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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Culture, Healing, and the Afterlife with Haresh Patel
01:05:50
Culture, Healing, and the Afterlife with Haresh Patel Haresh Patel is an entrepreneur. He founded a company called Mercatus which was recently sold to State Street Investments, one of the largest investment firms in the world.
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A
The rash was like a thousand mosquito bites, itching like crazy. The redness, the swelling. And then it also created hives which if you press them, they're like super, super hard. And if the hive happened to land on a joint, extremely painful. And there would be times I would be with a customer and I could feel my lip beginning to puff up and I had to exit like Superman or the Hulk, I think is the right word, right? There's a Hulk is where he has to exit, where he knows he's turning into something else.
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Keep watching to learn more.
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A
Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org thinking allowed conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery.
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A
With psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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B
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we will be exploring culture, healing and the afterlife. My guest here in Albuquerque with me is Haresh Patel. Haresh is an entrepreneur. He founded a company called Mercatus, which was recently sold to State Street Investments, one of the largest investment firms in the world, actually. He is also the author of a soon to be published book called the Ghost in my a 55 year journey to Healing. Welcome, Haresh.
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A
Thank you, Jeffrey, for having me here in Albuquerque.
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B
It's a pleasure to be with you and I'm delighted that you made the trip to Albuquerque and we can speak face to face in my little studio. You've experienced a remarkable healing journey. I think to set the stage a little bit, we might let our viewers know you're an electrical engineer by training, sort of a hard headed, no nonsense businessman, successful businessman. But you, along the way had encountered the mysterious world of consciousness and it led to a dramatic healing.
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A
Absolutely. Like you said, I got an electrical engineering degree from Notre Dame and then I moved to Silicon Valley, which put me right in the epicenter of technology and probably the furthest away from spirituality and any of the topics we're going to talk about today. But my awakening happened about three years ago in kind of two simultaneous two different continents within a month of each other. Diagnosis of something I was suffering, which is a very bad deep skin rash. And it was probably something out of this world where I never expected. First time was in Costa Rica in. I think it was in 2023. And then a month later, I'm at a wedding and there's a lady named Sherry, who's the groom of the mom.
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B
The mom of the groom.
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A
I'm sorry, the mom of the groom. And, you know, out of the blue, you have two people giving me the same diagnosis, which there's a ghost in my body. It's my mom that had, when she passed away when I was six years old, that she had been clinging onto me too tightly. And I had a hard time believing it. But when you got two strangers on two continents in random events that I could have, could not have been at, I had to start believing and I had to start understanding what they were saying. And we'll talk a lot more about how we got there. But that, to me, was a moment where the engineer in me, the technologist in me from Silicon Valley, the son of a physics professor, kind of had to throw all that out and say, there's gotta be a lot that we don't know, that we don't know. And I had to start exploring and.
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B
Believing, well, let's go back to you at age 6 when your mother was tragically killed in an automobile accident.
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A
Yeah. So I was born in India, state of Kal, Gujarat. My dad came when I was a year old to get a PhD in physics at Colorado State University. And the first three years he stayed by himself, but over time, he got super depressed and stopped going to classes. And the university started asking, listen, we're paying you a full stipend. What's going on here? Must have diagnosed him back then to have some sort of clinical depression. And he opened up and said, I really miss my wife and my son. And the next thing we knew, we were on a plane and we joined him here in Fort Collins, Colorado. And so we spent the first couple years in Fort Collins, and then my dad got his first teaching job at St. Anthony's College in New Hampshire. And we decided that we would make a vacation out of it. We, meaning my parents, decided I was a little too young to make that decision, but they said we could either fly or we'll see the country. Most people go west. We went east. And unfortunately, that very first night of the accident, the wee hours in the morning, a single car accident took my mom's life. And it was something that my dad still regrets to this day. But he Lost control of the car and it tumbled many, many times. And in that process, we walked away, quite frankly, with no scratches. She got thrown from the car, no seatbelt, probably door slightly ajar, and obviously the impact of a car tumbling at 80 miles an hour out of control. She didn't die on the spot, but I was there with her in the ambulance as we made our way to the hospital. So that's what happened. So life has plans, you know, even though you plan something else. My dad planned a future for us in New Hampshire, a new beginning of his career. And, you know, life had plans, and we had to deal with that.
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B
Do you remember much about your mother from those early years?
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A
Absolutely. It's kind of as I wrote the book and my dad's reading it, he was shocked how much I remembered. And it was one of those things that at age 4, I don't remember the trip coming to the U.S. i don't remember boarding a plane. I don't remember meeting my dad again. I don't remember the drive from Denver Airport or walking into our home. But somehow that next morning, everything came to life. And I was there for pretty much a photographic memory from that moment. And so, yes, absolutely. That accident, if I close my eyes, I can hear the screeching of the tires. I can feel the tumbling, the scraping of the car, the metal crunching very, very vividly. I remember every single detail.
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B
And were you close to your mother?
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A
I would say yeah. I mean, I lived with her for four years, so it was her and I and our extended family on my dad's side. So I got very close to her. Now, at age 6, you really don't. Can't put your finger on what that means. But the fact that it was just her and I fending for ourselves while my Dad's in the U.S. yeah, I was very close to her, and she was very close to me because I think she spent only a couple years with my dad. She spent more time with me because of that longevity when he was studying and we were alone in India.
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B
Well, and I gather now you're in the middle of Colorado somewhere and your mother has just died tragically. And of course, given your background from India, from, I presume, a Hindu family, the natural series of events I would think would have been she would be cremated and maybe the ashes taken back to India.
