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- [00:00]
Ben
In this episode of Hana Cosmos, we learn that my singing voice is exactly the same as Evanescence's Amy Lee's, so that's impressive. We also shock the world by determining that reincarnation is, in fact, the demons.
- [00:15]
Brian
This episode is brought to you by Zilli Creative Works, bringing you face to face Family fun that is fierce, fast, and affordable.
- [00:27]
Ben
The world is not just stuff.
- [00:34]
Brian
Minus 111.9.
- [00:46]
Ben
Widely publicized mystery of the Flying Saucers may soon be solved.
- [01:07]
Brian
It was May 5, 1957. The streets of Hexham were still. The midday sun shone down with startling strength. It made the already heavy air feel that much heavier, like a glowing fog blanketing the world. The woman looked outside of her brownstone window and soaked in all of this exterior serenity. But for all of this peace. Peace. She could not stop her hand from shaking. She could not stop her heart pounding loudly and irregularly enough to give her a headache. She was done. She was tired. She was hopeless and helpless. She had given her heart over as a living sacrifice to despair. But despair does not keep its sacrifices alive for long. Despair is a cruel God. She walked to the bathroom and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. What had she become? She could no longer say. She pulled on the mirror, revealing a small medicine cabinet behind it. She grabbed two bottles. What they contained is irrelevant. What matters is that they contained enough of it. She opened the bottles and poured the contents in between gulps of sink water into her mouth. The change came suddenly. Still shaking but no longer nervous, she exited the bathroom, walked to the kitchen, and grabbed her car keys. She walked to the front door and stopped to look back before leaving the home. She did not recognize anything anymore. She did not bother to lock the door behind her. The car's engine turned over. The woman pulled out of her driveway and rolled slowly onto the empty road that led closer to town. It was all too much. The divorce, the custody battle, the demons she didn't bother to wrestle with anymore. It was time. The woman sped up, swerving in and out of her lane. Soon the sides of the road contained sidewalks, but the sidewalks, for a stretch, were empty. Suddenly, on the horizon, she marked three children walking. She could see the church they walked toward. Further ahead of them, its steeple glistened in the sun and made her look away. She pressed her foot further into the pedal and the car lurched fast down the road. The kids drew closer. She became angry at them. Why should they make their parents happy? Why shouldn't others feel the loss that she felt? If she could not see her children anymore. Then she wanted to make sure that some others could not see theirs. Before the end. The steering wheel jolted back to the left as she forced the passenger side wheels up onto the curb and onto the sidewalk. The children still did not notice what was coming. Her foot pushed until the pedal could go no further. Her eyes were fixed on the children, two girls and a boy. In the final seconds, they did not turn back to look at the menace that chased them down. She saw their faces just before the impact. And then they were no more. Her wicked lust to share her own depravity with someone else had done its work. In an instant, the quiet peace of the English summer day turned to a theater of sins stained with the blood of youth. The children lay crumpled on the sidewalk now, shrinking in her rearview mirror as the woman pressed on down the road. She felt nothing. Minutes and then hours passed. Hours that saw the authorities gathered around the scene of the woman's murder of others. But hours that did not see the woman able to murder herself. She came to grips with the truth that she had failed. She pulled over and fell asleep, just waiting to be found by the police. When she was found and when the trial was done and the doctors had spoken, she was taken to a psychiatric hospital where she spent the rest of her days in the despondence of an unjust peace. History does not remember her name. As for the children, they were named Joanna Pollock, Jacqueline Pollock, and a neighbor boy named Anthony. The girls were 11 and 6 years old, respectively. It's not known to us how old Anthony was. They'd been walking to church together on that summer day. They'd been walking, as all children should walk, without a care in the world to slow them down or bow their heads. The families arrived on the scene with a kind of senseless devastation clouding their lives. They were faced with the impossible question which has plagued every unfortunate parent to share their grief since the days of Cain and Abel. How can we go on? What do we do now that what we cherished most has been lost? The parents were spent and they thought in their darkest hours that it would have been better for themselves to have never been born. As for Anthony's parents, we don't know exactly how they coped. One hopes they were able to find comfort and solace in the faith that their son was going towards the house of. But as for the Pollacks, we do know more. They had to go on for the sake of the four other children. They already had four other boys. Through pain and loss and Shadows of evil outside of their control, they pressed on. They never forgot their girls, but they didn't forget their sons or each other. For that, one cannot help but commend them in wonder. And yet one also cannot ignore the twisted way in which the father, John Pollock, consoled himself. He proclaimed Christ, yes, but he also held a deep conviction in the power of the occult. He had always tried to hold these two views in tandem, one in the left hand and the other in the right. An endless tug of war between two faiths that he must have known could not possibly live with one another in peace. But once his daughters were gone, he felt the pull of the occult more and more, yanking him over to one side and loosening his grip on his Christian faith on the other. Even as a boy, he had wondered at the thought of reincarnation. In the wake of the tragedy, this interest turned to a focus, and the focus turned nearly to an obsession. He began to pray. Unnatural prayers, twisted prayers. Prayers that asked God to give up comforting him. Prayers that asked God instead to return his daughters to him somehow. Then, early the following year, his prayers, or so it seemed to him were answered. His wife became pregnant. What came of that birth has gone down in the annals of mankind as some of the strangest things we have ever witnessed as a species. As the due date neared, tensions in the Pollock household rose exponentially. Not only did John continue in his unshakable belief that the pregnancy marked the reincarnation of his loss, he began asserting with equal certainty that his wife was actually pregnant with twin girls. This was something the doctors refuted time and time again leading up to the birth, since they were only ever able to hear one heartbeat. But John was not swayed. He somehow knew in his heart of hearts that two children lived lay in his wife's womb. His wife, Florence, was torn between three things. One, she did not want to feed the reincarnation delusion from John. Two, she did not want to disagree with the doctors. But three, she was also excited at the idea of two new babies. Whatever hope she had for John being right never showed, and she contented herself with wishing he would just let it go. But he never did. More than that, Florence so fervently disagreed with the reincarnation idea that she was entirely uncomfortable with John's consolation by it. And she was even more uncomfortable to see that he really, genuinely believed it. Things came to a head in August of that year, just two months before the birth, when she nearly filed for divorce from her husband. But ultimately, they reconciled, neither one still giving an inch on what they thought the coming child would be. Florence just loved her as the gift of another daughter from God. But they also did not wish for this conflict to break the family in two. Especially not right before it grew again. On the morning of October 4, 1958, the doctors stood dumbfounded as, sure enough, twin girls were born to John and Florence Pollock. The fact that John had been right about the pregnancy immediately began to shake for Florence's doubts of reincarnation. But she didn't show it yet. Their new girls, Gillian and Jennifer, breathed the free air of the world for the first time. Two identical twin girls. It was a joyous time for everyone. But right away, the doctors noticed something unusual. One of the girls, Jennifer, had birthmarks that her twin did not share. And yet it wasn't so much that she had birthmarks, but rather where the birthmarks were. That was so strange. One of them on Jennifer's hip matched a birthmark Jacqueline had had almost exactly in the same spot. The other one, a slight discoloration on the forehead, matched a scar Jacqueline had again, and almost exactly. Florence chalked it up to divine providence, a sweet ribbon tied onto a sweet gift from God. But John took it as further confirmation that his wish of reincarnation had been granted. When the girls were three months old, the family moved about 30 miles away from Hexham to the charming coastal village of Whitley Bay. The fresh pair of twins marked a fresh start for the bereaved family. It was only right that they left their place of mourning behind them for better days on the eastern shore of their homeland. In fact, it would not be until the twins were 4 years old that the family returned to Hexham for a visit with with old friends from church. But by the time the girls were three, the family started to wonder whether or not they had somehow returned before without the rest of them. It started with basic toddler phrases. I remember Hexum when we go back home. Tony was good neighbor. Phrases like this began to escape each of the twins with increasing regularity before their fourth birthday. Before long, the phrases started to evolve until they appeared to both parents as more memory than random words. Thr together, the twins seemed to know the names of streets and parks and shops that were frequented by the Pollux before the tragedy. Favorite Hexum restaurants and ice cream parlors started to be a regular request from the girls. It was all uncanny, but it was nothing compared to what came with the actual visit. Having never seen hexum before, having never even seen pictures of hexum to the knowledge of the family before the little girl started pointing out and naming landmarks on the way in. And I don't just mean pointing to a train station and calling it a train station. I mean pointing to the train station and giving it its proper name. Pointing to a creek beneath the bridge and naming the creek correctly, or naming the bridge for that matter. The girls knew Hexum. But how? They asked to visit their favorite playground again, one they named by name on the other side of town, near to their old home. It was the playground that Joanna and Jacqueline loved most in their old neighborhood. They even recited, as if it was a nursery rhyme, the directions to the playground from the front door of the family's old home. At the friend's house they found some of their late sisters old toys. They proceeded to give the toys, mostly dolls and playhouses, the same names that Joanna and Jacqueline had given to them. They even divided the toys up into groups, one group the favorite of Gillian and the other the favorite of Jennifer. Just as the late sisters did. The twins even started asking for the same types of snacks and books that the older girls had once enjoyed. For all of this, John grew more settled in his opinion of their reincarnation. But Florence continued to resist. That was until she walked in on them discussing the crash in what must have been a sincerely difficult thing to witness. Florence waited outside of the girls room listening intently while Gillian cradled Jennifer's head in a kind of make believe saying, the blood is coming out of your eyes. That's where the car hit you. This coupled with increasing levels of strangeness, pushed Florence over the edge. At one point she watched Gillian point to the birthmark on Jennifer's forehead and say, you got that mark from falling on a bucket. Jennifer had of course not fallen on a bucket, but Jacqueline had. And it's what had given her the similar scar. The small town story of potentially reincarnated sisters started to garner some attention from the wider world. Eventually A man named Dr. Ian Stevenson visited the family and requested an interview with the girls. He was a clinical psychologist whose personal area of interest included cases of apparent reincarnation. At the conclusion of their time together, Stevenson admitted that he had a very difficult time explaining some of the twins behavior with conventional wisdom in the field. He included their case in one of his seminal works, Children who Remember Previous Lives. Stevenson noted some particularities that the parents had not thought to mark yet as well. For instance, during one session with the family, the doctor saw Gillian holding her pencil in a very impressive way given her age, delicately, with the pencil nestled between her thumb and forefinger. Meanwhile, her twin sister Jennifer, grasped the pencil with her fist and could not write. At the time of the accident that took the lives of the older girls, Jacqueline, 11 years old, was able to write proficiently, while Joanna was only just beginning