going to be OK. Yeah, man.
I feel that. Wow. Yeah, that was something. Yeah. I mean, the way he perfectly had everything
timed and ready, and he was given just a glimpse back to the conductor to let him know certain
cues. Yeah. Well, and also the fact that he actually wasn't perfect. And he's just doing
it all at the same time. You know, like, there was a couple moments where like the crowds
like, what do you want us to do? And they all started laughing, but he kept like reeling
them back in and like, like it just shows like the authenticity of it. He just goes with it
and he's able to recover even with the whole crowd laughing. You know, yeah, he's a very
good performer. Yeah. Very good performer. And he's got like a very soft, but like powerful
voice. Yeah. He's got these really deep low tones. Yeah, super warm. Yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, please go watch that. This guy, this is our future, for real.
That's crazy. Yeah, legitimately, some of the biggest people in music are calling him like
a guru, definitely like a once in a generation type of musical talent, which is incredible.
So yeah, and you were saying he contributed to music theory and some of their ideas of
music in general. Yeah. He's got actually, so if you who are listening is into music and
you haven't done the dive into Jacob Collier yet, he's also got a ton of YouTube videos
on his own channel where he breaks down his logic sessions. And he'll actually walk you
through how he created the song. all the layers involved, like what he did to achieve it. And
he's like super open with his knowledge and he just loves like teaching and spreading the
like love of music. So there's tons of his music out there but there's also tons of his like
music education out there where he's teaching people and explaining like how his brain works
and all this stuff. It's pretty awesome. Right. Yeah. He's open sourcing his talent. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, exactly. More people like him, please. For real. Anyway, let's get back into this
book. All right, let's go. So this next section, remember, we're talking about arguments against
it, right? And addressing them. So this one is called Alzheimer's disease, which is an
interesting point. Another argument that is, or another argument is that the loss of memory
and personality that comes with the brain deterioration of Alzheimer's an intact brain is necessary
for consciousness to occur. If memories and personality features cannot survive the partial
destruction of the brain, they surely cannot survive death. In considering this, we can
acknowledge that a person certainly needs an intact brain to express memories and personality,
but that does not necessarily mean that the brain is producing those things. William James
looked at this question in the late 1800s in relation to the overall question of life after
death. He suggested that the brain, rather than producing thoughts, might permit or transmit
them. In this transmission theory, he likened the brain to a colored glass that sifts and
limits the color of light that passes through it. Even though it does not produce the light
that passes through it. Filters it. Right. He pointed out that though consciousness depends
on the brain to transmit it into the natural world, this dependence could be quite compatible
with the possibility of it's continuing supernaturally after the life, after the end of the life.
He said that when the brain decays or stops altogether, the stream of consciousness associated
with it vanishes from the natural world. But the sphere of being, that supplied the consciousness
could still be intact. I do not know if James would have approved of the following analogy,
but we can consider the modern example of a television. And honestly, this analogy is a
little dated now because no one actually watches TV from broadcast anymore. We'll go with it.
If your television breaks, the stream of images, that it's supplied no longer present for you
to enjoy. But since it simply transmitted those images instead of creating them, the television
programs continue to exist until you find another television to bring those images to life in
your home. Similarly, the consciousness that found expression in the natural world through
a particular brain may continue after the brain decays or dies, and it may then associate with
a new brain. or a new transmitter at a later date. Maybe a better modern analogy is a cell
phone, right? So your cell phone gets data through the air, right? So you're watching YouTube
on your phone and if your phone dies or breaks or you drop it in the lake. YouTube doesn't
break. Right. It's still there waiting for you to have your next phone to connect to it. So.
That's kind of the analogy for any of y'all young enough to not ever watch broadcast TV.
Right. So this line of reasoning does not prove that such a phenomenon actually happens. James
pointed out that the idea that the brain produces consciousness out of nothing is no more simple
or credible in itself than any other theory, such as the proposal that it is an organ that
transmits consciousness. Indeed, science has made little more progress today in pinpointing
a source of consciousness in the brain than it had in James's day 100 years ago.
Yeah. Mm-hmm. The next section is on religious objections. Although reincarnation is not part
of mainstream Judeo-Christian doctrine, some members of those religions have believed in
it. Many in the West today believe in reincarnation as individuals, and some Judeo-Christian groups
have included reincarnation in their beliefs. In Judaism, the Kabbalah includes reincarnation.
which is also part of Hasidic Jewish belief system. Some groups of early Christians, particularly
the Gnostic Christians, believed in reincarnation. And some Christians in Southern Europe believed
in it until the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 CE. Exactly what happened at that meeting
has been a source of controversy, but church leaders there were believed to have condemned
the idea of souls existing before conception.