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A
You would think. Now, there was an interesting discussion my mom and dad had that I learned about later. And they're both sitting on our front porch, and out of the blue, she turns to him, she Goes, you know, Praful, when I die, I do not want to be cremated. I want to be buried. And he's just like, what are you saying? You're a 27 year old young woman, right? Only one child, and you're telling me about dying? And she goes, yeah, I just want you to know that. And I don't know what she saw or what she felt, but that she had two desires. One was, please bury me. Which is very much against our Hindu beliefs. When we really believe in cremation, the soul rises from that and it gets reincarnated into a different life form. And so that was violation number one, I would say. But my dad honored her wishes in that moment of tragedy. And at the same time, even if he wanted to perform the Hindu rituals, he probably didn't know what to do. He was also 27, 20 years old. There's no Hindu priest. We're at the middle of the Kansas, Colorado border, which is prairie country. And so we would not have had access to that. And even the crematorium, the closest crematorium, even 50 years later, was in the town of Colorado Springs. So there was just so many factors that happened, but the biggest one was honoring her wish that she kind of out of the blue blurted out that, hey, listen, I really, really do not want to be cremated for the fear of just being burned.
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B
So you had her buried, I presume, somewhere near the accident itself in that same town.
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A
So the accident happened in a small, I'd call it a hamlet. This is called Bethuen. And Springfield is the closest town in Kit Carson. And so there's two cemeteries there I discovered years later. And we buried her in one of the two cemeteries and we moved on. So we from there we, you know, finished the funeral and, and you know, a lot of friends that were from college came over from, from Fort Collins and we flew to Pittsburgh. A good, close family friend wired money to my dad. Obviously not having a job. He didn't have money for the funeral, he didn't have money for the plane tickets. But we flew to their, their home in Pittsburgh. They lived in State College, Pennsylvania. They were both students there. And we spent the summer with them as a way to kind of really move on as much as we could out of that tragedy.
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B
And I presume your father then took.
- [11:22]
A
The job and he always had the job. Yeah. So, yeah, in New Hampshire we had the summer off. That's why we were traveling towards New Hampshire. So we spent about a month with this family, Harsha than Remilante, as I called Him. And when we were leaving, my dad really broke down. Interestingly, Jeffrey, one thing that happened to me that we didn't talk about is I didn't express any emotions. I didn't cry when my dad told me that my mom passed away. When he was sitting in the doctor's office weeping, I observed him crying and I knew what happened. It wasn't like I didn't understand. I knew exactly what he meant when he says, your mom is gone and she died in that car accident. I didn't express any emotions at the funeral. Also I can see the casket and I didn't express any emotions for whatever reason. I just totally bottled up. There was nothing internal going on either, any kind of grief that I was holding back. And I think part of the problem that I had was holding all that in. And so that was, I thought, something that, as I look back in retrospect, I'm still curious. What was that young six year old boy thinking? Or why was he so non expressive? It's still tickles my curiosity around why?
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B
Well, one answer of course is that maybe you were an old soul who had a deep understanding of the immortality of the soul and you knew that death isn't the end.
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A
I did have an interesting experience a year later. We were heading back to India and I remember seeing a lady, I don't know exactly where, we changed planes, it was in one of the Middle Eastern countries. And I said, dad, do you think mom reincarnated herself? Because she looks just like mom. And so I did have an understanding of death. I had an understanding of reincarnation. Not sure exactly how I picked it up, but I had that wherewithal around me.
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B
Well, I gather life went on for you and at some point though you began developing symptoms.
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A
I did. Life moved on. We got to New Hampshire, our professor, the dean of the college, who was my dad's boss, picked us up from the Greyhound bus station. And he asked, what hotel should I take you to? And I guess we both looked a little bewildered. And he kind of got the wind, he goes, you didn't make any plans? And he said, you know what, why don't you guys come over to my house, I have six children, I can take in two more. And so we spent the next three, four weeks with his family. It was just incredibly gracious of him. I call him one of my first angels. Outside of my mom being my first angel post her death, that was the first angel that people just went out of their way to welcome us. We were very different. We were the second Indian family to enter New Hampshire. So when we went to McDonald's, you know, people stopped eating. It wasn't because they were trying to be rude or mean, but we looked different, right? And. But people were extremely helpful. So we. He. We got an apartment on Church street in Goffstown, New Hampshire. And, you know, it was on the third floor. Below us was another family of six children, Betty Lou and her husband Carl. And, you know, she was our neighbor below. And we got furniture from the church. And grade school started. Grade one, I think I was about a week late by the time we got to New Hampshire. So I remember walking into the first classroom and being introduced to the class. And Ms. Merrill was my first grade teacher. So, yeah, life moved on.
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B
Well, you mentioned your mother as your first angel. Did you feel a sense of connection at all with her after her death?
- [15:09]
A
I did not. To be quite honest. I did not. It wasn't until later, as I entered, I think, my sophomore junior year in high school, when my mom passed away, before I got into the ambulance, because my dad said, why don't you go in the ambulance with Mom? I need to be here. Because the police were taking records of what happened. And he whispered in my ear, he goes, when they ask you what happened, just let them know that I was, you know, avoiding an animal on the road, a deer. And that's. I took it for granted, right? That's what it was. But junior year, he finally opened up and he said, you know what? I didn't tell you what really happened. And he's very emotional. And he said, what I was trying to do was your mom had just whispered, like, I'm really hungry. When's the next stop? When's the next little town coming? And in the world of today's texting and driving, he was looking at that physical map, and the minute he put the map down saying, okay, we got so much distance till this next city comes up. He was about to hit a reflector pole. And so he never hit the reflector pole. He overreacted, and the car tumbled and tumbled. You know, physics took over and the motions. And so he's still. He's 87 now. He still lives that guilt to this day that he caused an innocent life. So, you know, that is kind of when I would say the guilt started coming out. But the guilt came in the manifestation of dreams, your guilt, my guilt, and the guilt of hiding something, right? Because I was told to tell everybody that he swerved to avoid an animal. And then when I went back to India that year, Most people are quite curious, especially on my mom's side. How could three people be involved in a car accident? One person die, and two people walk away without a scratch. So the rumor mill had started spreading, which happens in small villages. Happens here, too, right? Like, there's got to be something more. And so every time there was an opportunity to have me alone, my mom's side of the family would grill me. Were you in the accident? Were you in the car? And I was just recounting the story I was told to tell. So years later, when I'm revealed, my dad revealed what the real reason was, I think something triggered in my body. And so I would have these recurring nightmares that I was hiding something, I was hiding a body, and that it was going to be discovered. And I would just hold my eyes tight and my fists like, I hope they don't find it. I hope they don't find it. And that was the general theme. But each time it got more and more grotesque. A burned body. And it wasn't until about three, four years ago that at one point, I'm in my own bedroom in California and somebody drops a body, like, with a mummy totally wrapped between my wife and I. And I just woke up startled. And so that trauma of that grilling that happened in the village of India where my mom's family was, because they were rightfully, you know, doubtful, like, how could you. How could this happen? How could this happen to our daughter? How could this happen to my sister? So it was a combination of a whole bunch of things that happened. So that was happening. And at the same time, there was always a question in my mind and a little bit of, I can't express the words, but we buried her in the middle of nowhere and we left her there. I moved on. That was beginning to, I would say, grow and mushroom. And that's what was beginning to cause, I think, some of my early symptoms.
