UC Berkeley Doctor’s NDE Deep Dive: 1700 NDE Cases Unveil UNEXPECTED Truths! with Jeffrey Mishlove Ph.D

Best-Selling author, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, received an interdisciplinary doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980. He has been a registered Commodity Trading Advisor.

He has also been a California licensed psychologist. From 1987 to 2002 he hosted the national, public television series, Thinking Allowed. He is the author of the Handbook for Contestants in CNBC’s 2007 Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge.

Jeffrey is a licensed clinical psychologist, an accomplished radio and television interviewer, and one of the most erudite and articulate personalities on television. He is the author of an encyclopedic volume of consciousness studies, The Roots of Consciousness.

He is keeping up the flame as host of New Thinking Allowed, an ongoing YouTube based series.

Dr. Mishlove is a past director of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and has served as President of the Intuition Network.

Jeffrey holds the only doctoral diploma in parapsychology to be awarded by an accredited American university (University of California, Berkeley). A revision of his doctoral dissertation, Psi Development Systems, was released in 1988 as a Ballantine paperback. This book evaluates methods purported to train psychic abilities. He is also author of The PK Man.

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Follow Along with the Transcript – Episode 051

Alex Ferrari 0:34
I'd like to welcome to the show, Jeffrey Mishlove. How're you doing Jeffrey?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 2:09
Great. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Alex Ferrari 2:13
Thank you so much for being on the show. I really, really appreciate it, you have a fascinating journey. And you've been doing some amazing work over the years. So I really want to kind of dive into your path and your journey. First and foremost, how did you get started? You know, in this path in a spiritual path in Parapsychology that, how did you get to start? How do you get started in this? What made you get into this?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 2:37
Well, you know, it probably goes back to my earliest childhood is a 10 year old kid, I'd be Gan reading books from our local library about UFOs. And I started writing letters to some of the authors. So I think I've had this interest in the paranormal, going back as far as I can remember, but then naturally, you grow up, you're trying to assume adult responsibilities. I was a graduate student at Berkeley, in 1972, if you had known me, I, you would have seen a person doing group therapy sessions at San Quentin prison with murderers and rapists. And it was at that time that I had a series of dreams, the most powerful one is, is one in which my Great Uncle Harry came to me and in the dream, it was like, more real than real. And I woke up from that dream, just crying tears of joy. It was such a wonderful dream and a singing at the same time, which has never happened to me since then, or before. And it's how I wrote home to my parents. I said, How's Uncle Harry? I had a dream about him. And my mother phoned me as soon as she got that letter, and said, How did you know that was when Uncle Harry died, right? Practically at the same moment. So that made me feel like I couldn't just continue on my criminology track. I needed to explore this further. Because I started talking to my professors at Berkeley, and I learned quickly none of them had anything intelligent to say about that kind of an experience. So I resolved one way or another, I'd have to become my own expert. And eventually, I think I was guided by dreams, largely. I managed to create a very unique, individual interdisciplinary doctoral major in Parapsychology get at Berkeley and That was really the beginning of my professional involvement in this area nearly half a century ago.

Alex Ferrari 5:07
Now, can you tell me what the Bigelow Institute prize that you received this because that was really what caught my eye when, when I was when I was pitched to have you on the show. I was like, he did what? So I love to hear exactly what that is.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 5:22
Well, Robert Bigelow is an entrepreneur in Las Vegas, he owns budget suites. It's a hotel chain, residential hotel chain, and he also owns an aerospace company that got shut down. During the pandemic, it was deemed a non essential business. And for decades, he has been one of the major individuals financing research into the paranormal. And he decided to set up a new institute called the Bigelow Institute for consciousness studies. And one of the very first things they did was to establish this essay competition. Well, they decided, first of all, he had spent 20 years researching UFO activity and felt that he had pushed that about as far as he could. And so he wanted this new institute to focus on the question of survival after death. And so to initiate their program, he created an essay competition and for the best evidence for survival. The recent ABC affiliate in Las Vegas described it as possibly the biggest Essay Competition of all time, to solve the biggest question of all time. And so I entered and my entry won the grand prize.

