← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Every Ancient Civilization Agreed: Your Soul Chose This Life Before You Were Born
00:36:29
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A
What if your life is not random
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and instead you're here for a reason you're not?
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A biological accident on a small planet in an ordinary galaxy, hidden inside every ancient tradition on Earth, across cultures, across centuries, across millennia, built independently by people who never met. Is the same idea an answer to
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why we are here?
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Some call it destiny. Some call it karma. Entire civilizations have been built around this. And in more recent years, a growing number of researchers and experiencers have been calling it Earth School.
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The idea that this planet isn't just a place that you're stranded, it's a place that we have all been sent struggles.
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The relationships, the pain, the joy we experience, all of that is the curriculum of Earth School. Your soul arrived here with something specific to learn.
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What we do here sends a ripple outwards to people we've never met, across generations, and possibly even across the cosmos.
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When you start to see patterns in describing the soul's journey, the lessons we have to learn on Earth School, and you see it in ancient texts, mystical traditions, religious practices, it makes you wonder, what if that's not a coincidence? What if we could put all of these pieces together and see how it could change our lives? School is in session.
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B
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing
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for selling the car.
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B
I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate.
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It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done.
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The car is gone.
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I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana.
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Give it a whirl. Love ya.
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So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Support car comes from Wise. The smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. Fed up with losing out to hidden fees? When you send money abroad with your everyday bank, choose the smart way.
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And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
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And on this very special episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, we're not claiming to have all the answers. But we're going to follow the clues. We're going to explore the evidence. Some of it rooted in ancient texts, some coming from experiences today. And we'll see what happens when we start connecting all these pieces. Join us on this journey, because if there is something more going on here, something bigger than we've been told, wouldn't you want to be the first to know?
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In 2003, Amy Call was 26 years old and living with chronic pain from fibromyalgia. Her doctors prescribed her new medication, and she had an allergic reaction. Her nasal passages swelled shut. She couldn't breathe, and she couldn't call for help. And then the struggle was over.
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She felt herself pulled upward and out of the top of her head. What happened next? Amy spent years trying to explain. She found herself all of a sudden in a place of complete clarity. And in that place, she was given a very specific understanding. She wasn't told, she wasn't lectured. She was shown something that restructured everything she thought she knew about her life. She was having a near death experience. And when she returned, she said, I came to understand that most of us have lived much, much longer than we can even fathom. She wasn't talking about living a long life. She was talking about many lives. She was talking about some sort of system, a design, something that looked, from where she stood, remarkably like a school. And here's what was strange. Amy had never heard the phrase earth school. She wasn't particularly religious. She wasn't looking for a spiritual explanation or experience. But she got one, and she's not alone.
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Amy's experience was actually very similar to stories that we've heard on this podcast. Fantastic and almost unbelievable tales from people who have had near death experiences at different times, who didn't know each other. They had them at times where the Internet couldn't share that amount of information. And yet the same similarities of people who pass over have their consciousness changed, are so strikingly similar.
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Betty Guidano, better known as Buddha Betty, in her nde, what she described was being shown, this literally is an Earth school with a set of lessons that your soul chooses before you are born to have in this lifetime. She literally said that it was explicitly laid out for her. And many people who have nd ease describe, you know, some combination of a life review and a delivery of a message that this is what happened in this incarnation that your soul chose. These are the lessons your soul, before you were even born, decided that you were going to experience in this lifetime. All the painful ones, the trauma, all of it. Those things are things that your soul chooses as your lessons for this incarnation.
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In Earth School, and what is it about choosing, knowing that you've had a choice in selecting these lessons that change how we experience the troubles, the challenges, the hardship that we may experience in life if we know that it isn't random, how does that change how we experience it? And we're going to look at those ancient texts that may indicate and help prove that that is actually true.
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A
Well, first, let's talk about Earth School. You know, is this something that we just talk about now since people are reporting NDEs? No, it's actually an ancient idea. And it didn't originate in kind of one religion or even one cultural context or even on one continent. So what we have is this common idea that emerged independently and repeatedly across seemingly thousands of years of human history. So we can find it in Greece, ancient Greece, we can find it in Jerusalem, we can find it in Tibet. We can find it also in the Vedas and in the oral traditions of indigenous communities on every single continent. So these are completely separate civilizations with essentially no contact with each other. In the formation of these ideas. Different languages, different expressions, different incarnations of God, everything's different, but they're essentially describing the same Earth School.