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B
And let's describe the symptoms.
- [19:10]
A
So the symptoms started with just eczema, dandruff, dry skin. And at the time, it was also coinciding with being in middle school, being different and a lot of bullies that are everywhere. And so I was really struggling wanting to go to school. And so that's when I would say the beginnings of some of the issues that I had around. But I didn't share that with anybody. I didn't share that with my parents. Right. Like, I'm being bullied at school for the fear of confrontation. Probably some of the same reason I suppressed everything about my mom. But there was A growing sense around. She's there in the middle of nowhere. And that was whispering. And that whisper was getting louder and.
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B
Louder over time and manifesting in the Eczema.
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A
Yeah, manifesting eczema. But it was, it's like a, you know, like a horror movie. It's some start off with a bang, right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Mine was if you, if you kind of plot it over time, it was just so subtle. But when you step back and paint this 55 year journey, it was a thriller. Towards the end, where you're sitting at the edge of the seat, what's going to happen? To harass. Right. The rash had gotten so bad and it was misdiagnosed several times and we'll talk about that. But the rash was like a thousand mosquito bites, itching like crazy. The redness, the swelling. And then if. It also created hives, which if you press them, they're like super, super hard. And if the hive happened to land on a joint, extremely painful. And there would be times I would be with a customer and I could feel my lip beginning to puff up and I had to exit like Superman or the Hulk, I think is the right word. Right? There's a Hulk is where he has to exit, where he knows he's turning into something else. I'd have to make some excuse. Well, I got to, you know, I've got another thing. Sorry, Mr. Customer, head on. And my co founder knew what was going on because he knew about the rash. But most of the time the rash somehow stayed below the neck. But from time to time, covered up. It was covered up.
- [21:25]
B
Yeah, but, you know, but you were miserable.
- [21:27]
A
It was miserable. It's hard to describe, but I've never understood when people say I can commit euthanasia or assisted suicide. But when you're miserable, you can begin to at least connect the dots, like, okay, why would somebody want to live that way? And I was dangerously close a couple times where I felt like, wow, this is just unbearable.
- [21:49]
B
And I gather this rash has persisted for many, many years.
- [21:54]
A
Decades, I believe it came in different forms and each time it was more severe than the previous time. So the first visible rash, the first ones were, I would say, dandruff, you know, dry elbows, dry knees, kind of nothing to be concerned about. But the first big rash came when my son was born in 93. And you know, it took four or five days to kind of work itself out and it went away.
- [22:19]
B
How old were you then?
- [22:21]
A
Let's see, that was 1993, so I had to be about 32.
- [22:25]
B
32. In other words, 26 years after the accident.
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A
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. And the biggest rash that came was when I started the company Mercatus. And that was back in 2009 is when we formed the company. And in 2010, 2011 is when it came with a vengeance.
- [22:47]
B
Of course, starting a business is a stressful thing to do.
- [22:51]
A
It is a stressful thing to do. The stress there was. I was fired, actually, for the first time after 25 years in my career. And, you know, in the middle of what I call the worst economic perfect storm, I just decided, you know what I'm saying, I'm not going to look for a job. I don't like the cultures I've worked for. I don't like the bosses I've worked for. I'm going to just create my own culture. I didn't know what the company was going to be, but I just said, I'm going to write a book one day that the best thing ever happens getting fired. And that was just to give myself a guiding light, to not feel bad, but to say I got to create my own silver lining.
- [23:25]
B
Well, you've had a very fortunate career in business. But to get back to your mother, as I recall, you began to feel a sense of connection with her at around the age of 20.
- [23:39]
A
I had a very interesting dream. So I was back from Notre Dame for one of the breaks and I hear an insistent knock on the front door. So this is. So I was 6. This is about 20. So this is 14 years later. I get up out of bed and I answer the front door and there's a woman at the front door, very aged. I don't recognize her, but as soon as she starts speaking, it was my mom. But she had aged much more than she should have. She looked haggard, as if she'd been homeless for a long time, looking for us. And that's exactly what she said. Haresh, where have you been? I've been looking for you all these years. And as soon as I recognized it was my mom, I just freaked out. I slammed the door in my dream and I ran to my parents room like you would when you were a little kid. And I just snuck in bed with them. There was no way I could stay in my own bed. The next morning, I shared my dream with my dad and my mom. We were sitting at breakfast.
- [24:54]
B
Your stepmother.
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A
Your stepmother. Yeah. My dad got remarried. And we don't call her stepmom because she filled my mom. She was like a Cinderella wood in the glass slippers. So she looked at me with an odd look. And she said, I had the same dream. And we're like, stunned. And her dream was slightly different also. A knock on the door. She answers the door, and it's an older woman. And we described what she looks like, and we had an identical description. And. And her version was, she's screaming, you stole my son. How dare you. And so that conversation that morning was like. Almost like, dad, are you sure she passed away? Because once in a while in movies, you see that somebody comes to life after you leave. So did she really pass away? And my God, what happened? And again, we kind of cemented the story then and never brought it up again. But years later, just only about less than a year ago, I actually was trying to solve a sleep problem and a knot in my back that even a chiropractor couldn't fix. And I had hypnosis done to me, and I remember mostly everything I said. But I re. Listened to the recording, and in that recording, the individual, her name is Smita, she was the hypnosis individual administering the. The therapy. She asked the question, so when do you think your mom. And when do you think her soul kind of grabbed onto you? And without even thinking, I said, oh, 20. And I connect the two dots that I was exactly 20 when I had that dream. So a bunch of interesting dots began to connect around that.
