Next Level Soul Podcast Episode 739
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist, meditation researcher and the author of Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind. In this episode of the Next Level Soul Podcast, she explains why a meditative awakening led her to question a purely materialist view of the brain, what her research on neural filters suggests about consciousness, and what near-death experiences, dreams and meditation may reveal about awareness.
Key Takeaways
- Marjorie had a meditative awakening around age 30, and about twenty years later began opening up the research literature on spiritual experience.
- Her work on neural filters explores whether the brain filters consciousness rather than produces it.
- When she searched PubMed for near-death experiences, she found a large body of published research.
- Many post-materialist thinkers hold that awareness is fundamental to the universe.
- She shares the Kashmir Shaivism word hridaya, the heart of everything, which is neither the physical heart nor the heart chakra.
Who Is Dr. Marjorie Woollacott?
On today’s episode, we welcome Dr. Marjorie Woollacott, a neuroscientist, meditation researcher and author of Infinite Awareness. Her work sits in the space between science and spirituality, where evidence and mystery meet.
Her questions started early. Marjorie remembers being about four years old in the family garden, telling her sister that if God exists, they should dedicate their lives to God.
From Skeptical Scientist to Meditative Awakening
Marjorie says that before her own spiritual awakening around age 30, she would not have considered these experiences possible. Her scientific training told her what could and could not happen.
About twenty years later, she began to open up the literature and listen to what people were actually reporting. That shift, from dismissing to listening, is the heart of her book.
Neural Filters: Does the Brain Produce Consciousness or Filter It?
Marjorie has spent at least ten years researching what she calls neural filters in the brain. She traces the idea back to William James, the Harvard psychologist often called the father of modern psychology in America.
In her view, consciousness is not something the brain produces. Many post-materialist thinkers, she explains, believe that conscious awareness is a fundamental aspect of the universe. She also points to the placebo effect, which research shows to be a strong effect of the mind on the physiology of the brain and body.
Near-Death Experiences, Dreams and Direct Experience
While writing Infinite Awareness, Marjorie reached the chapter on near-death experiences and realized she had never really looked at the research. She opened PubMed, the national database of scientific articles, typed in “near-death experience,” and found a wealth of studies.
We also talk about the dream state, where people report receiving information or visits from loved ones who have died, and about the tension between scientists and everyday people who trust their direct experience. Along the way, the conversation touches on reported telepathy among nonspeaking autistic individuals and on reincarnation.
Infinite Awareness and the Playful Lens
Marjorie describes a view shared by many consciousness researchers and contemplative traditions: in essence, we are infinite awareness, taking on a particular lens and perspective to experience life in a body.
Seen that way, she says, we can lose much of our fear and anxiety. Each of us is one point of that awareness, and the whole thing can be approached with a sense of play once we stop worrying so much about life and death.
Hridaya: The Heart of Everything
Near the end of our conversation, Marjorie shares her love of Kashmir Shaivism, an ancient philosophy from around the ninth and tenth centuries. Its word for the self is hridaya, which means the heart.
She is clear that this does not mean the physical heart, and it is not the heart chakra either. It is the heart of everything, and she says her own heart starts dancing when she talks about it.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Curiosity opens doors that certainty keeps closed. You can question your assumptions and keep thinking critically at the same time.
- Meditation and self-reflection help you notice habitual thoughts and meet your life with more presence.
- Fear loosens when you see yourself as one point of a larger awareness. Love can be your steadiness when outcomes are uncertain.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Marjorie Woollacott.
Guest Links: Connect With Dr. Marjorie Woollacott
Listen to the Episode
- More episodes: Next Level Soul Podcast
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Dr. Marjorie Woollacott?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist, meditation researcher and author of Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind. Her work explores the relationship between the brain, consciousness and spiritual experience.
What are neural filters?
Neural filters are the focus of Marjorie’s research of more than ten years. She explores the idea, traced to William James, that the brain may filter consciousness rather than produce it.
What does Marjorie Woollacott say about near-death experiences?
When she searched PubMed while writing Infinite Awareness, Marjorie found a large body of published research on near-death experiences. She says she had never looked closely at it before, and that it changed how she saw the question of consciousness.
What does infinite awareness mean?
Marjorie describes a view in which consciousness is fundamental and we are, in essence, infinite awareness taking on a particular lens and perspective. She says seeing life this way can ease fear and anxiety.
What is hridaya?
Hridaya is the word for the self in Kashmir Shaivism, an ancient philosophy from around the ninth and tenth centuries. It means the heart, but Marjorie explains it is neither the physical heart nor the heart chakra. It is the heart of everything.
Where can I learn more about Dr. Marjorie Woollacott?
Visit her official site at marjoriewoollacott.com, find her on Facebook, or pick up her books.
Keep Exploring
- Watch Julie Ryan’s Free Masterclass on the soul’s journey home: Julie Ryan: The Soul’s Journey Home
- Another look at consciousness and the afterlife: NDEs, Psychedelics and the True Nature of Reality with Dr. Eben Alexander
- Go wider with our guide to reincarnation
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
These are things that are talked about in the New Age movement and the spiritual movement so much, but there is scientific explanation.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 0:07
So the irony for me is that the placebo effect, according to much research, is actually a very strong effect of the mind on the physiology of the brain and the body. Kids with telepathy that are autistic, which I've been now researching for the last year, they have a different way of knowing, and that's what we're forgetting about when we only think the five senses are the ways of knowing. And what happens then is you create doctors who are working very hard with technology to actually deal with you, but they are almost afraid to touch you anymore. They've lost that other half of healing.
Alex Ferrari 0:43
Why does consciousness, or the soul, need a body at all?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 0:48
The reason this is so important is actually...
Alex Ferrari 0:59
I'd like to welcome to the show, . How are you doing, Dr. Marjorie?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:03
I'm doing really well. Thank you very much, Alex.
Alex Ferrari 1:06
Thank you so much for being here. I'm I'm so looking forward to our conversation because it's not often I have a person with your background talking about woo woo stuff. So I'm
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:16
Oh excuse me,
Alex Ferrari 1:18
And I say that with all the love and the respect in the world, you can.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:21
You're talking to the materialists that are skeptical, and other people say this is real.