So yeah. And he does more on the religion, I just didn't highlight it at all. I just thought
the information about the Judeo-Christian beliefs, like, cause that's the main groups of religions
that people are like, well, these people say there is no reincarnation. But it's not exactly
true. If you're a modern Christian and your church doesn't believe in reincarnation, or
your pastor says it doesn't exist. like the early Christians did like the Gnostics and
some of the early Christians before the Romans, you know, edited the Bible. Right. I mean,
yeah, I mean, there's a lot of like, I mean, there's enough religions around the world and,
you know, ideas of reincarnation, whether it be like a whole system laid out as part of
their faith, just an understanding that this isn't the end or, you know, like there's some
idea of like the soul goes on, you're going to heaven, which is a form, you know, just
because you don't reincarnate into this life doesn't mean you're not incarnating something
else. You know, you're not just pulled into some other incarnation just automatically.
And maybe a lot of the reincarnation cases are just people who are attached or have unfinished
business and, you know. So that's why you get a lot of those types of stories. But you can
also see what would motivate the Catholic Church to not include reincarnation. Because if reincarnation
exists and you're kind of coming in and out of lives, what does that say about the concepts
of heaven and hell? What does that say about the church's moral authority over you? So.
Right.
I mean, I think we just need to. Get past that a bit. Yeah. So I think we're moving into the
end here. So we're on chapter 10. And this is conclusions and speculations. And I think the
speculation stuff is really fun. So to review the possible explanations for this phenomenon,
the best normal explanation in the cases of birthmarks and birth defects involves coincidence
for the birthmarks and faulty memory by informants for the statements that the children make.
In the cases that primarily involve statements by the child, knowledge acquired through normal
means can be used for cases in which the previous personality either was a family member of the
subject or lived in the same village, and faulty memory by informants is the best normal explanation
for most of the others.
We got the crier. That's right. He's defined his path for... Give him a second or... Do
a quick pause. Okay. The kiddos are back down. Settling, settled for sure. But we'll see if
that holds. Yeah. All right, I'll start this chunk again. So to review the possible explanations
for this phenomena, the best normal explanation in the cases of birthmarks and birth defects
involves coincidence for the birthmarks and faulty memory for. or by informants for the
statements that the children make. In the cases that primarily involve statements by the child,
knowledge acquired through normal means can be used for cases in which the previous personality
either was a family member of the subject or lived in the same village. And faulty memory
by informants is the best normal explanation for most of the others. It's clearly not sufficient,
however, for the cases with written records that were made of the child's statements before
the previous family was identified. So we have to resort to fraud as a way to explain those.
The best normal explanations for the past life behaviors of the child are fantasy combined
with coincidence and faulty memory by informants. But they both have weaknesses. Finally, in
the cases with recognitions by the children, We can use faulty memory by informants to explain
many of them. We're again left with fraud as the only normal explanation possible for the
controlled recognition tests. Yeah, I mean, it would have to be. Yeah, so. And I guess
it would depend on how much of the study were those, right? What was the number? And was
it a plausible enough number to be? This is where a proper act. application of Occam's
razor comes in because what is a simpler explanation? Is it simpler to say out of these millions
of cases, in some of these it's this, and some of these it's that, and some of these it's
this, and some of these it's that. All of them are wrong. And all the things that all seem
to be pointing towards the same thing, it's actually a combination of 10 different explanations
that all kind of work together. None of them are right though. That's pretty complicated
and it's not a very simple explanation. The simplest explanation that explains all the
evidence is that reincarnation is a thing. It's the simplest explanation. It's not, dang it,
I forgot the word for it, conciliant. It's not conciliant. And so that makes scientists want
to reject it and go for the less likely. due to Occam's razor explanations, that mage-page
of different explanations. Whereas if they follow their own Occam's razor that they tout, you
know, then Occam's razor would tell you reincarnation is the simplest explanation. Yeah. So. And
to focus our efforts in that, not hiding it. But maybe they're just agent Smith and they're
The ones keeping everybody in the simulation and reincarnation is a mechanism within that.
