UC Berkeley Scientist Reveals TERRIFYING Patterns in 1,700 Near-Death Cases with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 0:08
I was a graduate student at Berkeley in 1972 if you had known me, you would have seen a person doing group therapy sessions in 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 one in which my Great Uncle Harry came to me in in the dream 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 singing at the same time, which has never happened to me since then or before. And so 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 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. 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 that one way or another, I'd have to become my own expert. 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 parapsychology, 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. 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. Woo, woo. It doesn't count. It's it's not as important. And I think that's a shame. 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, about a woman who had been hypnotized and under hypnosis. This whole 17th Century Irish personality came out called Bridie 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 it really affected me strongly. 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, DOPS 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. 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. 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 a mystical union with the Divine. I have a simple definition. I don't think it's complicated. Consciousness is having the experience of being who you are.

Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 5:35
It's like, what is it like to be you? That's consciousness, where, even if you're not aware of it, you may that's being conscious, of being conscious, but 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. 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. The Vedanta literature and the Buddhist literature refers to karma and reincarnation. I can tell you this, and 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 cases that have actually been studied, is that what persists from lifetime to lifetime isn't a 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 in 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. 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 experience it from their perspective. So if, 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 on our 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. And it's fascinating how it's not experienced as an observer. It's experienced as a participant. Well, I imagine, for example, that a star might be a conscious entity for all we know, or a galaxy, and where is the human a moment? When you talk about what is a moment, a unit of consciousness for a human being, that'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 of such are conscious. Religious entities, a moment might last what we think of as billions of years. 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 the world that we live in. But from a mystical point of view, everything is one. All the dualities are actually illusory. I mean, they're real insofar as at this level you can't deny I think especially today, we're in the edge of world war three. You see good and evil being played out in on our television sets every day. But 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 in a way. When I became a graduate student in Parapsychology in Berkeley, I had a mentor who had set up an institute and invited me to live there with him, Arthur M young, 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 cosmologist. 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 turns lead into gold. And he was referring to the soul of lead in your soul into gold. I 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, 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. And I have to say it's the evolution of consciousness itself. I guess even to begin to answer that question, we have to ask, what is the present of human evolution? 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. That's who I really am. In fact, I 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, as well as all of your viewers and listeners or the same with every animal, every octopus, every grizzly bear or extraterrestrial or insect that that we the philosopher Schopenhauer called the One Mind that sees through the eyes of every living creature Well, that would be the realization of that, not just intellectually, as I'm explaining it to you, but understanding it experientially, that I think, is the path of spiritual growth.