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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Remembering Robert Monroe and Journeys Out of the Body with Tom Campbell, author of My Big TOE
02:09:47
Remembering Robert Monroe and Journeys Out of the Body with Tom Campbell, author of My Big TOE Tom Campbell, a physicst, is author of the three volume set, My Big TOE, describing a meta-theory that offers an account of the paranormal,
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- [00:01]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Keep watching to learn what the author of My Big Toe has to say. About six years spent with Robert Monroe, the author of Journeys out of the body.
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Tom Campbell
Book three in the new thinking allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP. Are we really Alone? Now available on Amazon, New Thinking Allowed.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offered 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 a free PDF copy of issue number eight of the new Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingalowed.org thinking allowed.
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Tom Campbell
Conversations on.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
The Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery.
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Tom Campbell
With psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to remember the life and work of Robert Monroe, the author of Journeys out of the Body. I'm honored to have with me here in my studio in Albuquerque, Tom Campbell, who was a longtime colleague and student of Robert Monroe and is the author of a three volume series of books describing a theory of everything called Big Toe. Tom is also the originator of an Internet experience called Tom's park, which is an opportunity for people to enter experientially into the theory that he has developed. Welcome, Tom.
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Tom Campbell
Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
It's a pleasure to be with you. People have been asking me to interview you since I first started this YouTube channel 10 years ago. And I'm delighted that the opportunity has come not only to do it, but to do it here face to face.
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Tom Campbell
Yes. How convenient that we find out, you and I, that we are neighbors. We're only probably a mile apart or so.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
At least for a brief period of time.
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Tom Campbell
At least for a brief period.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
It seems that you and I were both exposed to the work of Robert Monroe around the same year, 1972.
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Tom Campbell
Yes, I met Bob at the very beginning of that year, maybe even late 71. That was a long time ago. But that was about the time that myself and a bunch of the people I worked with went out to see Bob and row. And my reason for going out to see Bob was to see whether he was for real or whether he was just trying to sell books. Was he the real deal or something else. Because I'd had an experience of something that was unusual, being able to solve certain problems in consciousness that I couldn't have solved nearly so easily in an awake state. So that Kind of primed me for Robert Monroe. I already knew that there was something else going on that was important and very significant that was outside of the physical world.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
But at the same time, you were working as a physicist, and I assume you were largely holding the mindset of a conventional physicist being materialism.
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Tom Campbell
Yeah, absolutely. Well, probably it was a year or two before I met Bob and Ro that I had that experience. Actually. It was debugging software in my mind in a meditation state. And it was. It was such a powerful experience that that kind of shocked me out of the usual physicist viewpoint of reality, which is called an operational definition of reality, as it's titled. And what that means, that if you can't perform an operation on it, if you can't measure it, if you can't weigh it, if you can't physically interact with it, then it either doesn't exist, or if it does, it's irrelevant. Because if you can't interact with it, then what good would its existence? So that's typically what physicists today also believe. It's this operational definition of reality. But when I had that experience where I could bring up my code, you know how that code is laid out in long, long pieces of paper all attached to each other. And I just scrolled it by and I found the cards. This was back in punch card days, that the cards that had errors on them would stand out to me. They would change color, they would be colored red, and the rest would be, you know, the normal kind of color. So I thought, well, that's kind of silly. Let's see how that works. And I went up and checked my cards, and sure enough that cards that were red were the cards that had problems on it. So I said, wow, what a coincidence. When you're a physicist, it's hard to get out of that mindset. So I did more of it, and it was clear that I was getting information that was otherwise unknowable. For instance, in those days, one of the errors that would bomb your job was a key punch error. So the hole wasn't exactly where it was supposed to be. It was a half of a millimeter too far this way or that. And there really wasn't any way to see that looking at it. It all looked perfectly correct. And it told me about some of those errors as well. That card would be red. I'd go up and check it and say, ah, okay, a problem. This didn't work. This card's perfectly fine. But my job still bombed. So I went back to that card, pulled it out Retyped it and the card punched. Got a new card, and it worked fine.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Now, when you say the card was read, was it actually red or was this a visual experience?
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Tom Campbell
This is a visual experience. The cards were all manila, you know, the same color as a manila folder. And in those days, that was the only interface to computers.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
So there's something about your own consciousness that was. Or your subconscious, one might say, giving you additional information.
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Tom Campbell
Right. But it was information I'd ask for. I was sitting there and like most technical people, I work all the time, which means even when I'm not supposed to be working and I'm supposed to be doing something else, the problems are still in my head and I'm still thinking about them. So I was doing meditation, and I happen to think, I wonder why my job's bombing. What's wrong? I've been over those cards and over those cards, and I can't find what's wrong. I wonder what the problem is. And then there it was. There's my printouts, which I was also the programmer. I programmed the whole thing. So I was intimately knowledgeable about every line, every semicolon, every letter there. So I looked at it, and then one card just stood out. It's red. And I looked a little more. Another car stood out with the color. So these were just colors to differentiate those cards from the other cards. And I found out then, just from trial and error, that those were the ones that had errors on them. And it worked. So I played with it. I'm a scientist. I want to understand how reality works. And after, I don't know, after some months of playing with it, I realized that the operational definition of reality was lacking, that there was another part of reality that was beyond the physical. It's something that you couldn't measure. It wasn't measurable. It was all mental. It was in mind space. And that there was another whole part of reality that I didn't know anything about. And as a physicist, my job is to model reality. That's what physics does. We try to model reality. So it was a big aha moment to me to say, oh, there's a lot more to reality than I thought. I wonder how I could model that, how I could understand it. How does it work? Because it obviously wasn't random. There was logic involved. I didn't just get random things. I got very precise things that were unknowable. A card hole, you know, punch hole that wasn't precisely lined up. And that isn't something that really could be known even by looking at it, they just got eliminated by, you know, that was it. You know, you just started retyping cards because you knew there could be a problem. So you just would make new cards until the deck would work.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
So you had a reason to visit Robert Monroe at that point?
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Tom Campbell
Well, I did, but I didn't know anything about Robert Monroe at that point. Another year later after that, and I got some pretty good reputation for being able to debug code. And a lot of would you help me debug my code? But I didn't want to talk about it because you don't talk about those things in a physics community. So I kept it pretty much to myself. So I take this job and my boss comes in. I'd only been there for, like, I don't know, a few weeks. I was very new in the office. And he tosses Robert Monroe's book to me and says, tom, read this book and tell me what you think of it. That's all he said. That was Bill Yost. He was the branch manager of where I work. And changed your life? Changed my life. So I said, okay. And I read the book over the next week, and I said, well, here's what I think. If this guy's telling the truth, if he really did experience that, then, wow, there's a whole bigger set of reality, which I knew from my experience that existed. So that's why I was so open to it. There's another whole bunch of reality that I don't know anything about. If that's the case, we need to connect with this guy and talk to him more. I said, on the other hand, maybe he's just trying to sell books and make some money. Maybe it's just you write something really fanciful and far out and you'll sell books that way. I didn't know which way it would be until about, I don't know, maybe a month later. My boss came in and said, we found Bob Monroe. He doesn't live that far away. We talked to him and we're all invited out to his house. Do you want to come? I said, absolutely. So a bunch of us, maybe two cars, maybe four, five, six people in each car. It was jammed, you know, full. We all went out to Bob Monroe's, and that was the first time I met Bob. So my viewpoint there was, is this guy for real or is this guy just a clever hocus pocus guy wanting to get some money? And I met him and he was very straightforward. He acted, actually and had the demeanor of an engineer. I Don't think he actually was an engineer by training. He was in radio and other things.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
But he acted like entrepreneur, basically.
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Tom Campbell
Yeah, he was an entrepreneur. And at that time he was just starting a cable company, Jefferson Cable, in Charlottesville, Virginia. So it was. He got there first. So all of Charlottesville was his for the picking for cable. And cable was a brand new thing in that time. So he was well to do. And as I approached his property in this car with all the others, I noticed the, I don't know, quarter of a mile of whiteboard fence, the pastures, the lake, the big house on the hill, and said, this guy doesn't need to sell books. This guy is not trying to sell, you know.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
He was very well to do.
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Tom Campbell
Yeah, he was a well to do gentleman. Lived on about 500 acres, had a tenant farmer who did farming for him and had a beautiful house with a beautiful view out in the Virginia countryside. He was a well to do Virginia gentleman.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
In my case, I knew that he was legitimate because in 1973 I was a graduate student in parapsychology. Working with Charlie Tartt was one of my dissertation committee members who had done research with Bob Monroe showing that in the out of state he was able to read numbers that were on a shelf up above that could only be seen by floating up to the ceiling.
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Tom Campbell
Yes, I heard about Charlie Tartt. I think what happened is that when Bob first had these out of bodies, they frightened him. He didn't know whether he was going insane or what was happening with him. Maybe he had a brain tumor. He had no idea. And Charlie was one of the people that he consulted with to see whether or not he had some physiological problem or whether his sanity was solid or what. So he got then connected with Charlie and they did some experiments and things together. And then Charlie became a good friend of Bob's and they did do some experiments. So that I heard about that from Bob, but I don't think I've ever really met Charlie.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Charlie died about a month ago. As a matter of fact, I believe it was just a few days before you and I met.