- [26:41]
B
So it would seem from the dreams, if we assume the two dreams represent some form of reality in what you could call hyperspace or the Bardo planes or the afterlife or the astral plane, that your mother had had a rough time of it since the accident, and she was aged, she was haggard looking. She was desperate to find you and finally did. And it was at that point that you think maybe she began grabbing onto you in a. Was unhealthy.
- [27:22]
A
I don't think I would discover that until 2021 that she had grabbed onto me. And that's what I was referring to when we started our discussion today was these two simultaneous events that happened where the diagnosis was that your mom's soul never rose. People that die tragic deaths have a very high propensity of being stuck here. A lot of us have seen the movie the Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze. And, you know, her soul, his, like Patrick's soul, was hanging around for weeks. She's been hanging around forever because she didn't have a chance to rise and reincarnate. And so those two incidences really cemented for me that there's something beyond science and math and engineering and technology that We've got to really explore.
- [28:18]
B
So we're talking about from the period when you're 20 years old until the year 2021 when you began to hear from some very learned people who were highly intuitive that they independently saw your mother grabbing on, pulling as if she wanted gather to take you with her into the afterlife.
- [28:42]
A
Yeah. Let me explain how both of those scenarios happened. So I've gone through a full 12 year journey with Mercatus from kitchen table to acquisition and helping through the integration and either end of that barbell. When we started the company, that big first rash happened. And that first rash started with the farmers market in Saratoga. We had bought some curry chicken tikka masala curry and anan, my son wanted that and so we grabbed it. I took a big bite. I'm a foodie, have to sample it. It's called tax with the kids. And I sat down in the car and I started sweating here. And I really felt like something was choking me right around the heart, like somebody grabbed my heart. And I was telling Amir, I said, I feel. Amir's my son. I feel like I'm having a heart attack. Now. I don't know what lack of wisdom I had. We should have gone to the hospital. When you say those kind of words right, but I don't know, it kind of went away after a few minutes. But that evening I started getting that rash. And for the next four or five days, the rash continued to spread and spread and spread. And again, I'm now looking back and I'm saying, what kind of idiot was I not to go to the emergency room? But my initial reaction, probably being the engineer, is, well, obviously I ate something and I'm eating something that's causing this. So I started a walk, water fast. I stopped eating, I just drank water. And the more I flushed out my body, that rash went away. So in my mind, it confirmed that we have some kind of allergy. So when I did go see the doctor, he put me in touch with an allergy specialist, went through a whole bunch of tests, several things that came up, and I'm telling you this in detail because it all connects with these two incidences. There was one big diagnosis that my iron level was super low. Lack of iron means lack of possible oxygenation and also issues around that could drive bad sleep. And those are things that can. And lack of iron. Iron is anti inflammatory, so you have no ability to fight it. But oxygenation is kind of a very common theme. Of all the doctors I saw, the 12 doctors I saw over that decade Always came back to something related to oxygenization. We never found the source of the low iron. I went through an endoscopic colonoscopy, a camera that was tumbling down because the doctor's theory was the only way you can have this kind of low iron and you're actually walking is you have to have internal bleeding. We didn't find it, but over time we learned that. I had an allergy to paprika, and I learned how to control it. It took me a year to isolate the paprika. It's in everything golden. French fries are golden because they soak those potatoes in paprika, water, mustard, ketchup. Finally, I isolate it, and I'm able to control the rash. And over time, it went away. And as I said, it was a barbell. Now I'm ready to sell the company. We're in the midst of negotiation with State street, and the rash comes back, exact same symptoms. And I call the doctor, I text the doctor. I still save that text. And we're now talking about 2021, early 2021. And he said, well, you know what to do. I said, yep, get rid of the paprika. Which I did for two weeks. It worked, but then it didn't work, and everything was triggering it. So we finally set up another specialist, and this was kind of my first. Aha. This is the first specialist. Spent an hour with me in conversation, like you and I are having. She wanted to know about me. It doesn't happen in our industry. And through that process, she kind of forgot to be a doctor. And then she said, haresh, I forgot to be a doctor. I need to. Can I examine you? Take out that little light. Looked at the ears, same thing, looked at the nostrils, really small nostrils. You probably have an oxygenation problem. And then one more thing she forgot. She goes, I forgot. I want to listen to your heart. And I said, oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you about one symptom. When I open my shirt, you're going to see that I get goosebumps and my hair stands up. And this five foot five woman shrieked about as loud as you can get. And she slammed the table where I was sitting on, where you have that tissue paper that kind of keeps you from touching the examination table or ripped. She goes, you've been misdiagnosed. You've never had an allergy. You have this thing called urticaria. Urticaria is a mast cell disease. These are submarines that kind of float. She gave me a visual of cells that float just underneath the skin. And they have lots of histamines packed in them. In your case, the hatches have broken and the histamines escape. So you have no ability to fight inflammation. And I'm saying, yeah, but all this food's triggering it. She goes, it's just triggering it. It's only triggering because you have no. And so unfortunately, there's only two remedies. She goes, we can't cure you. This was the common answer I was getting from all the doctors. Can't cure you. But you can take either steroids, which you don't want to. Steroids just have a really bad set of side effects. But there's this one drug called Xolair that was actually invented for asthma patients, but it seems to work for urticaria. And in your case, you have this chronic urticaria, which means we can't really predict if you'll ever get better. You're going to probably have to live this for the rest of your life. So I have to take these shots every four weeks. Every first shock was $3,000 a shot. That's if insurance doesn't cover them. Luckily, we had been acquired by State street and their insurance was good and they covered it. So I was at least a big sigh of relief. It's $3,000 a month is a lot of money. Right. And I could feel it every three and a half weeks that I needed to. I was waiting for that four weeks.
- [34:28]
B
So now you've become dependent on.