Alex Ferrari 6:56
So you prove that there is life after death with your essays? What is basically what it says?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 7:02
Yes, that's basically it. The standard was to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that would be accepted in a court of law. And I think my background in criminology probably helped me in that regard.

Alex Ferrari 7:20
So then, let me ask you, I mean, you've had you've had the pleasure of speaking to some amazing spiritual masters over the years and very interesting human beings rom Das, and so many others that I saw in your massive list of people you've spoken to over the over the decades, in your, in your opinion, and I think I know the answer this, I'm going to ask it anyway. Is there life after death and prove your case, sir?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 7:46
Well, of course, the evidence is overwhelming. Overwhelming. Okay. The intriguing thing is that so many people in our culture today act as if we can't be sure we don't know it might be this, it might be that it might be all fantasy, because we live in such a materialistic age. But in my essay, I took several tacks and basically I suggest that we have to see the overview. There are I list nine different independent lines of research that all point toward the existence of an afterlife, everything from near death experience, reincarnation memories of young children, after death communications that people received spontaneously, something known as instrumental transcommunication, where there are 10s of 1000s of hobbyists around the world, who are using computers and radios and other electronic devices sometimes to engage in two way communications with the deceased and in the most extreme of such cases, there are two books written on this known as telephone calls from the dead people actually engage in conversations back and forth for as long as half an hour with a deceased individual, someone they knew and recognized. Then you have of course all the spiritualist literature, from mediums physical mediums as well as mental mediums. You have deathbed visions, the spontaneous experiences of people who are dying, you have something known as shared death experience, which is people who are in the room when someone is dying actually experience with them what what it's like is they enter into the early stages of the afterlife. So I list in my essay dozens of what I call what crow examples. My, one of my intellectual heroes was William James, who's considered the founder of American psychology. But he was also deeply interested in this field and studied a great media. From the 19th century, Leonora Piper, he wrote, If you want to disprove the hypothesis that all crows are black, you only need to find one white crow. And then he said Mrs. Piper is by white crow. Well, I have dozens and dozens of these white crows all across nine independent lines of investigation. But that's just the start of this enormous evidence, because in my own case, Alex is I was explaining to you it changed my life. When Uncle Harry came to me in a dream. I was a criminology student. And today, I can look back over half a century and say, when I shifted into Paris psychology, that was a permanent change that occurred to me and when you look at the literature, you find that people who encounter the afterlife, sometimes it is so powerful, it changes their lives permanently, and dramatically.

Alex Ferrari 11:22
Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting, because so many, so many people around the world believe in some sort of afterlife, because on Sunday, millions of people show up to church, you know, all over the world have different kinds of afterlife. So there, there is a need to believe that this is not it. Without question, there's a need for that. But then there's things that happen to us in our life, our daily lives that are so indescribable, something like intuition. Something that's as simple as a gut instinct about a human being about a situation about don't go around that corner about press the brake right now, you know, sometimes, as you hear, you know, I've heard I've, I've actually happened in my life where someone, I hear a voice say, Don't do this, be careful with that. And it's a weird way of it's not like an actual talking voice. It's a weird energy or feeling you get, but just something is is instinct, about you walk into a room, and you're like, This is not a place I want to be right now. And you walk out, and then maybe a fight breaks out, you know, five or 10 minutes. I happened that to me many times in, in high school. And when I was, you know, clubbing back in the days when I was a young man, but something and I'll use something like intuition, because something like intuition, we all have it. Even when you meet somebody, you have a sense of who they are, without them even opening their mouth sometimes. Is that Is that a fair assumption?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 12:57
Absolutely. Yeah, I used to be president of a nonprofit organization called the intuition network. And our goal was to create a world in which people felt encouraged to cultivate this talent. We live in a in a culture, which is kind of lopsided in the sense that if you're good at mathematics, or if you're good at athletics, you get a lot of encouragement. But for people who are gifted intuitives, our culture sort of dismisses that as sort of airy fairy woowoo it doesn't count. It's it's not as important. And I think that's a shame.