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Tom Campbell
How about that?
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Jeffrey Mishlove
We will be publishing a book soon with 16 of my interviews with Charlie.
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Tom Campbell
Oh, neat.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
So working with Bob, he put the phrase out of body experience on the map.
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Tom Campbell
He did, and I guess I can forgive him for that. But out of body is just not the right term. I mean, it's the way most people think of it. They think that their consciousness is inside their body or their spirit or their soul, whatever they want to say. And that it somehow comes out of the body and then moves around in the non physical world and so on. But it's not like that. It's not that this spirit lives inside your body. It's not that way at all. To be more accurate, you have to say that not that you get out of your body, but that you get out of your mind. But that has another connotation that isn't very helpful being out of your mind, but you're already out of your body, your consciousness. So the body in my world is an avatar, a body that's computed, and consciousness is what's real and fundamental. So in that case, out of body just is the wrong way to look at it, but it's the natural way that people look at it. It's kind of the obvious way that people look at it.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Would it be fair to say that rather than the consciousness being inside the brain, the brain is inside of consciousness?
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Tom Campbell
Yes. Well, the brain in my model is just computed whenever somebody cuts open or looks inside of a skull. Other than that, it's not even computed. All of the memory, all of the processing, you know, the thinking and so on, is all done by consciousness. And consciousness is fundamental. And in my world view, you are a piece of consciousness, not a body. And you are making all the choices. You're the player of this avatar. And just like in, you know, virtual reality games where the player makes all the decisions and all the choices for the player, and the players just computed eye candy so that you can see what's going on on the board and who's interacting with who. That's the way it is here. So you're a piece of consciousness making all the choices for your avatar, a physical body. And there's a good reason why that is and a good reason for, you know, why that came about and, and how it was done and so on. We can get into that later. But more about Bob Monroe first.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I should let our viewers know that while you're here in Albuquerque, we plan to do a lengthy series of interviews. We're going to go into real depth on your theory of everything, your big toe, and we'll revisit this idea probably many times along the way. So my goal is that after we complete this series of probably about nine hours or more of interviews, that our viewers will have a good sense of what my big toe is all about.
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Tom Campbell
Yeah, well, that's good because it's such a drastic paradigm shift. It's way further than any other paradigm shift that we've ever gone through. I mean, we went through a paradigm shift, and the Earth wasn't really at the center of the universe. The Earth wasn't really flat. And all of these were paradigm shifts that took hundreds of years to kind of shift in the general population, you know, their viewpoint of reality. And this paradigm shift is probably 10 times larger than both of those put together. So it's a really big reach. But once you understand it, it simplifies everything. And all of the paradoxes in science, paradoxes in philosophy, paradoxes in psychology, even some new ideas in mathematics just fall out of it. And it really solves a lot of problems. So if you look at it just from its ability to solve problems, then it's a very good model. If you look at it from how easy is it to comprehend and get your mind wrapped around it? It's a tough one. It's hard to do.
- [19:01]
Jeffrey Mishlove
The benefit for our viewers, for us talking about Robert Monroe, is we're starting out with paranorma experiences. And it seems that one of the most difficult problems that intellectuals of any sort face today is coming to terms with the paranormal. So I thought that would be a good starting point.
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Tom Campbell
That is a good starting point. The paranormal happens only through the intuitive side. It doesn't take place in the intellectual side. And that's a difficult point for many people to get. They think that the paranormal ought to be just like the normal. You ought to be able to test it the same way. You ought to be able to hold a measuring stick up to it. If it works that way, it should always work that way in the physical world. Any researcher can perform that experiment anywhere, and it has to be the same. Well, in the intuitive space, that's not the case. So that makes these paranormal things not only not normal, but of a whole different class altogether. And it's difficult for a lot of scientists and other people to kind of get that difference. It has to take place on the intuitive side. So the consciousness has two pathways, not quite the right word, two different ways of processing information. That's a better term. And one of those ways of processing is through the intellect. And the intellect has this tool called logic. And logic is wonderful if you have enough information. But as everyone knows, logic depends on a great deal of information. You not only have your. You know, your premise, what you're trying to do, but you have a lot of, if this, then that, and if that, then something else. And you have this chain, and you have to understand all of that. You have to have information about that before you can really be logical. I'm Talking about deductive logic. Okay? So though we feel like we are logical people and logical beings, we are not nearly as logical as we think because there just requires too much information. And all the real important questions in life, like who should I marry, what career should I pursue? Should I quit this job and find another one, or should I stay here? All these jobs do not have a logical solution. You don't have enough information. You need a crystal ball to make those decisions logically. And all the things that aren't so important, like where did I leave my car keys? Well, those are easy because you say, well, where did I go after I got home with my car? The car's in the garage, so I know they're in here someplace. What was I wearing? What coat did I have on? Where did I go when I came into the house? What did I do next? And you can almost always come up with the car keys in a little short amount of time because you have enough information. So we're not really all that logical. The other side, since I talked about, the one that I'd like to mention, is the intuitive side. The intuitive side, it doesn't deal in logic. It's completely beyond logic. You can get information there, and you have access to a lot more information on the intuitive side than you do on the intellectual side. All those things that you don't know on the intellectual side, you mostly can know on the intuitive side. So we have this logical side with a great tool but very ratty information. And over on the intuitive side, you've got no logic at all, but you have this. All this information, but a ratty tool to access it. And I call it a ratty tool because it depends on your attitude, your state of mind, your beliefs. There's just a whole lot of things that it depends on. And you may be able to access that information now in an hour from now. You can't. It may have happened last week, but you can't repeat it again. So that's why I call it a ratty tool. So it's not that kind of a tool like a screwdriver. It always works the same way all the time, everywhere. This is a tool that is your awareness, your consciousness, and your state of mind, which changes for many people minute to minute, but certainly day to day puts you in a totally different space and a different way of connecting with that information. So you've got the intuitive tool, lots and lots of information, but a real ratty tool to pick it up. That's very problematic and sometimes works, sometimes doesn't and on the other side, you've got almost no information but this wonderful tool called logic that can just precisely do almost anything.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
I think it's fair to say Robert Monroe exemplified both of those tools, intuition and logic.
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Tom Campbell
And actually, that is the best state to be in. If you are just intellectual, then you have all those downsides that you don't have enough information, so you're always guessing, and half the time you're wrong. If you're only intuitive, well, people make fun of you and call you an airhead, and you come up with answers, and nobody knows how you got there, and you don't know yourself how you got there. It's just something that you've learned how to do that you can sometimes control, and you don't really understand it either, so you can't explain it to anybody else. So those are the, you know, those are the problems that you have.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I gather that in your work with Robert Monroe, you cultivated an even more pronounced intuitive faculty.
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Tom Campbell
I did. You need to develop both as a physicist. My left brain, my logical side, I had honed as much as I possibly could because that's the tool that you need to do physics. My right brain. I came into the world of right brain, dominant person. When I was a young child. I was very holistic in the things that I saw. I understood a lot more things than logic would have let me know. And like, for instance, my family would go on a trip, and you know how children are. After about the first 10 minutes, they say, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Well, in the first 10 minutes, I would start to chant, and I had this little chant that I made up. And by 10 minutes into the trip, I was gone. And I came out of it when somebody said, we're there. And I said, oh, good. And for me, the trip only took 10 or 15 minutes, so it was an easy trip. My sister, who was sitting beside me on the back seat, was very annoyed because she had no one to play with. She's two years older than me.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
You, in effect, put yourself into a trance.
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Tom Campbell
I put myself into a trance, and because it was boring on long trips, so I would just drop out and come back when it was done. And I had an intuitive sense that I could affect things with my mind and with my intent. And I would practice things like making the lights turn green when my father, who was driving the car, got to the light that it would turn green. And I could sometimes get like six, seven, eight lights in a row that were green. So I just knew that that, so I came in very right brained and intuitive. But I soon realized that what I needed to do was to become more balanced and I needed to work on developing that left brain, that logical side. And I didn't find it easy. When I was in high school, I found the mathematics to be difficult because it was too much process. So I worked on it and worked on it. Eventually, by the time I'm in graduate school in physics, it was easy. I got to the point that math was simple, it was easy, it was just rules. All you had to do is learn the rules. And it wasn't all that hard. You could understand what it was doing and what it wasn't doing.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
I want to highlight what you just said because I recall at the end of the third volume of your three volume set, you say there's one important want to share with people, which is if they work hard and apply themselves, they can accomplish things.
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Tom Campbell
Yes, indeed you can. But you have to understand that you have to accomplish things in both sides. You need to accomplish things on the intellectual side. And most people in our culture spend their whole lives honing that intellectual side. They read, they study, they grow. But on the intuitive side, most people in our culture peaked in their ability to use the intuitive side when they were say, three years old. And it's been deteriorating ever since, downhill.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
And it's gotten to the point where people in the intellectual community denigrate intuition.