- [34:30]
A
I become undependent on that?
- [34:31]
B
No, Larry.
- [34:33]
A
But I've now also become curious. I'm not the idiot where I ignored not going to the doctor, not going to the emergency room. I said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. And so we happened to be in Costa Rica, and it was kind of a random choice to be there. My wife wanted to do a health and wellness clinic, but she wanted to do a weight loss. And I kind of got tagged along. It's not like I. I don't need to lose weight either. And everybody at that small boutique retreat is talking about Dr. Vinod. He's life changing. He's game changing. Oh, my God. I mean, you think he was Jesus Christ walking on water. So I told Vinod, I said, listen, we're an Indian couple in Costa Rica. There's this gentleman named Dr. Vinod who's running the wellness. We should at least meet him and socially say Vinod is an Indian. He's an Indian guy. He's an ayurvedic doctor from India and the owner of that retreat is also kind of a health and wellness freak. So she used to go all over the world and she built her own health and wellness to take the best breed. And she fell in love with Dr. Vinod and his practice and she hired him out of the Ananda Spa, which is rated number one spa in the world for health and wellness. So she hired him, moved him to Costa Rica and he's running the clinic. So we met one evening after getting on his calendar just for social. But he piqued my interest because he had really good questioning skills. He was curious from the moment he met us as opposed to telling us his story. So I said, you know what? I'd love to sign up for your program because I've got this rash and they say I don't have a cure. So remember I told you the first doctor, the allergy doctor gave me an hour. Dr. Vinod gave me two hours. It's clue number two. Very rare, very rare, right? But he also asked for something very different. He said, listen, we, we're not a hospital here like where I used to work, so I have no ability to give you. We're in the middle of a rainforest. I have no ability to administer a urine test or blood test or a whole battery of things I should really look at. So what I need you to do is get not just the last set of tests, I want you to go back as far as you can. And I learned how painful it was to collect your own records because of our HIPAA laws and our FDA laws and being in Costa Rica. Somebody wanted to fax something, somebody wanted to mail something, somebody wanted me to pick it up. And all had excuses. I can't give you your own records. But I spent a good part of a week collecting my records and sending them to him. As soon as I got something, I sent it over to him. And he did something we did at Mercatus, which is collect records. We used to collect records for financial institutions. But he also plotted it out. And when I saw my own plot, it was all hand sketched. You could begin to see that horror show, the start of the. The problems. Only when you see it in the picture, you realize, wow, this has been happening for a long time. It's just each chapter is more climactic than the previous chapter. So he spent two hours with me. The first hour was like being with the doctor. The second hour, he asked a question that every other doctor asked with a twist. Every doctor that I met over those 10 years trying to diagnose this problem always Asked, are you stressed now? And I said, yeah. I mean, yeah, I have three kids. They're growing up. They have their issues. Wife, we love each other, but we have our issues like any other normal couple or family. CEO of a company, we run out of cash every once in a while. But yeah, I mean, that's just life, right? But he said, no, no, I want to know the first time in life you were stressed. I had to think about it. And I said, well, middle school, the time I was being bullied, I was really, really stressed. I really was driving dry heaves. Sometimes I throw up in the morning because I really, I was tied up in knots having to deal with these kids. He said, no, we need to go back further and further now. I felt like I was in a psychologist chair. He was really examining my life and what was happening. And we got to a question. He said, tell me about your emotion levels. And I said, well, that's the joke in the family. I don't have any emotions. I don't seem to laugh when other people laugh at a joke. I don't seem to cry when other people are crying during a movie. And I'm like, my mom. And he said, well, tell me about your mom. And I told her about the accident. I told him about the accident. And he wanted to know deeply, okay, did you perform, did you cremate her? Did you perform this particular Hindu ritual? Did you do this? And he really wanted to examine, he wanted to know why we didn't do it then. It was 10 o' clock at night. My appointment started at 8. It was 10 o' clock@ night. The critters are chirping out in the middle of Costa Rican jungle. And he says, I have my diagnosis for you because we can't cure your medical. No different than any of the other doctors. But he said, and this is where I again, my engineering brain is defying everything he's about to say, this is a crucial point, crucial point. This is a crucial point. He said, let me tell you what's happened. Your mom's soul did not rise because you didn't cremate her. And she is holding on to you because she's lonely. She's been with you the whole time and she's holding onto you so tightly you can't breathe. The breathe and the oxygenation with the iron deficiency and the small nostrils, I mean, all the medical, modern medicine was always pointing towards oxidization. He had it from a spiritual side, which was a soul, the ghost in my body. That's why my book is written with that title. There's a ghost in my body that's holding me so tightly that I can't breathe. I don't know what to think. I really don't. I mean, like, this is, I mean, Costa Rica, right? Of all places. It's a jungle, and there's all kinds of black beetles coming out and crawling on the floor. And you've got this bizarre diagnosis. It makes sense logically.
- [40:02]
B
Your background as an engineer would be such that it would be natural not to accept this story.
- [40:10]
A
You're right. I mean, that's exactly. I wasn't accepting. But it was enough that somebody had hit me on the bat with the head, hit my head with a bat. I walked away stunned. But it got me thinking about, you know, that she's been out there a long time. I've been feeling over the years, more and more guilt, like, why haven't we done anything? Why don't we memorialize her? And so it did start the process of I wanted to bring her back home. I wanted to bring her out of that place that was the middle of nowhere.
- [40:38]
B
Had you, at this point in your life, felt since the dream you had when you were 20, any other sense of communion with her?
- [40:46]
A
No. No. It was that dream, and then it was all these symptoms, and then it was a recurring dream of the hidden body. Somebody died. Something bad happened, and I'm hiding it or I'm hoping it's not discovered. It's all manifested in the medical problems with the skin rash and the skin issues.
- [41:06]
B
So basically, you did not follow Dr. Vinod's advice, but you were intrigued.