Alex Ferrari 1:27
Exactly, exactly. Our our our main currency here at Next Level Soul is woo. So it's it's it's a compliment to say the least. So can you tell everybody a little bit about your background in that did not start in this world. So how did you start, and then how did you come over to this site? How did you connect the two dots, if you will?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:51
So I'm going to actually start a little bit earlier. So when I was a little kid, I was like four years old, and I remember very distinctly this moment when my sister and I were out in our garden. We had like a little mini-acre farm that my parents had created with vegetables and all these sorts of things. Anyway, we were sitting out there, and I said to her, "If God exists, then we should dedicate our life to God." This is a four-year-old. Now, I don't know where that came from, but that I remember distinctly saying that. And then, of course, I went through life, and in fact, then in high school, I met a teacher in the 11th grade American history who took us back to Plato and studying the great books of the Western world. And he talked about the allegory of the cave and how when one leaves the cave of the five senses in a certain sense and comes into the light, you go, "Oh my God, this is what the world really is." And then nobody believes you when you go back in the cave, but I thought, wow, I want to understand where the soul resides in the human body, and I then went to college and I took my first biology and psychology courses. And the teacher said, "Excuse me, there isn't a soul. Your brain creates your consciousness, and here's all the evidence that that is the case." And there you go. I mean, then I said, "Okay, they must be right because they are the ones that have done all the research." And so I gave up on that, and I started doing research in neuroscience. And I began, like them, looking down on everybody that believed in a soul or consciousness that was fundamental as weak-minded. And I took on all of the hubris, the pride of I know and they don't know. So there I am going to graduate school. I start doing research in rehabilitation medicine, in helping people with stroke with their balance control, or people with Parkinson's or something like that. And I became very successful. And I was getting grants and writing publications and getting my promotions. And first of all, I was very unhappy, even though I had everything that the material world said should make me happy. Since I had switched to that framework, and then one year, my sister was just starting a new position at a university in Virginia, and my sister was in the Casco Mountains with an Indian meditation master because she went another route in life, which was to become sort of a hippie-like person searching for the soul, and she said, "You know, it's your birthday in August, and I want to give you a birthday present. Would you come up to the Catskill Mountains, and I'll give you this intensive meditation weekend? And I would just love to see you, and it would be great to do that." And my boyfriend at the time reminded me, basically, he thought this was crazy. My sister was a bubblehead, as he used the term, and so he said, "Don't do it." And so I canceled, and then I decided I wanted to do it. My sister got me the last seat in this intensive meditation weekend, and so here I am now. First meditation session. I'm sitting on the floor. My eyes are closed, and we're told now that this meditation master is going to walk around the room and he's going to initiate every individual there, and the initiation was going to happen through his touch. And I'm a scientific materialist skeptic at this point, and I'm saying, yeah, okay, but I decided that I was there for the weekend, so why not put my skepticism aside for the moment and just be curious about what might happen, and so when he comes around, my eyes are closed, and yet I am totally aware. It's like that awareness where you just like feel what's going to happen. And so when he came around, what I felt was his touch between my eyes and on the bridge of my nose, and then I felt what felt like a mini lightning bolt, like a tiny electric current, go from the place where he had touched me down to the center of my chest. I could feel the exact point where it stopped. It was the heart, but not the physical heart. Much more than a physical heart had ever felt, and that point then began radiating outward like pure love, like pure nectar flowing through me with this incredibly beautiful feeling. And the words that came to mind were, "I'm home, I'm home, my heart is my home," and I mean it's not what I would have expected from my analytical mind, but that's what came out. And what I should say then is that I then went back to Virginia the next day to my university position, and the next morning at 5am, I got up and I spontaneously sat up on my bed and I meditated because there was some certainty inside of me that knew that just beneath the surface of my awareness, where I'd been most of my life, there was this ecstasy that was just like simmering, waiting for me to be aware of. And I mean, it's not like I immediately went back into a state of enlightenment, but I could feel that love that had been awakened in my heart in that moment, and I should say I've never stopped meditating since then. Every single day I get up, and and it's because it felt so good. I think a friend used a great expression. He said, "When we have those moments in our lives, it's like the door to like real reality opens wide up and the light shines through, and then afterwards it closes down, but it never closes down completely. And so we know it's there, and that's why we keep pursuing it.
Alex Ferrari 6:51
Once you came back to the to the to the real world, quote unquote.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 6:54
Yes.
Alex Ferrari 6:55
What? How did you rec? How did you reconcile what you've experienced in your own personal kind of awakening, if you will, and this materialistic point of view that you've been living your entire life. I'm assuming there there was a, I wouldn't say a battle because I think you already figured it out once you had the awakening. But now you're like, well, now what do I do?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 7:17
Yeah. Well, and I think the interesting thing is that the way I phrase it to people is that it's like a seed is planted in that moment where you like see a different reality for a moment. It's like that's the truth, but then you're going back to your regular life at a university with all these skeptics surrounding you, and you don't know how to actually assimilate and digest that and put it into your life. And so what happened is I began living two separate lives, literally. So during the day, I would go to the university and I would do my rehabilitation research on stroke and Parkinson's disease. And then early in the morning, I'd get up and meditate. On the weekend, I might go to a retreat, and I did this for probably about I guess 20 years in the university. And partly it was like I'd occasionally like be in a conversation with a university faculty member, and they would say, "Well, you know, what are you doing this weekend?" And well, I'm going to a meditation retreat, and you would see the veil close down over their lives. Like, don't talk to me about that. And I say, "Okay, I won't." And so I knew that it was not acceptable in my university communique. And so all I can say is that it took a long time for me to begin to figure out how to assimilate, and the humor is that I have a husband, Paul, who I married after I had had these experiences, and he also loves to meditate. And we would have faculty gatherings at the University of Oregon, and he, in the conversation, would start to bring up his favorite topics like homeopathy or energy medicine, only to get a kick under the table from me, as I would try to change the subject because I was so afraid of losing my credibility with my scientific colleagues, and so finally, about 20 years later, it took me that long. I said to myself, "I have to start at the university doing research on meditation and consciousness to understand this at a scientific level as well as just my experiential level, and so in fact, what I would do, which is sort of humorous right now, is I would have a big grant from the National Institutes of Health to study posture control in people with stroke, and then with the equipment, like an EEG setup, I could then allow my other students to do research with the EEG to study meditation, and so I could actually solve both at once. And students began coming to me that were interested in things like tai chi and yoga and meditation. And so I began doing research in that area. And then I retired and said, now it's the time that I can begin to write a book to actually understand it myself. So I wrote the book Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a scientific mind. Really, first of all, for myself, and I began to explore every aspect of research that asks: Is consciousness fundamental, or is it simply a phenomenon of the brain? And some of these topics I had never looked at before because I was a materialist, like reincarnation. It's like you know reincarnation. No, that's impossible. The scientist knows it can't be true, or things like after death communication. But then, when I opened up the scientific literature, there was article after article after article. And as I began to do the research for the book, I said, "Oh my goodness, I'm getting more and more curious." And now I think that these people doing the research are really telling me something important about the nature of consciousness.
Alex Ferrari 10:22
You brought up reincarnation and and this like oh that's impossible, but I'm going to play devil's advocate, and I know we're both we both drank the Kool Aid already, so it's it's it's just a an argument that I want to have with kind of defended in a sense because a lot of people say oh reincarnation is that's impossible doesn't make sense, and of course we've been programmed through, especially in the Western world, about that. Eastern is a lot more acceptable, but in the West, it's a it's a lot it's a lot more taboo. Not as much as it used to be, but it still is. But I always found it fascinating. I'm like, well, if you don't believe in reincarnation, do you mean to tell me that the God this this let's say you can agree that something even Einstein said something created this. There is an intelligence to all of this, so let's say that okay. So then, if we only have the one life, then it's luck? Like it's just it's just like you happen to be born a white woman in the United States in the time period that you were born, because if you were born a white woman in the middle of Kenya, 1500 years ago, your experience might be a bit different. So you know, and then people who are born with disease, and people who are born mega rich, and people who who have no cares in the world technically of the material world, and people who are born with poverty and it's luck that made no sense to me as a as a young Catholic boy, it made no sense to me. I go, but reincarnation, like, oh, oh, we're here to experience something and learn from those experiences as we evolve to the quote-unquote next level soul, and we are constantly evolving. And then, why wouldn't me? If I, if there is a soul, why wouldn't I want to experience it as a woman, as a man, in different types of scenarios and experiences, in to really understand the full spectrum of this reality. Because if you're only born once, you get one pinhole into this experience. And some people, you know, some souls die instantly. Some souls die a month later. Some souls die 105 years later. It just doesn't make sense to me. Would you agree with what I'm saying? Does this make sense to you?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 12:29
Well, of course. So I have two hats that I always wear, and one is the scientific hat that I put on sometimes, and then the other is the meditator hat, the experiencer hat. And so on the experiencer side, I say absolutely, and right now because I have been studying that and experiencing it for the last now 20 years, you're absolutely right. And the problem is that when I had that hat on as the neuroscientist, where you only believe in five senses and you believe in, for example, genetics creating who I am. It's my father's genes and my mother's genes that came together and create who I am. And then, basically, Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia that did all this research on reincarnation says, "Well, these children that say that they had a past life have a scar of where the, for example, the bullet went into their head, like on their temple, and came out in the back of their head, and you can see it now in the new child. And I'm going, uh-oh, my my scientific worldview won't accept that part of it. But then you say maybe the scientific worldview needs to be modified a little bit and expand a little bit to include the phenomenon that it reminds me of the Lamarckian genetics, which was that experience can change the genes, and that was actually put forth by Lamarck long ago. And then the materialist scientist said, "Excuse me, he's just full of baloney." And now people are coming back and saying maybe experience can change the genes. So my own intuition now is that gradually we will find a way to explain it, because our worldview will begin to expand from just the extreme reductionist materialism to something that can include consciousness as fundamental and consciousness as able to change the physical body.