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Tom Campbell
Exactly, exactly. Now the person who has developed both is a balanced person. What happens is that if you're dominantly logical, you're dominantly left brain. That left brain jumps in to your efforts to work with your intuition and gets in the way. You know, you're trying to talk to your dead Uncle Fred and you say, dead Uncle Fred, are you out there? And then you hear this voice, yes, hello. And your intellect jumps in and says, oh, did you just make that up? Did you hear that? Where did that come from? And now your intellect has jumped in to solve the problem and it's gone. The intuitive side withers, disappears and you're left with nothing. So to get balanced though, well, let me say the opposite too. If you're very right brained and have no logical side, then you can't function very well in this world. This world requires you to be intellectual, it requires you to think, it requires you to follow directions, it requires you to understand how things work. It requires you to change the oil in your car. You know, there's things you have to keep track of. So the best way to be is extremely Right brain and extremely left brain at the same time. And then what happens is they work together as partners. Because when you're mostly right brained and intuitive, your intuition kind of refuses logic. It looks at logic and says, that's too cumbersome. I can just skip all that and go to the answer. I don't need to go through all that stuff. And vice versa. Your intellect throws out the intuition, so the two fight with each other for dominance. Once you have them both about equal, then they cooperate. And now your left brain gets the information, passes it over to the. I mean, your right brain gets the information, passes it over to the left brain to do some analysis, and back over to the right brain to get more information that you need for the analysis. And the two just pass the thing back and forth to where you now live in a whole brain world where you're not out of balance, you're in balance, and the two halves of your mind work together very well as teammates rather than as one trying to dominate the other.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
So back to your visit with Robert Monroe. We have you driving out there to Whistlefield Road to his farm in two cars, but eventually you became more of a permanent fixture.
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Tom Campbell
I did, yes. Bob and Rowe took the bunch of us up to his lab, which was just an empty building, had really nothing in it but just sheetrock on the walls and a roof. And he said, I have this lab. I want to study consciousness. I want to understand what's happened to me. I want to understand this out of body. And I'm looking for some scientists. And we were all scientists. This is what our job was. So we were all scientists and mathematicians and engineers and so on. So he said, would any of you like to participate? Because I'd been a student all my life. My hand shot up in the air, and guy behind me was just a few years older than I was, and he. Both of us had had experiences that were not part of this reality. So we were very curious and we wanted to spend time studying these phenomena because we were interested in them. So we raised our hands. He determined that I was a physicist, the other guy was an electrical engineer. And he said, okay. And then, oh, I don't know. A month later, Bob went off on a trip someplace. And when he came back, we started going to the lab. And after that we were coming out there anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a week. It was like a halftime job. And on weekends we'd bring our families and we'd put our children and our wives into the booth and so on. And after About, I don't know, a year or so with that, Dennis, maybe it wasn't a year. Maybe after about a year of that, Dennis came across an article by Oster in a Scientific American back in the early to middle 60s, and it was about binaural beats. And they said, Oster said that the brain waves are entrained by binaural beats. So you listen to a binaural beat of 8 hertz and you get a brainwave, energy starts to move toward the 8 hertz. So we said, great, let's try it out. So Dennis borrowed some stuff from the double E lab at the university, and I borrowed some stuff from the physics lab at the university, and we put together some binaural beat tapes. Dennis actually produced the first one, and we went out to experiment. So we started with that, and it worked so well that when Bob came back from another trip he was on, we told him about it. He listened to them. Then we started bringing everybody else that we could grab hold of, including our families, to listen to them, just to see what the effects were. And we found out that the effect was, was obvious on almost everyone. Now, they all didn't have the same reaction. Some people just instantly lost consciousness and would regain them when it was over. They later termed that clicking out. And some people found them annoying. But most people found that they had a very pleasant drifting around in barely conscious kind of a space. And then they would often get pictures or connect with, hear things, see things. And it obviously was a step forward. So Bob then. Well, Dennis and I had played to optimize this Barnardo beats before Bob got back. So we looked at different waveforms. You know, mostly you get sinusoid when you just get stuff off the shelf. But we did, you know, sawtooth waves, triangle waves, every kind of waveform we could find. We did different bass frequencies, we did different beat frequencies. And after about two weeks spending probably more than 20 hours in the lab those two weeks, we optimized what we thought were great. Bob came back, we showed him this. Bob got excited about it, tried it on lots of people, and Bob got the idea that this could be a business.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Let's define for our viewers who may not know what is binaural beats?
- [35:06]
Tom Campbell
Okay. The binaural beat takes two tones at a small difference between them. So let's say we have 100 hertz and 104 hertz, and if you take the hundred hertz tone and put it in this right ear and the 104Hz tone and put it in that left ear, those two tones go up into the oral nerves, which go across and opposite sides like usual. And you end up with a beat frequency that you can actually hear, quote, unquote, hear not through the eardrum, but here in your mind at the corpus callosum. That's the membrane between the two hemispheres. So you have one frequency in this hemisphere, 100, 104 in that hemisphere. And they mix. They mix and you get the difference between the two, which is 4 hertz. It's a beat. Now, if you just took those two things and put them out in the air. So here's a speaker for 100, here's a speaker for the 104. And you played them, you would hear a 4 Hz beat. You would hear both of the tones, but you also would hear a 4 Hz beat. Now, a 4 Hz beat means 4 beats per second. You know, you can think if you count fast. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four. It's that kind of a. You'd hear that going on in the air because the two frequencies mix in the air. And when they mix, it's. A little math will show you that. But when they mix, you end up with a beat frequency that's equal to the difference between the two. And Bob had this experience of 4 Hz vibration just as he went out of body, and he reported that. So we started working for 4 hertz. That was our target, just because Bob experienced that. And we found 4 Hz actually was something like 3.878 or something like that, but really close to 4 Hz. That was optimal for creating this state in which your mind was open to other things, you let go of the physical world. And by that I mean, as you stop processing, if you're lying on a bed and at the lab there were water beds and three booths in a row. And you get in a waterbed and you stop feeling that you have pressure on your back from the waterbed mattress. You stop processing noises that you could hear in the lab and that you could hear outside. All that stuff just stopped. You ignored it. You ignored it to the point that it didn't exist. And you started to then have other kinds of information that would come to you when the information of your senses was turned off. And that's what we were looking for. So we optimized that. Bob thought it was marvelous. He called up a lot of his friends and said, hey, we're going to do a little experiment. I'm going to show you some new technology that works really Great. And he rented the whole hotel right at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He didn't live that far from there. It was a Tuckahoe motel. And he owned a cable company, as we said. He wired it with cable and with other wires so that we could put GSR on everybody to kind of keep track of where they were in their mental state. And a lot of people, I don't know, 15 people maybe came, 20 people, and they had experience after experience and we just booked all kinds of paranormal things were going on. The word got out and suddenly Bob was overwhelmed with people who wanted to try out his new out of body technology. And he decided this was a business. And in another six months after that, myself and Dennis and at that time, Nancy Lee. It's called Scooter, that's Bob's stepdaughter. And Dennis and I, we were on a road. We were going to Boston, we were going to California. And we laid it. We made this big harness, sound harness, so we could play something. And a whole bunch of people would lie down on little air mattresses and put on headphones. And we started to take the technology out and it was very popular.
- [39:26]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And I assume you as well were experimenting personally.
- [39:30]
Tom Campbell
Oh, yes. Dennis and I would come up every time we were there. It went like this. We go up, we'd work for about an hour, two hours, because we'd get there like 6:30, 7:00', clock, right after dinner. And we would work there putting together equipment, putting in new equipment, fixing up things so that we could do more. We got an EEG that we could put on people and we wired that so we'd work in the lab for a bit. Then Bob would come up and we'd stop work and we'd go get in the booths and Bob would get into the control booth and he'd have often something for us to do or things to try. Most of the ideas were his ideas or he'd give just free reign. At that time there was only one focus and that was 10. And then eventually there was a 15 and there was a 12 and then a 15. And then it started going up and up to higher numbers. But there's nothing magic about the focus points. They're just random places to people have experiences of a particular type. But anyway, so we were at the very beginning of all of that. And then we had this thing at the Tuckahoe and Bob decided he was going to make another corporation. And that's when TMI was invented. First in his head and then became an actual Thing and what years later he sold Whistlefield and picked up some new land and he actually got that new land in a land swap, sight unseen. He picked up that land in a land swap. He was in a course where they swapped land. Some other guy had this land and was coming for him and said, well, I'll swap you this for that. And he went to see it and it was beautiful, he loved it. So that's where TMI then got. It was called the New Land. Then I remember getting a jeep with Bob and we went out to see the new land. So that's really the origins of tmi, you know. And he took those Binaural beats, he embedded them in the sound that he already had and that became his hemisync. So that's kind of the, you know, the very short story of Bob Monroe. But I spent probably most of a decade, probably five or six years intensively there, 15 to 20 hours a week. And then I was on the board of maybe not Directors, the advisory board for a while. I moved out. I moved away from Charlottesville, so I'd come back to forgery board meeting. I gave a talk at one of their professional seminars that was up on YouTube. But so that's kind of my. The time frame that I was in. But during those, say, five or six years that it was intensive, I learned a lot. I learned an awful lot. And one interesting story that I will tell that the readers will probably find interesting is that one day after. Well, I guess the way it went is first we came, Dennis and I came to the lab, we worked, Bob came, we had our things, Bob went down to the house and invited us. So Dennis and I would go with Bob down to his house. This. This was usually like 10, 11, 12 o', clock, you know, a.m. and the next day. And we'd stay there till 2 or 3 o', clock, then we'd go home, go to bed, get up at, you know, 7 o' clock in the morning, go to work. So that was our schedule. So we were down at Bob's house and he was telling us about a thing that he had just had. He had out of body. And he often would discuss his outer bodies with Dennis and I and he'd explain what he did and what he experienced and we'd kind of talk about what did it mean and that sort of thing. Because my job was to come up with a model of how it all worked. Dennis's job was to do a lot of the engineering of putting the equipment together. So anyway, this one thing Bob had this experience. He said, let me tell you about this experience. And he told me about a test that he had. And he told me the first test was a series of tests. He told me about the first test and then he told me about the second test. And when he did that whole memory dump just flowed back into me. And I told him, stop, don't tell me anymore, give me a minute. And I got all this data dump. I had taken that same series of tests when I was much younger and I was, when I was like 7, 8 non physical entities came and put me through a training course. And this test was toward the end of that training course. So I told him, wait a minute, all right, here was your third. And I told him what the third one was. And his mouth dropped open like, how did you know? Were you there? And I said, no, I was there a long, long time ago. I took the same test. So then I told him the next one and then he told me the next one and I told him. We went through the whole series right up to where we both bombed and the tests were over. So either that was the last question or we both got the wrong answer.