And stop me at any time. Simulation, it's all simulation. It's all simulation. Video games
all the way down. Since no single explanation can explain all the cases, the only feasible
way at this point to explain them through normal means is to say that A normal process produces
each case through some imperfection in the case, and different processes are responsible for
different cases. In considering this, we should first note that no perfect case exists. Perfection
is rarely found in science. And for any medical study that is done, someone can always find
a way to criticize it or to doubt its finding. This is particularly true in the study of spontaneous
phenomena. These cases do not take place in a laboratory where we control all the conditions
to produce the cleanest case as possible. Instead, they take place in the real world of uncontrolled
conditions. Some phenomena occur in nature and cannot be reproduced in a lab. And if we think
that they are important enough to study, then we have to accept the limitations that come
with it. Right, so. Certain things we want to study and you just can't make it happen in
the lab. So like your strict controlled scientific tests, it's just not feasible. It's out the
window right away. Right, so if you think it's important, you want to study it, you have to
accept studying it in the real world. And studying it in the real world comes with imperfections
and all sorts of confusion. And it means that certain cases. like cases aren't going to be
perfect, there's going to be multiple explanations, and then you have to kind of develop a body
of evidence that points in one way or the other. Yeah, that's... I don't know. It just seems
like science is just setting itself up to be closed minded in a lot of these. Yeah, I mean,
obviously not everyone. Ian Stevenson is a scientist and Jimmy Tucker is. I mean, just like the
accepted, like their scope is. Yeah, like the mainstream materialistic view, those people
in science. Yeah. Therefore, none of these cases is perfect, and we recognize that. With the
imperfections, we can argue that a dishonest set of parents here or a coincidence there
or a conversation about the previous life in front of a young child or else bad memory can
explain each case. So perhaps together they can explain all the cases, right? So. Like,
you're essentially saying that, like, because these imperfections exist, like, we know some
cases will be some of these alternate explanations. Mm-hmm. It's just going to happen. Some kid's
going to hear something and say something, and the parents will take it as a reincarnation
case, and they will have faulty memories, and it will go into their database. Yeah. But by,
like, raising the standard of evidence and being systematic, Like, then you can't, like, it's
one thing to say, like, in any particular case, like, this was more likely for that, but then
to then try and apply these explanations to all of them across the board without looking
into all of them, you know? Yeah, no, that's, you gotta look into all of them, and obviously,
otherwise you're just, you're just, you know, poo-pooing at a face value, just off of the.
So just because some of them are definitely going to be some of those other explanations,
that doesn't mean that all of them are. Is such an explanation satisfactory? In a particular
case, we may think, for example, that coincidence is quite unlikely, but nonetheless possible.
If we use such reasoning to explain all 2,500 cases, then we're taking the unlikely and raising
it to extremes. After a while, looking for any conceivable defect in each individual case
begins to feel like missing the forest for the trees. If we stand back and look at this worldwide
phenomenon as a whole, then we see a pattern of remarkable events. Even though the cases
are only evidence and not proof of paranormal process, when we consider the weaknesses of
the normal explanations, I don't think that they can adequately explain the strongest cases
as a group. I think they fail and therefore we must turn to paranormal possibilities to
see if they can provide a better explanation. Yeah. I mean, my honest, like right off the
bat, I'm just thinking we just, we need to study these things more and destigmatize these types
of studies and get them into the mainstream because we need money to be able to do the
type of research to be able to, you know, to actually find out what's going on. Maybe it
takes somebody to look if it's a simulation to find out. Right. And those normal explanations,
the materialistic explanations, it's important that we consider those. And it's important
that we keep them in mind. And it's important that is considered every step of the way. But.
Like that doesn't mean that it's the best explanation, you know, like it just means you're trying
to be objective. You're trying not to make up your mind about a case before all the evidence
is in. And even when you do have the evidence, as he states, like it's not proof, it's just
strong evidence, you know? Like it's evidence that demands an explanation. Right, and it
needs to be researched. Right. It demands that at least the attention of... you know academics
and scholars and When we look at the different types of cases all together, reincarnation
provides a much more straightforward explanation overall than either ESP or possession. It easily
explains all the cases, which the others do not. And it certainly is more obvious explanation
than the other two. The big question becomes whether the cases provide enough evidence of
a paranormal process so that we should favor reincarnation over the normal experiences.
Right, so he's saying among paranormal explanations, it's very clear that reincarnation is the best
paranormal explanation. So really, it's just a question of, do we have enough evidence that
the paranormal explanation is more favorable than the normal one? OK. In attempting to understand
this, we should keep in mind some physicists now consider consciousness to be an entity
separate from the brain and one with important functions in the universe. Conscious observation
at least appears capable of affecting the future and even the past on the level of the microscopic
quantum world. And if consciousness is indeed a fundamental part of the universe, if Stanford
physicist, Andre Lindy is correct, when he says that a consistent theory of everything that
ignores consciousness is unimaginable, then the world is a far more complex and wondrous
place than what the physical world shows us in everyday life.