Alex Ferrari 13:36
I mean, when you look at but if you start looking at Eastern philosophies, Eastern religions, Eastern that the Yo, you know, yogi's that, that were around, you know, two 3000 years ago, you start looking at those, and I know you have done deep dives into those, those texts, the Bhagavad Gita, those kinds of things, you start going deep into that stuff. People were talking about this stuff 1000s of years ago, before Christ, be you know, even before Buddha sometimes depending on how far you go back. But it is, it is fascinating that the east, it's so much more acceptable. And in the West, it's taken a while for the West to come up to it. And I always talk about the rising, rising consciousness of humanity, where as you speak about meditation in the 1950s, or 60s, they would have looked at you would want I like this guy's crazy if you talk about yoga, you know, it would have been, but now everybody understands yoga understands them. The physical, the mental, even the spiritual benefits of something like yoga or meditation when meditation was the most scientifically studied areas, ever. I mean, there's so many studies on meditation and the health benefits and all that stuff. But why do you think that it takes so long for the West to accept something that the East has been doing for 1000s of years.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 15:03
And even in the West for 1000s of years, but yeah, Native Americans, right? Modern times it will or the ancient Greeks. Iranian times, let's say since the 18th century, Western culture has been an aberration overall, we've become heavily materialistic to the point where people think that if it if it's immaterial, for example, we say it doesn't matter. If, if we don't understand something, if we say it doesn't make sense, so matter incense is what counts, the external appearances seem to be what counts and our internal realities are subjugated to a kind of colonization, you might even say, of the material world. So I would say, our culture, currently Western culture, for the last two 300 years in particular, just has it backwards.

Alex Ferrari 16:07
Yeah. And I think that it's been so I lost my train of thought, where it would say exactly what you said, again,

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 16:16
Eastern culture, for the last two 300 years, has it backwards.

Alex Ferrari 16:22
So what I was saying is that this seems to have begun at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when now material things took over, like before the Industrial Revolution. Yes, of course, there was material things in England and in Europe, and, but nothing compared to what happened in the industrial revolution, we beat it, the whole world became industrialized, we had machines doing things for us that we have never done before. So all of a sudden, I think our mindsets started to go towards the material, because you just see, I mean, we were building these giant structures and boats and bridges and planes and things that were just fantasy. Less than 100 years ago, before HG Wells, no one talked about any of the kind of concepts of, of flying, I mean, maybe the VINCI with the flying machine, but But generally speaking, nobody really talked about a lot of this stuff that science fiction was talking about. But isn't it funny after it was written in science fiction, less than 100 years later, we started creating a lot of the things that we were talking about.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 17:28
I think we became seduced by the power of our own technology, that mechanistic materialistic worldview was so effective when it came to building railroad trains and bombs, that we felt that we could describe all of reality as a mechanistic clockwork kind of process, to the point where we think that we human beings are nothing more than sophisticated machines ourselves.

Alex Ferrari 17:58
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's a I think it's an arrogance, of humanity and of man specifically, that we, because I always say, people to people, no matter where you are in the history of man, they know at that moment in time that they know everything. Like they've got it, they got it covered, you know, so when the Greeks were like, Zeus is That's it. It was Zeus. It happened to the Egyptians like raw, that's thick, you can't tell me that rod doesn't exist, you know, and it's it's constant. So it's a constant, really painful growth process. But I don't know if I'm sure you've noticed this. But in the last 200 years, we've done such giant last 120 years, let's say from the 19th century, on 20th century on them, the speed of growth has been immense, not only in the physical. But I feel also in the spiritual specifically in the west where things concepts have flown in much faster than they haven't 1000 years prior.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 19:09
I think one of the advantages of the internet we live in a global culture these days, so we have access to the great Wisdom Teachings of of every tradition, but still, our culture is still very heavily lopsided. A perfect example of this is the fact in 1980, I received a doctoral diploma from the University of California in parapsychology. Now, subsequently, to my knowledge, nobody in the United States has received a diploma from an accredited university at the doctoral level that says parapsychology, like 40 years later, I'm still the only one

Alex Ferrari 19:55
That's really fascinating. So you have an actual PhD in Parapsychology from Berkeley? Yes, I do. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show. That is insane because I've never heard of, of that even being a possibility.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 20:20
Well, it is, I say, was through a unique, individual interdisciplinary doctoral major. And to be honest with you, there are groups of people who consider themselves the self appointed skeptics and the promoters the gatekeepers of reality who believe we have to live in what they call a rational universe. And when they heard that the university was about to award a doctoral degree in parapsychology, they put enormous pressure on the university not to do that. And to, even after the degree was awarded the skeptics, so called skeptics, they're not real skeptics in a philosophical sense, but they put pressure on the university to retract the degree.