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So what is Earth School? The idea is actually deceptively simple. What if this planet, this place that we all call home, we're not just stranded here, but it's a place that we've been sent to or we've chosen to come to. So many NDEs describe the. That the other side is actually our home, that we are souls that have come to have a physical experience, and that we have come here to incarnate, to have relationships, to have loss, to have failure, to have moments that feel like they're gonna break us as part of this curriculum. So what is it that we're enrolled in?
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It's not just people who have experienced near death experiences. They that have insight into what this Earth School is about. People who drop in to deep meditative places where they have access to information that seems to be on some sort of download mechanism. They also indicate this is school. We're all in session learning a set of lessons that have been given to us for a very specific reason. This has the potential to transform the way you see suffering, the way you see illness, the way you see pain, tragedy. This is a complete reframe. So I think it's important to realize that we don't have to rely on people who have died and returned to give us an education in the education we're receiving. There are many, many people who resonate with this notion that everything you experience is part of what your soul needs to experience. There's a larger purpose for it, and we can find a freedom in understanding that everything that is placed before you is a lesson waiting to be learned.
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And it seems now more than ever, with the Internet and the ability to share these stories, that we're getting peaks beyond the veil to what might be on the other side. But let's go backwards and explore the clues that have been hidden in and passed down through generations from cultures all over the world.
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One of the earliest instances of a reference to this notion that this is not all there is for our soul actually comes from Plato's Republic. And in case you don't remember your last class in Classics, this is around 4th century BCE and it's actually Socrates telling a story about a soldier named er. So, er was this guy who died in battle, but his body's actually found on the battlefield about 10 days later and it still has not decomposed. Hmm. Two days after that, they're placing him on the funeral pyre and he revives. He's back and he's got a message. What Ur describes is watching souls in the afterlife being reviewed, judged. The just rise upwards and the unjust fall below. But here's what stopped Plato's readers cold. The souls then had the opportunity to choose their next life. He saw Odysseus drawing the last lot and selecting the life of an ordinary citizen. Odysseus had had enough glory and he wanted to learn something different. So these souls were then given a drink for from the river of Leth, the river of Forgetfulness, so that when they arrived in their new lives, they would have no memory of previous lives or the fact that they had chosen. Now. You might say Plato was writing a fantasy, but he wasn't a fantasy writer, he was a philosopher. And he was making a claim that the choices that we make in this life are reflecting what our souls have come here to learn. And the universe is organized around that learning.
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Plato was great. He was on to something, clearly.
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Yeah, he's a pretty smart guy.
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B
What's fascinating is the idea of forgetting, right? That is a theme that, that comes up over and over because people ask, well, if we've been here before, why can't we remember between lifetimes? And what happens is that as some people change their consciousness, begin to meditate, they can start to remember. And we wonder, are we creatively imagining it or are we actually getting information from the past?
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A
This notion of forgetfulness calls to mind something in the oral tradition, in the Jewish tradition, that when you're a baby in your mother's womb, you are taught all the languages of all of the animals and all of the trees and all of the plants. You learn the languages of the entire universe. And right before you're born, the angel Lila touches your mouth and you are made to forget. So one of These is the explanation, we've talked about this before for the little angel's bow between your nose and your top lip, that that is where the angel touches you to make you forget. But the notion is you have the rest of your life to figure out all of the languages of the animals and the plants and the trees, that you know it somewhere in your soul, and you are deliberately instructed to forget it so that you can learn it again. In this incarnation, there's another kabbalistic tradition from 16th century. In a hilltop town called Tzfat, there was an exceptional Jewish mystic, Isaac Luria, and he was known as the Ari, the Lion. He developed a system that Jewish scholars still consider one of the most comprehensive maps of reality ever assembled. At the center was a concept called gilgual, the cycling of souls, as well as tikkun, the ability to repair and rectify in other incarnations. What the Ari taught was that every soul arrives in this world with, for lack of a better expression, unfinished spiritual business. It's work that couldn't or wouldn't be completed in a previous life. And the specific circumstances of your birth, who you were born to, the challenges you have, your particular gifts, your particular wounds, they're not random. They were designed for you because that's what your soul needs to learn. Each incarnation is a deliberate episode in the soul's extensive curriculum, designed to confront it with various life challenges tailored to its spiritual needs. Your most difficult experiences, the ones that seem like they're going to bring you to your knees, that's not proof that the system is cruel. It's proof that the system is incredibly specific.