to learn. Additionally, Stevenson performed a blood test on the Pollock girls to figure out whether or not they were truly identical twins. The results showed without any doubt that they were indeed monozygotic twins. Identical twins from a single egg, which meant they should have shared the same genetic material through and through. This surprised the doctor because it meant that if Jennifer's birthmarks were of a genetic origin, her sister would have had the exact same ones. While this can be explained by a genetic aberration that occurred during the twins gestation periods, the similarity of Jennifer's marks to Jacqueline's does seem almost too good of a coincidence to be true. This went on for a number of years. Some new instance of apparent revelation would come to the twins about their sisters, knowledge they shouldn't have had. It would lead to some attention from the press, which would lead to some believers and some naysayers. Then, as mysteriously as it all began, it started to cease. The girls reached further into girlhood, about 7 or 8 years old, and stopped having or stopped voicing their old memories. Eventually they faded altogether. Then one day they were done. The parents never heard of the late girls again, and the twins became entirely their own people in all of it. The Pollock parents maintained that neither they nor their sons talked to the twins about their deceased sisters or the accident that took them. To this day, it is one of the most controversial cases of parapsychology ever recorded. Gillian Pollock died in 2002 at 44 years old. What is man? What is the substance of man? What is his nature? What is his end? These questions have been a ghost haunting mankind since the first days after his fall from grace. In answering, we tend to do one of two things. We either untether ourselves even more from our Creator, or we see ourselves more and more clearly, our Creator's truth, illuminated by our Creator's light. When man sinned, he became a cursed thing. But he did not stop being man. Though even his rational nature has been touched by the curse of sin. Fallen man yet remains rational man. Though oftentimes the providential rationality of the playwright is far too complex and transcendental for him to comprehend. And even though his rationality is often turned to folly and error. And so we find answers to these questions that, though undeniably rife with error, nonetheless confession contain glimmers of truth that compel us to think deeper. Yet we cannot see as far as we often think we can by the light of these glimmers. An interesting penumbra doesn't lead to the clear light of day for the one lost in the deep shadow. One thing that all great societies have agreed upon for all time is that man is somehow a composite of both a physical body that we can sense and an equally real but invisible, invisible, energizing essence or soul. The nearly ubiquitous belief among all religions is that this soul is something immortal. Different religions take this immortality to different levels of status. Some, like Christians, maintain the soul's immortality but do not attribute divinity to it, While others, like the Orphic mysteries, believe the soul to be a God in itself or a part of the divine nature as a whole. Whole. The paradox comes in when one recognizes that it is those religions which divinize the soul that also cyclically bind the soul to the body, something they universally see as lesser than that which is invisible. What does it say about their theology and theogony that the divine nature is continually trapped within a cage of physicality it only ever wishes it could escape? It says that the gods are weak and tossed around by some other force outside of their own will. It turns them into something less than God's. As a counter to this, the Christian religion, despite its so called lesser view of the soul, is the only belief system that gives the physical body its proper place. After all, God became man and Jesus is still a man for all eternity. Glorified man, yes. Immortal and perfect man, man, yes. But true man, the body, like the soul, is hallowed by its maker. But I digress. At any rate, Hinduism, Buddhism, some sects of Judaism, Wicca, Native American paganism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and even the Virgilian vision of Elysium exposited by Anchises among countless other religions, firmly hold to some kind of reincarnation or transmigration or metempsychosis. Especially in the eastern lands, belief in some kind of rebirth is as widespread as religious belief itself, which is to say, it's universal. But is it true? Well, obviously not. When we behold the world in light of our Creator, in the light of his revealed word, we find that all of these reincarnational fantasies are just that, fantasies, phantasms, lying, ghosts. Whenever we see a case of supposed reincarnation, we're seeing something which is somewhere along the line either a deception or a mistake. But if it's a deception, who is doing the deceiving could it be that dark forces in the world, seeing the prolific conviction of reincarnation, a conviction they perhaps even taught us, can somehow make its proponents think that it relates happens? After all, if it really is appointed once for man to die and then to judgment, what better way to keep him trapped in sin and death than the notion that he will have another and another and maybe even infinite chances to live again? Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we discuss the lure and the lie of reincarnation. But first, some unfinished business. Returning to the saga of the Pollock sisters, there are facets of Dr. Ian Stevenson's life that should further interest us. You see, he was very serious about reincarnation. He documented dozens of supposed cases of it throughout his career and caught no small amount of flak from the more conservative camps in his field because of that. But one must always wonder where the seed of the idea came from. Where did he first make the connection? Of this possibility? No one can ultimately say, probably not even the doctor himself. But one season in his life may be worth noting as a contributing factor. For there was a time when Stevenson became friends with the popular author Aldous Huxley. When the two met in the 1950s, Huxley was just going public with his endorsement of psychedelic drugs and their positive effects on man. The young psychologist was eager to see if he might use the drugs to help in his studies. He therefore started to take LSD himself and record his experiences. He studied and interviewed others as they also took varying doses of the psychedelics. He described his findings as profoundly impactful on his life. He even went so far as to say that his trips gave him the gift of perfect serenity, freedom from all anger and anxiety. He bemoaned the fact that the serenity fled so soon after the drug wore off. He said the memory of that peace persisted through his life as a kind of hope, something he always wanted to get back to. Dr. Ian Stevenson was raised by a lawyer father and an eclectic mother. His father was a foreign correspondent he saw very little of in his early childhood. His mother therefore became his chief parent and confidant. Given how sickly Stevenson was in his early years, he even started to think of his mother as his closest friend. He therefore took great interest in all that interested her. One Such topic for Mrs. Stevenson was the esoteric doctrine of theosophy, a subject which she reserved a whole bookshelf for in their home. Stevenson read every single book, cover to cover, as a youth. He said that it fueled his love for the paranormal forevermore. Escape Master is a fast paced fantasy card game that your family game night needs. Think of speed or Dutch Blitz mixed with deep fantasy lore, battle strategies and character building. 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- [23:48]
Ben
Guns.
- [23:49]
Brian
Cryptids with guns. That's where Armored Republic comes in. They equip law abiding citizens to stand against the unthinkable. Even if it's a gun wielding devil worshipping Bigfoot. From combat tested coatings to high performance carriers, every piece of their ballistic armor and tactical gear is built to protect. Visit armoredrepublic.com or text join all caps J O I N to 88027 to get involved in the preparedness effort.
- [24:21]
Ben
Brian I got bad news the other day. I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also I started googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts.
- [24:42]
Brian
Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap ladies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl.
- [24:51]
Ben
Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it then?
- [24:54]
Brian
You ignorant Normie? All you've needed to do is go to indigosundrysoap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties.
- [25:08]
Ben
Okay, I am literally going to indigosundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy then.
- [25:13]
Brian
What I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle.
- [25:21]
Ben
Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men's six pack because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't.
- [25:28]
Brian
So true King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show Indigo Sundries Soap Company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps. Discount code Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.
- [25:40]
Ben
Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?
- [25:45]
Brian
Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description.
- [25:49]
Ben
Okay, so I'm going to go to indigosundrysoap.com I'm going to pick the men's six pack bundle and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout. All caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show.
- [26:01]
Brian
Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something. Dignified, man. Ben, I knew we were handsome, but I didn't know we were that handsome until I saw our recent Haunted Cosmos thumbnails.
- [26:20]
Ben
Yeah, your skin looks so velvety smooth.
- [26:24]
Brian
I mean, it's unbelievable. Chris at New Dominion Design Company did an absolutely fantastic job not only on those thumbnails, but on our recent book cover as well.
- [26:32]
Ben
Yeah, exactly. And if you need some design work from Chris, you should go to newdominiondesignco.com get started there and he'll serve you right, man.
- [26:40]
Brian
He will make you look 50% as handsome as Ben, guaranteed.
- [26:48]
Ben
Hey everyone. Welcome to this episode of Hana Cosmos. We are in the. Why are you laughing?
- [26:54]
Brian
It's because of the contrast between what you were doing moments before you went into the official intro to just being like, turn it on. Well, welcome everybody. How are you doing?
- [27:05]
Ben
Maybe we'll get into what I was doing in just a second here. But first, let me cordially welcome you to this fourth episode of season five of Haunted Cosmos. Today we are going to discuss reincarnation and properties of the human soul. Welcome to my co host, Mr. Brian Sauvey.
- [27:22]
Brian
I would like to put my marker down right from the beginning on the Christian view, which is traducianism.
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Ben
And if you believe anything else, you're an idiot. I'm kidding. You're not an idiot.
- [27:32]
Brian
I mean, some people did believe in.
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Ben
Other views, but almost everyone actually did.
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Brian
Hey, but they're wrong. We disagree with them because we disagree.
- [27:42]
Ben
With them and that means that they're wrong. Now before we get into that, before we get into that, a little bit of housekeeping. Brian had his seventh child since recording of episode three in this one. So everyone on your own. I don't care where you are. You could be on the bus, you could be at work, you could be in a board meeting listening to this when you shouldn't. Give a round of applause, please for Mr. Brian Sobe. Thank you. Yep.
- [28:06]
Brian
And my little girl. Orpheus.
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Ben
That's right. No, Eurydice is the girl's name. Orpheus is a boy name.
- [28:11]
Brian
Actually, I named her after a virtuous woman from literature page out of my guy Ben's book.
- [28:16]
Ben
He actually took the name from me directly, literally, because I was like, I'm going to name a daughter Penelope. And he was like, good try.
- [28:23]
Brian
Uno reversed. I got there first. Hey, possession is 9/10 of the law.
- [28:28]
Ben
That's right.
- [28:29]
Brian
I possessed a girl to name Penelope before you did.
- [28:33]
Ben
So you had the girl, therefore you can take eminent domain over the name. Right?
- [28:38]
Brian
Well, it's because like 99 out of 100 name ideas Ben has are utterly unusable. No, like Cinewolf.
- [28:45]
Ben
Okay, I'm willing to admit I have some years under my belt.
- [28:50]
Brian
The first name idea I ever heard from you was, I'm going to name my child Cinewolf.
- [28:55]
Ben
You know what? No, I stand by it. That's a great name. Cinewolf was not only a great English saint that was friends with Bede, contemporaries of Bede, but he was also an English king.
- [29:03]
Brian
It goes hard.
- [29:04]
Ben
Yeah, it goes hard. But here you go. Let me know what you think in the comments. Best girl name literally ever that's possible is the name Psyche, which means soul, by the way. There's a connection to the episode Tryin. And so this isn't banter. This is actually connected to the show.
- [29:21]
Brian
Till we have faces.