Alex Ferrari 21:08
That's pretty well mean. But no, it looks like like Einstein said, great minds always are thwarted by simple or smaller mines or something along those lines. With your within all the studies that you've done over the course of your career, can you touch upon a concept that so many different religions and philosophies have touched upon 1000s of years, which is reincarnation, come multiple times, we come back to our lives, and we have different lives. And we, and we learn in each life and we move on. And we have different experiences and my feeling, I mean, again, I've studied a lot in the eastern side of things in the specifically in India and the yogi's and, and that kind of stuff, and reincarnation is just a given, it's not even a question. It's just like, yes. And when I just looked at it from a logical standpoint, myself, I was like, if I, if this is the only time I get to be here, it seems pretty brutal, because it's basically the luck of the draw. So that means if I'm born a man at a certain time period, and in a certain country, was I born rich, or was I born poor, if I was born a woman, if I was born, a man of color, or a woman of color, in in, you know, in South Africa, when they had apartheid, or in slavery, like, it seems, or if you're born with a deformity, or you're born like, it just seems like that's kind of like a really brutal way to look at life. I reincarnation made so much more sense they would come back for different experiences, and so on. So what's your explanation of it? And what do you have to say in regards to it?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 22:45
We could talk long hour

Alex Ferrari 22:49
Of course!

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 22:50
My memories about this go back to the third grade. I think I was about nine years old, when my classmate Lee Rosenthal, gave a book report on back in the 1950s, a book about reincarnation that had been published at the time, it was a best seller called the search for Bridey. Murphy. I've had that book. Yeah, woman who had been hypnotized. And under hypnosis, this whole 17th century Irish personality came out called Bridey. Murphy. And so that was the book. And so Lee Rosenthal is giving his book report and he says, this book says that we lived before this lifetime. And at that moment, even though I'm a little nine year old kid, I felt electricity running up and down my spine, it was like, really affected me strongly that. So I think there's a lot to be said about reincarnation. Today. The major center for the study of this phenomenon is the University of Virginia, the Department of personality, Perceptual Studies, DRPS, at the University of Virginia Medical School, they've been researching this for half a century. And they have a database of over 2500 cases from all over the world where young children as soon as they can begin to speak, they start talking about, I used to live in this village and I had these parents and this used to be my name and you're not my real mommy, my real mommy lives in that other village and all of these things and researchers get called in to study such cases. And they're actually of the 2500 cases, approximately 1700 of them are considered to be what they call solved, which means that the information that the young children provides actually led to the identification of the previous personality. So, the when you look at that database, that's just one example of dozens supporting the existence of past survival of the personality after the death of the body. But that database alone is, makes the case for it.

Alex Ferrari 25:25
And when when, I mean, I've had a lot of guests on the show who haven't had near death experiences, and I've studied Raymond Moody, who studied, you know, you can have a godfather of near death experiences and coining the phrase near death experience. All of that, after talking to them and listening to these stories, many of them are similar in scope. It's interesting that some very like some very Eaton Alexander, for example, who is a neuroscientist, complete an atheist, complete skeptic. And this this thing that happened to him and he came back from from death, completely unexplainable. It was like an unexplainable return, you should have been legally dead. When he came back. And when he did come back, he was able to write all this stuff down. That I mean, other than being extremely entertaining to listen to these stories, they seem to be some, there's a lot of similarities, culturally, from culture to culture, depending on where you are in the world throughout time. These kinds of stories keep coming up. So for me, that's a really interesting piece of evidence towards the the case of reincarnation, if you will.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 26:43
Well, the evidence from near death experience certainly is evidence for an afterlife, but I don't think it means that everybody has to reincarnate. I think it's possible that you can go into the afterlife, and you have many options. At that point. Reincarnation is one of them if you want to come back to this dense physical earth plane, but you could also move up the various levels that have been described in the spiritualist literature and elsewhere, of the gradual evolution of the human soul. It's sort of a mystical path, ultimately leading to mystical union with the Divine.