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And this was a thousand years after Plato wrote the example we just gave.
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Somewhere in between, you have the Tibetan Book of the Dead, right? That's the 8th century in Tibet. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is essentially a guidebook for dying for the soul that is in that space between lives. And what the Tibetan Book of the Dead does is it describes states of consciousness that the soul is passing through after death, what it encounters, and then the choices that it will face before returning to a new body. So the text treats this transition as something that you can navigate and you can learn, and you can also prepare for it, right? Is there some part of your soul that can maintain some wisdom from this incarnation so that when you choose next, not all is lost? Right? Can your consciousness in some way hold these different incarnations you have? And. And the assumptions that are baked into these kind of notions is, you've done this before and you're going to do it again. And what you learn this time is going to shape what you're going to then be ready to learn next time. Like every soul has a journey, we're just one stop. This name, this identity, this face, this is what my soul's doing now. But it's learning lessons through all of time and will continue to do so.
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B
And that's what each of us hope, that we're not just simply cycling through and repeating the same lessons, that there is an evolution of some kind, that life may not be perfect, but at least it's not the exact same as the last incarnation. And a lot of meditation, or getting your intuition back, talks about this notion of remembering to reconnect with something that we once had at some point. And some people will say, I had it as a child, and other people will say, I don't even remember if I connected to it as a child. But it feels familiar when that message is received that we have information beyond what we've experienced only in this lifetime. And how do we access more of it? So we talked about Plato, we talked about Kabbalah, we talked about the Tibetan tradition. But it shows up other places as well.
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Yeah, I mean, nearby places. If. If you've thought about karma in this conversation, that's absolutely, you know, kind of the next dot that we can connect, you know, in the Vedic traditions, in the Buddhist traditions, karma, we kind of misunderstand it in the west as, you know, like cosmic scorekeeping, like, oh, if I do good things, good things will happen, and if I do bad things, I'll be punished. But that's actually not what the original concept is of karma. In. In Hindu and Buddhist frameworks, Karma, it's not so much about reward and punishment. It's about learning through consequence, which is also, you know, when you think of parenting and what a lot of parenting manuals encourage you to do, don't use reward and punishment. Use learning through consequence. Right? Every action causes an impression on the soul, and those impressions shape the conditions of what will be your next life. Not as punishment, but again, as part of this continuing curriculum. That cycle is samsara. The goal is not to win samsara. It's to learn so completely that you don't need to keep returning. In Zen Buddhism, it's this notion of you're going around a circle, but at some point you will break free of that circle and you will no longer be on that circle. You know, moksha, this kind of concept, which is in many yogic traditions we talk about it's a graduation that is liberating.
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B
And that is the case both in the evolution of the soul and our lifetime, but also a mirrored system to what many of us go through with specific lessons in our life. Do we repeat the same patterns? Do we have compulsion? Do we try and make it right by having slight alterations? Or do we break free of the cycle entirely and create something new?