- [41:12]
A
I was intrigued and to the point where I started talking to my wife and said, I really want to exhume my mom's body and I want to bring her back home. I want to finish the cremation. At least I would say 90% was something we should have done and 10% hoping that I didn't have to do what Dr. Vinod said. Dr. Vinod's prescription was, I have to go to India. I have to go to a town called Bodh Gaya, and I have to perform a ritual called Pindhan. Now, he didn't explain why. He just said, that's his two hours are up. He was probably tired. I had to research it myself and turn up. Bodh Gaya is where Buddha got his enlightenment, and they built a Hindu temple there. And Pindan is that particular temple is where the portal is the thinnest for stuck soul to rise in. Pindan is the ritual that allows that journey to happen. So that's why that particular location, you could do Pindan anywhere, but your odds of success are very high in that particular spot. That's why he had selected that spot. I researched that later on on my own. So it triggered something in me to start a process which we eventually complete. But it wasn't until almost two years, two and a half years later, that that I actually did something about it because I was still in this denial phase. But a month later, I'm at a wedding where we're not the chief guests, right? We're sitting on table number one. We're sitting on table number 19. So it's a bit of a random that we were invited. We were invited. On the bride's side, the groom's mom gives a speech around spirituality, the afterlife and bringing those spirits back. And it was different, but it piqued my son's interest. So he chased her down when she was in the lobby and he was talking to her. I also went out in the lobby for different reasons because I wanted to see where the food line was being set up as I was getting a little hungry and the speeches are dragging on and, you know, there's some magnetic force that pulled us together. And her name is Sherry. Unbeknownst to me, she's a medium. She's an evidentiary medium. Again, I'm learning all these things after the fact. The night before she's meeting me, she is hearing his voice. Bring me home. Bring me home. And also kind of urging that you're going to be helping somebody. After she gives what I would call probably the most climactic speech of her life, right? Where she's blessing her son and her new daughter in law. She's restless in her chair when she sits down. And her soulmate Mona whispers to her, I think you need to go help somebody. Don't worry about me, I'm okay. You can go and do what you need. Your life's calling you. So that's what brings her to the lobby. So we've got this other random event and in her case, she keeps hearing a woman's voice. Bring me home. And when she sees me, she's holding her hand really hard because I think it's her left hand or her right hand, I forget which one is. They're trying to lift up and she's trying to control it. And then at some point she can't. And she said, I'm sorry, I need to scan you. And it's like when you meet somebody, she's a vip, Right? She's the groom's mom, and you can't insult her by saying no, right? At least that was my reaction. I said, okay, and so can I get close? And she goes, can I scan you? And she. Normally her scan process is top to bottom. In her case, she stopped right at my heart. She could, oh, my God, I can feel your mother right here. And I'm like, oh, like this is not happening to me. And she said, she's holding on to you so tightly that you can't breathe. The exact same words I heard a month ago from an Ayurvedic doctor in Costa Rica that was from India. How can I have two random events where I should not possibly could have been there could have been anywhere else in the world, had the exact same diagnosis? Now I have to believe. I have to believe. And in her case, she said, she's not holding on to you lovingly. She's holding on to you maliciously. She is so lonely that she wants to take you now. And you need to tell her, mom, let me go, because if I die, I will reincarnate and you will be stuck here forever. So she's forcing me, you got to tell mom, let me go. And she's making me recount these words. I'm just besides myself. And I call my dad that night. And if I call my dad, it's always around, like some problem or some issue, right? And this time I said, dad, we're not talking about the past. I'm calling you to talk about the future. We're going to bring mom back home. Because I needed his permission, right? As long as he's alive, he has to sign off on the paperwork. And this is something he doesn't want to talk about. It's not like he doesn't love her. There's just so much guilt built over that he took her life. That's how he feels. As much as I'm consoling him or dad, it was an accident. That's why they call it an accident. You didn't do it intentionally. So we had that conversation, and we brought her home. We did the cremation near Saratoga, home.
- [46:23]
B
In this case being California.
- [46:25]
A
But to get there, I now am a believer. Sherry has offered to have a conversation afterwards, and I take her up on that offer. I wanted to drive down to Santa Barbara, but I don't think my wife was completely bought into it. So we did a virtual call, and she said, I can help you virtually. So we did a virtual call rather than driving down and meeting her in person, I'm a big person. That's why I drove. I mean, came. Flew down here to meet you and to do this.
- [46:50]
B
And I'm glad you did.
- [46:51]
A
Yeah. And so we did it virtually. And then she made an offer. She goes, would you like to speak to your mom? Who wouldn't want to? So I said, absolutely. And so again, she wasn't. I wasn't hearing my mom's voice, but she was the medium communicating between us. And she goes, what would you like to ask her? And I said, I want permission to bring her back. Is she okay with that? And she goes, well, I can see she's entered the room and she showed me her arm on the zoom call, you can see her goosebumps and her hair stand up. And she goes, she's in the room now. You can communicate with her. And we went back and forth. And then she started taking over the questions. Okay, Vidya is her name. So, Vidya, is it okay if Haresh re exhumes your body? And she gave permission. She goes, yes. Would it be okay if he cremates you? And surprisingly, she said, yes. And then she asked, where would you like to be cremated? Now, I had already made arrangements for, you know, exhuming her body and getting proper permits, and we were going to take her body back to Colorado Springs, which is where the closest crematorium is. But she had a violent, I don't want to be cremated there. So Sherry's asking me, where else do you think she would want to be cremated? I said, well, how about Fort Collins? That's where we lived. The answer was no. And she goes, well, I said, well, my dad, she was married to him. No. When I said Saratoga, she said, absolutely. She wanted to come home. Remember that voice? I wanted to come home.
- [48:18]
B
Home being your home, my home.