Amen. I believe that too. The evidence in our cases supports this idea. And for the remainder
of this chapter, we will operate from the perspective that if this is true, we can consider what
the cases may tell us about the process of reincarnation. We will have to speculate a fair amount as
we do so. And we should remember that the world of consciousness may operate very differently
from the physical universe. Therefore, any conclusions that we may make about reincarnation are tentative
at this point. But we have some fascinating questions to explore. So this is the part where
he starts speculating. On his personally? Yeah, yeah. So he's got a section here talking about,
does everybody reincarnate? Which we can go into if you want to. But I didn't. I kind of
had it highlighted. I had the title, but not text highlighted. I would assume everybody
reincarnates. It's just remembering. Yeah. Let's go over this, because I like this, like the
speculative stuff is what really gets me interested. When we see evidence for reincarnation, one
reaction is to think about how it could affect this individual, as individuals. Clearly, we
would all love the opportunity to see our deceased loved ones again. We can think about the emotions
that Patrick Christianson's mother must have felt when she determined that her first son,
who had died as a toddler, had returned to her. A loss of that kind is obviously devastating
and we would all be comforted to know that such a loss might not be permanent. Unfortunately,
we must remember that what is true about the children who report past life memories may
not be true for the rest of us. They may be a unique group, and even if they have reincarnated,
no one else may have. For instance, they may have had issues that kept them connected to
their earthly experiences so that they came back while others don't. The situation could
be like stories of haunted houses in which they say that a ghost is stuck there because of
grisly death or a similar reason. As I discussed earlier, 70% of the previous personalities
died by unnatural means. In cases where the mode of death is known, and of course, a number
of those dying by natural means died suddenly as well. This suggests that a violent or sudden
death is much more likely to produce a future case of a child with past life memories. than
other types of deaths. Such a death may be one factor that can cause our subjects to have
connections to the earth that lead them to be exceptions to the normal state of affairs.
After death, consciousness may typically blend into a larger universal consciousness or go
off in another realm of existence, heaven, for example. For all we know, the traditional Judeo-Christian
views of life after death may be correct in general. even if our cases are legitimate cases
of reincarnation. On the other hand, reincarnation may normally occur, but without memories continuing
from the past life. In that case, we may have all had previous lives, even though most of
us don't remember them. If this is true, then the usual process may get disrupted either
by a factor in the previous life, like an unexpected death, or by some factor in the next life.
This may lead to some memories to be present in the next life. And therefore, even though
everyone may reincarnate, our cases are unusual because of the presence of the memories. The
cases do not answer which possibility is more likely. It could be either. Past lives being
unusual or just the memories of past lives being unusual. Wait. Past lives being unusual or
just the memory of past lives being unusual. even though they indicate that reincarnation
incurs in some circumstances, although we would all like to see our deceased loved ones to
return to us or return ourselves to our children or grandchildren after our death, these cases
do not answer the question of whether reincarnation is universal. They provide evidence that we
can reincarnate, at least under certain circumstances. which is certainly a significant finding, but
they don't indicate if all of us actually do. Even if we do all reincarnate, the patterns
we see in the cases with memories may not apply to the rest of us. The type of death or some
other factor might change the normal process to produce patterns that could go along with
the enduring memories. For instance, children who've had past life memories may be more connected
to a certain location than others would be. or a certain family. Right. These children
tend to reincarnate close to where their previous personality lived, yet others who reincarnate
without memories may not be similarly constrained. Likewise, the children who describe staying
in one particular location for years between lives may not be typical of all who reincarnate.
We should remember that other differences could occur as well. between the cases of children
who have past life memories and any others who reincarnate without such memories. Yeah, it's
almost like when you die and have a sudden death, like there's like a block. And like, whereas
if somebody else died right next to you, theirs just kind of goes out. Like if theirs was like
a natural death, yeah, yeah. At the nursing home next to you or whatever. And you know,
you died suddenly by somebody shooting you outside the building or whatever. Like you have this
block that like blocks you in because of the sudden, but then the other like the person
who died of natural causes, you know, floats up and goes wherever. And that process is what
wipes your memory. And then when you reincarnate, you just have no idea that what happened before.
But when you hit that block. you still go through the same, like you don't go through the same
process as the others. And you can, that's why it's usually like 18 months. Like, and then
you get the ghost and the poltergeist and all these other phenomenon. And those could be
those, you know, stuck souls just waiting to find a new body or whatever. Interesting. Yeah.
Your future kid is freaking haunting you and making stuff drop off your fireplace. It's
just being a practical joker while it kills time waiting for you to get pregnant. Yeah.