- [44:36]
Jeffrey Mishlove
How interesting. So it's as if there's some sort of a. Out of body school that you both attended and after decades the test was still the same.
- [44:47]
Tom Campbell
Yes. And there's a lot of people get tested and testing is a thing that happens a lot, mostly fear tests. But in this case it was how grown up were you, how much ego, how much belief, how much other things were getting in your way and how much did you actually, you know, how much have you grown up is kind of was what the test was. And the questions got harder and harder and harder until you weren't any, you weren't grown up enough to answer the next one. So anyway, there are lots of tests and I've run into people since that have had taken tests that I have taken also. And some of them are very complex. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot going on there. And when I inquired about it, I was told that when they find good tests that work well, they keep using them.
- [45:40]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Who is they?
- [45:41]
Tom Campbell
Who is they? Is the larger consciousness system. We're a system of consciousness. We are consciousness and we're part of the system of consciousness. And the thing that's, that's really nice about it is that. But the point of this is to grow up, to get rid of the fear, get rid of the ego, get rid of the beliefs and that come to that later. When we talk, but that you can also talk about in terms of entropy reduction or you can talk about it in terms of consciousness evolution or consciousness quality. So the whole point is to increase the quality of your consciousness. But because we're apart from, as we evolve and increase the quality of our consciousness, the whole system gets a plus up if we get a plus up. Because we're part of the system, it's us, we're it. So we're part of its strategy for its own evolution. And you have this system that now is motivated for us to succeed and to grow up. Because we grow up, it grows up.
- [46:49]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So I gather you had these guides who were testing you as a child and then you forgot about it.
- [46:58]
Tom Campbell
Well, it was a little more than just forgot about it. I had this. I had an entity come to me. I was probably six or seven somewhere in that age. And he came to me and offered to. He didn't say out of body. I didn't have any of that nomenclature, but offered to give me an experience that I would enjoy. And I had talked to these entities before. I'd always had other non physical friends. I was a very right brain young kid, you know, so talking to non physical people was just part of life. I didn't know that everybody else didn't do it. I figured everybody did this just like I did. So it wasn't unusual. I didn't think anything special about it. And one time they came and said, would you like this experience? And I said, sure, let's do it. They pop me out of body. It was like, wow. And I went out through the window, I played with it and I could go right through a window and that was amazing. I got near the ground and I started moving and then I got to this hedge that was between my yard and the neighbor's yard and it was like, oh no. And I went right through it and I thought it was fun. So I played with it and they did this for me three or four or five times to the point I was very used to it. And I would travel. I could travel around the neighborhood and see what was going on in the various houses where my friends lived and whatever. So I thought it was a lot of fun. And then I said, I want to learn to do this myself. I don't like that you do this for me. I want to learn. And they said, no, we really don't want to teach you that. You're not ready for that yet. And I complained, I said no, I want to learn to do this on my own. So they said, okay. So they told me what to do, and I did that. And of course, they were facilitating this whole thing. And I started this oscillation like Bob talks about. And it got stronger and stronger and stronger until I was like a flag in a gale. You know, I was just whipping around. I said, okay, okay, I quit. You can do it. And I could see they were going, huh? Yes, we took care of you. So I didn't have to have that experience. They gave me that just to chill me so I wouldn't be doing it. But I did learn. They did teach me. And the thing that we're getting to here is they enrolled me in this course. I would come out and they would teach me how to manipulate things, how to deal with things in the non physical. All right, I played with it. I could move, I could go through things, but I just randomly was whatever. So they taught me how to move, how to be quick with my intent, how to hone my intent to where I could very quickly do things. So there were tests in that. Like there'd be little lights that were lit, and I had to walk from here to there and just touch the lights. But I walked up to it. I thought, well, that's easy. I can just step from one to the other. But then they'd move. You'd go to step one of light. So you get on that one and, you know, the next one would slide around and you try to get it and it'd slide. And then the lesson was, use your intent. Use your intent to make them stay still. And then, okay, I did that. And I had an intention. Next light, you go right there and stay still. And then I walked all the way across. And you know, I got a gold star for that. And then I got to the point that they could stay like this and I could just kind of jump from one to the other. And one would come automatically and land right under my foot just as I needed it. So I didn't have to really think more of it singly, but I could do the whole ensemble at once. And I was doing that on one thing. And Bob was evidently watching me. And I went, next time. Now, this was when I was a kid, but Bob was watching me when I was doing something similar to that as an adult. I got these tests all along. So that just popped into my mind one time Bob was watching and he said, you were a bit of show off, weren't you? And I said yes, because I'd gotten to the end of it and I'd done one of those things, like the football players do at the end. Sac, he called me out on that.
- [51:11]
Jeffrey Mishlove
But Bob was watching you when you were a child?
- [51:14]
Tom Campbell
No, no, no, no, not across time. No, no, no. I just jumped across time because when I said it, that other idea jumped into my head. But when I was a kid, I learned to do these things. And I was in a training course and I would be drilled over and over and over to use my intent. And these things then went away once I got to the point where I had kind of passed to where they thought I should be. And I had something. And I should tell you that when I was out of body, I wasn't a child. I wasn't 6 or 7 years old. I was an adult. I was like 25. And then when I come back in my body, I turn back into a seven year old. And I do that slowly just to. Just to feel the difference. Here you are and you're in charge, you're in control, and you come back and you're this little person. And the mind was the same, but the body was very different. So anyhow, I did that. And then one day when I was there, these two guys showed up. And I talk about this in the book. These two guys showed up and what they were going to do was the Kundalini thing. They were there and they had like work orders and they said, this one's only a little kid. You sure you got it right? The guy looks, checks his paperwork. Yeah, I got it right. It's him. And anyway, we went through this. So they put this substance in me that flowed through me. It was like white energy. And I tricked them a little bit and said, yeah, a little more. Give me a little more because that's my personality. And anyway, they gave me a little more than they were supposed to. But after that I had two other entities come that shut the gate and they said, no more, you're done for a while. And I said, why? I passed my test. I'm doing okay. Why are you locking me out? And they wouldn't tell me anything about it, except then one said, you need to grow up like a normal kid. If you grow up too weird, you're going to end up in an institution and it isn't going to work.
- [53:19]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, how old were you?
- [53:21]
Tom Campbell
Probably eight at that time. I was about eight. So they shut the door and I was no longer able to do that. By then I was doing it on my own. I was okay. I could get out of body and come back on my own, but that shut me out. And it wasn't until Bob Monroe was telling me about his test that he had taken when all that memory poured.
- [53:46]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Back like 20 years later.
- [53:48]
Tom Campbell
20 years later? Yeah. And it's like, oh, wow. Yeah, it was about almost very close to 20 years later and I remembered tests that I had taken while I was in that training.
- [54:01]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So it all came back.