Alex Ferrari 14:15
What I found interesting in what you just said is that our genes are created. So let's say your mom and your dad's genes are are combined to create this in a soup of some sort to create you, and I don't disagree with that. I think that's completely right. But I think as a soul, we choose what parents we want to come through because they're gonna those genetics, and and and we can get into epigenetics as well. But there are certain things elements that that those two. And now I'm going to get a little woo, but those kind of like ancestral lineages bring toward bring bring into your experience. So if you have two Olympic athletes who are mating, chances are that child's going to probably be athletically gifted. Same as you have two musicians or two scientists or two artists combined, there's probably going to be something there. So as a soul, we choose the parents and the lineages that we want to go through because not only are we picking up the combination of their genetics, but we're also picking up the lineages of their ancestral lineages of both, and also pick up, and now we're getting a little deeper: ancestral karma, and ancestral trauma that we carry along, and that's been documented so much. But you could just see, you know, from different traumatic lineages what happens to the child, and as and generation after generation, and then the smokers and the the alcoholics and all these kind of things. These are things that you have to kind of break up. And then there's always a soul that goes, "Nope, I'm stopping it," and we're going to break we're going to break the cycle. Does that make sense to you?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 15:53
It does. And the thing that I like about that too is the fact that even though you are getting your parents' genes, I mean, in terms of the egg coming in and being fertilized, okay, there you have the genes from the father and the mother. We now know so much about genes being covered up or uncovered depending on the stress in your life or what you're doing or what you're eating, all those sorts of things. And so, in fact, you could have all the genes for Crohn's disease, which a good friend of mine has, but it only those genes only get uncovered when you're in severely stressful situations, and then the Crohn's appears, and then my friend has to say, "Well, oh my God, I understand what caused it. How can I begin to like modify my life to perhaps get those genes not to be so strongly transmitting this disease state?" And that is fascinating to me. And I think we don't really understand how much our mind, brain, genetics interactions work to cover and uncover these things that affect our entire physiology of our life.
Alex Ferrari 16:50
Can you explain to me, from a scientific and a non-scientific perspective, the placebo effect? Because I really want to let people understand people for people to understand the power of belief, the power of their own mind, and that which is one of the great woo woo woo terms is like your thoughts are things you create your own reality. These are things that are talked about in the New Age movement and the spiritual movement so much, but there is scientific explanation somewhat to it, correct?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 17:22
You know, when you say scientific explanation, it depends on which side of the science you're looking at. So, first of all, correct? Yes. So, the irony for me is that the placebo effect, according to much research, is actually a very strong effect of the mind on the physiology of the brain and the body. So, it's and the skeptics know that, and the only way they deal with it is to say then the placebo effect is not real. So if we're giving you a medication or a therapy, we have to ignore the amount of improvement the placebo gives you, and then it's only something above that effect of the mind on the body that they say then is the chemical in the body. And you're going, oh, really? So that's the first thing, and then the next thing is that when they actually do those experiments and they look at the effect of the placebo. So, for example, it's with pain medication is one of the examples. So they give a person pain medication and they tell them that it's actually a very strong one, or they say it's a sugar pill, and and they play them around back and forth, and so that the people don't know it's happening, and they've of course found that yes, they can give the person a sugar pill, in effect, a non-effective pain medication, and they find that in fact, when they believe it's a pain medication, it changes the exact parts of the brain that are turning down the pain receptors in a certain sense in the brain that are saying there's pain. So your placebo from your mind believing it's a painkiller will actually change your brain. It's not just oh I'm feeling better. No, this is a real physiological effect. Even because I studied Parkinson's disease with L-dopa, which is what we usually give people. If you give them the placebo and tell them it's L-dopa, it will change the parts of the brain involved in the various basal ganglia nuclei that actually create alveoli, and and they get better, and you see it physiologically, and you go, oh my god! But this is the scariest part for me. They did an experiment. I think it was National Institute of Mental Health where they told, I believe in this case it was dentists. It was related to dental pain. What three different patient groups were going to get? Were they going to get the placebo or the real painkiller or the painkiller that wasn't effective? And what they found is that when the dentist doctors believed it wasn't going to be effective, that affected what happened to the patients. In other words, your doctor's belief system affects what happens to you, and that's the scary part. So be careful. Any clinician that's out there, be careful what you think is the case with your patient, and at least be curious about these various things that they're doing, whether it's a healing effect from a Reiki person or a. Medication that you're giving, or something else, because, and here's the reason I believe that now, from taking off the scientific hat and putting on the meditator experiential hat, our beliefs do create our reality, and it's a co-creation of reality with other people around us. I believe that's why those studies that say prayer helps people in healing is because it's a co-creation of reality, and if we could only do one thing to change our whole United States, it would be we'd all start thinking positive thoughts. So,
Alex Ferrari 20:29
Right, and it's like when you walk into an environment, like perfect example, we had a conference a year, a couple years ago, called the Ascension Conference, and the energy in the room, everybody's mind was so like-minded, and they were all there for the right reasons, and they were all really just there to heal and to connect. It was addictive. Like the entire room, like anybody who walked in, the crew people that walked in, the kitchen staff that was working behind the scenes, they all started to feel they're like, "Geez, this is an amazing." I mean, I had a security guard's like, "Where do I sign up?" Like they got so caught up in the energy of the room that it was fascinating. So yeah, that the doctor thing I've never heard that before, but it makes absolute logical sense that you know just your pure energy of what you believe will affect others, and we do it all the time. If you're in a bad mood and you walk into a room, and other people are in a good mood, depending on how big your energy is, you could either they match you or you match them. But there is going to be a matching of some sort unless you're consciously kind of pushing that energy away. Does that make sense?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 21:43
It does. And I want to add again because I'm thinking about the way we are picking doctors these days, meaning the last 30 years or so, compared to how we used to pick them. We used to pick them for medical school because they wanted to heal people. They had incredible compassion. They they really had empathy for other people, and they were going to medical school to learn all the tools to help out. Now, instead of that being the priority, is how well did you do on all of these different examinations in science and technology and things like that to get into medical school? Where were your grades on all of your scientific chemistry, physics background exams? And those are the people that get picked first. And what happens then is you create doctors who are working very hard with technology to actually deal with you, but they are almost afraid to touch you anymore. It's like, but partly with all of the things going on in our society, it don't touch. You know, but it's like they've lost that other half of healing that doctors used to give because they're working with technology. They're not working with their hearts in the same way they used to work with their hearts. And I know about doctors in the past that had incredible intuition about what was wrong with their patients, and they used their intuition, and that helped their patients. And now it's like the new genre of doctors are almost afraid of that, and so they are like I was before, only in touch with my intellect. Intellect is great. We're not arguing with intellect, but we want to combine it with our intuitive, quote unquote, heart space, so that both are offered to the patient at the same time. Yeah, and let's not even talk about insurances and how the and how a doctor today has to deal with things, as opposed to a doctor 40 years ago has to deal with things. It's it's it's that's why so many people are starting to go to alternative healings and alternative medicine and naturopaths and things like that because there is still a a love there a care for people to truly truly heal them in a different way. So let me ask you then, and I'll I'll play devil's advocate one more time. If the brain is not producing consciousness, what actually, where does it actually come from? Very good thing because it's not what is producing consciousness, as you know. So it's a very interesting question the way you ask it. And the issue is that most of the people that are post materialists these days really believe that