Alex Ferrari 27:26
Now, what is your definition of consciousness?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 27:31
I have a simple definition. I don't think it's complicated. Consciousness is having the experience of being who you are. What is it like to be you that's consciousness?

Alex Ferrari 27:46
And being aware of that?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 27:48
Yeah, Well, even if you're not aware of it, you may you that's being conscious of being conscious. Even just having the experience of having experiences at all seeing the color red, for example, is a conscious experience. Whether you know, you're thinking that you're, we call it sometimes a metacognitive stance, you could say, Yes, I see red and I see that I'm seeing red and I see that I'm seeing myself seeing red and it's like an infinite regress at times.

Alex Ferrari 28:22
Now going along with reincarnation, can you discuss karma? Which is uh, and you might know this better than I do that did start in the Indian culture, karma or the in with the Bhagavad Gita or Hinduism? Or is that the come from somewhere else?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 28:40
Well, of course, the Vedanta literature. In the Buddhist literature refers to karma. And reincarnation, I can tell you this, it's a very interesting finding the research that we have the 2500 cases that are at the University of Virginia, don't support the classical notions that people have of reincarnation and karma that come out of the Indian culture, the idea you're a bad person in one life, you're going to be punished in your next life. I remember studying in anthropology, there was a village in India, where they believed if you're a very bad person, in that village, in your next lifetime as your punishment, you'll be reborn as an American. And you'll have to live in this materialistic culture where it'll be very hard for you to pursue your authentic spiritual growth. But what the research literature what we gather from the the cases that have actually been studied is that what persists from lifetime to lifetime isn't the sense of reward and punishment at all. but a sense of the habits that you carry forth. If you're a person who has strong inclinations, or habits of thought and action in one lifetime, you're likely to carry those with you into the next lifetime. Or, often, we also see, in the cases of people who remember their past lives, that a very high percentage of them happen to remember their lives because they were violently killed in the previous lifetime. And so they come into their next lifetime, perhaps with a phobia related to how they died in the previous lifetime. One of the most fascinating kinds of evidence that we have is that people who are, let's say, stabbed or shot in a past lifetime, are often born with birthmarks, that correspond to the death wounds of the previous life. So you have certain things that carry over from lifetime to lifetime. But there, I haven't seen anything in the literature that suggests that if you're a bad person for any reason, and one lifetime that in the next lifetime, you're going to be punished for that. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But it certainly not in the sense that some people talk about instant karma. It doesn't seem to work that way at all.

Alex Ferrari 31:29
No, I understand. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of been accepted into the zeitgeist, the word karma is like, Oh, you're gonna get that's Instant Karma, you do something bad and right away, something bad back happens to you. My explanation or my understanding of karma, from my point of view, is just that karma is not a good or bad thing. It is part of the evolution of the soul. So what we consider good or bad, is not is a duality that doesn't exist in the afterlife, or in the souls of illusion, it is something that the soul actually looks for looks for, because it needs to go through something like the soul wanting like, I want to go through pain. We can't conceive that because we, we, we just want to be happy all the time. And we want to have pleasure all the time. We don't want pain. But for the evolution of the soul, that pain might happen. So if you did something good in or bad in a prior lifetime, that you made that you haven't learned that lesson, you probably shouldn't kill people. Well, now you're going to feel that pain. And now you learn, hopefully, you learn and evolve that way. So it's not a punishment. I agree with you 100%. But from my studies, at least my understanding of it is more of part of the evolution of the soul. And there is no good or bad in that space. Does that make sense?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 32:49
It that makes a lot of sense. And it reminds me of in the near death literature, there's something called the past life review, that a high percentage of Near Death Experiences talk about where you get to experience the impact that you have had on all the other people in your life, moment by moment, second by second, and you will experience it from their perspective. So if you hurt somebody, then you get to experience what that felt like to them when they were hurt. And people say that it can an earth time, it might only take a few minutes, but they can go through lifetimes of experience in this altered state of consciousness or near death state and experience these things. It's fascinating how it's not experienced as an observer, it's experienced as a participant.