- [29:22]
Ben
And anyone that disagrees is an idiot. Another one is Istra, which also means soul. But my wife was so vehemently opposed to those that I, you know, I'm living with my wife in an understanding way.
- [29:35]
Brian
If you name your daughter Psyche, the thing is, I know you and you'd constantly be saying psych. You'd constantly be doing it.
- [29:44]
Ben
Hey, Psyche, can you come here and give dad a hug?
- [29:46]
Brian
Psych.
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Ben
I don't want a hug. I'm kidding.
- [29:47]
Brian
I would want constantly doing it.
- [29:49]
Ben
Anyway, welcome to the show. A little bit of housekeeping. Just normal stuff. If you guys have enjoyed the off season releases of the dusty tome that we did before these all released to the public, then consider supporting the show. Also, if you support the show on Supercast, you will get full access to the rest of this season already. So that'll be three more episodes, not including this One that you've never heard before that are completely done ad free. Fully produced and fully produced by. And this is our last new announcement, at least partly produced by our newest member of the production team here at New Christendom Press and Haunted Cosmos, whose name is Evan Brandt, Evan Longoria. Or our personal favorite, I think. Evanescence.
- [30:35]
Brian
Evanescence. Wake me up Wake me up inside I can't wake up Wake me up inside Save me from the nothing this episode has become.
- [30:46]
Ben
And I would like to sing that song as a personal letter to Mr. Evanescence, who's in the studio now along with Martina McBride.
- [30:54]
Brian
We didn't get rid of Martina McBride.
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Ben
Martina McBride is still singing Independence Day like he wrote. And we're proud of Martina McBride. He's an OG, you know.
- [31:04]
Brian
Oh, he's an OG. He's a pillar. He's a foundation stone.
- [31:07]
Ben
That's right.
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Brian
But what we're doing, he's a short king.
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Ben
How do you say it in Mexican?
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Brian
In. In.
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Ben
Martin is our. In. I don't think that makes sense. Martin. How do you say it?
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Brian
Martin is our. Seriously, my guy.
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Ben
In Serio Insidio Cafe.
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Brian
Anyway, we were trying to get him to teach us how to say so. True king.
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Ben
Yeah.
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Brian
Which is like, verdad. Rey. Rey.
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Ben
And then what's that? What does encerio mean?
- [31:36]
Brian
It's like. Seriously. It's more like a Mexican would never say verdarey, but he would say like. So that's more authentic.
- [31:47]
Ben
Yeah. Okay. Evanescence is a. Is not from Mexico.
- [31:52]
Brian
No, he's not.
- [31:54]
Ben
Now Martina McBride reigns from Mexico City, Utah. Evanescence. Where are you from?
- [31:59]
Brian
Arizona.
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Ben
Evanescence is from Lake Havasu.
- [32:02]
Brian
You had to like Arizona.
- [32:05]
Ben
I once again almost said Lake Ayahuasca. I don't know why that's always what.
- [32:09]
Brian
I keep saying it.
- [32:10]
Ben
Instead of Lake Ayahuasca. Arizona doesn't exist. So welcome to the show. We're talking about reincarnation souls. We got into some very interesting stuff in the cold open there. I think that we talked a lot about the bad views of the soul, this metempsychosis, this transmigration, which all comes back to a kind of pre existence of the soul, which is a distinctly pagan idea, that before the body is ever created, the soul has existed basically from the beginning of time and is free in that existence of spirit almost as a part of the divine nature.
- [32:44]
Brian
It's like a chip off the old divine essence, often like a splinter from the tree of divinity.
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Ben
Splinter cell.
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Brian
And so you're trying to get back, like a lot of the time I can't wake up.
- [32:55]
Ben
So the soul is constantly trapped in a body saying, I can't wake.
- [32:58]
Brian
Wake me up.
- [33:00]
Ben
Can't wake up.
- [33:01]
Brian
People are gonna stop watching this episode.
- [33:03]
Ben
And so the pre existence, like most of these pagan ideas, if not all even. Well, I guess except a pure materialist that denies the soul's existence. But all these pagan ideas can basically be wrapped up in pre existence. And almost all of them claim that the soul undergoes some cycle of being trapped in various inanimate forms or animate forms. So human body or even like a piece of rock or something like that. And as they go through those cycles, they're yearning for release from that animal, human or inanimate form, so that they can be reabsorbed into the divine nature that they were pre existent in. And so we get forms of reincarnation that take different flavors depending on the different culture that you are a part of. Those things are bad.
- [33:52]
Brian
Yeah. And I mean, this is what like metempsychosis and transmigration. Both of these are ideas of the soul moving from one thing to another. One shell, one like sort of puppet to another.
- [34:04]
Ben
Yeah. One evanescence, if you will.
- [34:06]
Brian
One essence. Well, actually the essence of the thing would stay the same, Right. It would move to a different shell and one material form. What's really shocking to me is that when you look when you first think of reincarnation. Right. We've for a long time had written down. We got to do an episode on alleged instances of reincarnation.
- [34:24]
Ben
Yeah.
- [34:24]
Brian
We've got some wild stories. Probably the most famous one would be the Pollock twins. But then also the cold, the hot clothes of this episode.
- [34:34]
Ben
The hot clothes om Seti is nuts.
- [34:36]
Brian
It's crazy. And in each of these stories there are skeptical answers to them. Like in the Pollock twins. Yeah. They had brothers already. And of course mom and dad say they didn't ever talk about this stuff. But do I know every conversation that happens between my now seven children? Absolutely not. I've heard some wild ones that I've taken.
- [34:58]
Ben
Do I even remember everything that I've said to my children? Absolutely not.
- [35:02]
Brian
And then when you add in the. What's the word? Were you like accidentally lead somebody?
- [35:09]
Ben
Yeah, yeah. It's like a subliminal type.
- [35:12]
Brian
Yeah. You're influencing. The father really believed in reincarnation. He was very passionate about this idea. And then really set off even before the death of the original daughters. He was interested in a lot of these ideas. And then he was set off by the death of this extremely tragic Incident, senseless murder of his daughters. And so you could see how he might influence his daughters. And maybe not even being self deceived, not knowing that he was doing it, but even giving some of those sort of skeptical caveats for the hot clothes, there's some of those. And for this one, there are, in all of these most compelling stories, there are things that just seem beyond normal explanation.
- [35:59]
Ben
Yeah, yeah. I think some of the conceit of the episode can be described as like, we know that there are skeptical objections to all of these stories. Fully aware of that. And so maybe we're asking, well, what if these things weren't or can't be described by the skeptical objection? What if there was something more going on? If so, and we understand that's assuming a lot, but just if so, how would we explain it otherwise?
- [36:25]
Brian
And so what was interesting to me, because I've known about these stories, you've known about these stories for a while, I have heard them before and thought we need to do an episode on them. What was really fascinating to me as we got ready for this episode is actually realizing how ubiquitous the concept of reincarnation is across so many different types of false or pagan belief ranging from like we've already mentioned ancient Greek ideas. For example, Plato 100% believed in reincarnation, taught reincarnation. He had several dialogues like the Phaedrus and Phaedo where he mentions reincarnational concepts. He even, you know, Plato's very famous for his Platonic forms, his idea of the Platonic form, that there is a world of forms which are the perfect essence of a thing. And then in the world you're just, you have reflections or you have iterations, reifications of the form. Yeah, but his idea was that the human soul existed, pre existed its birth in the world of the forms. And it had borne witness to these forms. And so even when we're learning, I think he called it anamnesis, which is when we're learning, we're actually remembering things we've forgotten.
- [37:46]
Ben
Yeah.
- [37:47]
Brian
So he has this famous dialogue, I can't remember which writing it's in, but it was with a slave boy who was learning geometry simply by being asked a series of questions. And his point was that the slave boy wasn't learning geometry, he was remembering what he had seen.
- [38:06]
Ben
It's like the questions are reminding him of what he had seen.
- [38:08]
Brian
The form of geometry in the world of forms. So I mean ancient Greek philosophy, but all the way through Gnosticism and then even to modern theosophical ideas and Eastern ideas, Native American mysticism. Like you see this concept, I had underappreciated how ubiquitous it was.
- [38:29]
Ben
Yeah, I just kind of was expecting that it would be ubiquitous in the east and the more naturally mystic religions. And so I too was very surprised to see how common it was in the Western tradition, the pre Christian Western tradition. But even in the Christian tradition like you see these corruptions of the true faith in Manichaeism and Gnosticism you even see guys like Origen, who I believe Origen was a Christian, he was a church father, he did a lot of weird stuff, that's for sure. But he was, you know, School of Alexandria. They were so tempted to fall into the ditch of syncretism with Greek pagan philosophy like to an extreme degree that he even tried to reconcile pre existence with the Christian faith. Now he denied any transmigration and reincarnation, but he certainly was like no, the soul existed basically from the creation of the angels, which is, you know, and you can figure out when that was. And the body is a trap and it's trying to get out.
- [39:35]
Brian
And then you can even see this reflected in American folk cultic Christian offshoots like Mormonism. Mormonism believes in the pre existence of the human soul and that it's actually created as an offspring of Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father. They create almost a female goddess deity in heaven in Mormonism and postulate this pre existent soul that then comes down and even similar to the Platonic like learning as remembering where you have all this things you witness there there's this war and conflict in the Mormon folk religion where you have all this kind of like pre existent stuff and then you're sort of coming down and choosing a side, having forgotten. It's almost like Gandalf.
- [40:19]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:19]
Brian
When he comes as a my, he's a Maiar and then he comes and incarnates in Middle Earth and he's forgotten a lot of what he had beheld.
- [40:26]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:27]
Brian
And he has to like figure out who he is again in his journey through Middle Earth.
- [40:32]
Ben
Oh, I'm Olorin who wept in the, in the gardens of Lorien.
- [40:35]
Brian
Yeah. It's like all this, it's fascinating how strong this idea is and what it really where it really clicked for me. I was thinking okay, I'm a demon. I'm not really a demon. But I'm thinking what if I.
- [40:50]
Ben
What if scenario step one of the scenario, Brian's a demon.
- [40:53]
Brian
Step one, if I'm a demon and I'm trying to deny Hebrews 9 in Hebrews 9 Paul or the author of.
- [41:01]
Ben
Hebrews, who I think was Paul, says it was Apollos.