conscious awareness is a fundamental aspect of the universe, and they believe then that in fact if you look around you, everything around you is consciousness. The trees are conscious. The animals, of course, my my cat. I have to take an aside because when I was the young neuroscientist, because of my quote-unquote brainwashing from all of my professors, I thought my cat was just like a little robot with a tiny little brain inside, and the cat was mainly reflexes. And I, it's like it's a sad way of looking at other animals and thinking, oh, it's only like the higher primates and the humans, and then the other higher primates are not really important because we can do experiments on them and we don't even care. And it's like something went wrong with us when we turned into this society, believing that we are material beings that have evolved, and now our brains are creating our awareness, and everything else is not really consciousness, or it has a minimal consciousness, but we're the only ones that really know. So. I think that getting back to that alternative hypothesis that yes, consciousness is in everything. It means that the trees have their own way of interacting with each other, and now there are experiments out there about how they communicate through their roots. And in fact, I love this other thing that I hadn't heard about before. That is, when we go out in the forest and spend hours in the forest, we're doing what they call, I guess, forest bathing because the trees secrete these chemicals that actually help our immune systems. And it's like there's this beautiful balance that's happened in the world where we can, in so many ways, accept the, I guess, the benevolent way that we interact with all these other creatures and beings in the world, and then somebody says, "Well, how can a protozoan, a single-celled animal, have any consciousness?" And then you say, "But wait a minute, it can actually be attracted to certain chemicals and repels from other chemicals. It moves itself around with this little flagelli in the water and things like that." It's like, why can't you call that a proto-consciousness? It's like, why do we have to? For me, it's again that thing that, well, we humans are the ones, and everybody else is lower. I would say that we all have a consciousness appropriate to our level of what we're interacting with in the world, and it's all perfect. And the I believe the animals, and again, we're going to maybe talk about the kids with telepathy that are autistic, which I've been now researching for the last year, they have a different way of knowing, and that's what we're forgetting about when we only think the five senses are the ways of knowing. Animals have telepathy. I now know, and these children, for example, and young adults then with autism that are non-speaking have amazing telepathic abilities. And until they are actually taught in school to be able, well, school or out of school, because a lot of school systems don't believe it's real. Taught to spell using a letter board, they can't communicate, and people think they are at like a four or five year level of cognitive abilities. And then once they start showing that they can communicate and spell, they find these have been kids have been absorbing incredible amounts of knowledge all their lives, and finally they're able to share it. So I think what we mean by intelligence is a very interesting and complex question, and we need to include the non. Who do I want to call it? The non five senses: knowing and communicating in addition,
Alex Ferrari 27:18
Is it's fascinating. They I found I think was a scientist who's doing research on consciousness of plants. Yeah, and it was pretty fascinating because I saw the the experiment where they put two two seeds, and then you could see how this the the roots were growing. One actually had water underneath the soil, and the other one had this sound of a of a river, and it was fascinating how it went to the sound. Now, as well as I don't know, you and I both know, or at least I believed that plants don't hear, but music. If you play classical music, they grow differently. There's so there's all these sorts of, but that one I found very interesting because that's now we are at a whole other level of consciousness because you're like, oh, the sunflower moves towards the sun to get the like that's you could argue reflex, you could just yeah. But that, how is that happening? So there is a level of consciousness, and this is stuff that the ancients knew. This is the stuff that the the Native Americans knew, and a lot of indigenous people know. But we've forgotten. It's it's fascinating. It really and it's starting to come out more and more in the in the natural world, like in in the in the in the world today, people are starting to realize it a lot more and more.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 28:43
Yeah, it's true, and there's this interesting tension because I think, as you say, in the real world, meaning the people that are not the academics like myself in a university or the scientists in their laboratories, are more willing to like look at their direct experience and accept their direct experiences as telling them something about the way the world works. Where we scientists say, "Excuse me, I was taught only the five senses," and therefore, getting back again to the young people with telepathy, the scientist says, "I know that they cannot have telepathy because we only bring in information for our five senses. So if they're looking like they have telepathy, it must be because their parent, their mother, or their father, or their therapist is actually influencing them when they're trying to actually use the letterboard and moving the letterboard around so that the parent's thoughts are what come out. And you're going, really? Couldn't we perhaps test that a little more to make sure that's the case or not the case? And now, as we, like myself and others, are doing the experiments, it becomes really obvious when you're curious that these young individuals want more than anything to show their agency that they know what they're saying and that they also can read the minds of the people typically that they are close to. And if they, in fact, one one of the young people. Who's been interviewing along with my friend Marina Weiler from the University of Virginia, is named Casey, and he says that I have telepathy best with my mother, not quite so much with my father because we just we haven't gotten whatever that is going on between the two minds, and the same thing with my therapist that I really know. And when my friend Marina was actually at Casey's home with the family. Casey was very, very good at reading his mother's mind, and I'll just give you an example. So I would actually, because I was on a Zoom call with them, and they were in their home, and I then on my iPhone created a five-digit number, and then I sent it to his mother's phone, and we wondered whether he could actually sense it from the phone without his mother looking, he couldn't. But as soon as she opened it and she looked at it, he typed the number exactly. And when they did it with his father, he had a harder time with his father. He just didn't have whatever it takes to have. It's almost like you have to have a mental fusion. He has to see through his mother's eyes. What that means, I don't know. But that's that's their experience that they're seeing through their mother's eyes, and so the same thing with. So when Marina said, "Well, can I try it with you? Can I just go ahead and look at the number?" He couldn't do it with Marina, and he then typed into his letter board, "I need to really get to know the person and practice with them for a long time to be able to have that mode of communication." And the reason this is so important is actually asking the individual and then working with them to say, well, why does this work and why does this not work? We then don't put them into this dry laboratory situation, making them a lab rat and saying, I'm going to give you a particular condition, and you either succeed or you fail, and that's going to determine whether you have agency. You have to like work with them to find out what gives them the ability to actually read their parents' mind, and when it doesn't work, and that will tell you so much more about what's happening. It's like what a real scientist does. They look at all the different conditions and they say, "This is when it works. This is when it doesn't. What does it tell me about that individual's ability to communicate?"
Alex Ferrari 32:00
It's fascinating. It seems like there's when you're explaining it. The first thing that starts popping into my head is the yogis of India, the ancient yogis. They could see through other people's eyes. They had that deep, but they're at a whole other. They could do it with any. I don't know if I don't know exact stories, but yeah, did they could they do it with anybody or could they do it with only certain people? I believe that they could if there was a a willing participant could do something like that.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 32:28
That's a critical part. Just before you go on, because I know that another one of these young people that was interviewed said exactly that: that if it's a skeptic that comes to his home, no, get it, and he's not a willing participant, and they they feel that energy that's blocking them. So there is something that probably even for the yogis, it's like this person is ripe to hear me, and I can hear what they need, and I will share it with them. And maybe another person is not ready, and I you know I laugh because because I have a meditation teacher, and other people that I know in my own meditation tradition receive all these dreams from her. They receive these amazing messages, like like as if they're telepathic. I almost never receive anything like that, and I think it's my intellect that's blocking me. I'd love to make it that way, but I am a strong intellectual person from all those years of being a scientist and how I came into the world, and so I don't know that she's saying no. I'm not going to give this information to Marjorie. It's simply that that communication channel, for whatever the reasons, I am not able to open up like other people can open up.