- [48:20]
A
And that's when Sherry said, your mom has been hanging around for 55 years. She's been hanging around my wife and your kids, and she's been watching them, and she has a lot of joy around them. She wants to be brought home. So we brought her home. Southwest Airlines. I made all the arrangements. I was like an anxious son tracking her flight information. I was getting texts from the funeral home, like, okay, you know, the purse has been loaded with her body and now it's on the plane. And finally she came home. And that's when I broke down. That's when I had all the emotions that I should have had as a six year old. My knees buckled and, you know, I wept like crazy. But it was good. It Was a good. It was a good closure. We actually had a Hindu priest. We took her down to the Saratoga Funeral home, got her cremated, and we spread our ashes in Half Moon Bay. Half Moon Bay, for a lot of. You might know, because you lived in the Bay area. Always foggy, miserable, quite frankly. It's beautiful, but it's cloudy and foggy, and that was day. There was not a cloud in the sky. There was no fog bank out there. It was incredibly. And I felt I could breathe again. But it never. It didn't cure me. Like I said, I had a little bit of hope that maybe this would be the process. I didn't have to do what Dr. Vinod recommended. So I was still continuing to ignore what he said.
- [49:36]
B
But it was a step in the right direction.
- [49:38]
A
It was a step in the right direction. The guilt, the thousand pounds of weight that was on my chest felt like it had been removed. I felt good about what I did.
- [49:49]
B
That's huge.
- [49:50]
A
Yeah, it was huge. And I loved the Hindu priest. He explained everything. He said, we're giving her coconut and we're giving her banana. We put this all on her. It was a cardboard box that came size of a casket. But it was something very temporary for transportation and rice and sugar. And she goes, this is all for the long journey. And so it was just beautiful the way he explained it. So I felt good that we did the right thing.
- [50:17]
B
Consistent with your cultural background, with the Hindu culture.
- [50:21]
A
Yeah. So I finally. I'm still continuing to take these shots every four weeks.
- [50:30]
B
You're dependent on the zolar.
- [50:32]
A
I am so dependent that I tried to take the shot because as we sold the company, I had more time to travel and do the things we wanted to go do. So I want to take longer vacation. So I said, you know what? The hospitals in India are great. They should be able to order Xolair. We produce most of the world's drugs anyways. So I tried to administer it in India in one of the best hospitals. As soon as they brought in a bag of ice, you know, with the shots on top, I knew that it was like a scientific precision around how it's transported from CVS Specialty Pharmacy to Stanford Medical Group to my doctor's office. It can't be delivered on Sunday because it has to be refrigerated right away. It has to be dethawed at a very specific window. I have to call them when I'm leaving the house. And he goes, what's the traffic say? 20 minutes. Okay, we'll take it out. And it has to be otherwise it, it's ineffective. So I was like a scuba diver. We had to measure exactly how much oxygen we had left in the tank. And so I end up trying it. So I'm stuck on this four week schedule now. I've sold a company, we're doing a big going away party in New Delhi. We're going to take a small vacation before the four weeks are over to Sri Lanka and we have three days left. And my wife could tell what's on my mind. I said, I need to go to Bodh Gaya. I've got to try what Dr. Vinod said. So we went to Bodh Gaya. We booked a trip. It's a one hour flight. It's only one flight in, one flight out. It's not a big town, it's not even a small city. And we performed the puja, we arranged for a priest and we prearranged for what the donation needs to be to the church and to the priest. And I have to say, there was nothing spiritual. I did not feel like Buddha, that I had some enlightenment. It was a pretty disappointing trip, quite frankly. But we went through the full set of rituals that you do. And we took our trip to Sri Lanka, we came back to the Bay Area and it's time to go get my shot. But I was not feeling the urge to get the shot. So I said, why would I go do it if I don't need it? So I called the doctor, said, can I post someone? She goes, yeah, just call us a half an hour before you need it because we have it here. I never called him again. It's been almost two years now.
- [52:45]
B
So after the ritual, the puja in Bodh Gaya, this terrible problem, I forget the exact name, but. Urducardia, Urda cardia. So the urdicardia went away.
- [53:01]
A
Went away. It went away. So there you go. He was right. Sherry was right. And in my book, when the manuscript is almost done, I put, as I think it's called, epigraph, where you take a famous quote of somebody famous. And I decided to choose Einstein. Like my dad, he's a physicist. Einstein is known to probably be the most brilliant scientist. Yes, indeed, brilliant mathematician, father of our nuclear age. And yet he says we should believe in the mysterious. So what I'm hoping people get out of my story is first of all, stay curious. I didn't take no from an answer for like, we can't hear you. I went to 12 different doctors. It was number 11 and 12, number 10 and 11, that actually.
- [54:06]
B
And even when you rejected Dr. Vinod's recommendation to go to Bodh Gaya, you kept it in mind.
- [54:12]
A
I kept it in mind. So keep it in your mind. So keeping an open mind, being curious, keeping an open mind. And I think the other thing I learned is that modern medicine does not connect the mind and the body. Our insurance doesn't pay for mental health. Right? It really doesn't. It's so skinny, right? Go get open heart surgery. No problem.
- [54:41]
B
Very minimal.
- [54:42]
A
Very minimal. It's all reactive. And in this case, there's three elements, right? There's the spiritual aspect. Number two. There's the mind and the body. And really only pay attention to the body when it's serious.
- [54:58]
B
And the culture.
- [54:59]
A
And the culture, Right. And so all of those things for me came together. And so part of my journey is I want to be able to help people understand that they should keep an open mind, they should stay curious, they should get to the root cause. Because my root cause was not in my body. It was in my ghost that was in my body. And it had to be released at.
- [55:24]
B
Some point, which is something that medical science pays zero attention.
- [55:28]
A
Pays zero's attention to. And as I've started my journey on building the next company, which is, I think we'll talk a little bit about more, it's about how can I avoid if I can take one person. Maybe my mom left the best gift behind. Maybe there was a purpose. Why this journey happened is that I connected the dots, right? Centralizing health records, structuring the data so you could actually plot it out so you could see a picture painting the picture of the whole elephant. Because you have to see the entire. All these pieces are connected. And that's exactly what Mercatus did. Only then could you do scenario analysis for what we did for investors was all around if interest rates change, if tariffs happen, which are happening every day now, what is the impact of my investment decision? So to me, those scenarios are symptoms. You have to marry symptoms with historical records and seeing the entire person. Spirituality, culture.
- [56:28]
B
In other words, what you're doing these days is taking some of the same principles that you used in your prior company, Mercatus, which I gather is pattern recognition over large quantities of diverse data.