Or he's just doing whatever, yeah, floating around, seeing the world, I don't know. Here's
an interesting question that he kind of goes on for a while with. In cases of reincarnation,
what reincarnates?
As in like the mind or the... Yeah, so despite these reservations, we should still examine
these cases closely to see what they say about life after death. One question is this, if
cases are examples of reincarnation, then exactly what reincarnates? The case shows that memories,
emotions, and physical traumas can carry over to the future life. I've referred to a consciousness
continuing, but this is not a very specific term. Other terms can be used such as soul,
astral body.
Those have specific connotations we may not feel are accurate. For that reason, Dr. Stevenson
coined the term psychophore, which is a cool word. Psychophore, which he derived from the
Greek meaning soul bearing to describe the vehicle that would carry the memories after a death.
So yeah. Psycho, but... My favorite type of music is psycho for music. Soul music. Soul
bearing. This entity, the psychophore, or consciousness, appears to be able to obtain new information
based on cases in which children describe events that occurred after the previous personality
died. We might wonder how could it do so, since the consciousness obviously does not have any
sense organs like eyes and ears. The answer must be that it can get information through
paranormal means. This is similar to the reports of patients who have near-death experiences,
as they often describe watching events from above their bodies. It also fits with other
studies in parapsychology that show some people are able to gain knowledge that they do not
obtain through their normal sense organs. Rather, they gain it through paranormal means. And
though we do not know what those means are, if a person can do so during a life, then we
can logically assume that their consciousness could do so if it survives death. Yeah, why
not? Right. I think we're over for a break. You wanna take one? Take a little break. Okay.
We'll be back. We shall be right back.
You said we were getting into kind of the end there. Yeah. We're doing some more speculation.
Yeah, we're still in speculation territory. So this section is the when and where of reincarnation.
Says, let us now consider whether the surviving consciousness has any control over when and
where it is reborn. In a number of cases, the children have reported that they chose their
next parents. In the Asian cases, they sometimes describe an episode in which they see one of
their future parents and decide to follow the person home to join the family. In the American
cases, the children may talk about being in heaven and picking their next parents. Although
these stories are obviously not unverifiable, some of the Asian ones have been at least partially
verified in that the parents had been in the area described by the child around the time
of conception. In other cases, we think of how bitterly the children complain about the family
they're in, and we may conclude that they show no sign of having chosen their parents since
most of the children do not report any memories of the time between lives. We get no indication
from them if they were involved in any decision making or not. Is it possible that they were,
but do not have access to the memory of being so? We have no way of knowing for sure, but
given the variety of cases, it is possible that some individuals choose their parents or their
place of rebirth while others don't. This brings up the larger question of whether anybody at
all makes decisions in the process of reincarnation. If the individual consciousness does not decide
when to be reborn, do guides, angels, or gods decide? Or does it occur naturally without
any conscious decision making? Various belief systems have different scenarios for how the
individual goes on to the next life. Though a few of our subjects talk about the guides
directing them to their current family, most of them don't say anything about the time between
lives. So our cases really shed very little light on this important question. Unfortunately,
I know. I want to know more about that time. Along these lines, we can look specifically
at the location of rebirths. One conclusion we can draw from these cases is that the place
where the rebirth occurs, at least in situations in which the child retains memories of the
previous life, isn't random. The vast majority of the children report past lives in the same
country of their current life. And many of them say that they lived in the same village or
even in the same family. What do we make of this? One possibility is that geographical
constraints affect where the consciousness can go to be reborn. Though the idea that consciousness
would be limited to a small area seems odd. It fits with the stories by some children staying
in a particular location, the place where their previous personality died, for instance, until
they saw one of their future parents. I'm more inclined to believe that consciousness is drawn
to particular areas because of emotional connections with them. Many of us identify strongly with
being from a particular country, so we might naturally be more likely to be reborn in the
same country. In addition, people have many emotional attachments to particular places
and will be drawn to return to them. Most importantly, an individual's connections to other people
may play a big role in where the rebirth occurs. In the same family cases, the children may
be reborn in the family because of a strong emotional connection that has continued, particularly
in cases in which the previous personality was a child who died young. The individual consciousness
may still be closely tied to the family, so it's drawn to be reborn in it. The mechanism
of how it is drawn is, of course, a mystery. But I can imagine emotional force in the world
of consciousness that would draw individuals to particular places or families with an almost
magnetic pull. In cases in which the children report past lives from other countries offer
possible insight into this. In these cases, the children usually stay after they died.