Alex Ferrari 33:32
Let me ask you from your experience, because it's something I deal with all the time when I'm in the room with guests, and I have I don't know if there's anybody else that has more experience than I do in this, just purely because of the numbers. But dealing with people that are psychics, mediums, channelers, yogis, I've had master yogis in here, mystics. When they're in the room and they're doing their thing, I had a lot of times it affects me on a physiology physical level so much that I get wiped out. I start to yawn. I I mean, there's sometimes you can see me. I'm just like I can't, I can't, I can't move. And then the second they stop doing whatever they're doing, I'm like, what the hell just happened to me? From a from your perspective, I'd love to hear what you think from both sides, the scientific and the esoteric perspective. What energetically is happening? Because on the esoteric, I understand it's the energy. I'm a empath. I I can connect with, and it's it's ability that I've built up over time. I've also built up tolerance over time as well, so I don't get affected as often as I did before. But sometimes, sometimes, like I had a master yogi, he's 82, Guru Nath. He came in. I like I when he was meditating, he was she's like I'm going to send you something, and I was just like, it was like waves of energy hitting my third eye, I was like, "Jesus, what is happening?" So I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on that.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 35:08
Okay, so putting the scientific hat on, that's also the meditator because I've been doing research now for at least 10 years on what I call neural filters in the brain. So just to give people that might be listening and understanding about that, it's like we know, in fact, William James from the late 1800s and early 1900s, the father of modern psychology in America, who was at Harvard University, was the first person that I know of really at that era, late 1800s, with a few other peoples to say we have neural filters in our brain that block a wider awareness, and we start out with the five senses because the five senses only allow us to get a little bit of the electromagnetic spectrum from the world around us. So just a little bit from the eyes, a little bit from the ears, etc. So already we have done this to our information that's out there, and it's for our own good to be able to navigate in this world. Okay, then this this ascending system called the ascending reticular activating system through your brainstem to your cortex basically is only going to let in information that you want to attend to. It's very good at saying, well, you want to attend to this, I'm going to shut out everything else. So that's another filter. And then in the cortex itself, there's this default mode network, which is also called the mind wandering network, that is associated with our roles we're playing in the rule and the world, our ego, and it is there to make sure that we are doing what we want to do, getting what we want to get, and it's making all these judgments about what's good and what's bad, and that further reduces what we're attending to. It's like, what's good for me in this moment? What do I want right now? And then our conceptual language filters that only allow us to see according to the concepts we have in our brain what's happening. So we have all of those things that are then reducing down our awareness. So now I'm sitting here with you, and all those filters are fully activated. And then if a yogi walks into the room and does have this ability to actually, in whatever way transmit some sort of state of their mind, they're turning down those filters to actually begin to help me have a wider awareness. And it can have different effects on different people. One is to go into a state that feels more like sleep, but what's happening is that you're so adrenalized normally, you're out there just sending all this like attention outward, they're calming that down, and you're going into then this more meditative and perhaps a little bit more sleep-like state, but it's a different sort of sleep than normal, and so that is one of the ways that it's happening. And you might then ask, well, how does that differ from normal states of meditation? I would say that I'm doing then the self transmission in a certain sense while I'm repeating a mantra when I'm focusing on my breath breath to allow those circuits to begin to get quieter and quieter and quieter, and there are a number of people that have done research studies. I can give people the quotes from this, but basically, Brewer is one example. He and his colleagues, who were at Yale University now at Brown University, showed with advanced meditators they put them into the MRI, the scanner for their brain during meditation, and they found that the default mode network was turned way, way down, especially two modes which have medial prefrontal cortex right here, posterior cingulate, and interestingly, it was directly correlated with the state of their feeling of unity, awareness, their expansive consciousness, and the same thing is the case with many people with the psilocybin dose. That again, psilocybin turns that default mode network down, and then they have this wider experience.
Alex Ferrari 38:36
So that's ayahuasca, that's psilocybin, that's ketamine, that's all of these other other things, peyote, all of that is what dulls these filters and allows these. So that's why you connect with. Like I have a a funny story that I had a friend of mine. His name is Bruce, who is just long story short. He was in Berkeley in the '60s, and a lot of who was the guy who created? Oh God, with Ram Dass, the the the guy the the teacher who started talking about psychedelics. What's his name? God, you know who I'm talking about, right?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 39:14
I'm I'm sure I do, but the name is not coming to me right now.
Alex Ferrari 39:16
Okay, so there was that. It was it was there was a guy that was with Ram Dass in the in Berkeley in the 60s, and he had a bunch of LSD straight from Switzerland. I think Switzerland. This is not Timothy Leary, right? Somebody else. Timothy Leary. It was Timothy Leary's LSD, a jar of it, and his bud. And his buddy said, "Hey, do you mind? Do you mind holding this in the refrigerator for Tim? He'll come by pick it up in the morning." He's like, "Sure." He had never tried LSD, and his friends like, well, listen, if we're going to try LSD, this is probably the best stuff to try it with. And he took a drop, and he was a dropper out of this big thing, and he was about to just give him a drop, but he accidentally squeezed the entire drop. So he had like 60, 60 60 parts of it, if you will, doses, and there's nothing you can do. I mean, you're done. You can't bump the. You're done. Go for the ride. And he, and then the stories like he went to the middle of the universe. He spoke to God. Had aliens. Like his whole body was deconstructed. He came back, and it changed his entire life. He became a screenwriter, and so on afterwards, but that is a perfect example of. I mean, and sometimes people aren't ready for that. That's why ayahuasca, if it's not done properly, it it can really it could.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 40:31
It's dangerous. It's dangerous. And if it's the wrong person, if they are somebody that has their own mental problems and they tend to be bipolar or something like that, it would like you never want to do that, yeah. Yeah, it's it's. I've that's fascinating because that makes all the sense in the world. But the yogis seem to do it within meditation, yeah, and and focus of the mind to create the dulling of the of the senses. And even you and I, when we meditate, there is a version of that. That's what meditation is for. It's to bring all of this down, quiet all the noise, so then you could open up to information, quote unquote, downloads that come in, information that comes in, and experiences that are not available to you in your normal waking day because you have not mastered your own consciousness. Not conscious. You haven't you mastered your own mind yet enough to be able to do that. Correct?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 41:24
Absolutely. And we talk about the dream state because interestingly, again, many people have these what would these downloads during the dream state, or they have their grandmother who died come to them and tell them some very important information in their dream state, and then the materialist says, "Excuse me, dreams are nothing. They're just you know garbage from your day that's going through you. Not at all. There may be some garbage sometimes during the dream state, but it's the time when your senses and your filters are turned down, and so you can get this information from a loved one who has died or from something else happening in the world. And I think you may know Elizabeth, what is her last name? It will come to me in a moment. Jeff Kreipaul worked with her. She had an NDE in Texas when she was crossing the parking lot of her Jewish temple to go inside during a thunderstorm and struck by lightning. She came back and then she began having these dreams foretelling accidents like planes crashing, and once again it was like during her dream state that this precognition would come to her, and she hated it because she didn't want to know that people were about to die or that were dying like within minutes of her dream, and yet that was the fact. So it's like I guess I want to tell people these filters are there for a reason because we would not want to know about all the future disasters going on in the world every moment. It would make us go crazy. But also that it's a powerful opening to what we're talking about: non-local consciousness, which goes beyond time and space. Time and space, according to many scientists now, including Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, Federico Vajgine, are these belief systems that you have to take on when you come into this time-space reality as a being of any sort, and you have to believe in time, space, and gravity, or you couldn't be here. And therefore, when the filters turn down, you then can let go of that belief system at least momentarily, and see things that are really always there, but we just can't attend to them because of our beliefs.