- [56:44]
A
It is, it is. It is identical. And I'll tell you where the aha moment happened. So I'm still not in the mode of going to Bodgai. I'm only a month away now before that happens, Chatgpt is out and that's anything and everybody wants to talk about. Yeah, right. And I asked my son, who is a big fan of yours, by the way. He's watched more episodes than probably any of any one of your followers. I asked him. He was my human chat GPT. He'd always do deep research and find all kinds of. I said, amir, I have this thing, urticaria. I am not ready to believe that can't be cured. Can you go deep into the Internet and chat GPT was around. He's the one who found this doctor in Sacramento, Dr. Reddy. Dr. Reddy's a vet. That's his first degree. Then he got a medical degree. Wasn't really bought into the whole medical pharmaceutical shenanigans. And so he went and got a degree in holistic medicine. And so he runs, actually two practices in two different parts of Sacramento. A veterinary clinic and a human clinic. And another individual that gave me a little bit more than two hours, same thing. We saw the nurse did all the vitals. She took all the, you know, the forms that you fill out or on history. He walks in. She hands him a nice, clean manila envelope. I don't want to see that envelope. I don't even want to know your symptoms. I want to know you remember the old days. Doctors knew you. They came to your home. They got to know your family. We used to have conversations. He wanted to have a conversation. He wanted to know my whole history. When I shared this in touch that you and I have been talking for over an hour, he went on the whiteboard. This was the aha moment. And he said, haresh, I've been quizzing you for the last two hours or interrogating you, so I'm playing Sherlock Holmes. The problem you had is that you've gone to 12 different doctors, 12 different specialists. They poked you, they prodded you, they've done whatever they need to do with you. Put electrodes on, but they didn't connect all the dots. They didn't do any pattern recognition. Each one was reaching behind the curtain, feeling a part of the elephant, and they're all interconnected. And then he went and drew eight quadrants, and he said, everything you told me about your mom is called the energy quadrant. He just simplified it. It's called the energy quadrant. And a lot of things happen in energy. Trauma, ptsd, spirituality, mediumship, all of that happens in that quadrant, and it has a huge bearing or butterfly effect on what happens to you physically. And so when he drew those eight quadrants, my mind was exploding. I just said, this is exactly what Mercatus did. We took private market investors that invest Billions of dollars into airports and infrastructure, pipes and bridges and tunnels, and real estate holdings. What do they have? They have thousands of scattered records across many, many data rooms. They have financial models that don't connect with each other. They can't see any patterns. And without patterns, they can't do scenario analysis. It takes them six weeks to figure out when Trump announces a new tariff, it takes them literally six weeks to figure out, what does that mean? That's like, crazy.
- [59:58]
B
And of course he'll change his mind.
- [60:00]
A
He'll change his mind. And so they don't know what to do. Do they buy that portfolio? Do they hold a portfolio? Do they sell the portfolio? What's the valuation? What do they tell their investors? We solved that by connecting all that data. And I saw the same thing. Those eight quadrants were eight different data rooms. ChatGPT added one more layer that's more powerful. The eight quadrants are really a more systematic way of ingesting data. Then we structure it so you can actually see what the whole elephant looks like, what that elephant's journey has been since day one. Now, you can add a new symptom, you can add a new scenario. It's the same thing. Now, you can actually now say, what if? But the power of AI is you have the knowledge of, for example, an oncologist. 5,000 new white papers get developed every year. Which person has time to read those 5,000? Nobody. So AI gives you the curation of 5,000 documents, digest it, and say, here. So now you have the power of all the doctors and all the knowledge in the world to say, here's the whole elephant, here's his or her whole story. Here's all the historical records. Here's some new symptoms. Now, help me understand what's out there. And what might be out there is you need to go see a sherry. You don't need to go to Mayo Clinic. Let the person decide if he's curious and he has an open mind.
- [61:26]
B
In other words, you are providing, or hope to provide, an AI system that will be holistic and comprehensive and will include some of the most uncanny and problematic spiritual issues that people may run into.
- [61:45]
A
It'll give them all the options. I don't think anybody should be denied all the options as long as they have an open mind. And as Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford graduation speech, commencement speech, you said, stay hungry, stay foolish, which is stay curious, keep an open mind, Right? And so we all should be given an opportunity to see all the options. And if you want to rule them out, that's okay. I ruled out Dr. Vinod for three years. Right. I blocked him out. I didn't believe enough. Right. So that aha moment was those eight quadrants.
- [62:19]
B
So I gather you're hoping that people like yourself who are struggling with conditions that are painful, painful that generate suffering, but are undiagnosable, will be able to improve their lives as a result.
- [62:34]
A
Absolutely. There's 100 million of us in the US one out of every three and a half people that have something that they're being treated but they're not cured. And if I can cure one person, then my whole journey was worth it.
- [62:49]
B
Well, Haresh Patel, this has been fascinating conversation and the interesting part for me is I'll get to watch and see how you continue to progress with your new business.
- [63:01]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [63:03]
B
It's been a real pleasure. I think your story should be helpful to many of our viewers and I imagine that we'll be getting lots of comments from viewers who are going to say, how do I get a hold of your product?
- [63:19]
A
Well, I hope we can solve this problem because we've got a massive crisis. I call it primary care doesn't exist. Doctors are so compassionate. They just don't have the time. So I'm hoping that the 13 and a half minutes that we get behave like we have two hours with them because we're not going to change the 13 and a half minutes.
- [63:37]
B
No, there are very few doctors who spend two hours.
- [63:40]
A
They don't have the time.
- [63:41]
B
They're not paid that way with you. But with AI, you can move at least a few steps in that.
- [63:47]
A
Absolutely. You can have all that homework done.
- [63:49]
B
And I imagine, of course, course, you'll want to interface with holistic practitioners who can use that information.
- [63:55]
A
All of the above. All of the above.
- [63:58]
B
Well, thank you so much for being with me.
- [64:00]
A
Thank you.
- [64:02]
B
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [64:33]
A
Book four in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tartt, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [64:47]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org.
- [65:39]
A
Sam.