Or the children usually say that they died in their past life in the country where they currently
live. An example being the Burmese children who say they were Japanese soldiers killed
in Burma during World War II. Many of those Burmese children express a longing to return
to Japan as if they were trapped in Burma after dying there. We don't know if they were trapped
there by geographical limitations or emotional ties. Their actions as soldiers, many of whom
were very harsh with the Burmese people, may have created an unresolved emotional connection
that caused them to stay in Burma for their next life. Whether the explanation is geographical
or emotional, we can say that these cases show that individuals often keep some links with
a life after the end of it. We don't know if this is true in general or just in cases with
preserved memories. But these cases demonstrate that in some situations, links do continue
into the next life. In the cases of Burmese children who report memories as Japanese soldiers,
a link is maintained with both Burma and Japan, and the children are born in Burma, but still
long for Japan. Yeah, that's so interesting. It's the ideas of being located, like having
you imprinting on a certain location. And those are the outliers. So like, whereas the... If
you believe that everybody reincarnates, like you're going anywhere at any time. And maybe
you spend more time in this in-between space. There was one case that we went over in one
of the episodes where there was like an old woman who died in the US. She wasn't from the
US, but she went to the US for surgery and died in the surgery. I forget if the child was like
the... the later personality was born in the US or not. Oh, yeah. I don't remember. But
I was thinking earlier when you were talking about the case with the twins who are fighting
in the womb, or who are fighting because of the one. Yeah. They're fighting over which
set of parents between two sisters or something, right? Yeah. They had, their previous personality
had been in their cousin's family. Right. So, their new life, it was, their previous life
was the aunt and uncle of the new life. Their new life, yeah. That's right. But they died
in the womb, right? Wasn't it like a miscarriage? Uh, yes. It was twins in the womb who died.
because one of them had the umbilical wrapped around. And then when they were reborn, they
were reborn separately as brothers in that family, not as twins. At different ages, like five
and three or something like that. They were close, but they were arguing about what happened
in the previous. Which is crazy. And the one kid was blaming the other kid for it. Can you
imagine Wyatt and Sawyer just like? Yeah. just like one, there are five and three. Like having
an argument about a previous life. Dude, it would be pretty intense. That would be epic.
The question of karma. So I highlighted a little bit of this one. I looked at our computer database
to see if any characteristics of previous personality would correlate with the circumstances that
the subject was born into. Specifically, I looked at the following items about the previous personality.
Was the previous personality saintly? Was the previous personality a criminal? Did the previous
personality commit moral transgressions? Was the previous personality philanthropic or generous?
And was the previous personality active in religious observances to see if any of them correlated
with the economic status of the subject? the social status of the subject, or the caste
of the subject for Indian cases. In doing so, I'm aware that we would consider a child with
loving, supportive, but poor parents to be born into positive circumstances, but we might at
least think that positive circumstances would be more likely to include higher economic settings
than lower ones. When I ran the correlation tests, only one of the characteristics of the
previous personality correlated with the circumstances of the subject. Saintliness in the previous
personality showed a very strong correlation with the economic status of the subject and
a significant correlation with the social status of the subject. This means... that the more
saintly the previous personality was considered to have been, the higher the economic status
and social status that the child is likely to have. Saintliness did not correlate with the
caste of the subject in the cases in India, and none of the other characteristics of the
previous personality correlated with the circumstances of the subject. We have to consider then that
the correlations that the saintliness item shows may have just been a statistical fluke. And
we have little evidence that karma from the previous life affects the circumstances of
rebirth. Yeah. And you know what Rizwan was talking about at 1.2 is like the idea of karma
and like it not being like in their theory and his simulation theory. He believes karma is
more like a set of objectives. So like if you're reincarnating and your soul has a set of objectives
that it needs to accomplish, that your karma is helping you along a path of like achieving
those things. And it's just layers on layers of like, different interactions with the world
that like try to get you to the point or like. experience certain things or, you know, like
that's an idea of karma. Yeah.
WIDDUH be interesting. It seems a little confusing to me, like the idea of karma just in that.
You're being born into a new life, so I don't necessarily see why a new life... Or a previous
life would affect it. Yeah, why a previous life would necessarily affect a new one as far as
karma in a car-matic way. Is that a word? Car-maic. So another thing that Rizvan was talking about
too is the idea of a level system, if you were to think about it in an MMO, RPG kind of a
way. Yeah. Like, the reason certain people are more attuned or have some ability to see certain
things as phenomena in our world, if they have a certain level. Like, if you're a character
in a game, they're a level, and you have certain abilities. So a level 2 and a level 30 person.