Alex Ferrari 43:26
It's kind of like microwaves and radio waves; they're around us. We can't see them. Yeah, we just we just figured out how to detect them now. Yeah. So what's to say that there's many other things that you know ultraviolet, We can't see it. It's there. Yeah. Yeah. It's there. We're just not capable of seeing it. Now, I wanted to dive into the work that you've done with NDEs. What did your experience with near-death experiences, and when you first started studying this from a scientific perspective, how did it just rock your world?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 43:57
I didn't really know much about them until I started writing this book, Infinite Awareness, and I got to the chapter on near-death experiences, and I thought, well, yeah, I've never really looked at this. And I opened up PubMed, which is this national database of all the scientific articles that have been written in science of one sort or another. And I just typed in the word near-death experience, and up came all these papers. And I went, oh my God, because I didn't believe in it, I wasn't curious, I didn't look, and it's all been there all along. So I began reading that, and I was working on that chapter in this textbook. And then an interesting thing happened: beautiful synchronicity. I am at a meditation retreat that I'm giving with another person in the Massachusetts area. And before the retreat starts, she is actually an MD, and she's going to be our tech person. She's volunteered to do the technical things, and I'm talking to her, and I say, "Well, I'm writing this book, and I'm just working on this chapter on near-death experiences." And she says, "Oh, I had one." I said, "You had one?" "Oh, I'd like to hear." And she said, "Well, no, we're about to start the retreat. It's a week long. I'll tell you after the retreat is over with." So I waited, and then it's Bettina Payton. And I then wrote her experience into my book, but we also published a paper that we published in a journal Explore that actually showed both of our perspectives: the scientist and the MD, who was an atheist before this happened, and how it changed her and what she experienced. So that I could say, "Look, here I'm putting both hats on, and we have an MD and me putting both hats on, and this is what we thought was happening. And I think it was fascinating because, again, she was an atheist. She was married to another doctor who was also an atheist, and she said after this experience, where it was during the birth of her third child, and by cesarean section, and she bled out and basically left this reality, and then she was told she had to come back. And then she's watching the melodrama in the operating room of them trying to actually resuscitate her, and she's actually mentally telling people what to do because she's a doctor. She said, "No, no, you're putting the IV into this particular vein. It's never going to go there. Go up to my elbow." And the guy sort of shakes his head, and then she says, "Go up to the elbow again, silently to him." And then he goes up to the elbow, and and then she sees a senior surgeon walk into the room, and he walks through the crowded room with all these people, comes to her side, goes into her blood-filled abdomen because they were doing a C-section, finds the aorta, which is like spurting out blood. He wraps his hand around it, he clamps it shut, and she then feels in that moment her consciousness go back into her body, and she feels the energy come back. I'm going to live, and she then, when it's all over with, they also tell her her little baby daughter has lived, and she wakes up afterwards in the recovery room. She's surrounded by the team and her husband, a doctor, and she won't let them say anything to her. But she has a trachea tube in her throat, so she can't speak. So she asks for something to write on. They give her a napkin, and she writes words to this effect: "I know my heart stopped. I know I had a hysterectomy. My uterus is out. I know I have a baby girl." And she said that she just wanted them to know she knew it all, and she said, "From that moment, I knew that I was not this body; I was consciousness." She knew from that experience that it never changed. Interestingly, her husband, who is still with her all these like 30 years later, is still an atheist, and she has totally changed. He he loves her dearly, but he cannot change his own belief system. He's built her a beautiful meditation room in their house. He lets her do everything she would like to do spiritually, but it's not for him. And then we almost have to accept each person's journey and just say, "Of course, okay, that's fine." But so there, that was my first example getting back to NDEs. And then what next happened is after I had written my book and I had begun to explore this even more, somebody told me to listen to your podcast to a particular podcast. It was Stephanie Arnold, and I listened to that and I said nobody in science is paying attention to these NDEs that nobody is aware of, nobody remembers until they're put under hypnosis afterwards. I have to write a case study of Stephanie Arnold and get it into a peer-reviewed medical journal. So after listening to the podcast, I bought her book, I read it, and then I contacted her, and we did the near-death experience scale and a number of other scales about spiritual transformation, and I think Robert Mays, who's from the IANDS Group, International Association of Near Dead Studies, had also interviewed her. So I said, "Can I also have your notes too?" And I wrote up this extensive article. I think there were 14 different events that she remembered during the hypnosis, and they were all verified by the hospital staff, as you know, because you interviewed her. And I wanted that to go into the literature because people say, well, only like maybe somewhere between maybe six and 20% of people remember their NDE, so they can't be real during cardiac arrest if only so few people remember them. But it's like, no, we just need some sort of extra technology like hypnosis to bring the memory back, and people might say, "Well, why would that work?" And it's because when you are having an experience, it's often easiest to remember when you're back in something equivalent to that state. And hypnosis is a lot equivalent, more equivalent to being under anesthesia, etc. And it can allow the memories then to come to what we would call explicit memory, explicit awareness. So I thank you for the interview because that allowed me to actually meet her, and then I write up the article.
Alex Ferrari 49:28
So when you started to dive into NDEs on a again from a from your point of view as a on a scientific standpoint, people say that like oh it's all in the brain. It's chemicals that get released in the brain, which I find hilarious. It just doesn't make any sense because there's many NDEs that I've spoken to who were technically brain dead. Some were dead for, I think, the longest one I had was, I think 48 hours. I mean, he was in. Yeah, he was in the body bag. Yeah, going in the refrigerator. Yeah, and but then I think it was I think one of the doctors saw him crying, and then he's like he blinked or something, and and they said wait wait a minute this guy's is this guy alive? And he came back, and the body had not, but it took a while for him to back because the body started to do what the body does. Yeah. When consciousness left, but then consciousness came back. It's so. What was your? Did you walk? You didn't walk into it thinking that, right? Obviously, you had already.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 50:36
No, I'm basically. Well, you could imagine that I had my meditative awakening when I was about 30 years old, and so this was about 20 years later that I began to like open up the literature, and and then begin to listen to what people had to say. And so, of course, when I was first before I was 30 and had my own spiritual awakening, I just I would never even look or talk. You know, it couldn't happen. I knew because of my belief system. And then after I began looking at the literature, oh, the other thing that happened is that so my book now is out in 2015, late 2015, and I decide that I would like to give a talk about what the research that I have now been doing for the last couple of years on the book, and so I go to the International Association of Near Death Studies conference, and at that conference, I remember I walk in and am listening to I, you know, I think at that first conference, Mary Neal might have been there, who was the again orthopedic physician who had this incredible kayaking experience where I think she was underwater for probably an hour or more, and again was resuscitated, et cetera. And I mean, so many other people of that sort, and I'm going. Oh my God! Two things happened. One is that the IANDS meeting with these people there, other NDE experiencers, is a totally different experience than the Society for Neuroscience in the United States, where I had been going every year since I was a graduate student before the Society for Neuroscience Meetings are dry. They're competitive. You're trying to put other people down to show that your results were better than theirs, and it's not a comfortable meeting to be around in. I mean, it's very interesting to watch scientists put other people down in that way. And in the International Association of Neurosist Studies, everybody is giving each other hugs. They are sharing their experiences. You feel the love permeating the room, like you were talking about with the Swami, who was like giving you this experience on the podcast. It's like it's a whole different energy of interconnection and love. And so when I began going to those meetings, I said, "Oh my goodness! If people only knew they shouldn't be at this meeting. All those scientists need to go over here and find out what a meeting can really be like, where you really want to share with others and explore things. And you know, if we could just have a little bit of more of that in the Society for Neuroscience Meetings, it would be a much more fun meeting to be with with my colleagues.
Alex Ferrari 52:57
No, I was just there. I was a I was a keynote at IANDS this year, and it was a really interesting group of people. A lot of love, a lot of hugs. Everybody was really supportive of each other. It's it wasn't competitive. Like how like my my death was better than your death. Like that's not a thing. It was it was quite beautiful. Now in your studies, have you? And this is the the part of NDEs I really find fascinating, is NDEs across culture, because NDEs a lot of the NDEs that I've interviewed, many of them have been Western, either U.S. or Australia or just Western countries. I have had a handful from India. I've had a handful from the east as well, and other cultures, even African as well. From your experience, are there any common denominators across, regardless of culture? And are there differences culturally that you found? Because I found that you know Buddha shows up sometimes. Jesus is the hardest working man in show business, so he always shows up. But then Vishnu shows up some in, or someone like that. All depends. So, what's your experience?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 54:07
Exactly the case. And in fact, I think when people actually look at near death experiences across cultures, they find like Bruce Grayson has done like the near death experience scale, and we just expanded that. I'm one of the authors on a paper where we tried to look at it even more carefully in terms of what, how many points do you have to have to actually have what seems to be like at the threshold for truly a near-death experience, or at least a deep core experience, etc. And you find that the commonalities, of course, are things like when you your awareness leaves the body, when often it's hovering above the body, watching everything in the room as if you're seeing everything, hearing everything, and then of course, then your awareness may go down the hall, and then you can hear the conversation down the hall, and then it may leave the realm entirely, and then you may connect with your deceased grandmother or something like that, and then you may be told by your grandmother or a higher being whether it is, for example, just a being of total love and light and you associate it with whether it's Jesus or whoever, or whether I'm with Bettina Payton. She said it was just this incredible, intelligent, vibrating, loving energy. And finally, it told me. She said without words, but with a thunder, "You must live." And when that happened, she then funneled back down into the operating room, and there she was trying to help the doctors revive her body, etc. So those are a lot of the commonalities. The tunnel is again a commonality, though she didn't have that. But the issue is then, what are the differences? And it seems to be that whatever you meet on the other side, according to your spiritual tradition, you often have a identity of that person or that being, whatever you want to call it, associated with what has been your spiritual path throughout your lifetime. So, as you say, it might be the Buddha, it might be Jesus, it might be Muhammad. Sometimes, again, it's just a being of light, and that makes a lot of sense. It's like you know we do come into this world and get belief systems that we then hold on to in terms of who we are. So why wouldn't you then see a being through those belief filters? And something that I don't know about, and I think nobody knows about, is when we leave this body, and now we are in awareness on the other side, like an NDE or or somebody that's truly had the body die. We don't know what's on the other side. I don't know if, for example, the being who was Jesus is now in a disembodied state there for those people that really have a relationship with them. Maybe they've been going through lifetimes of this journey, and and he's there. And maybe it's the same way with Muhammad or Buddha, or there's also some sort of a quote-unquote non-identified being of light that is fully omniscient, et cetera. So I let that be. It's a mystery, and I'm happy with that mystery. But I do know that depending on who I, who what culture I'm in, I may see one being or another. And I guess I'm not worried about that. The skeptics have to say, "Well, that explains that it can't be real." They want to say, "Well, because your beliefs affected you." And it's like, "No, no, no, I don't agree with that."