- [41:05]
Brian
It was, you know, he says it's appointed once for man to die and then judgment. And this reincarnational idea is just flatly denies this. If I'm trying to convince man that the urgency of this life and his need to be reconciled to his God and reunited to the divine essence, not as a splinter from the divine essence, but as an image bearer of the divine essence. If I was going to try to convince man, don't worry about judgment. You're going to have infinite tries. You can become greater and more over time. Death is not the end. It's nothing to be feared. It's not really an enemy even. It's actually helping you in your cycle of metapsychosis. And all the. Then what better idea to whisper in the ear of everyone from the ancient Greeks to the Native American pagans, to the Gnostics. I mean, all across history you see this idea whispered, death isn't the end, and not in a Christian way, but death is in the end. You're going to have infinite tries. In fact, you are God. You're a part of God reincarnation and the pre existence of the soul. And these doctrines are some of the most alluring lies. I mean, to the point that if you go right now in almost every town or city that all of our listeners are in, there's probably a psychic medium somewhere that you could get a hold of and go meet with and have tarot reading or whatever. Don't, don't. If you go do it, one of the things they're almost certainly going to do is tell you some tale about.
- [42:42]
Ben
Your past life in a past life.
- [42:43]
Brian
This they would say if Ben and I both went to mediums and they did some cold reading and knew we were friends and all this, they'd be like, the reason you and Ben are great friends is because you guys served together in the Civil War and you lived on neighboring.
- [42:56]
Ben
Which side.
- [42:59]
Brian
You lived on neighboring homesteads and. Or like you guys knew each other back in the medieval times. Or they're gonna tell you mediums do this constantly.
- [43:07]
Ben
You met in the Holy Land. Like you both stabbed a Muslim at the same time during a crusade. And then you were like, whoa, dude, I was going for that same guy. Check out the King's hall podcast.
- [43:20]
Brian
Sometimes Ben forgets, if not in the.
- [43:22]
Ben
King's Hall, I know. To learn about the Crusades. Yeah.
- [43:25]
Brian
Wow. But, you know, there's a reason they do that. It's because we Want to believe that like there's a part of the flesh that wants to believe that I'm just a part of this never ending cycle of me's and I'm so important and you know.
- [43:41]
Ben
Yeah, it messes with this kind of post lapsarian telos of man, but it also, it very explicitly denies the prelapsarian ontology. So it denies man's creation. We read in the first verses of Genesis that Adam was formed of the dust of the earth as a body, but the soul was given to him by God also at that time. Yeah, so it was created by God at that time. It wasn't some pre existent thing that then came and possessed the shell that was made from the dust. And then we also see how Eve, when Eve was created, she was taken of the rib of Adam. And from that rib God made the total Eve, an embodied soul, full image, bearer of God. Yeah, that he breathed. Right. It never says he breathed into her again. And so it stands to reason that he didn't. And so from Adam's single rib came the total Eve and her soul was.
- [44:34]
Brian
Then like it happened then God breathed the total ontological. The being of Adam formed from the material and the immaterial in the creation of Adam and in the creation of Adam contained all that was needed once the woman was taken from him to continue to generate human beings. And not just material meat, shell human beings, but the whole man and the whole woman, which is an embodied soul. Not just the man is not just an immaterial thing trying to escape his body. In glory and in eternity we will be embodied. Yeah, the God man Jesus was resurrected. You know, Paul in 1st Corinthians 15 gives this extended great meditation on this. The realities of these things and the mysteries of them, that we really are like seeds. And what will spring up from our planted physical bodies now will be different from what was planted in the way that an oak tree is different from a, a seed, an acorn, but we will still be. There is continuity of being between those two things. And you see it in the Lord Jesus that he had a recognizable human body now. It was glorified. It could do things that you know, his pre glorified body did not do. There's changes. It will be transformed.
- [45:54]
Ben
Paul says, I always think of that in the office when Dwight's like, everything in my second life is the exact same, except that I can fly.
- [46:05]
Brian
So if we back up for a minute and say what is the Christian view of man and the soul? We would say that his immaterial self does not predate his conception in his mother's womb. It doesn't predate that. But that every part of that man, the immaterial and the material, is there and grows into his fullness, his stature as a fallen man. And then should he be united to Christ in faith and regenerate and then dies, he will be like a seed that's planted and that will rise with an immortal but yet in continuity, physical body and still immaterial self united forever. And that is the state of affairs that we ought to desire, even being partakers of the divine essence, as Peter says, not in the way of the splinter from the divine being re. But. But as a created thing.
- [46:59]
Ben
Yeah.
- [47:00]
Brian
And within that view there are two.
- [47:03]
Ben
We.
- [47:04]
Brian
We haven't defined our terms well, but let's do that now.
- [47:06]
Ben
Yeah.
- [47:06]
Brian
There are two views of how the ensouling of man happens. And Ben can. Ben can walk us to creationism introducingism here and explain these two views that we've already referenced of how this happens.
- [47:19]
Ben
Yeah. So these are views of the generation of the soul. And creationism is the majority report in church history. Most of the early church fathers up to the medieval scholastics, reformers and reformed orthodox believed in creationism. And the view is that at the time of conception, or depending on who you ask, 40 days later, sometime, like Aquinas said, it was like 40 days later. We're excited. I made it up. At the time of conception, God creates a soul, soul ex nihilo in time, that is then put into that embryo that's created in the womb into that person, thus making them an embodied soul. All that the person gets from its parents is the body. That's it. Now, that includes like the brain, but it doesn't include the spirit. It doesn't include the soul. You could say that it doesn't include the mind or the heart. You know, all they get is the body. And so the. The problems with that are, I think, myriad. 1. It really doesn't give a good answer for the propagation of original sin and the total depravity of mankind. How are we saying that God is. If the soul of man is corrupted and it is.
- [48:33]
Brian
And not just his body, not just.
- [48:34]
Ben
His body, the soul of man is totally depraved. And it is. How are we saying that God is creating a totally depraved soul in time ex nihilo, every time someone is conceived, Would that not be outside of God's nature to actually create something and be the author of something that is tainted and corrupted?
- [48:55]
Brian
This is not what we see with the angelic beings, with Lucifer, he was not created in his sinful state by the Lord. He was created in his perfected but fallible form, and then he fell into sin.
- [49:09]
Ben
Yeah. God is not the author of sin.
- [49:11]
Brian
Creationism would require either God to create a perfect soul, and then in the function or the act of its incarnation, there's some sort of staining that happens. Or it's almost like. It's almost like a renewed fall every time.
- [49:24]
Ben
Yeah. By nature of being put into a corrupted body, it then is corrupted.
- [49:27]
Brian
It's fallen.
- [49:28]
Ben
Yeah. Again. And I think being charitable, like, that's more what they would say. Like, they don't deny original sin and they don't do that, but it does, I think, make it harder to do that. But the other thing that it does is it affirms that the kind of man, like man's species, his genus, is only material. So in order to reproduce after your own kind, you have to reproduce what that kind is.
- [49:55]
Brian
The total thing.
- [49:56]
Ben
That is the total thing. So if man and woman are able to reproduce after their own kind, which they are, because God says that, and all they can reproduce is the material form in which the soul inhabits by this point, providential act of God directly every time, then that means that man's kind is only material and the soul is this bifurcated thing that is completely separate from it and is only infused within it in a way that is inherently unnatural. It is supernatural. And we don't see that. At least I don't think that is compelling at all from the pages of Scripture. So it's an orthodox view. It's been the majority position, but I don't think it's compelling whatsoever. It also fails to explain a lot of what traducianism gives us, explanation for that we see in nature. But we'll get to that in a minute. Traduchinism says that when a man and a woman come together, husband and wife, and they conceive and have a child, that child that they are making by the normal operations of progeneity is a total. Man is an embodied soul. So traducianism affirms that man's kind is an embodied soul, not merely a body. So God is still providential, of course, over all things, but he's made it such that man and woman, by coming together, can create an embodied soul. So not only does the child inherit the biological data and the genetic makeup from the parents, but the child also inherits the soul, his own soul, from the parents. It's not like a pinch off of some lump that Adam had that we're all pinching off of. No, it's an individual soul. It is its own thing, but it is inherited in the same way the body is inherited from the mother and father.
- [51:40]
Brian
And when we say creationism is a majority view, many theologians have held traducianism. Luther held to it. Augustine leaned that way.
- [51:47]
Ben
Augustine leaned that way. He would sometimes speak one way, sometimes the other, but he recognized the validity of both.
- [51:53]
Brian
Tertullian.
- [51:54]
Ben
Tertullian was a Truducian. Luther was a Truducian tradition. Gregory of Nyssa was a tradition. Aquinas was a creationist. Calvin was a creationist. And then, like I said, Augustine kind of waffle.
- [52:03]
Brian
And when we say creationist, just remember the distinction. We're not talking about as the. The creationist view of the creation of the universe, cosmos.
- [52:13]
Ben
We're talking about the generation of the soul.
- [52:15]
Brian
Of the soul.
- [52:15]
Ben
Yes.
- [52:16]
Brian
So this is relevant. The reason we bring it up is because when you look at these stories of reincarnation, they are. They are alluring and they're compelling because there's a part of us, our fallen nature, that is attracted to lies that aggrandize man and also divert him from his need for repentance and faith. Yeah, because he can be purified through like many of these reincarnational cults, included asceticism, vegetarianism. That's how I know they're not true. Where you could. You could be born into a nobler man the next time around, if you lived a great life and even escape ultimately the Goladov and be. Escape the form of man at all and become into the realm of the gods or of a God. So the reason it's important for us to begin with these foundational Christian theological guideposts along the way is because they act like rails that keep us from veering off of the road of orthodoxy and right understanding of ourself illuminated by the revealed word of God in the light of our Creator who made us so he knows what we are and are like into myths and errors and lies and things that will ultimately lead us to not just error, but in these cases like these are damnable lies.
- [53:32]
Ben
Yes.
- [53:33]
Brian
When Mr. Pollock was trying to hold on to this occultic, theosophical, reincarnational belief and his Christian faith at the same time, they will tear you in two. You can't affirm both. So it's important for us to interrogate these stories with the fixed guardrails of truth and that's what leads us to theories like maybe there were parts of this story with the Pollock twins and some of these other stories where they really did have knowledge they should not have had, and it wasn't just from their parents or from their brothers. Okay. Maybe there were even str. Like the fact that he knew that there were twin girls in his wife's womb, which he should not have known.
- [54:19]
Ben
Right.
- [54:20]
Brian
And he was totally certain, and he.
- [54:21]
Ben
Was correct, and the doctors disagreed with him.
- [54:24]
Brian
And that's a very long.
- [54:25]
Ben
That's the crazy. The doctors were like, no, there's not twins in there. And he's like, nah, it's twins. They were doing ultrasounds.