- [54:02]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, and it all just flowed back into me and suddenly I went from not even aware of it at all to every detail just dumped back. As I told him, just hang on a minute, I'm processing. And it took me about a minute to get it all in, but that was, I was shut out because it wasn't going to be good for me to be that facile with the out of body stuff and still be a kid because I would have said I have these friends, I do things and all I would have been judged of some kind of mental case and that wouldn't have been good. So it came back when I was ready to deal with it and then we went on from there. But tests are often given people who are trying to go out of body. They read about it and they want to do it, but they're frightened and they get out of body and suddenly they're a stranger in a strange land. And they don't have any idea are there monsters live here or what. And they have a fear of the unknown. And that fear of the unknown will manifest into some scary thing and often they will come back frightened out of body with a terrifying experience and they won't try to do it anymore because it frightens them. Well, the whole point of this virtual reality that we're in is to get rid of fear, not create more fear. So often tests are given right at the process of trying to get out of body. A monster will show up with big fangs with blood dripping off of them or something and growl at somebody or a couple of thugs will come by and beat you up or something will happen. And if you deal with it well, which is not to be afraid of it, you know, that monster say, well hello, nice meeting you here, have a good day. And then the monster turns into smoke and disappears. You say, but if it's ah, then back in the body you go and you're not ready yet. So these tests are given to keep people who really shouldn't be there from being there, you know, before they're ready. Because what will happen? They'll get so terrified that then they're worse off than they were before they started. And that's against what the system is trying to do, it's trying to help people grow up and get rid of their fears, increase the quality of their consciousness. So it works. And those people who are ready and experience it, they just get to experience a little bit at a time. So it's one step after the next. It's in a learning process. So that's kind of how that works. And as it turns out, I came to this much later. I learned a whole lot just in the last 20 years since I published the books. Between then, I didn't just sit down and say I figured it all out. I've learned a whole lot in the last 20 years. And the out of Body can best be described as a single player game with a larger consciousness system. You basically fed a data stream. This virtual reality is a data stream and you get this data and the data describes the reality. You play an avatar that has to abide by the physical rules of that game of that reality. And when you go out of body, you're on a single player game with the LCS who gives you experiences that will give you opportunities to learn something. Sometimes they're scary. Sometimes. You know, for instance, young men, okay, young men almost always find themselves in the first, I don't know, first years or even the first decade. They get out of body, they're fighting evil. They're into the fighting evil mode because that's where young men are. And they take their sword of truth and they go out and do battle with the forces of evil. And it's that kind of almost a martial arts kind of thing. But it turns into a struggle, good against evil. And the young guys do that. But eventually they have to outgrow that. That's not what it's about. It's not about fighting and vanquishing evil with your weapons. You know, that's. So you outgrow it. And then eventually that doesn't happen anymore. You don't run into any more evil guys out there. They're all gone now. Because that was a learning experience that was given to them. That was a genuine out of body. But they got that experience because that's where they were. That's their sense of reality and how you deal with it. You deal with the bad things by fighting them.
- [58:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
But there are whole religions that get stuck there. That reality is a war between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
- [58:52]
Tom Campbell
They never outgrow that. Yeah, that is a thing. But you know, so that's. If you talk to 20 somethings and early 30 somethings about their out of bodies. You'll find a lot of fighting going on, but. And a lot of monsters and evil things, but that's not really the way it is.
- [59:08]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I gather once you were reawakened by your conversation with Robert Monroe, then things really began to.
- [59:17]
Tom Campbell
They did. They accelerated very quickly. I immediately got right back into that groove just as I had left it. And I suddenly had a lot more facility in the out of body. I knew how to do things because all that came. That came back. Yes. So then I started doing. Once I pulled all that together, I started doing physics in the out of body state, I started doing experiments. Shouldn't say physics. I started doing experiments while I was out of the body. And the experiments are just basic science. We did things that were evidential because both Dennis and I said, well, if this doesn't turn out to be real, we'll be out of here. But meanwhile, we'll go along, see what we can do. So everything was evidential because we were trying to prove to ourselves that it was real. He's an engineer, I'm a physicist. We're hard cases as far as proving that, you know, all this stuff is real. So we did remote viewing and then found out whether we were right or wrong with targets. We read numbers on the wall that Bob would go out and write on a big chalkboard he had in the next room. We would heal all the things that are basically paranormal things. We did them in order to gather evidence. In remote viewing, we did most because that's where the evidence lies. You get an immediate right or wrong at the end of it. So we did a lot of that. We did projection of times. We said, what's the headline going to be on the newspaper this day, next week? That kind of thing. You know, looking at the time, at that time, I didn't have any idea what was going on. You know, it was all a bit magical. I knew it was. It had rules. It wasn't random. So I wanted to find out what were the rules. How could you, you know, I wanted to make science out of it. So I do say healing or remote viewing. I change a variable. All right, I'll enter it this way, or I'll have this frame of mind, or I will get this deep or that deep, or I'll do things differently. I look with diet. And that's when I stopped eating sugar, because I found out if I had sugar, that my mind was more unstable and it wasn't as easy to finally control. But by then, Dennis and I had each, you know, hundreds and hundreds of times gone to these states or whatever. So we're pretty good at getting to those states and maintaining them more or less precisely and getting back to them the next day and the next week. So I could go there and change a variable and say, all right, I'm going to heal this time. I'm going to spend an hour on healing this thing and then I'm going to work on it all week. And the next time I'm just going to glance at it and heal, but with intensity. And how does it work? And with healing, of course you have to do statistics because if you take somebody's headache away, well, it may have just gone away anyway, you know, so you don't know. So you have to take 100 people's headaches away. And then, you know, if they went, if 80 of them went away right after you worked on them, now you start to get some statistical evidence. So I did that. Change a variable, try it again, change the variable, try it again. And I continued that for like the next 30 years. And that's basically how I then came up with this model. It was from the evidence that I got through that. Constantly changing variables and see how it affected trial and error, trial and error, trial and error for about 3. And then I thought I knew enough about it that I could write the books and understand consciousness. Those books didn't start out as a theory of everything. They started out as really an explanation of consciousness and how it worked.
- [63:05]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I understand there were some very dramatic healings that took place.
- [63:09]
Tom Campbell
Oh yeah, I've had. Well, I've done a lot of healings and probably thousands of them. And I'd say, you know, 5, 10, 15 of them were rather dramatic. I had several that way. Actually. There's a book that's going to come out shortly by a young lady, Sylvia Kuzman Crawford, and she was a 14 year old girl, lived in my subdivision. I was friends with her parents. She got in a car accident and broke both of her thigh bones, both of her femurs broke, her other parts of her legs broke, arms broke. She was really torn up. She was in the back of a station wagon and she was right where the impact occurred and she should have died. Matter of fact, they called in and said, we got this girl, but it's not likely she's going to make it. So they weren't expecting a live girl to show up at the hospital, but she did. And her mother called me when she was in transit because I talked a little bit about what I was doing because I Was going out to Bob's all the time. And I shared not much of it, but just a little bit. And her mother was desperate for anything that might help. So she called me up and said, sylvia's on her way to the emergency room. They said that she might bleed to death. We don't know. She was terrified. She says, anything you can do to help. So I did, and I did help her. I did help her get through it. And later, Sylvia was curious about some things, so I told her what I had experienced and what I did. And she got more and more into it. Now, she's written a book about that experience. So that was one that was rather miraculous. And actually that one where she did survive where she wasn't supposed to. Then a little later in that same experience, a nurse had given her an overdose of morphine, fatal overdose. And she drifted off and they couldn't wake her up. And Mother called me up again and I brought her back from that one. So there actually were two events in that one incident. So anyway, there was that one. There was another one that was particularly fun were this friends of mine. One was a minister and the other one was the. At that time, he was the. He was the city attorney. So he was an important member of the community. And they called me. They had this friend, and she was dying. She had already been given her last rites, but the priest had come in. She was expected to live for about another 15 to 20 minutes. She was bleeding to death in her intestine someplace. And they tried. They tried everything that they could to stop the bleeding, and nothing worked. So when they were in the last 20 minutes, the lady who was the minister called me up and said, this friend of mine laying on a bed, bleeding to death, is there anything you can do about it? And I went in. And first I do. I don't just heal. I talk to the person because I want to find out what are the circumstances. You don't just butt in and do things. You have to be sensitive to what's going on. And I talked to her, and the reason that they couldn't stop the bleeding is that she was ready to go. She was gone. Her life had kind of gotten to a dead end where her faith was waning and she didn't really know what to do and felt kind of wrong and useless. So she was. She was willing herself to die. So the things they were giving her, the medicines weren't working. She was overriding them with her own free will. And I talked with her for a while and told her that she still. There was a lot of things that she could still do in the world that were very helpful to a lot of people. And it wasn't just about her. It was about the contributions she could make, the people she could help. And by exiting, she was kind of copying out on a set of life experiences that were important for her. She still had a lot to contribute. So I went through all of this and eventually after about five minutes of that, I changed her mind. And after I changed her mind, then I started to heal her. And it wasn't that hard. Once she was cooperating, the healing was actually very easy. So I did the healing and the bleeding stopped. And that was probably about 15 minutes into the 20 minutes that she had left. And it coagulated. They gave her, dumped a lot of blood into her. They'd been giving her transfusions, but it was just running through her. So they gave her more transfusions. And the next day she went home. She didn't even have to stay another day. The next day she went home and she told my friends, the two friends of mine that were there with her, she told them the story about what had happened to her and while she was in that condition and so on. But I didn't know anything about that. They didn't tell me. It was just nothing like that. Then about a year later or so, I was a group that makes movies of paranormal and psy things called the Path. We've run across the Path. But anyway, so they wanted to film me for that. And at the time I had construction going on in my house. So I talked to my friend who had a mother in law suite outside of his house. And he said, sure, you can come on over and do that. It was the same friend that was the friend of this lady that healed. So after he got done talking to me, he asked Peter, he said, can I interview you? You've known Tom for a while, I'd like to interview you too about things that you know about. And so he started talking to me. And Peter brought up this case of this girl. And he told something that really floored me because I didn't have any idea. All I know is I worked on her, she got better and she went home. Peter said that this girl, she got better and when she woke up, she said that she had had a conversation with God and that God had convinced her that she wasn't done and that she still had work to do. That she was re enthused about her work, about her ministry and other kinds of things. And she was just really. And she talked about the things that God had told her and it was exactly the things that I had told her. And I had also written in an email to Peter and his wife Carrie, I said, well, I worked on her. I think she's going to be all right. Here's the discussion I had with her. I told her these kinds of things to help her. One of the problems was she really was not cooperating.