Alex Ferrari 33:51
Isn't it interesting when you said time, you know, time is such a construct that is it doesn't exist, but it doesn't exist because a percept perception is all about time is all about perception. My cat perceives time very differently than I do. The the net that was born a few seconds ago and will die in 10 minutes or an hour or however long in that lives. Their perception of time is completely different. If you leave this solar system is it 12 o'clock somewhere in the universe like so. So time is really interesting on on just as you just want to start getting really deep into that. Were in the soul's evolution and what we do this, this life is fairly quick. And as you get older, you feel it's getting quicker and quicker. When you're a kid

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 34:47
To speed up Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 34:49
As a kid, you're like, oh 30 so old, and like you and I both would kill to be 30 you know with our minds today though with our minds. Today, please. But but it's just I always find that very interesting the concept of time and how we look at it. And we're all of that I just love to hear your thoughts about it as well.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 35:11
Well, I imagine, for example, that a star might be a conscious entity for all we know, organics galaxy, and where is the the human a moment, when you talk about what is a moment, a unit of consciousness, for a human being, it's roughly a fifth of a second, maybe a 10th of a second. But if you're a star, or a galaxy, or a group of galaxies have such are conscious entities, a moment might last, what we think of is billions of years.

Alex Ferrari 35:48
It's all perception. If you're precepting, it as a star as a galaxy as a Natur. As a human being it's a, it's a completely different understanding of how you look at things. And I know that makes a lot of people listening, maybe their head starts to hurt a little bit. When you start going, Wait a minute with time, like, just think about it for a second, if there was no sun, if there was no rotation, our if we lived on Jupiter, time would be different. If we lived on Mars, time would be different. It's just a different perception of that. I'd love to ask you about the concept of duality and non duality. What can you define that for me, please?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 36:26
Well, normally our everyday world is a world of duality, we think especially in terms of good and bad, right and wrong. Evil and not evil is a question of duality life and death is duality. So we're always making judgments. That's, that's the world that we live in. But from a mystical point of view, everything is one, all the dualities are actually a losery. I mean, they're real. Insofar as at this level, you can't deny I think, especially today, we're in the edge of a world war three, you see good and evil being played out in on our television sets every day. But the at a different level. It's like you're reading a novel, you're reading, War and Peace. And after you finish the novel, you can put it down and you can appreciate all the characters in the novel and say what a wonderful story it was. A good story has a mixture of good and evil, but you can transcend the whole story, in a way.

Alex Ferrari 37:41
Yeah, it was interesting, I was speaking to another guest the other day, and he said something was so profound to me, I never really thought about it. He's like, no matter what part of life you're in. And you could be talking about the micro with yourself, or the macro, which is the use of the world. When evil comes up, let's say there's a balance of good that comes up against it. And when that evil goes down, the good goes down. And he says, Look at history. Anytime there was a great disruption. You could use World War Two, for example. Great, great amount of pain and suffering and evil came up well, there was an immense amount of power on the opposite side that came into to fight that. And now that's happening now in front of our eyes every day on the televisions, like what Russia is doing is is immense about an evil. And it's just horrible what they're doing. But then the world is starting to unite in a way that I haven't seen in my lifetime before. So it's really interesting to start thinking about Danny's like, even if, if they say your mom never hugged you, did you have an aunt the hug? Do? Was it a teacher? Was it a friend's mom, some somewhere the balance of what you were missing, finds its way to you in some way, shape or form? Generally speaking, what do you think of that?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 39:04
Well, there are many spiritual traditions that are based on the notion of non duality. I was raised in a Jewish religion so we have you know, the idea of one God. But when there's a legend, I think from the Jewish tradition that sort of explains this, Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, and he receives the 10 commandments from from God. And it's basically you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind, which really means love everything, love everyone all the time. And Moses comes down and he sees the children of Israel worshiping the golden calf, right and he gets angry and he takes the Tablets of the unitary view of the world the sometimes they call The tour of the tree of life. And he smashes it. And the legend is that all the letters flew back up. And Moses has to go back up to Mount Sinai a second time, because he sees the children of Israel aren't ready for the Torah of the tree of life. And when he comes back down with a second set of tablets, this is now the Torah of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's about how do you live in a world of duality, because you're not yet ready to live in a world of unity.