- [54:30]
Brian
If you look at the rate of twins and then identical twins and then girls, it becomes a very, very unlikely thing to. To happen. Just. By now it could. I was constantly claiming through the pregnancy of my wife, you know, we just had Penelope, that it was twin girls. Yeah, it was actually just one. And it was Penelope.
- [54:51]
Ben
It was gonna be Penelope and Penelope.
- [54:52]
Brian
Yeah, that was exactly right. Penelope was gonna be really unfortunate for her. I'd call her popo. She'd hate it.
- [55:00]
Ben
Uh oh, here comes the popo.
- [55:01]
Brian
Here comes the popo. And here comes the pee pee. So it can happen. Like, enough people. There's a selection bias where if 500 people all make an unlikely prediction, at some point one of them is going to be true, and we're going to remember that one. But let's say that it can't be explained through these natural means. There's still another explanation, and it's the same Explanation from Acts 16 with the girl practicing divination and prophesying she had an unclean spirit, and they know things, and they have ways of knowing things that we can't. And so what better way for a demon or, you know, to get in and bring this family to the completion of its apostasy from the Christian faith than by nurturing and nursing the father's preexisting proclivity towards this heretical, occultic, wicked belief by leveraging tragedy and then inserting the lie and then propagating it. And, I mean, how many people have been taken in by this story and would go, well, I can't be a Christian?
- [56:11]
Ben
Yeah, I guess reincarnation is true. Yeah. No, I think that's a great point. If I can say one more thing before maybe going into the next segment, I want to give something. This goes beyond the brute doctrine of traditionism, but it's kind of an implication of traditionism that I think helps Explain some of what the reincarnationists are seeing. So if I'm being very, very charitable, then I would say that some people who have believed in reincarnation, part of why they believe it is because they see occurrences in nature that seem to be only explainable by something like reincarnation. For example, let's say there's a young man who is, who's growing, you know, he grows up in Texas, okay. But generations prior, his family lived for a long time, multiple generations in Tennessee. Right. And he's like, well, I'm going to go visit my old family land in Tennessee. My great, great great grandfather had a farm there and I'm going to get to go see it on a business trip. He goes, and he goes onto the farm and he feels a sense of belonging. Like there's this very abstract but nonetheless extremely real and potent sense of like, this is my place, this is where my people dwelt. This is what formed me in a way. So a reincarnationist might see that and be like, well, it's because, you know, maybe your soul is reincarnated after you maybe were your great great grandfather. Right?
- [57:40]
Brian
Yeah.
- [57:40]
Ben
The traditionist has a category for a type of blood memory, if you want to call it that, where since man inherits his soul from the ones that came before him, you can say that maybe some of the ethos of the man is also help formed by the souls that came before him. Let me give you another example so that, you know, I'm not saying something totally crazy. Let's say there is a country where everyone ubiquitously worshiped a demon God and they sacrificed people. And you know, it was like the serpent drug sacrifice trio for a thousand years. Someone that's born in that country in the thousand first year at a level of the soul is going to be more predisposed to that than someone who grew up in a Christian country, or even a non Christian country like Rome, okay. And went and visited that place. They would be like, this is not compelling to me at all. Like, this is horrifying. This is terrible. I think part of why that is is because like, the soul is inherited from the people that came before it. And so even the dispositions of your affections, even things that you're predisposed to believe at a natural level, are going to be informed by that. Now, of course, grace, not only does grace perfect nature, but it also supersedes nature. And so grace is far more powerful than just our natural inclinations. So of course the Lord can redeem who he redeems and the gospel is mighty to save the worst of sinners, no matter what. But I do think that that could be a way where traducianism could provide a healthy, orthodox way of attempting to explain something like a blood memory in a way that keeps you far from the ditch of pre existence and reincarnation.
- [59:25]
Brian
And what I think this does is it helps us avoid the materialist, rationalistic Darwinism that infected man and boils everything down to his genetic physicality. Materialist account for all these things like brute determinism. It ends up being a trap, an inescapable trap where you are inescapably trapped by your material self. And so if you come from a line of people, you can see how wickedly compelling these ideas would be. In things like eugenics, where we are now saying that you come from, we basically have to cut off this physical line of malformed physicality because you can't transcend it. There's no grace in this system. It's just genetic determinism. And what we're saying is that you have an interplay between real reaping and sowing and real imaging of those who went before you and a real development of people and a family and an ethos and all this different stuff. Like the. The reason that you can have three generations down the road, like a great, great, great grandson or a great great grandson who is of a. Of a man who's just like all of a sudden his spitting image and his personality double. And there's the same. And it wasn't because they spent time together.
- [60:42]
Ben
Right.
- [60:42]
Brian
It was because they came from the same stock and people. Yeah. And we're saying not all of that is the material self, but there's actually a mechanism by which the immaterial self is also heritable and woven. It's unique, but it's woven by the parents and your forefathers.
- [61:00]
Ben
And part of why that is is because I would flatly deny that a person's personality, their likes and dislikes and their maybe even their like, skill set, you know, is only determined by genetics. Yeah, No, I think that, like, the soul is not just a enlivening force, you know, it's a personal thing. It's an individual thing. Like when Saul goes to the witch of Endor, to summ Samuel, he sees Samuel, but it's Samuel's ghost, it's Samuel's spirit. And yet he can nonetheless recognize it as like, that is Samuel. So the soul and the body are a lot like how we talk about the seen in the unseen world where it's a tapestry that is interwoven, where if you pull on the one, the other gets pulled as well. Like that is true for the human being. So anyway, maybe now that we've waxed.
- [61:50]
Brian
Poetic, take us into the next interesting and frankly disturbing story and frankly, hold.
- [61:58]
Ben
Onto your evanescence because this is gonna take you for a Wake you up. In December of The year of 1926, a baby girl named Shanti was born to two Indian parents in the capital territory of Delhi. She was a healthy girl and was a welcome addition to the young middle class family. Her parents loved and doted upon her as much as their means would allow them. And for the most part she was a normal, loved and well adjusted girl. I say for the most part because there was one glaring difference between her and other children her age. That was that Shanti hardly spoke at all before the age of four. The family and community just assumed that she was a particularly reserved person by nature. But later revelations would cause that assumption to crumble. Once Shanti turned four, you see, the floodgates of speech finally opened and the waters that came from within were strange indeed. Shanti started to ramble constantly about her husband and her children. About how she missed her family and longed to return to them. She started to beg to go visit them since according to her, they were not far away. The parents tried to brush all of this off as some kind of confusion or youthful nonsense, but she wouldn't let it go. She insisted time and time again that it was not make believe. And then finally she started adding details to her claims. She described her old home. It was In Mathura, about 90 miles away from Delhi. She was married to a member of the Chube family named Kedarnath and her name used to be Lugdi. She had had a child in that life. Finally she told them that she had died 10 days after giving birth to her son some years before. She herself had been recast as Shanti. These details only heaped on frustration and her parents grew worried that she was somehow a victim of a psychosis. They discouraged the girl and told her not to speak of such nonsense anymore in response. Response, she ran away, hoping to reach Mathura on her own and be reunited to her lost loves. She didn't succeed in this attempt, but the episode did force her parents to reckon with the fact that they couldn't simply let this go. They therefore asked Shanti how her story could be proven. At this point, Shanti was 8 years old. The parents enlisted the help of a grand uncle who could have a letter sent to contacts in Mathra? The uncle therefore asked, asked Shanti where he should send his inquiry and to everyone's astonishment, she replied with an exact address for the home in which she supposedly used to live. The exact wording of the letter is lost to us, but its contents included every substantial claim made by Shanti in regards to her previous life in Mathura. Her husband's name, the approximate age of her child, a detailed description of the shop where her husband worked, and of course, the address itself. Soon a reply came and the reply verified every single thing Shanti said as substantially true. The address did belong to a Kedarnath of the Chube name. He did have a shop that matched the girl's description. He had lost his previous wife only 10 days after the birth of their first child together and her name had actually been Luddy. Immediately a meeting was arranged between Shanti and a representative from Kedornath's relations, specifically his nephew. On the day Shanti met her supposed husband's nephew, she immediately recognized him as such and even called him by the name Kanji. That was his birth name. Before the two had formally been introduced, the occurrence was observed by other members of both families. When Kanji walked away, he stated, I was convinced that the girl was really my own relation now personating in another body. Thus it was agreed upon by all that Keter Nath should come to visit the girl and see if her story could be further confirmed. On November 13, 1935, Keter Nath knocked on the door of the Devi household with his new wife and child. The child was the one from the previous marriage in tow. Shanti answered the door and immediately began to weep at the sight of her lost love and the child she had borne who was now her own senior. She wept for an hour before she could gather herself again. When she did, her motherly affection to the child Nitlaw was an odd thing for everyone to witness. For it seemed to them that she behaved much the older than he and he in turn let her dote upon him instinctively. For the remainder of the evening, Keter Noth and Shanti were given leave to speak one on one in an adjoining room of the house. It was understood that Kedar would be posing questions to her of greater specificity and intimacy in regards to his late wife Lugdi. By the end of the interrogation, Keter was moved to tears. He too believed in his heart of hearts that the soul he spoke to was that of the one who had borne him his child, his own wife, Lugdi it was after this meeting and confirmation by Ketar that the story became more widely known. The leader of the Indian National Congress at the time, a man by the name of Mahatma Gandhi, expressed personal interest in the case and commissioned a 15 man team to accompany Shanti to her supposed old home in Mathura to see whether or not they could confirm the case's reincarnation. On that trip she was kept under a very close watch. Everything she said and did, every interaction she had with the Chube family and every other claim she made was documented and verified by third parties who knew the truth. At every turn, she was vindicated. The official report from India which confirmed the veracity of Shanti's case became widespread. Soon true believers, unbiased investigators and staunched debunkers were flocking to Delhi and Mathura to try their hands at verifying, solving or exposing the case as fraud. All respectively some did walk away believing it all. Some walked away undecided. Some believed that it was a hoax. Dr. Ian Stevenson, the same doctor from the story of the Cold Open, even went on record saying that it was an extremely compelling case which grew harder and harder for him to disprove. Most notably though, a Swedish critic named Sturry Launnerstrand, who wanted nothing more than to totally expose Shanti as a fraud, concluded concluded his investigation by writing quote, this is the only fully explained and proven case of reincarnation there has ever been. More could be said about Shanti Devi. But we will content ourselves with just one final piece of the story. You see, part of what made Shanti's case so fascinating to so many was not only the apparent substantial truth of her so called reincarnation, it was also the fact that that she claimed to remember some of what transpired in the period between Lugdy's body dying and Shanti's body being formed. What follows is a paraphrased account that combines multiple interviews Shanti gave over the years of her life in regards to this supposed soul memory. What happened at the time of your death? Shanti? I did not experience any pain. Only darkness, great darkness that felt thicker than air closed in on me. And then dazzling light, bright white light opened before me just as the darkness finished closing in. INTERVIEWER what happened next? Shanty I stood up in my body. I could look back and see Lugdy's body still laying there. But I wasn't in it anymore. INTERVIEWER Then where did you go? Shanty Three young men, maybe, maybe there were four of them, approached me from the light. They all Wore vibrant robes like saffron. They carried me from the body across the light to a vessel that was square and charcoal colored. It was like a cup with sharp corners. They placed me inside. Then I began to ascend. Up and up and up I went past three different planes of reality. I passed the most beautiful garden I had ever seen and flew across cross a wide river that seemed to flow with pure white milk. In every plane I could see legions of dead people solemnly proceeding. Did you ever stop ascending? Yes. Once I arrived at the fourth plane, I stopped and felt compelled to exit the vessel that had carried me so high. There were more saints there. It was a strange sensation. For though all that it contained was pure warm light, it didn't feel like an open, open space. Though I could see no walls anywhere I looked, the light wasn't blinding. But I couldn't see any boundaries despite feeling closed in. How much time did you spend on the fourth plane? I don't know. There was no sense of time because there was no sense of days passing. I never grew hungry or thirsty. And there was no night. What happened on the fourth plane? Shanty? I saw Krishna, the high God. He was a brilliant being seated on a great throne. A bearded man, like a sage stood at the foot of the throne. Krishna read from documents brought to him by other people. The documents were lists of actions performed by souls on the world. Krishna was pronouncing judgment upon all of them. Interviewer what did this being say to you? All I can recall is him saying, House number 565. That was the number of my home when I returned as Shanti. What happened next? I was carried by the men in the saffron robes and was placed on a descending spiral stair made of silver and gold. The stair was very bright. At the bottom of the stair was a dark room like a cell. A terrible smell came from all the walls of the cell. I was told to lay down on a clean spot of the floor in its center.