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You know, we think about all of these ancient traditions and many of us are then kind of drawn to wonder, well, where does Christianity fit into this? You know, where does Islam fit into this? Of the Judeo Christian, you know, kind of structure, Was this anywhere hidden in there? You know, we've spoken to Brian Murarescu who has an entire, you know, canon about what early Christianity was keeping from the Greeks, from the Romans, and what it was leaving behind. The early Christian church. There were significant communities that believed in reincarnation. It's a feature of many texts that came out of the Old Testament tradition of the Jews and that continued into many of those early Christian communities. The Gnostic Christians described the soul as older than the body, that it traveled through multiple lifetimes toward a reunion ultimately with the divine. One of the most influential theologians in Christian history wrote extensively about the pre existence of souls, the soul's journey, learning across multiple lives. And in 553, Emperor Justinian convened what was known as the Second Council of Constantinople. And among the propositions that they decided to condemn it was voted out was the pre existence of souls. So reincarnation got a gigantic thumbs down from Christian orthodoxy at that time. So it wasn't discovered that it wasn't true. It's not like somebody had a better idea. It was voted out. But the teaching didn't disappear. It just went underground, as most teachings do when they're voted out. The Rosicrucians are ones who continue this line of thinking that survived this rejection from the second council. But for most of Western history, right, for most of Western history, this classroom notion, this earth school notion has really been kind of segregated from any dominant tradition. But it didn't really go away. You know, it really didn't go away.
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B
So here's the part that for me is maybe the most interesting, that these ideas sprung up in disparate places throughout time with a very hard chance, a small chance that they could have been shared in these pockets of the world, that these communities wouldn't have been able to know that each one of them were circling these same ideas.
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A
Well, I mean, it would take a very long time for this kind of information to travel. You got to get on your camel and you got to, like, stop 86 times along the way. There was some interaction among communities. But what you're talking about is it seems to be that there is some sort of independent philosophical evolution of this notion. If I can just sort of lead the witness. It seems that you're indicating that there's something about our experience, our consciousness. We don't know, but there's something about our experience that seems to, no matter where we find ourselves across the globe, be leaning towards an explanation of why we're here. As one of. There's a curriculum that your soul has to learn. It's going to keep learning different things in each of these incarnations. And you're not going to remember that connection.
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B
Yes, absolutely. And the explanation can either be that there is some form of universal truth that all of these societies across human history have come to. And that they know somehow that that information is available to them, whether it be in dream or consciousness of some kind that they become aware of, or that human suffering is so great that we all need a way to cope with it in some form. And this continues to be the best story that we've been able to come up with. And it's somewhat miraculous that the story has so much similarity to it across all of these cultures. Cultures.
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A
The extreme example is if you give, what is it, 500 monkeys, typewriters, eventually they'll come up with the Old Testament. Right. If you think about the different kinds of poetry that exist in the world, there are certain kinds of poetry that they're known to different communities. So Japan has haiku. Right. Haiku didn't independently evolve all over the world at other times. Right. That's something that's specific to that kind of, you know, poetic culture of Japan. And there's examples of different kinds of poetry and prose all over the world. So those are all different variations on ways that we express ourselves creatively. What you're talking about is we have something that seems to be independently repeating itself. No matter the culture, no matter if there's one God or thousands, no matter if you're in poverty or if you're in a palace. There's something about either or the magicalness of whatever higher power or the kind of magicalness of our need to understand and create a structure that is somehow hardwired into the human brain. Because that's the only way that you would have this kind of independent sprouting of the same kind of idea unless it was being shared another way.
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B
It could be that the thing that we continue to remember across all of our lives is the fact that we have had other lives and that there is a larger purpose for us being here. The thing that also emerges, especially in modern day time, is that the accounts of people who have these near death experiences start to increase and the stories begin to be shared over and over again.
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For most of recorded human history, these things were passed down through oral tradition or they were written down in documents. But an amazing thing started happening in the last few hundred years. Researchers began showing interest in accumulating data to try and understand what are we actually talking about. And in 1975, Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life. And we've spoken to him here on the podcast. He was the first physician to coin the term near death experience. He had interviewed at that time over 100 people who had been clinically dead and then came back. The accounts were almost identical. There was some sort of tunnel or a narrow place that they went through. There was a blinding and powerful light. They interacted with people who had died before. They felt a tremendous sense of peace and love. And they consistently reported a review session of their life that was a series of instructions for their soul so that they would know what to do next.
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B
Imagine that getting instructions like, how many of us feel lost on a regular basis and are wondering, what direction should I take? Does it mean anything? What's my purpose? And these people, through extreme circumstances, are coming back with a knowing and a clarity that so many of us would benefit from.