- [70:14]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, when you say you told her, were you telling her verbally or was it more telepathic?
- [70:19]
Tom Campbell
Oh, it was all telepathic. I was sitting. She only had 20 minutes to live. I didn't go to the hospital. I just jumped right in, talked to her, found out what the problem was, try to change her mind. It did change her mind and the healing was easy because she was then positive about living. But then I wrote to my friends who had asked me to work on her. I said, well, I talked to her and these are the things I told her. And it seemed to change. Yeah, it seemed to. So when Peter, now I didn't know, this is a year later, he's telling this to this people that are doing the video. He's telling her, yeah, she talked to God and God told her these things. And it was exactly the same things that Tom had written to us and told her.
- [71:05]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So you were there as God's representative?
- [71:08]
Tom Campbell
No, what happened was that she was a religious person and she just heard a voice and the voice was kind and the voice was telling her that she had value and that she was worthy and that sort of thing where she was feeling unworthy and, and she just jumped to the conclusion that that was God talking to her. It was just me having a mind to mind conversation because I right away found out what the problem was. You have to do that first before you heal. So the problem was she didn't want to live. She was done. So that the problem. I couldn't solve that by healing her because she has more control over her body than I do. And even if had I overwhelmed her and made her heal, that wouldn't have been the right thing to do. You don't interfere with people's lives. So I just, my healing was healing her mind and then it was easy healing the body. So she just dumped to the conclusion, who else talks to you when you're about to die but God? So she jumped to that conclusion and that was the perfect conclusion for her because she was also a minister of some sort. And it worked. And it was a. Yeah, I remembered it and I Remember the detail that I talked to her, but I had no idea that that's how she interpreted those words. But then I was pleased because it was exactly what she needed to know. It was exactly the perspective that she really needed to have. I didn't intend it that way. I was just going to be that disembodied voice, you know, talking to her. I was not trying to play God.
- [72:48]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, there's so much depth in this story to unpack because you're not even in the same room with her. You're at a distance.
- [72:57]
Tom Campbell
No. I hung up with my friend, said, can you help her? And I said, okay, I'll give it a try. And they said, she's bleeding to death. She's only got about 20 minutes left. And I hung up the phone and I just stood there. I didn't sit down, or I just stood there and popped my mind. By that time, I could get into that altered state where you can heal in probably tenths of a second. I do that now. You can get into that state just instantly, because I've done it so many times. So I just dropped into that state, connected with her, because I had her address. She was the girl that my friends were with, and so on, and that's all you need. And I said, what's the problem here? And I kind of looked at it, and the problem was obviously that she really didn't want to live. And so then I kind of looked at her and who she was and what she was doing. I got a database dump on her, and it was obvious that she was just disheartened and kind of losing her faith, so to speak, and wasn't sure anymore about what she was doing or what value it was. So I tried to help her have a more positive attitude toward herself and so on. And I didn't force her to change her mind. I just told her things that did end up changing her mind. I don't try to push anything on people. That's the wrong way to approach it. Don't just go heal somebody, because you can. You have to be aware of. Disease is often part of the process of growing. So you have to let that take its course. So, anyway, so I found out that that was it. I helped her see her life from a different perspective that was more positive than the one she had. She changed. But because she was a theologian herself, she interpreted that as God speaking to her, and it all worked out.
- [74:46]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Just let me ask you this. Did the healing work emerge out of your work with Robert Monroe?
- [74:54]
Tom Campbell
Yes, because we were trying to do everything paranormal. We wanted to experience everything that was paranormal, and I wanted them to study it. So I spent hours and hours and hours and years later doing this work, you know, doing it this way. And I found that sometimes when I was busy and somebody said, you know, my answer is, he's having a hard time doing it. And I just say, okay, answers heal better. Okay, done. And I wouldn't spend more than 20 seconds on her, and Aunt Susie would have a miraculous healing. And I thought, well, that's strange. I really didn't put much effort into it. And other times I put a whole lot of effort into it. I spent a week working on a person that didn't seem to work. So I wanted to know why. Why is there differences like that? What's the point? What's the underlying logic? Because all of this has its own logic. Consciousness is not a random system. It's a system. It has its own logic, its own reasons for doing what it does and how it does it. And it has its own structure and its own rules. And I wanted to understand. That's what physicists do. They try to model reality. And this is just. To me, it was another reality that I was trying to understand. So, yes, when I was at Bob's, we did mostly remote viewing, but we did a lot of healing. We did. We got around in databases, got information. We talked to other entities. We tried. Bob usually have a list of things for us to do. He was very practical. Talk to other entities and see if you can find some other form of energy that we can use. You know, it's a very practical thing. And I tried that for a while until I learned that that was really not a very profitable way to go about things.
- [76:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Yeah, I seem to recall Bob was interested in coming up with new inventions.
- [76:49]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, right. And that really wasn't what it was all about. So, you know, I did some of it because Bob asked, and I was willing to see how that went and what were the constraints. But as it works out, to bring a new invention here, you have to almost be at the point that you're ready to create the invention yourself. Otherwise there's too big a gap in your understanding. Like if you took a color television set to a bunch of people in the Amazon that had never had contact with outside world. It may be awesome to them because they could see all these little people on the screen doing things, but how could you bring that technology to them? You can't. They don't have any of the concepts. They don't have Any of the, I mean, even the guy lives next door doesn't have a concept of how the television works. They don't know what the piece parts do, they don't know what all those little chips are for and how the colors get there is all magic. So you have to understand, you have to be at a level of understanding where you're almost ready to create it yourself before you can understand what's going on, to learn from that stuff. So it's really not a good mind, not a good situation to mine there to try to get things like that. Because all you can do is help somebody take that last step. But if there's like five steps to take, it doesn't compute.
- [78:18]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, during the course of our conversation so far, you have talked about what the larger consciousness system desires from us. And I get the impression that your ability to be able to speak about it means that you are in alignment with it.
- [78:39]
Tom Campbell
Oh, absolutely. It's, you know, the purpose here and the purpose in creating this virtual reality is so that pieces of consciousness like you and I can have experiences. And those experiences require us to make choices by the quality of the choice we make. Do we make a choice out of self centeredness, out of greed, out of whatever, or do we make that choice because it's being helpful? It's useful, it'd be helpful to other people. In other words, are we self centered, it's all about us, or are we other centered? Which is love? Is it about love? So we're here to make these ethical, meaningful choices. And this virtual reality gives us lots of opportunities to be greedy or to be helpful or whatever. And as we make these choices, we evolve the quality of our consciousness. If we make good choices toward the side of love and caring and consideration and compassion and all those things. And we de evolve if we make choices toward degree and self centeredness. And it's all about me, I want more for me. So that's why we're here. So the whole point is for the consciousness system to evolve. To evolve means to move and become more of making choices toward being love. So we have a purpose here and that's to make choices and to learn from those choices. And it doesn't matter really where you are in that thing. Where you are in your evolution is kind of irrelevant. Wherever you are, you're at a level where choices are at your level to make. And you either evolve or de evolve by the quality of your choices. And the system wants us to evolve because as we evolve, it evolves, it does evolution on its Own as well. But we're part of its thing. So consciousness is a system, an aware, conscious system. It's an information system. It's all about information. It's an information system, and it wants to evolve by making better choices, by lowering its entropy. If you look at the physics side of it all, that boils down to entropy by lowering its entropy. So we have a purpose.
- [81:01]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Let's stop for a moment and talk about entropy. Some of our viewers may not know. Why would you want to lower your entropy?
- [81:10]
Tom Campbell
What is entropy anyway? Entropy is a measure of disorder. That's one way of looking at it. So if you have a lot of disorder, disorder into chaos even, that's high entropy. There's lots of entropy and disorder. As you order that disorder, as you clean up your teenager's room and you pick up the dirty socks and underwear and you put them in the hamper and you restore order to the room, then you're lowering the entropy of that system, the child's room. So that's lowering entropy. That creates order. Now consciousness, when it creates this virtual reality, and there are pieces of consciousness like you and I and everybody else who are playing avatars, making choices for those avatars, okay, now you've got a social system. It's not just an individual anymore. It's a lot of people working and interacting with each other. That's where all the ethical choices come from, is that interaction of working together. Now, if you have a social system where people have to work together, you lower the entropy of that social system by being cooperative, by being caring, by being thoughtful, by being considerate. All of those things lower the entropy. In other words, the people interacting with each other can produce more, be more, if they cooperate, if they care, if they help each other. The opposite side of love is fear. On the fear side, if you have a group of people and fear is dominant, then there's no trust. Because fear, you fear that somebody, if you give them information, they'll use it against you or they'll take something away from you. There's very little trust. And you don't share. If you got a good idea, you keep it to yourself because you're going to make something with it. You're going to get. You're going to benefit from it. Sharing it would, like, ruin it. Everybody get it and use it, and then you couldn't benefit from it. It's like, you wouldn't get the patent, you'd share it with other people. So you don't share. You keep things you don't trust. And what Happens there is that two or three people get together so they can take things away from this individuals. Well then those individuals get together and then you get bigger groups and bigger groups and you end up eventually with power groups of large numbers of people with just a few people on top making all the choices for all the people down. And if you let that evolve to where it naturally goes, you end up with what, 3% of the people owning 95% of all the resources and which.