- [72:03]
Brian
Hey, Ben. I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?
- [72:12]
Ben
Maybe it's Grandma's butter recipe. Or my. Maybe it's Gray Toe tallow.
- [72:17]
Brian
Their tallow products are 100% organic and naturally contain the good stuff your skin craves. No mystery there.
- [72:24]
Ben
So say sayonara Sammy to kitchen experiments. And say hello to healthier skin. Gray Toad Tallow Trusted by skin Envied by Great Grandma's butter Recipe.
- [72:37]
Brian
For more information and to get a sample pack, check out gray toad tallow gallow.com don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps. Cosmos15 for 15 off your order. Man, what is that? Did you hear that? Is that a ghost?
- [73:01]
Ben
It's just me moaning through the pain of a terrible night of sleep and a hurt back.
- [73:07]
Brian
Honestly, you probably just have a magnesium deficiency, which like the fae, is a very real thing.
- [73:13]
Ben
Well how? Well, how do I get more magnesium? Do I start leaving offerings out to it or something?
- [73:18]
Brian
No, you just use Humble Love's Magnesium Cream. It's got no weird chemicals or demonic ingredients. It's made by a husband and wife team. Totally clean, totally safe, even for kids.
- [73:30]
Ben
Well, at least that doesn't sound scary Theory it's not.
- [73:34]
Brian
Visit the humblelifestore.com that's the humblelifestore.com and use code NCP15 for 15 off your first jar link in the description.
- [73:48]
Ben
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- [75:22]
Brian
I actually woke up this Morning and thought to myself, I want to know what Ben's drinking more of lately.
- [75:26]
Ben
Coffee. Can you believe that?
- [75:27]
Brian
Unbelievable. I thought you were in a tea.
- [75:29]
Ben
No, no, I'm into coffee now. And you know who makes the best coffee in the world?
- [75:32]
Brian
Who?
- [75:32]
Ben
Is it Squirrely Joe's Coffee.
- [75:35]
Brian
Oh, are that. Is that that thoroughly Christian business that doesn't hate you in everything you believe in?
- [75:40]
Ben
Yes. Not only that, but they also love their neighbor by donating many of their proceeds to a worthy cause called Operation Underground Railroad Man.
- [75:48]
Brian
Everybody should check out Squirrelly Joe's Coffee at Squirrelly Joe's Coffee dot com.
- [75:52]
Ben
That's right. Squirrelly Joe's Coffee. Share coffee. Serve humbly. Live faithfully.
- [76:00]
Brian
Okay, so first of all, we have to remember the connection between the religious deception of a region and its stories. Here we have absolutely hand in glove relationship between Indian culture and Hinduism and their reincarnational dogmas.
- [76:18]
Ben
Dude, I'll tell you what's hand in glove.
- [76:20]
Brian
What's hand in glove?
- [76:21]
Ben
Indians and reincarnation.
- [76:23]
Brian
That's what I'm saying.
- [76:24]
Ben
I know.
- [76:24]
Brian
He actually just said, if you think about it, most people have at least a superficial awareness of Hinduism and the caste system and how you have lower castes all the way down to untouchables that are the outcasts of society. Up to the Shawarmas, the Sharmas, the Charmans, Charmin Extra Downy Soft.
- [76:43]
Ben
The Shermans who own Skinwalker Ranch.
- [76:45]
Brian
The Shermans, that's right. It's all connected. And the upper castes were elite and they're like royalty in the Hindu faith. You can be reincarnated up the chain basically, if you're really good.
- [77:00]
Ben
Yeah. It's another just works.
- [77:01]
Brian
Righteousness, reincarnation, blah blah, blah. So we should expect to hear in that culture the demons getting up to some stuff where they're reinforcing reincarnation.
- [77:13]
Ben
Dude, it's crazy that you mentioned that. Cause I actually have a story just off the top of my head.
- [77:18]
Brian
You're kidding me.
- [77:19]
Ben
Emergency story mode. This is totally cold. Off the top of my head, a guy named Gopal Gupta.
- [77:25]
Brian
Gopal Gupta.
- [77:26]
Ben
Gopal Gupta. What was he up to? Well, he was born to a lower middle class family in Delhi in 1956. In Delhi. Okay, so he was born to a lower middle class family in Delhi in 1956. When he was about two and a half years old. His dad had some friends over, I guess I don't know if lower caste people do that, but that's what the story said. And they were done eating and he told Gopal hey, go put this dish away. And Gopal goes, I won't pick it up. I am a Sharma.
- [78:00]
Brian
Which first of all, if one of my kids says that. Yeah, immediately speed with which they are spanked.
- [78:06]
Ben
Yeah.
- [78:07]
Brian
This isn't going to be a Charmin soft spanking.
- [78:10]
Ben
This is going to be.
- [78:11]
Brian
I'm really shoehorning this toilet paper joke in.
- [78:14]
Ben
You cried, I wiped away.
- [78:18]
Brian
But how crazy is that? The two and a half year olds like, no, I'm an elite.
- [78:22]
Ben
So one thing is like a two and a half year old, I have a two and a half year old.
- [78:26]
Brian
Yeah, they're kind of dumb.
- [78:27]
Ben
Can he comprehend the idea of a cast system?
- [78:30]
Brian
They're kind of dumb.
- [78:31]
Ben
Well, he knows that dad's the boss, but that's pretty much where it ends. My 2 year old this morning was.
- [78:36]
Brian
Just, he had a large die cast, you know, school bus toy and he was just going, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. Riding it on top of a heater, which is not very realistic because the wheelbase was longer than the the width of the platform.
- [78:51]
Ben
So my two year old yesterday, not good reasoning. He was riding his bike down a hill at the park. He's a really good bike rider. So he'd like feet up and everything. He got going way too fast and just like totally over the handlebars. Slammed his face into the ground. And he looks like a bird now. Like his lips so swollen it looks like a beak. And then this morning he was just running. Yeah, just running.
- [79:11]
Brian
Yeah. Let me guess.
- [79:12]
Ben
Eyes wide open, looking in front of him.
- [79:14]
Brian
Ran into the wall.
- [79:14]
Ben
And he ran right into the table. The corner of the table. Anyway, Gopal Gupta didn't do that. Gopal Gupta said he was a Sharma. Now Sharmas are members of the highest caste in India. They're elites.
- [79:27]
Brian
They have plus 10 attack.
- [79:28]
Ben
Yeah, the Brahmins is what the cast is named. Now this boy claimed not only that he was a Sharma, but he as a member of the Sharma family, owned a medical company in Mathura. Once again, Mathura comes up. What's happening in Mathura? A lot of demons.
- [79:44]
Brian
A lot of demons in Mathura.
- [79:45]
Ben
Yeah. And that he had a mansion and he had servants. He claimed that he had two brothers and a wife and that one of his brothers shot him some years before. My nose.
- [79:55]
Brian
Dude, what is going on with your nose?
- [79:56]
Ben
Nose is so itchy right now.
- [79:57]
Brian
People are commenting on Facebook at this point about your nose touching.
- [80:01]
Ben
Well, it's itches all the time.
- [80:02]
Brian
I see several.
- [80:03]
Ben
I have an itchy nose.
- [80:04]
Brian
If Dr. House were here, he'd be like, what's the differential diagnosis on an itchy nostril?
- [80:08]
Ben
He'd say, what's the prognosis? Death within minutes.
- [80:12]
Brian
He'd probably say paraneoplastic syndrome. But it's not.
- [80:15]
Ben
Say we say we got to do a bone marrow biopsy of the. We had a spinal tap. Yeah, okay.
- [80:20]
Brian
So he. He said he's got servants. He lives in a mansion.
- [80:23]
Ben
He had a wife, two brothers. One of his brothers shot him.
- [80:26]
Brian
My brother killed me.
- [80:27]
Ben
Yes.
- [80:27]
Brian
That was.
- [80:27]
Ben
That's what he's. That's his claim. Okay.
- [80:30]
Brian
Like 11.
- [80:31]
Ben
And by 11, I mean eight years later.
- [80:34]
Brian
When he's 11.
- [80:35]
Ben
No, almost. Just eight years later. When he's almost 11, his dad travels to Mathura on a religious festival event. And there he sees the name of the medical shop that his son had named all those years before. And it is the same name.
- [80:52]
Brian
Goopti Gupti Medical Shop.
- [80:53]
Ben
Well, it's called Shulk Shankarak. That sounds actually a pretty cool name. Shankarak is a cool name.
- [81:00]
Brian
Shanktane Kalima.
- [81:02]
Ben
What's that from?