Alex Ferrari 57:09
Yeah, and and it's and that was something I found with the hellish experiences that people who because generally I'd say it's about 90 to 95% are very positive experience. I mean, other than that, you died, but on the other side is quite positive. But there are that small percentage that are hellish experiences, and almost every time I've spoken to well, every time I've spoken to someone who's had a hellish experience, they've said that they it was their own their own belief system that said that they had to go through that on their journey, and then anytime during that experience that they say, you know what, I want help. I need someone to take me away. I need someone to help me. It ends like that. It's like automatic. Jesus comes, an angel comes, everyone scatters like roaches, and and they're taken up to quote unquote up to a higher a higher place of light and love and so on. So it's it's it's quite fascinating. So let me ask you this, and now I'm getting into some deeper questions. Why does the why does consciousness or the soul need a body at all?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 58:18
It's a beautiful question. So from all of my research I'm doing on consciousness and different traditions that talk about this, the way in a consciousness being fundamental like world view, often what someone says, whether it's a Federico Vargin or whoever, they say, "Okay, we are in essence infinite awareness. We're the whole container of infinite omniscient awareness, etc. But we aren't embodied, and infinite awareness wants to have the joy of creation, and so infinite awareness decides to become a point of consciousness, or of course, billions of points of consciousness, so that infinite awareness can actually create an embodied experience in the world as a way of knowing about itself. It's a playful knowing about itself. So I think about myself. So at one point I wasn't embodied, and it's like I want to actually experience what it's like to create this reality, co-create with every other point of awareness around me. And the point is that it's playful in that you get you get amnesia about who you really are. You're not infinite awareness anymore. Now you think I'm the point of consciousness that is Marjorie Woollacott this body, and suddenly I'm attached to the fact that I feel limited. I'm no longer infinite, and I don't have everything I want because I think, oh my goodness, I really would like this or this or this. I'd like to be a little bit better athlete. I'd like to be a better musician, whatever. And I'm not those things. And now it's my journey back to knowing who I really am, but with embodiment. And then, of course, as you say, according to the reincarnation hypothesis, then you get so far in a particular lifetime, but not as far as you might have liked. And so then you're ready to come back and have more experiences. And something I love and. I'm going to add one more thing, in that perhaps some of your listeners will roll their eyes out. It's okay, but I love a lot of the people who are channeling someone from the other side. And for example, I know so Suzanne Giesemann is somebody that's alive today that is a good friend of mine, and she channels Sanaya. And then Jane Roberts, who has long been dead, but channels Seth. And I have a friend that has read every single book she had channeled through Seth. And Seth said something as I've been reading these books now with my friend that I love. He said, you know, when consciousness comes into these different bodies at different moments in time across history, one particular consciousness only wants the pleasure cruise, and they take the pleasure boat for a number of lifetimes, and then they get bored with pleasure cruises, and they go for the speedboat, or they go for the adventure boat, and then you begin to understand why it might be that somebody is willing to take the particular lifetime where they're going to be in all sorts of weird, awful things, and they're going to die early. They wanted to experience that, and then the next time might be different, but it allows consciousness to do everything within the spectrum, from complete black through all the levels of gray through white of pleasure, and it helps me understand why my life is not only a pleasure cruise. I think that's all I wanted, but I didn't get the pleasure cruise. Nobody gets the pleasure cruise. We get the learning cruise. That's my biggest lesson.
Alex Ferrari 1:01:19
And the the funny thing is, I've never heard it that way, but it makes all the sense in the world. Like, let's say you're a soul, and you're like, you know what? I want to jump on this cruise. Yeah, and and you've seen these cruise lines now; they're just massive. They're like giant cities of five, 6000 people, and it's and you could get lost, literally lost on this ship. But let's say you are incarnated in that ship, and now you experience. In the next 40 years, you're just going to go through maybe less. You experience everything that ship has to offer, every single thing that that ship has to offer, and also the limited abilities of where it docks. You can jump off in Rome, but you only have three hours in Rome. You can't really dive into Rome, and back of so. Let's say you go through that entire thing, and you've gone around the world 1000 times on this cruise, and you've experienced everything you can from this perspective. You will eventually you'll be like Jesus. I gotta, I gotta do something else. So you go like, you know, what would what would it be if I got to stay in Rome? And you know what would I? What would that experience be? I don't. I can't get back on the ship now. I have to live here, and experience this. Well, what that like? And it just keeps going. And that's just in our little mini version, little mini perspective of Earth. Let's not start talking about the universe, which is a whole other thing. And your hypothesis about about creation wanting to create and experiencing all these different experiences that also translate not just to us as souls and and intelligent beings on this planet, but every organism on the planet from the smallest microbe to us, and then what? What about all those planets around the universe that have no life? " " Quote unquote, have no life on it. Even in our own solar system, Saturn is experiencing something right now. Jupiter is experiencing something, not what we would consider consciousness, but there's stuff going on. There's a storm going on in Jupiter that's been going on for I don't know how long. So what's that experience like, and is that part of what I guess God or the universe wants to experience? What's you what do you think?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:03:37
Well, I say absolutely yes, and I mean when we can see it from that perspective, we lose our fear and our anxiety. We just say, "I am one point of that. I am that, and I decided to experience it in this way from this tiny lens with this perspective." And everybody else chose their own lens and their own perspective. But it's all playful if we stop worrying about life and death. That if we just say, "Oh yeah, I'm going to leave this body and I'm going to go to the other side," it's okay. I'm going to become the container again, or at least you know, at some other level beyond my identification with the physical body, and then I can relax into playfully noticing what's happening around me, and not getting so tied to, "Oh, I'm I'm in pain. I have to do this." I think that in our limited egoic state, we surround ourselves with walls of protection of the things that we don't want, and it's like maybe I could just relax a little bit more and accept everything that's going on in the world as the universe really trying to learn more about itself in ways that I could never even fathom, and again with the planets, you know, the biggest conversation that I'm having right now and controversy with my friends that are post-materialist scientists is whether only living things are conscious, or whether Jupiter is conscious and Sun is conscious, and the dust around us is conscious, and I don't know the answer, but I think part of it is a semantic issue. If they mean does that particular planet have agency, and does it have like thoughts like us? Well, no, I don't think it does. But I think there is a proto-consciousness that we don't necessarily understand that is in everything, and it just depends on how far down we go in terms of what we're willing to call some level of consciousness. My friends that don't believe in that that would be called panpsychism. My friends that don't believe in panpsychism would say they're just informational units of consciousness. And I'm thinking, well, if consciousness is the essence of everything, I'm willing to say that sand has as its essence consciousness because it came from consciousness, which solidified into that material object. So I think it's perhaps where we want to draw the line with what we're willing to call conscious. Would you agree, or do you believe that, let's say, Earth has its own soul? I would be. My heart says yes. As you're talking, the heart says, "Of course it does. The mind says, "Well, I don't know how I would actually explain that. My intellect doesn't know, but what it is is is the feeling like there's a river. Like so, the Maori in New Zealand believe that rivers do have their own rights, and it's the same thing. The earth has its own rights, and I think that when we come from that lens, our heart says yes because then I will really want because it's one with me because we all have that soul together. I will take care of that earth and the earth will take care of me. I will take care of the river and the river will take care of me. And the love between the two of us will make us both so much more enriched and so much more happy and full of love.