They've had more lives, so they've gathered more XP in their reincarnations. Yeah, and
they have different abilities. And. Maybe one of the abilities is to be able to see spiritual
beings or UFOs or both or, you know. Which can explain cases where two people are staring
at the same sky and one person sees a UFO and one doesn't. Mm-hmm. Right. And all the different
interpretations of UFOs. Mm-hmm. Through history. Right. You know, it's kind of an interesting
way to think about it. Yeah. But... All right, let's keep this going. We're getting close
to the end here. Enduring emotions. To consider further the possible emotional links, we might
like to think that the love and positive emotions we give to others can last more than one lifetime.
And the cases give us hope that they may. Not only do birthmarks and phobias occur in these
cases, but the children also continue to express love for the previous family. Love endures.
Such an idea is not only comforting, but may well be true, based on the evidence from our
cases. The idea of the emotional connection, but not the roles enduring across lifetimes,
can affect the way that parents look at their children, because it suggests that parents
need to provide discipline for their children, not in a domineering or harsh way, but as guidance
for a fellow traveler. Children can be seen as equal partners sharing life's journey instead
of inferior beings. even though they are partners that need direction and need to feel a sense
of security that their parents are in control.
When the rebirth does not occur in the same family, the enduring connection or at least
the longing it creates can be a problem in the new life. Many of the children show great emotional
upset because they feel that they're being kept from their real parents. This generally resolves
as children grow older, but it can be very intense when it is present. I noted in chapter 6 many
of the Asian parents respect what their children say about their past lives. since they usually
believe in reincarnation. But they also make clear to the children that the current life
is different from the past one. Unfortunately, they sometimes make this point with great emphasis
and some of them make very hard, use very harsh methods to get their children to stop talking
about the previous life. That's unfortunate. Yeah. Even this might be better in the long
run than emphasizing the link to the past life. relationships from the past life are in the
past. And we don't benefit from focusing on past lives to the detriment of the current
life. Some of the children certainly experience great distress in wanting to continue the relationships
they recall from previous lives. And this can affect their interactions with their current
parents. Similarly, some adults get so caught up in the possibility of their past lives that
they neglect to experience the current one. Surely this is not the best course to take.
While being aware of the possibility of reincarnation may make people more appreciative of the spiritual
aspects of life and the spiritual components of others, people should not focus too much
on possible past lives. I think that's wise advice. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's cool
that you can experience that, but I can see you some, I mean, and it depends on their personality,
right? Like you might have that happen to you and be able to move on and be fine. But I can
see it being something that like happens when you're younger and it sticks with you and it
can affect your life. Right, right. because of the focus you put on it? Then you've got
a section here with advice for parents. Okay. Parents frequently ask us for advice on how
to handle their children's statements about past lives. Though each case has individual
differences, I can offer some general guidance that I hope will be helpful. First, parents
should know that these statements do not indicate mental illness. We have talked with many families
in which a child claimed to remember another set of parents, another home or a previous
death, and the children rarely show any mental health problems. Several studies have looked
at this question. I recently completed a study with a colleague, Dr. Don Nidifer, in which
we looked at psychological testing results of 15 young American subjects. They were between
the ages of three and six years old at the time of the testing, and we found that they were
generally quite intelligent. When we looked at scales measuring problem behaviors, their
averages were all within the normal range, and they did not show any evidence of psychological
problems. When children talk about their past life, parents are sometimes unsure how to respond.
We recommend the parents be open to what their children are reporting. Some of the children
show emotional intensity regarding these issues, and parents should be respectful in listening
just as they are with other topics that their children. When a child talks about a past life,
parents should avoid asking a lot of pointed questions. This could be upsetting to the child,
and more importantly from our standpoint, could lead the child to make up answers to the questions.
Separating memories from fantasy would then be difficult or impossible. Asking general
open-ended questions such as, do you remember anything else? Is fine, and empathizing with
the child's statements That must have been scary, for instance, when a child describes a fatal
accident. Certainly is as well. We encourage parents to write down any statements of a past
life that the children make. This is particularly important in cases in which the children give
enough information so that the identifying of a particular deceased individual might be possible.