- [83:54]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Is where we are.
- [83:55]
Tom Campbell
The people to do all the work are the ones at the bottom. They do all the work, which is where we are. So our society is fear based society.
- [84:04]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Plus constant conflict between.
- [84:06]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, constant conflict. Because the big things are always fighting with each other, trying to take each other's stuff, trying to control the ethic of materialism. Materialism has its own ethic. If you're a materialist, you have to think in a certain way. The ethic that goes with materialism is control, power, force. Okay, I'm a materialist. The only thing that exists is the physical world. And here's some stuff in the physical world that I find useful. So I'm going to take it and then I have to keep it. So I'm going to have to protect. Other people want it too. So now I not only have to take it, but I have to be able to defend it and keep it. And then I get other people to help me and I will help, I'll give them some stuff, but they're going to. So now I have a bunch of people. Now we can take things from smaller groups and so on it goes. So this happens that way. So it's the fear based way. That's high entropy. When you do things from fear, what you create is fundamentally unstable. You can only build so much before it falls apart. And the reason for that is there's no trust, there's no cooperation, or there's very little. Now maybe there's trust and cooperation on this group and trust and cooperation sort of somewhat around this group. But these two groups fight with each other. But if here's the boss and he's in charge, well, somebody else wants to kill that boss and he'll be in charge. It's just not stable. So whenever you have a fascist government, that government is inherently unstable. It can't last. It might last 50 years or 100 years, but eventually it self destructs because it's wrong. It can't build. It sows the seeds of its own destruction by the way it treats people. It creates animosities that eventually tear it down.
- [86:06]
Jeffrey Mishlove
But I've heard the same argument about democracies. They also seem to have the seeds of their own destruction.
- [86:13]
Tom Campbell
Well, but that problem is a little different problem. They cease being democracies. And the idea that they cease being focused on being helpful, considerate for the people, of the people, by the people, that's the social thing. That's low entropy. They start being about control, power and force. We want more power. We want more control. We want to manipulate the people so that they do what we want them to do and they think the way we want them to think. So what happens is that old ethic of control, power, force takes over and deteriorates the democracy into something else. And that's why democracies have a problem, is because materialism is the fundamental belief in western culture, which is now culture everywhere. That fundamental belief is a control, power, force belief. You take it, you own it, you defend it, you fight for it, grab other people's stuff if you can and get away with it. Control, power, force then reasserts itself. So here we are, humanity, really a bunch of conscious players. But they have to play with the rule set that's in the virtual reality. And their job is to make choices. But they don't make very good choices because it's easier to grab somebody else's food than to go find your own. So they don't make very good choices. They have to evolve, they have to grow up. You don't start at the top, you start at the bottom.
- [87:51]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You learn from your mistakes. It's the best way to learn, right?
- [87:54]
Tom Campbell
It's almost the only way to learn. So that's what we're here for. But that general ethic of control, power, force is still there. So you'll get little pockets. Like the Greeks had a republic and they voted and they discussed and they did what the majority wanted. And everybody, you know, got along with that. But it didn't last but for so long. And the Romans had a republic, but it didn't last for so long because in that general population, the ethic of control, power, force still is dominant, but it's changing. If you go back 500 years from today, you'll find that everything was a whole lot worse than it is now. You think things are bad now. Things were really bad then. Life was. Life was cheap. Somebody could pull you off the side and run a sword through you just because they felt that'd be fun to do or because they wanted some sword practice and you were a good target. You know, it's not like that anymore. Well, maybe some places here and there, but basically we've grown up a lot in the last 500 years now. But look at the almost 200,000 years before that. And basically it was a warlord mentality from the beginning and still. And our growth, our evolution. I don't know if a camera can pick on my hand running around, I'll stick his other hand out. It gets on the camera more. It was like this very little growth, just barely going up, barely going up. But then it goes up fast because when you grow up it's easier to grow up more. So it's an accelerating function. So we're now right at this point at the knee of the curve. We're right where it starts to accelerate. That's why there's so much contention right now. Change is coming and it's coming fast. So 200,000 years, roughly homo sapiens has been around as a being, as an avatar. So 200,000 years, not much changed. Warlord mentality. Warlord mentality. Then we got someplace about four or five hundred years ago and it started. We had little blips here and there, you know, like the Greek and the Romans and little blips of cooperation and caring. But eventually the masses overwhelmed that and it's now starting to go faster until it goes vertical, until it goes vertical. And when it goes vertical then we will have created a human culture here that is caring and basically happy and content and very productive and it'll be that kinder.
- [90:38]
Jeffrey Mishlove
A low entropy culture.
- [90:40]
Tom Campbell
A low entropy culture. So we're making that turn now and what we're seeing out in the world right now, everybody thinks we're regressing and we are slightly, because like any curve, it's not monotonic because it's ups and downs, but the trend's been up. So right now I think we're seeing those forces of negativity and the forces of chaos making the last great hurrah. You know how it is when animal gets cornered just before it loses, it puffs up and growls and makes a ferocious, a ferocious last ditch effort to scare its nemesis away. And I think that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing this last gasping hurrah of the negativity trying to prevent this curve from going up. And it's going to fail, of course, because the good news is that evolution is relentless. It may be slow, but it's relentless. And one day we will be in.
- [91:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
That evolution can be very patient.
- [91:47]
Tom Campbell
Yes.
- [91:49]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Now I assume these ideas, I'm pretty sure the Idea of relating entropy to human evolution and also equating the reduction of entropy with the idea of love, and in particular, unconditional love. These are your unique ideas. They didn't come from Bob Monroe.
- [92:09]
Tom Campbell
No, no, no, no. They didn't come from Bob Monroe. Bob Monroe was a good reporter. He reported things the best he could. But like any reporter and like anybody, actually, what happens is you get information, you get a data stream, but you have to interpret that data stream. Your reality isn't the data stream. Your reality is your interpretation of the data stream. That's what you get. Now, the interpretation depends on your background, depends on what you know, what you've learned so far. So, for instance, here's one major one that Bob missed, and that is that when he had this experience, he talked to me right after because he was kind of disturbed by it. And that was the idea of loosh, you know, that we are, you know, we're being farmed by, you know, our masters for loose, you know, and we're just like cows, you know, at the bottom end of the loose factory assembly line. We make loose, others consume loose. But what happened was he was getting. He asked the question about the big picture of reality. What is really the big picture? And what they were telling him was that the big picture is that we're here to evolve, to grow up, to become. And they were telling him this and that as we did this, as we evolved, the system evolves and the system grows, and we're a part of that whole system. So they're in the process of telling them that. Bob came. His parents, I think, were farmers. He came from Ohio, I believe, in a farm community. And Bob got that. That description, I just told you. And he got it as, here we are trying to grow up with this higher thing is taking what we do for its own benefit.
- [94:16]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You use the word louche.
- [94:18]
Tom Campbell
Louche.
- [94:19]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I'm not familiar with it.
- [94:20]
Tom Campbell
Oh, yes. It's the thing that Bob did. And what he said is that we are now producers of loosh was probably a very bad rendition of love. And we're supposed to make this loosh, and then this higher power than us consumes this loosh for its own benefit. So he saw it in terms of a farmer. We're the cows. We make loosh from our emotional connections and things, which is if our emotions and feelings are positive, right, we move more toward love, and if they're negative, we move away from it. So we're making this loose, this love, and this larger being is growing from that. So he Saw that in terms of a farmer's viewpoint, the loose makers and the consumers, and we were the bot, we were the cows. And when we make loose and these overlords of ours.
- [95:20]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So it's dualistic thinking.
- [95:22]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, so that was his interpretation when he had it. He was shaken by it.
- [95:26]
Jeffrey Mishlove
It's paranoid.
- [95:26]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, he was shaken by it. And he said, I just had this experience and I asked for the big picture. He had me aside. I was just sitting there with him. I was down at his house and he told me about it. He says, we are like farm animals and we produce this stuff that was called loosh. And I said, loosh? What's that? And he says that's what they call it, they call it loosh. And then there's these higher, more advanced beings that consume loosh. And they just have us around in order to make the loose for their consumption. So we're farm animals. And of course what he was saying is that yes, they have us here making choices so that we'll make good choices for love. And in that doing so we will evolve and the whole system will evolve with it. But he missed that. So what happened is he wrote that in his book. I think it was the second book, you know, he did Journeys out of the Bonnie Far Journeys, Ultimate Journey. I think it was in his second book. And a whole lot of people took that the way he did, which was negative. We have overlords that are using us like farm animals. And this fear thing got in about the non physical.
- [96:46]
Jeffrey Mishlove
It's an idea that's been around for a long time. You find it in Gnosticism.