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A
We have thousands of years of mystical traditions where people were arguably much more in tune with mysticism, spirituality in general, their inner world. You know, imagine a world where you're not distracted by your phone, the building that you're in, you know, needing to have people clocking in and out, right? Think about what life might have been like, right, for thousands of years in terms of spiritual development. Very, very different. But what we're seeing is that when people experience transcendental things, when people die, they're having experiences quite similar to what people for thousands of years considered part of the mystical, religious and spiritual canon. So this is not a reward and punishment system like Judeo Christianity. In many cases, it's kind of manipulated these stories to be. This is a diagnostic meaning you're being given the opportunity for your soul to be assessed, to see where you caused harm, to feel the harm that you may have caused, and to see how that can be transformed in this light, right? Of love, of safety, and of healing. More recently, the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual studies. We've had many of the psychiatrists on Bruce Grayson, Jim Tucker, you know, Bruce Grayson spent 40 years interviewing NDE survivors. And this is what he said his subjects consistently told him. They realized that there is a meaning and a purpose to everything that happens to them, even the things that feel like they're bad. There are lessons for us to grapple with and learn from and not just run away from. So that kind of language, this, this is a lesson to grapple with. That's not wishful thinking. That's not, oh, all these people out there just wanting you to like, feel good about dying. No, we're literally getting messages from people all over the world who have died and come back and have a different way that they operate in the world because of what they learned about Earth School. If we are to believe that the information that people might be getting in NDEs is linked to thousands of years of mystical tradition and possibly some universal truth, this is where people might jump in and say, wait a second, we can't use NDES as evidence. It's just like a dying brain, right? It's a brain that's in some sort of like freakout session that then somehow, I don't know, nobody knows really, they're coming back and they're reporting all these things. Well, the fact is, the brain, when it is in those states, there's actually some really incredible research out of the University of Michigan showing that what actually is happening in a near death experience is a blunting of a lot of interference that we normally have to interact with, that the brain is actually in a level of conscious processing that has some sort of truth to it. Meaning we don't get to just dismiss NDES as, oh, well, that's just craziness. It can't possibly connect to thousands of years of tradition talking about Earth School. Well, this kind of research points to the fact that what's going on in the brain is actually, it's a real experience. It's not simply a hallucination. It's not something we get to just write off as well. That's crazy and I can't explain it. What if the information that we're getting from NDES is modern proof that these thousands of years of conversations about the soul, choosing lessons in Earth School, are actually legitimate?
- [32:44]
B
There's a fascinating area of exploration with children who remember past lives. This also happened from the University of Virginia's Perceptual Studies department. And we spoke with Dr. Jim Tucker, who is one of the leading researchers collecting evidence and examples of Training children who have memories that seemingly can't be explained.
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A
And the way this ties into Earth School. Right. If. If souls are arriving with this curriculum, we're supposed to not remember. But what if some of them do? What if there are souls that refuse to forget? That's where Jim Tucker comes in.
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B
And his predecessor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, spent 40 years collecting over 3,000 cases that explore this very thing.
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A
Jim Tucker's book about this is one that you should absolutely read to see what a scientific exploration of this kind of remembering looks like. That book is called Life Before Life. So highly recommend that this typically happens with children when they're little, like between the ages of 2 and 5. And what Jim Tucker studied, He's a psychiatrist. What he studied was there were children who had a very elaborate description of a life that their soul had previously led in ways that sounded like it made no sense. They knew acquaintances of the person they claimed they were incarnated from. They described how that person died. Some had birthmarks or injuries or corresponding to the wounds that killed their previous self. Some had phobias related to tragedies that befell the people they claimed that they were embodying. One child accurately described a dead relative that they believed they were in a previous life, down to a specific scar on his left hand. She had never met him. She had never seen a photograph of him. It's unreal. And cultural expectations cannot explain this. Memory reconstruction can't explain this in many cases. This was before kids could look things up on the Internet, before the parents even had information about these deceased people or relatives. This is. These are not kids who were reading Plato and re remembering the shocking detail
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B
of their memory when they couldn't have had exposure to those details. Brings into question the very nature of reality. What does it mean when a child has that type of remembering?