In such a situation, having the statements recorded ahead of time would be and providing the best
evidence that the child actually recalled events from a previous life. At the same time, parents
should not become so focused on the statements that they and their children lose sight of
the fact that the current life is what's most important now. If children persist in saying
they want their old family or old home, explaining that their current family is the one they have
for this life may be helpful. Parents should acknowledge and value what their children have
told them while making clear that the past life is truly in the past. Parents are sometimes
more upset by the statements than the child is. Hearing a child describe the experience
of dying in a painful or difficult way can be hard, but both parent and child can know that
the child is safe now in this life. Some parents may be comforted to know that the vast majority
of these children stopped talking about a previous life by the time they are 5-7. As I have mentioned,
the memories will persist into adolescence or adulthood only on rare occasions, but they're
usually much less intense than they were during the younger years. In many cases, as the children
get older, they do not even remember that they ever talked about a past life. Overall, parents
can often find children's claims to remember previous lives more remarkable than do the
children, for whom the apparent memories are simply part of their experience of life. The
children then move on from the memories to lead typical childhoods. So I think that's important
to the point he was making about not making leading statements. For sure, yeah. Yeah, it
makes sense. I mean, why it's made statements. Or leading questioning. Right, just trying
to find a specific answer to a certain thing. Yeah. Just asking him, do you remember any
of the answers? If you were to question in a way that leads to the answer. How did that
feel? Stuff like that. Right. Tell me more about that. Something to get them to describe it
without like asking for something specific. Just let them do the remembering, I guess.
Right.
Oh, hey, look at that. We are out of time. Shoot. Well. Right on time with the outro cue, huh?
Yeah. Let me just, I'm going to move the outro music back here. So you guys will not know
that it came in on us. I just want to outro the book a little bit. He talks a little bit
about future research and gives a little bit of final thoughts. And then that's the end.
Maybe we should just power through that real quick. OK. All right. So future research.
Even after 40 years of research, our work here is still very much unfinished. I'm planning
to continue to focus primarily on American cases of past life memories, along with doing studies
in which we look at particular facets of the cases. I hope that as more people hear about
our work, we'll be able to conduct investigations of more American cases and stronger American
cases. If we could study cases in the United States as strong as the best of Asia, then
the work would be very hard for people to dismiss. Cases have been harder to find here, but I
remain optimistic that at some point we'll have a collection of cases that are so well documented
that we can confidently answer the question of whether some children are able to remember
previous lives. We may also have another tool at our disposal in the future to help answer
that question. A number of researchers have looked into how the brain functions in recalling
actual memories compared to false ones. So like you can like scan the brain and like tell the
difference when someone's recalling a real and a false memory. It's like a lie detector for
the brain? Yeah, yeah. Things that people think they remember happening that actually didn't.
The work is preliminary at this point. It's involved showing people lists of words. They're
then showed a word and asked whether it was on the previous list. Sometimes the people
think they remember seeing the word on the list when they actually didn't. Thus they have a
false memory. The researchers have done brain imaging studies in which they measure brain
activity when people are recalling the false memories compared to when they're recalling
actual memories. And they've found that different parts of the brain light up. are active during
the different types of recall. If this research progresses enough so that such testing could
determine whether particular individuals have accurate memories of events from earlier in
their lives, then we might be able to use it to evaluate memories of previous lives as well.
This would be years off if ever, but it's an intriguing possibility. And then. That's pretty
cool, by the way. It would be pretty sweet to be able to tell that. Also pretty terrifying.
I mean, that's just going to lead to all sorts of things. Yeah. They developed that. It will
be used in court and stuff. Yeah. Final thoughts. If we're able one day to answer definitively
the question of whether or not we can survive death, I hope that this work with young children
will be an important part of that answer. If it is, then that will demonstrate that the
smallest and youngest among us have wisdom to share with everyone else. They may be old souls
and new bodies. If we're all spiritual beings, we should aspire to treat others with the respect
that this implies, and treating children with such respect must include listening to them.
Just as children in this book may have important knowledge to impart to us, so may others if
we're ready to listen to these small fellow travelers on the most remarkable road of life.
Out of the Mouth of Babes. That was a pretty good outro there. Yeah, right? So why don't
you guys hit us up. Let us know what you thought of the reincarnation series. Did the series
move you in any direction? What do you think of it now? Yeah. Let's go ahead and wrap this
episode though. Please check out those episodes with Joe Rogan. I guess just the one with what's
his name again. You just had it earlier. Say something. Rick Sean. Rizwan. Something like
that. I don't know why we're forgetting now. Yes. Rizwan. Rizwan Verk. Yeah. We'll leave
a link to the episode. But follow us on Facebook, Instagram. If you're listening to this on YouTube,
leave us a like, comment, subscribe, get involved with the conversation. The website, dualitycheck.net.
You can get all the links to the podcast, different platforms. Visit to it there. Email us. You
can email us at host at dualitycheck.net or message us on Facebook or Instagram. And we'll
be looking forward to hearing from you. Yeah, until next time. See ya. Later.
Bye!
you