Alex Ferrari 1:06:38
When history looks back on this time period, these last 150 years, which is arguably we've advanced more in these 100 last 150 years than we have in the last 6000, 7000 years. It's pretty remarkable what happened to consciousness in this these 100 years. I mean, all of a sudden everything just changed, the industrial revolution and so on in such a fast pace, and I always tell people, I'm like nothing changed. All the raw material was here. All what changed? We changed. Our consciousness changed, and our ability to connect with that information of building a car, telephone, internet, science, all these things just showed up, but it was there all the time. When we this disconnection from nature, this disconnection, like what Namari was saying about the river, American Indians have similar things. The so all sorts of indigenous people have this connection to the earth. We have become so disconnected from our food, from our environments, from the earth in general, that I think we're going to be looked back the same way we look at the Romans and the barbarians that they were in the Colosseum and what they looked at and entertained. We're gonna, and 100, 200, 300, 500 years from now, they'll look back at this time, going, "Oh my God, look at them!" Would you? Do you agree?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:08:10
I totally agree, and I think that the paradox for me is that there was Socrates back in the times telling them the truth, and they could, and so it's like in each era we have the people telling the truth, like the indigenous people, and then we ignore them or we kill them. And I mean, so you know, sometimes people say, "Well, it's just since the industrial revolution." It's like we have been doing this forever, and who knows? It's like some people do have that wider understanding; they absolutely know at that deeper level, and they want to tell everybody about it, and for whatever the reasons, the fear and the general population, the people that only see through five senses and that's all they have, wants to kill that person because they're destroying the balance of their worldview. It's it's it's a strange paradox about humans.
Alex Ferrari 1:08:55
It is a very strange paradox about humans, and but you know what is I find funny is that, and I've had the and and and a lot of people might roll their eyes that might have not seen my other shows, but like I've had Jesus on the show through a channel. I've had Buddha, and I've had conversations with these energies and these these these people, and I find it fascinating. And I go, and one day I had Buddha on the show, and I I'm rolling my own eyes as I'm saying this out loud because this is my reality, and I said, "What was it like walking around Earth at the time period that you walked around trying to explain to them these basic understandings about suffering and things like when their consciousness was nowhere near an air? Same thing with Jesus. Same thing with any of these prophets that came through, that they just couldn't comprehend it. Like, what was it like for them to walk through it? And he's like, "It's tough. It wasn't easy. It was. It's funny." But do you believe that there are these kind of. Avatars, prophets, masters, who incarnate because their job is to awaken humanity to take them to that next level, at at a risk to their own experience, like Jesus and many of the other ones, Martin Luther King and Gandhi. I mean, in more recent years, where they had to basically sacrifice themselves because they pushed the envelope so far that they were killed eventually. But, but do you believe that these are like these beings are brought in? They choose to come in and go. You know, humanity needs some help. Let me plant some seeds. This, and they're not going to be ready for it. Like you know, you know, do unto others as you want on to do unto you. Very controversial. You know, women should not be treated as well. Very, very controversial. All that stuff back in the day. Do you believe that?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:10:59
I absolutely do. I mean to me it makes sense because I believe that this is a benevolent, loving universe that we are in, and we, when we only see it from our limited perspective, then see black and white. They see anything that causes me suffering is not benevolent. But if this is the learning cruise and not the pleasure cruise, that's not the case. If everything that happens in my life is meant to take me back to that awareness, then that's all positive. And when things are going hellishly in this world, like they often do throughout the years, and right now it seems that way to many of us, it's like then it's like this benevolence says, "Let me incarnate, you know, in one form or another, to help you out a little bit more, and maybe to bring you up to the next level, so to speak, as you're saying. And so, I accept that, and I also believe, though, that in each one of us we can be awakened to that. And maybe that's part of what your show is about. That's what my research is about. It's like, look, that incarnation ability is within my own self to become a higher level soul and to share that with other people, and the more we move to a higher level, the more that energy radiates out to others, and the more they allow it to radiate out even further. And I think that's what we're all really doing right now in the sorts of things that you and I are doing in this world.
Alex Ferrari 1:12:14
So you do believe that there is a consciousness for humanity itself, as a because there's an individual consciousness, like we have individual atoms inside of our body, but there is a collective of all those atoms that make up me and make up you. So there is all of us are those atoms within humanity's consciousness, and that makes up humanity as a person, quote unquote, and its consciousness. And we, as a collective, choose which direction we would want to take. You know, we can go down this darker path, or we can go down a lighter path of love connection. You know, not lack in in waking up, or we can go back towards. Hey, let's go back to the Roman times. I think that was a good. That was a good. Those were good times back then. Sure, I mean there was a lot of issues, but it wasn't a bad time. I mean the entertainment was good. The Colosseum was solid, you know. So like, do you believe? Do you believe it in the human consciousness? And then if there is a human consciousness, is there a consciousness like we kind of talked about planets? Is there consciousness in galaxies? Is there consciousness in? I mean, because does the Milky Way have its own thing?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:13:23
Yeah, we are the whole container, and that whole container has all these different levels as it instantiates in different forms. And so, yes, I mean, it's me, it's my city I'm living in, is the trees around me. We are all in one, even across species, and then it just keeps going out. And I think that once we understand that again, you know, my heart feels that when we talk in this way, my heart just gets starts dancing inside because it knows the truth. So I mean, that's what I think we all need to know. It and just part of it is can we relax into the knowing that it's all okay? It is all okay, and I just want to like maybe even just end with one thing that happened to me about maybe four or five weeks ago for the first time when I was dealing with some difficult issues. My husband has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and he's having his own challenges, things like that. And I've been as his caregiver dealing with those things. And I was doing my yoga in the morning. I do my yoga postures each morning, and all of a sudden, in the middle of the posture, this image came to me in my brain for a moment, and it was this. It was first of all that I saw all these paths going out from the present moment, and every single possible path was just fine. There was not a good one versus a bad one. They were all fine, whatever happened. The next one was that this whole reality seemed like crystalline clear water. That was just the most beautiful clear water that is what everything is, and the next chains were falling away from my being. Those three things all came at once, and I began to see that's the truth of the reality. That if I just let go of my beliefs that things have to be different, then I will be able to accept this moment. And everything beyond it as just fine, and that particular moment of light sort of came down to a smaller level, but it's still there, and it comforts me when I get upset about things going on with my poor husband or the world or whatever else. It's like everything is really unfolding in its own perfection. When by perfection you don't mean pleasure, you mean that we are learning more about who we really are, which is infinite awareness.
Alex Ferrari 1:15:28
You said something, and I and I just want you to answer this question because it's something that is said a lot, and I've never had anyone explain it on the show. You said in your heart you know the truth. In the heart you know that that's hap that's the real thing. Can you explain that in a way that someone intellectually can understand in the best you can? Please, yeah.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:15:52
So first of all, we don't mean the physical heart, and I don't even mean like if you're a yogi oriented person talking about the chakra. Heart chakra. Yeah, it's not the heart chakra either. I love so Kashmir Shaivism we haven't even talked about yet, but it's an ancient philosophy from the ninth century, 10th century, and their word for the self is hurdaya, which means the heart. It is the heart of everything, and when you get into that state of complete still awareness, you enter your own heart because it's the heart of all, and that's what I really mean. It's like we touch into that place of total stillness, total love, because the essence of the heart of all is love. It's love. It's awareness. It's that sense of absolute being that is fine as it is, and that seems to be what is like triggered inside of me with certain things. It's like that that part of me just jumps with yes, and the love just flows out.
Alex Ferrari 1:16:52
Beautifully said. Thank you for that, Marjorie. Where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world?
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:16:58
So there is my website, marjoriewoollacott.com, and I'm also part of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. I'm the president, and we do a lot of interesting discussions. And the Scientific and Medical Network, which has a Galileo Commission, we have a lot of very interesting meetings like Beyond the Brain coming up. You'll find me at different venues like that, as well as the IANDS meeting. And I wasn't there this year because my husband was dealing with other things, and so I couldn't come, or I would have seen you there. So those are some of the places they might get in touch with me. And of course, they can email me on my website, and I will try to answer if I have the time.
Alex Ferrari 1:17:32
Marjorie, it has been a pleasure talking to you. I I love these kind of conversations because they we go into the deep, deep, deep waters of of these kind of deep spiritual conversations, and I love your perspective on on everything. And I appreciate you sharing everything, your journey, and all of your perspectives on this. And thank you for everything you're doing to help awaken our consciousness and this planet. So I appreciate you.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott 1:17:57
Thank you, thank you very much, Alex.
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