- [35:24]
A
I do want to give a little bit of a nod to what might be kind of a skeptical view of this kind of notion of Earth School lessons, souls coming back. Let's talk a little bit about terror management theory. And no, that's not the theory we teach. For anyone who wants to come work with us at Mayim Bialik's breakdown, it is a theory developed by social psychologist Ernest Becker. And what Becker argues is that human civilization is organized around the fact that we're gonna die, and it freaks us out. So we build all these systems. We build religion. We create meaning and structure and legacy and explanations. And it's so that our own mortality is somehow bearable. So if we look at that very Skeptical, you know, potential explanation for our existence here and how we think about death. Earth School is kind of an elaborate and sophisticated example of that. You know, it's a story that's comforting and it's possible that when we are suffering, when we are having a near death experience, the brain is calling on this, this kind of management system right under the stress of dying, like you're dying, and so there's a reason and your soul chose this. It's a very elaborate thing that I don't even know, you know, kind of from a neuroscience perspective, how to test that, how to verify it, or how to really wrap my head around it.
- [37:01]
B
And it's true that the convergence across cultures of these ideas, to a strict materialist, they would say that's not evidence of a shared metaphysical reality. It's evidence of shared human psychology, it's evidence of humans facing death, it's evidence of us all needing meaning. But it is not necessarily evidence of the code of reality being stored in these pages. I don't know that I believe that, but that's what a strict materialist would say.
- [37:35]
A
While there are many things that cannot easily be explained. You know, children knowing details about, you know, a person from generations before that no one even knew about, you know, these kind of fascinating, verified details from NDE accounts, being able to say what people are wearing in rooms that they're not even in, hearing conversations buildings away. This sort of recurring theme, that there's a curriculum, not just be a better person, but if you're struggling to be a better person, you're not alone. There's a lesson that you're supposed to learn surrounding this, that and the other. And also this kind of cross cultural, you know, convergence in all of these different accounts, there's something there. And just because we can't explain it, it doesn't mean there's not something there. It means that we don't yet understand the entirety of it.
- [38:28]
B
For me, it also expands on the notion of what we're doing here on Earth, all of human civilization. What is the point? Is there a larger intergalactic meaning for the processes happening here? And if, for example, like many of the NDErs explain, we are souls here to incarnate in Earth and to have these experiences that we have chosen to come here, that when we leave, that is our home on the other side, that it is actually a real privilege to be here, how does that change my mentality? Do I believe that, that I am a part of something, a collective that is all experiencing and trying to uplift this place, there's a little known section of Earth school which talks about the Earth experiment, that we're all here to learn and to grow, but that there is some stakes in how the Earth unfolds. And it isn't arbitrary and it isn't about whether or not humanity or will not destroy itself. But in fact that message is being watched further than simply from the vantage point of Earth, that it has cosmic importance to what happens.
- [39:51]
A
And I don't know that we've convinced all of the skeptics out there, but I think what's important, you know, for us as sort of like a take home message is that what if you operated in such a way that you didn't believe that the universe was indifferent to you or you didn't believe that God was out to get you or that you were constantly in this cycle of reward and punishment. We have evidence from a variety of civilizations or thousands of people across thousands and thousands of years. What if you were to approach life as if it wasn't an accident? You're not an accident. There is randomness, but your struggles and your journey are not random. Somewhere there is a soul that knows what lessons do we need at least to learn in this lifetime. That's the journey that you're on.
- [40:34]
B
And we're glad that each one of you is on a journey with us. As things are difficult, we hope that our explorations can offer some hope in your particular path.
- [40:45]
A
And the notion of why is this happening to me? How can we shift? This is happening to me to, this is happening for me. That that is a place of spiritual comfort. And it doesn't mean that you don't have a role. It doesn't mean that you don't have to do the legwork and work to better yourself and work on healing all of your past traumas. But just know that there is some wisdom to this journey you're on. There is some purpose to you showing up in Earth school. So remember the old days when they would call roll in class. Maybe now you'll have a different meaning too. I'm here. Thanks for being here. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
- [41:28]
B
It's Maya Bialix Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two and now she's gonna break down.
- [41:38]
A
It's a breakdown.
- [41:39]
B
She's gonna break it down. Mind Bialix Breakdown is supported by Elastique where science meets style in wearable wellness.
- [41:50]
A
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