- [81:04]
Brian
Indiana Jones Temple Doom. Oh, that's when he's, like, tearing the heart out.
- [81:07]
Ben
Maybe that's where Gupta got him.
- [81:11]
Brian
So that messed me up when I was a kid.
- [81:13]
Ben
Dude, me too. The first time I saw it, I was six. I really did. I had nightmares. So he sees the medical shop. It is owned by Sharmas. He goes in and he talks to the manager, and he's like, hey, Mr. Manager, like, what's the deal with this medical shop? He's like, yeah, it's owned by some Sharmas. And actually it was two brothers. But one of the brothers got shot by the other brother some years before, and he left behind a widower. And then it turns out Gupta remembered the family drama that led to the murder. But that's crazy. The Sharma family confirmed it. But that's crazy, because the Sharmas, they were in such a high cast that they had it totally sealed. No one knew about all the drama. Not even the government knew. Like, yeah, it was crazy. So anyway.
- [82:03]
Brian
But Gupti knew.
- [82:04]
Ben
Gupti was.
- [82:08]
Brian
Gopa.
- [82:08]
Ben
Gupta knew.
- [82:09]
Brian
Dude, I have another story off top my head.
- [82:13]
Ben
What?
- [82:13]
Brian
In your notes.
- [82:15]
Ben
Oh, yeah, yeah. Brian also has an emergency story mode story right now.
- [82:20]
Brian
Yeah. This is crazy because, again, this reminds me of, like, obvious connection between Sharmas and Eskimos, because bear with me here, you have, like, Sharma cast the Brahmins, Chris Sharma, famous rock climber who climbs high up stuff what is also high off the ground. Icebergs. Icebergs, eskimos. But in 1946, an Eskimo fisherman living in Alaska. His name was Victor Vincent, or Cockady. To his fishing buddies, that was a nickname. Cockadoo. Cock a doodle do you. He died.
- [82:55]
Ben
So 1946.
- [82:56]
Brian
Yeah. I'm sorry. So Cock a doodle do died. Before he died, he told his niece.
- [83:00]
Ben
Cock a doodle don't die.
- [83:03]
Brian
So true. King and serio, jefe. So before he died, he told his niece. I gotta laugh out of Martina McBride on that one. Before he died, he told his niece, Irene Chotkin, that she would have a son sometime after his death who would be a reincarnation of him. So he's calling a shot. I'm gonna be reincarnated as your son, which is very creepy. It's a creepy thing to say. Well, sure enough, 18 months after Vincent passed away, Irene gave birth to a son. Not with him, but with someone else, based on the math, named Corliss Chotkin Jr. Right away, Irene noticed two birthmarks. One on his nose, one on his back that looked exactly like scars her uncle had.
- [83:45]
Ben
What?
- [83:46]
Brian
Crazy.
- [83:46]
Ben
That's like the Pollock twins.
- [83:47]
Brian
When Corliss was only 13 months old, unable to really speak, Irene was trying to get him to sound out his own name when the baby randomly blurted out, don't you know who I am? I'm Cockady. Baby shout.
- [84:02]
Ben
Can you imagine a 13 month old dude? I would be like, what's the deal with this baby?
- [84:07]
Brian
This is when I stopped believing the story was when I heard that line. But this is what she.
- [84:11]
Ben
That's when I started thinking, this is a good story.
- [84:14]
Brian
Inside Hana Cosmos listeners are two wolves. Me and Ben. Okay. Irene shared the episode with her aunt, who told her that after Vincent died, she had dreamed that he went to live with the chotkins.
- [84:25]
Ben
Ant.
- [84:26]
Brian
Corliss went on.
- [84:28]
Ben
It's pronounced ant. What?
- [84:29]
Brian
You said. What did I say?
- [84:30]
Ben
You said aunt.
- [84:31]
Brian
What's aunt? It's a U N T. Ant is.
- [84:33]
Ben
A N T. Aunt is how you say it.
- [84:35]
Brian
Different things. Corliss went on to recognize distant relatives of Vincent's, even knowing their names before ever hearing of them. In some cases, he was able to recognize Vincent's widow by name without having been told who the woman was. Eventually, Corliss stopped making results, you know, similar to the twins.
- [84:53]
Ben
Yeah.
- [84:54]
Brian
At some point, he stopped making these claims and just like, returned to normal life.
- [84:59]
Ben
Dang.
- [84:59]
Brian
Stop blurting out as a 13 month old like, I'm the reincarnation of Cockady.
- [85:03]
Ben
Yeah.
- [85:04]
Brian
So there's Lots of these stories floating around.
- [85:07]
Ben
Now, here's my question to you. What do you think about the whole, like, remembering her death thing with Shanti Devi? You remember when I read that part?
- [85:18]
Brian
Yeah. She liked the whole vision.
- [85:21]
Ben
Yeah.
- [85:21]
Brian
Of going.
- [85:22]
Ben
She's like, oh, I was going up the four planes of reality. And then, oh, Krishna was there.
- [85:27]
Brian
Yeah.
- [85:27]
Ben
Oh, some dudes in saffron robes.
- [85:29]
Brian
Yeah. Of course.
- [85:30]
Ben
It made me want Indian food. It made me want to go to that place and get some butter chicken tikka masala. We should go. Yeah.
- [85:37]
Brian
Anyway, some chicken tiki torch masala, dude.
- [85:40]
Ben
We should get some. I want it to be so hot that Evanescence has to sing my immortal Evan's essence. Evan's essence. Amy Lee, as he's also known. Yeah. Yeah.
- [85:53]
Brian
Wow. I think that yet another illustration of how we have demonic influence in these stories, to the extent that they're real and not made up, is that they will include visions that confirm the religious ideology of the demon stuff.
- [86:13]
Ben
Here's the thing that struck me. This was the crazy thing is how it's clear, like, her whole faith is demonic. Like, the Hinduism is demonic, but the death, like, the scene of death and kind of the afterlife that she remembered is, I think, close enough to what a Christian might think could happen in terms of general motifs to where it could even deceive people who are hearing the story. Like, that's how deep I think this deception goes, this conspiracy goes. You know, you're going up. It's a bright light. You're seeing a garden. What's that an allusion to? Ever heard of Eden? You know, clearly. And then you're crossing a river of milk.
- [86:58]
Brian
The garden city of Jerusalem, even.
- [86:59]
Ben
Yeah, exactly. The new Jerusalem, the river of milk.
- [87:03]
Brian
Like, I want that issues forth from the temple.
- [87:07]
Ben
Yeah.
- [87:07]
Brian
And it's milk, but it's milk.
- [87:10]
Ben
But no, even, like, the whole scene with Krishna set up on a throne, who's issuing judgment for the souls of people. What does that face for?
- [87:18]
Brian
I wouldn't want to be in a milk river.
- [87:20]
Ben
Sometimes when I get really thirsty, I think, like, I could. I could bathe in a milk river right now. I've never thought that there is actually a milk river in Montana. Really? Very popular. Yeah. Very popular landmark in the book Lonesome dove by Larry McMurtry.
- [87:33]
Brian
Is it cow's milk? Sheep's milk? Goat's milk?
- [87:35]
Ben
It's water milk. It's water milk. Yeah.
- [87:37]
Brian
It's earth milk.
- [87:37]
Ben
It's water milk. Yeah.
- [87:38]
Brian
Earth milk.
- [87:39]
Ben
That is crazy. Water water is like earth milk because.
- [87:42]
Brian
We all Know where water comes from?
- [87:45]
Ben
The. In the earth.
- [87:47]
Brian
Primary water. Primary water made deep in the cracks of the earth via geochemical processes.
- [87:54]
Ben
So, anyway, I think we all know where I'm going with that, and I'll just stop.
- [87:57]
Brian
What I want to say last. Last time here, we've. We've said what we need to about reincarnation. It's not true. It's demonic deception to the extent it's real. One last. I think evidence of this is found in our hot clothes.
- [88:09]
Ben
Yeah.
- [88:10]
Brian
Because just like we see with the Hindu connection in India, just like we saw with the ancient Greek connection and all these other various places across the world sharing the same deception, the final story shows a connection between the Egyptian paganism and reincarnation and the continuing of that deception.
- [88:31]
Ben
Great enunciation on the word Egyptian.
- [88:35]
Brian
Egyptian.
- [88:36]
Ben
One of the things that's, you know. Okay, I'll say one more thing. This is an important tie in. So theosophy, Manichaeism, all of these kind of corruptions of Christianity are also hermetic doctrines. It's important to remember that hermeticism was something that formed very, very soon before Christ's incarnation. It was in, like, the last century bc, around the time of Virgil, actually. And it originated in Egypt as a syncretism of two gods. Thoth, the Egyptian God, and then Hermes the Greek God. And that's how you get Hermes Trismegistus. And it's interesting how those two religions, it, like, heightened the mysticism for both of them. And one of the ways it did that was with reincarnation. And so you see in Egypt, kind of this seed that has been propagated even into modern theosophic doctrines with reincarnation. And it's just a deeper connection.
- [89:32]
Brian
And the ascended masters.
- [89:34]
Ben
Yes. Which, by the way, one of them was Count of Saint Germain.
- [89:38]
Brian
See our published works.
- [89:39]
Ben
Yes. Yep. Yeah. So anyway, with that, we're gonna go into the story about. What's her name?
- [89:44]
Brian
Ben, take us in. Om Seti Onseti Ohms. Om Seti. With an M. Oops.