Alex Ferrari 40:45
Now, with with again, with all your experience and studies, why do you believe that it is so difficult for us to be our authentic selves, to be true to who we are and to honor that inner thing that makes us special that makes that's I use the term secret sauce. There's a secret sauce that nobody else in the world has, but you and that you're here for that purpose. Why do we stop ourselves from being authentic? Because I studied being successful and in the film industry, and all this kind of stuff, and everybody who's successful in every aspect of life, every every part from art to business, they are authentically, themselves. Every master, every titan of industry, they were all authentic to themselves, and they were comfortable in their own skin. Why do we have such problems? Being comfortable in our own skin?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 41:48
Well, when I became a graduate student in criminology, well, no in Parapsychology in Berkeley, I had a mentor, who had set up an institute and invited me to live there with him. Arthur M. Jung, he set up the Institute for the Study of consciousness in Berkeley. And he was an inventor, he invented the Bell Helicopter, first commercially licensed helicopter. And he was also a cosmologists, he wrote a great book called The reflexive universe. And one day he said to me, Jeffrey, what do you think is the Philosopher's Stone, the mystical stone, that terms lead into gold, and he was referring to the soul, letting your soul into gold, said, I don't know. He said, It's the obstacles that we face in life. That's the Philosopher's Stone, we have to confront those obstacles, and then our soul gets refined, and we become closer to who we are. So I think we all come here, we're here on this physical plane, in order to face obstacles that you can't find anywhere else.

Alex Ferrari 43:04
It's kind of like you harden the steel by smashing it against a stone.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 43:10
You temper the steel by heating it red hot, or white hot,

Alex Ferrari 43:14
And pounding it, pounding it again and again and again. And that's what makes us that's what makes us strong and makes us move forward. I love this. I heard this somewhere. And I love using this example. The boiling water softens the potato, but hardens the egg. The same boiling water does both. And I thought that was such it's so profound at somebody's levels. I was like, Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right. So it's the it's the, the boiling water is the obstacle. And for some, it softens them. But for others, it hardens them so they can move forward. You know, so it's, it's interesting. Now, I'd love to discuss the mind brain relationship. You know, you talk a lot about that. What is the mind brain relationship, which is our best friend and our worst enemy all at the same time?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 44:09
Well, from a philosophical point of view, there's something called the mind body problem, which is a problem, an unsolvable problem that the materialists have, which is if we live in a cold, dead universe of inanimate matter, how do you get consciousness? And nobody has yet figured that out? I interviewed some 30 years ago, Francis Crick, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, the man who discovered the double helix nature, the DNA molecule, okay. And he had published a new book called The astonishing hypothesis. His hypothesis was that the brain creates consciousness. Now, most of your viewers sort of naively assume well, it hasn't that been proven a long time. ago, everybody knows the brain creates consciousness. And Crick had the honesty to say to me, it is only a hypothesis. It hasn't been proven. In fact, he said, and I have it on camera. The religious point of view might be correct that consciousness survives the death of the body. And, of course, Crick is no longer alive. I think if he were alive, he'd have to admit we have yet to prove that consciousness is produced by the brain, I would go so far as to say it's exactly the opposite. The brain exists within consciousness. I would agree because exists within consciousness.

Alex Ferrari 45:44
So the question is, if you're conscious, and then someone's telling you, who's driving, the who's driving the car that you're conscious of, there's someone driving in the background, there's someone talking to you like, well, who is that person? And like, how, like, you, right? You can't really prove it, you can't prove where it comes from. Because it's such. It's like trying to grab water with your fist. It's impossible. You might get a little bit in your hand, but you definitely not going to get a hold of it. It's it's a fascinating conversation. It's a fascinating thing. Just every this conversation has been extremely fascinating. Jeffrey, I want to ask you a question I asked. Well, first of all, I want to ask you one last question. What is the future of human evolution?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 46:38
Well, that's a big one. And I have to say, it's the evolution of consciousness itself. I guess, really, even to begin? To answer that question, we have to ask what is the present of human evolution, I and maybe I'm unusual, I think of myself, not as a person who was born in 1946. And who will probably die sometime in the next 20 or 30 years, I think of myself as a person who is actually at least billions of years old. I mean, my body is certainly it evolved from single celled organisms billions of years ago, and I suspect it may have gone through many cycles like that, that that's who I really am. In fact, I'd go even further and say that I subscribe to the mystical vision that all is one so that you and I are, one might say different versions of each other. Right? As well as all of your viewers and listeners. Or the same with every animal, every octopus every grizzly bear, or extra terrestrial or insect that that we share what the philosopher Schopenhauer called the one mind that sees through the eyes of every living creature.

Alex Ferrari 48:04
So So that's that so that answers our current consciousness so what is the future of human evolution?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 48:10
Well, that would be the realization of that not just intellectually, as I'm explaining it to you right? Understanding it experiencially, that that I think is the path of spiritual growth.

Alex Ferrari 48:25
And understanding that we are all connected and then when you hurt one you hurt us all. In so many ways in the more as I've walked the earth a little bit during my life, I started realize how much we are connected and how interconnected we are. I mean, if you just look at nature, nature's interconnected interdependent on so many avenues so many things that have to click for nature to work in the ecosystems that its nature. And now I feel that the world because we're the first time in human history, so connected with the internet so interdependent on each other economically that now we see what's happening in Russia where we're literally just completely canceling or ghosting an entire country for the for for right reasons, of course, but how that it's like wait a minute, if I if I'm not connected to the rest, will I survive? How can I survive without being connected to the rest? So it's a really interesting conversation to be had to understand that we are all truly connected and interdependent on each other. I promise you if there was a Independence Day style attack tomorrow, all everybody would be cool with each other. Everybody would be like we got to get together and work on this as a giant giant machine coming down and blowing up the world. Isn't that funny the way that always works out.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 49:54
Well, I think that's why people like Ronald Reagan used to talk about what if the world we're confronting a an alien invader, which it will be a way of uniting this world.

Alex Ferrari 50:06
Yeah, I hope we don't have to go through that. To unite. I truly don't think we're going we have enough going on in the world right now. We don't have to deal with that as well. Now, I'm asked a question asked all my guess what is your mission in this life?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 50:22
A good question. And I am reminded of the the moment I took training, I studied a fellow named Ted Owens, the PK man, I've written a book about him, published 20 years ago, he had enormous psychic powers. And I took his training program at one point in 1986. He could control earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, power blackouts, UFO sightings, and the like volcanoes. And so he said to me, what do you want to do with these powers? You're taking this training? I thought about it. And I realized, I'm not interested in doing any of the things that you're doing, which I had been documenting for 10 years. I said, what I want to do is to be a communicator to the mainstream of the public about these esoteric psychic called mystical realities. And that's what I've been up to where shortly after I took that training, I founded my first television show thinking aloud that ran on National Public Television for close to 15 years. And now I'm doing a YouTube channel the new thinking aloud YouTube channel. So my mission has consistently been since that time to make these realities communicable to the public at large.

Alex Ferrari 51:59
Jeffrey, and where can people find out more about you your books and your work, sir?

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 52:04
The simplest way is to go to newthinkingallowed. That's all one word.com A and it's allowed is not ALOUD. It's ALLOWED newthinkingallowed.com That'll take you to the YouTube channel. And we also have a foundation newthinkingallowed.org.

Alex Ferrari 52:27
Jeffrey, thank you so much for coming on the show. And I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing over these many, many decades of your work. So thank you, my friend. I appreciate you.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 52:36
It's been a real pleasure. I'm delighted to meet you Alex, you seem like a kindred spirit.

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