- [89:51]
Ben
Om Seti. The ancient Egyptian Osiris myth is the most influential myth of that people, without question. In it, we find the primordial king Osiris ruling in the earliest versions of Egypt with his wife Isis at his side. Inside the palace walls, envy starts to boil over and throw trouble onto the golden age set. The brother of Isis and Osiris conspires to kill the God King and usurp his throne. He joins in league with dozens of other plotters and eventually succeeds in his fratricide. In the chaos of the events, Set is able to steal Osiris's body away and hide it from Isis, who is struck grievously mourning for her husband and brother. In her grief, she leaves the kingdom of Egypt and goes on a search over the world to find the remains of her husband. Through ages of toil and constant weeping, she finally uncovers the body of Osiris inside the trunk of a massive tamarisk tree in the ancient city of Byblos on the Phoenician coast. With the help of Thoth, the God of necromancy and charm, Isis temporarily resurrects her husband and keeps him alive long enough for them to conceive a child. A promised child, prophesied to bring peace back into the world. Upon Osiris second death, he ascends to formal godhood and becomes a source of life for the crop yield in Egypt. Isis, now with child, returns to Egypt and finds a hellscape Set has ruled with open tyranny and brutality towards his people. She goes into further hiding before the time of her birth, which when it comes, yields forth the promised son, Horus. Horus. Horus is weaned and raised in secret and is trained in all the arts of war with the gods. In time, he grows strong enough to openly challenge Set in a bid to reclaim his father's throne through grotesque and violent war. Set is eventually killed by Horus, who takes back the kingdom and ushers in a new golden age. In some versions of the myth, Set is linked closely in appearance with the Greek monster Typhon, a giant in the form of a dragon. Given the overall structure of the story, the promised son of God, who is also a God himself, is born by the power of the gods to go forth and wage war on evil until he kills the dragon and sets men free. Some see in the myth of Osiris a very ancient pagan echo of the gospel promise given to the sinners in the garden in Genesis 3. With that introduction, let us now proceed with the story of Dorothy Eddy, aka om Cetty. It was night in 1907. The London suburb was extra dark with the wetness of that day's and night's rain. Streaks of light from street lamps made the ground appear smooth and slippery like black ice. But it was summertime and even the nights were warm. The Eddy family doctor ran down the sidewalk towards a small flat on the next street's corner. The leather case of medical supplies swung at his side and strained his wrist. The strain and the humid air made his glasses fog. As he finally entered the building and climbed the stair. He knocked on the flat door and took a moment to stare at the number in an attempt to regain his balance and composure from the run. The door swung open. Neither Mr. Eddy nor the doctor said a word. He rushed in and the door shut behind him again. He turned left past the entryway and made for the far wall. A steep wooden staircase was butted up. Against it at its lower floor landing lay the unmoving body of the girl, the three year old Dorothy Eddy. She had tripped and fallen headfirst down the steps. Her mother heard the back of her head slam into the floor and when she ran over to her, the girl was already unresponsive. The doctor tried his best to recover the girl. He performed CPR for nearly an hour, but still there was no pulse. He finally called the time of death and expressed his sincerest apologies. Another hour passed. The doctor was still attending the family, who were in a stage of grief bordering on out of body disbelief. Mr. Eddy tried to wake up from the nightmare moment more than once. But at the end of that hour, the most unexpected thing happened. Dorothy came back. Only minutes passed before Dorothy, to the continued shock of her parents and doctor, was playing on the bed with her dolls, asking for candy and asking for her papa to read her a book. When Mr. And Mrs. Eddy finally did snap out of it, they rushed to their daughter's side and gave her everything she asked for and more in tear soaked hugs the grown ups and embraced the little three year old who apparently was none the wiser to anything that had happened. The only thing she did that marked any change at all, and it was something she had never done before, was continuously ask if she could go back home. But she was home already. The parents told her this, but she didn't seem to understand. She would just stare blankly back at them and then with another smile, ask politely to go back home. The Eddies let it go for the sake of the joy filled relief they were experiencing. Perhaps they should not have let it go though. In the following months little Dorothy's behavior grew more and more troubling to her parents. She began to wake up in the middle of the night weeping. Not from fear mind you, but from a kind of painful sorrow befitting a toddler. When her mother asked her what was wrong, she explained again as a three year old that she had been dreaming of home. The place with big buildings and green fields and massive white mountains and crystalline rivers. She told her mother and her father that she missed her home and wanted nothing more than to go back. The parents were dumbfounded, but could do little other than try and comfort their girl until she drifted back to sleep. Usually she would be back in good spirits by morning. When Dorothy was 4, she accompanied her parents on a trip to the British Museum for a day. Despite her parents excitement about all of the wonderful things they'd see, the Dorothy only reluctantly climbed up into the car. It was a lovely summer day and she felt sure she was wasting it by going to a dusty old museum. But when they arrived, and particularly when they entered the Egyptian galleries, she came more alive than her family had ever seen. Her bronze and stone statues and household idols of the Egyptian pantheon stared down at her in dramatic lighting. She began running across the stone floor to eagerly look at every little detail of every little thing. Mr. And Mrs. Eddy figured she was overwhelmed with the regalia of it all, but Dorothy soon corrected them. It was the familiarity that sent her spiraling with delight. It was a piece, she told them, of her home. Dorothy believed she was an ancient Egyptian. It was all the parents could do to hide their embarrassment as their little girl kissed the feet of the statues lining the perimeter of the room. Onlookers laughed and some looked around with noses up as if wondering whose child this unruly girl was. They finally caught Dorothy on one of her sprints to the other statue and told her that they would be leaving right away. At this, the girl erupted into vicious fussing, yanking at her father's arm and screaming loudly at him until he was able to drag her out of the room and back out of the building. She screamed, cried the whole way home, anger now underpinning her homesickness as she started to see her parents more as captors than loving providers. Her father, for his part, was especially softened towards the girl. Of course there was the matter of thinking he had lost her only a year prior. But he also felt he could relate to her yearning for a place he didn't know he had unfulfilled dreams of his own, dreams he had never even tried to pursue. He wondered if her tantrums were just a youthful, full version of his own longings for something he knew he could never have. One day, Mr. Eddy came home from his work with a magazine in his hand. It was one of those coffee table picture books similar to National Geographic. He opened up Dorothy's room and gave it to her. When she saw the COVID her eyes lit up with joy, just like the day at the museum. She started breathing heavy and smiling bigger and bigger while she studied the COVID Finally, she could not hold it in anymore. She shouted, with gleeful tears in her eyes at her father, that's my home. That's my home. But why does it look so poorly now? She was saying this while pointing at the picture that overwhelmed the COVID page. It was of the ruins of Seti Temple at the ancient city of Abydos. Dorothy told her father that she had lived there, and she asked him to please take her back. The father, unnerved by the revelation his gift had caused, backed slowly out of the room, looking at his daughter as if she was a complete stranger. Years went by. Dorothy's steady descent or ascent, depending on who you ask, into her perceived past life of ancient Egypt grew richer and richer. More memories came to her, skills developed in her at an early age that set her up for a lifetime of working on ancient Egyptian artifacts, and she eventually married an Egyptian, moved to Egypt, and gave birth to a son whose name was Seti. But somewhere in the thick of that time, perhaps even very early on in it, a layer of morbid strangeness was added to the whole ordeal, which ought to be a real focus of our study. One night, when Dorothy was still a girl, and when the apparent memories of her lost home were still too ethereal for her to define, she suddenly woke from a dead sleep. The room was horribly dark. It made her wonder if the moon and stars and even all the streetlights were gone away, like how one might feel on a cloudy night when the power goes out. She felt her heart racing fast. Her chest felt pressed down hard into the bed, as if some person was squatted down on it, but there was nothing there. She tried to lift herself up but could not. She could not move her toes or fingers or anything save her head and eyes, those she could turn and look around with easily. She stayed in this state of partial paralysis for a few minutes before anything new happened. But when things changed, they changed fast. She had looked hard over to her left and seen nothing. She therefore turned to look back at her right. But when she did, a loud click from the part of the room she had just examined made her jolt her eyes again, back, left. There before her stood the hulking form of a bloody and partially decomposed mummy. The beast's arms were not wrapped, nor was its face, but everywhere else it was clothed with soiled wrappings from a forgotten time. The creature bent down to stare into Dorothy's eyes. Its face was clearly that of a man's, only the man was very clearly dead. But the eyes shone with vitality that seemed to light up the dark room. She recognized that face. It was the face of her own old and nearly forgotten husband, Seti I, the one who ruled over the palace at Abydos. She rediscovered on the magazine cover her home where she had once lived with her loving king. Upon her realization, she seemed to notice a softening of the preternatural eyes that stared into hers. What commenced then is something that happened, according to Dorothy, dozens more times over the course of that year. Seti's spirit sat to rest at the edge of the bed and began to narrate to her the entire history of her past life that she lived before she became trapped within the body of a girl who had fallen down the stairs. Again, according to Dorothy, this was that past life. Ben Trashet, meaning heap of joy, was born into a humble family in Egypt, circa 1300 B.C. which would have been just after the Hebrew exodus from Goshen. Each day the young girl went with her mother into the market to help her sell their small crop of vegetables to the people of the town. They lived on the outskirts of Abydos. While they did this, their father attended his post as a soldier in the palace guard. They were a happy people, happy with the meekness of their life, but shades of tragedy were soon to approach them, though they did not see. At 3 years old, Ben Trishet watched confusedly as her mother collapsed behind their family's booth. A crowd gathered around her and voices started to raise in panic. In the struggle, the girl was pushed away and could not see her mother take her last breath. She was taken home by her despondent father, who, on top of grieving for his wife, was faced with the terrible realization that he now had no way to both care for his daughter and work as a soldier. He couldn't afford his little girl. The following day, holding her little hand with his while it trembled, he walked her to the temple of Osiris in the holy place of Kham El Sultan. He was met by the priest. Once inside the doors, the priest was not surprised. This happened more often than he cared to remember. He took the girl's hand and led her carefully away. After gently placing his hand on the father's shoulder in a kind of consolation, Ben Treshet was raised by the priestesses of the temple. From that day on, she seldom interacted with any men in settings outside of formal worship. Thus, the years wasted away, and the bereaved daughter never saw her father again. When she came of age, which was 12 years old, the high priest revisited her case and told her to Decide whether she would stay in the temple and be consecrated as a virgin priestess, or go and try to make her way in the world outside of Kam El Sultan. Thinking there was barely any alternative, she swore her consecration vows and became a priestess. In the years following, she embraced the life she'd chosen with apparent peace. Offerings were made, prayers were given, substances were used, and entities were supplicated and communicated with. She learned her role in the annual ritual of Osiris Passion and played it well, to the great delight of worshippers. Ben Treshet was, after all, very beautiful. One year, on the day after the Passion ritual, the newly minted King Seti I walked into the temple square and made straight for Ben Treshet. He professed his love for her, and the two began a secret affair. This was doubly scandalous. It was no surprise that the king took mistresses, but to take a mistress from the virgin priestesses was a grievous sin. Likewise, for for a priestess to break her vow of chastity was punishable by death. But the two could not run from their affections, and it eventually led to Bentreshet becoming pregnant by Seti. When she could no longer hide her mistakes, she confessed all that had transpired to the high priest and told him that Seti was the father. Whether he believed her story of the child's provenance is irrelevant. Once he heard that she had broken her vows, any other detail was superfluous. He gravely informed her that she, with her child in utero, would be killed. Bentreshet, unwilling to bring shame upon Seti or herself, took her own life instead and in so doing, dealt the murderous blow to her baby. Thus ended the tragedy of Bentreshet, before her soul departed and supposedly became Dorothy Eady. Or at least that's what the nighttime apparition convinced Terrific.
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Brian
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Ben
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