- [96:51]
Tom Campbell
So anyway, so it was this whole thing, instead of being about love and evolution, became about fear and being used by our overlords to produce the stuff that they wanted. And we're like their cattle. So a lot of negativity got born out of that mistake. But you see, if you were a farmer and you had to interpret what they were trying to tell you and you didn't really understand entropy because they didn't talk in terms, they had to talk in terms of things that he understood. So they talk in terms of producers and consumers and stuff. And he misinterpreted it.
- [97:32]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And at that point, had your ideas evolved enough?
- [97:35]
Tom Campbell
No, not at that point, no, I didn't have any of those ideas. I was just 27, 28 year old. And he told me and he was very shaken by this idea because of the way he framed it in his own mind. And he told me and he said, well, what do you think? And I said eh, if it's that way, there's nothing we can do about it. It's way above our pay grade, isn't it? So why worry about it? It's okay with me. If that's the way the world is, then that's our place, that's our point. And we don't have anything to do but live it and try to be the best we can, right? To grow and so on. So that's what I told him. And he was amazed. He thought that I should be upset like he was, that it was a very upsetting idea that we were farm animals being farmed by some higher power. And I wasn't upset by it. I didn't have any other answers for it. And Bob was a good, you know, he was good about saying, getting what he heard. But I just took it and said, well, if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. Getting upset about it isn't going to make it any better. So just eh. And after that his attitude toward me changed a little bit. He was, he was amazed at the way I took it. And I just didn't see any point in getting upset about something that you couldn't change. So that was. But that now has triggered lots and lots of negative stuff out in the consciousness world and the afterlife world and all the rest of it just created all kinds of negativity and fear and other things. I just brought that up as a way of explaining that reality is what you interpret it to be. It's your interpretation. That's why you should always stay skeptical of everything you get. You need to be skeptical because you don't really know the big picture. You don't know why you got that exactly, or what your lesson is in it. Best to just make as much positiveness as you can out of it and let it go. Rather than trying to put that in a pigeonhole someplace and say, ah, this is what this is and this is what that is. So you have to take these experiences, use your own free will to assess them, take what you can that's positive from it and let the rest go. That's kind of the right attitude. But you see, communications are very difficult. So here's a data stream. I interpret it and that's my reality. You get a very similar data stream, but you interpret it differently. That's your reality. So you got 9 billion people all living in their own reality here together. But like any multiple player virtual reality game, there are certain things that we all see and we all share and somebody else does this, we get a picture of that and we're connected to it, so there's that. But everybody actually lives in their own reality. And you talk to people that are in your own culture, your reality and their reality seem like the same. And you believe that's reality all over. But you take two people from very different cultures and they don't share much reality at all. They don't see eye to eye. They don't understand where the other's coming from or why. You know, you take a guy out of the Amazon jungle and he sees a table as firewood.
- [101:05]
Jeffrey Mishlove
But even here in America, we are now talking about silos, people living in different silos, even if they're in the same neighborhood.
- [101:15]
Tom Campbell
Yes. So we have no end of challenges and choices that we make. And we can make those choices out of love and caring and being positive, or we can make them out of fear. And the things we build when we make choices out of fear won't last. They'll self destruct. And eventually the good guys always win.
- [101:39]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, at some point you. I don't know if you broke away or drifted away, but you were with Bob Monroe, as I recall, for about six years. At some point, your life took a different turn.
- [101:52]
Tom Campbell
Yeah. What happened is I changed locations. My job went from Charlottesville down to Huntsville, and I moved. I was still a part of it. I still came back for some events every once in a while, but it wasn't an everyday 15 to 20 hours a day. It wasn't that anymore. And that started right as Bob got real successful with attracting people to listen to his, his technology. And Dennis and I became trainers more than experimenters. Nancy Lee and Dennis and I. So we were going here and flying there and laying out our thing and people with headphones and we'd explain to them what was going on and why and how. And we did that for a while. But that's not what Dennis and I really wanted to do. We wanted to understand we were into the theory of why does it happen and what does it mean and what's my place in all of this? And that kind of thing. Being trainers wasn't us. So both of us kind of bowed out and said, we need to, we'll train some people, but we're not going to just fly around and give courses. That's not what we do. So at that time, we kind of backed out. And then within two or three years, I moved to someplace else. So I stayed connected and I came back and gave a talk One time to the people. But mostly we differed and I went on my way. And that was part of my 35 years of trying to figure out how everything worked. I was part of that. So I was coming to different conclusions and I was seeing things differently. Because when you do that kind of science within consciousness, you do start to see what the variables are and how the variables affect things. And you start to understand the logic of the situation. You know, just basic things like, you know, why can I remote view and get 100% of the targets today and only 60% of the targets the next day? What changed? What's the difference? So then you have to do that similar remote viewing under 10 or 20 or 50 different kinds of conditions to see which ones work. We don't know why they don't. You isolate the things that don't, then you test those. That's why it took 35 years. It's just a lot of repetition. But I was able to get into those altered states very quickly and I could reproduce those states very precisely. So that made it so you actually could do science there.
- [104:24]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I guess it's fair to say that your theoretical work really accelerated after you left your intensive period of working with Robert Monroe. But that period was essential for getting you some.
- [104:39]
Tom Campbell
Yes, exactly. That is a correct way to say it. Most of the stuff that I understand now I understood after leaving Bob and Row and just basically working on things, trying to understand the logic. Because I'd get a certain logic build up and I'd run into a point that didn't compute. Okay. I knew this for a fact because I'd done that in the non physical. And I didn't know how to get to that, to make that rational. So it's like, how do you pull these things together? And the big aha moment came to me when I came to the realization that it was all information. Consciousness is information. And when I got that, a lot of puzzle pieces started to fall together. That was the first big step because, okay, consciousness, what are you conscious of? What is your consciousness aware of? You're only aware of your five senses. You got five senses. You see, you hear, you smell, you taste, you feel, and that's it. Take away all of those. And what's your consciousness like?
- [105:41]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, you have emotions.
- [105:42]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, yeah, you have emotions, which take a lot. But most of your emotions are tied to these things, the things you hear and see and smell. So you take all of that away and you know, take your past away too. You know, if you just take all of that away, you're at that, what I call the, you know, the. The Descartes moment. I'm here, I exist, I am, I think, I can think, I can ponder, and I exist. And that's it. There's nothing else going on. That's your total sum content of the content of your consciousness is that you exist and that you think. It's the I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I think. And those two just support each other and that's it. So, well, what is that? Then? You're conscious to say, well, I'm conscious, I'm conscious. There's a camera and over here's the thing, and there you. And we're talking. I'm aware of all this stuff just because I have sense data. So what is consciousness? What are we conscious? We take in data. We then process that data. Part of the processing is comparing it to memory from past data and then seeing if there's any relationship there. Then we come to some kind of conclusion about what to do with the data. What should we do with it? And we make choices, the output. So what is consciousness? Well, you get input, you do processing, you have memory, and you do an output. What does that sound like?
- [107:12]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Computer.
- [107:12]
Tom Campbell
Sounds like a computer. Exactly. And that was kind of the aha moment. Ah, this is an information system, consciousness about information. So now you go back to the Buddha who said, all of this is may. All of this is an illusion. Oh, well, I understand that. It's information. These physical things aren't really physical things. It's just information. We gather the information, we grab hold of that and I can say, well, it's heavy, it weighs probably five pounds. And put it on a scale, I can tell exactly how much it weighs. But all of that is information. So we can. We gather information, we interpret that information. What it means, that's our interpretation. We look at it and process it. We interpret that information and what it means. Look at it from our past experience. I've seen other things like that, and they were made out of metal and they were about five pounds, you know. So you do that and then you decide what you're going to do with that information. Well, just let that sit there. I'm not going to do anything with it. So you make choices and that then cleared up a whole lot of things. Consciousness is an information system. It's about information. You get information, you interpret it. And at that point, the connection to a virtual reality was just that far. It took me a while to get there. It wasn't very far, but it took me a While to get there and said, okay, that's it. It's an information system. And then I said, well, what can I do with that? So I said, well, what's the smallest piece of information you can get? Let's reduce information down to the tiniest thing. Well, it would be what I would call a reality cell. It's a thing that is aware that it can be in state A or state B. Okay, it only has two choices. That's the minimum set, right? It has choices. So the minimum set is two. It can choose A or it can choose B. But it's aware that it has two choices and it can make A and it can be B. Well, that's your smallest piece of consciousness. Then I said, that's awareness with a choice. That's how I define consciousness. It's an awareness with a choice. So then I said, okay, let that thing be. Let it evolve. How could it possibly evolve? Well, it can evolve in several ways. It can say, all right, I can be, let's say, a one or a zero. We'll turn it into more computer terms. Instead of A and B, so I can be in a one and a zero. So I can be in a one and then a zero and then another zero and then a one and then a one and then a zero. Oh, that's a nice pattern. Let me make another pattern. So it starts making patterns, and then it starts making patterns of patterns. And all this is evolution. And what is it doing? It's lowering its entropy. It's creating order, you see. So the way to understand that. Think of an information system. And every bit in the information system is random. Every bit's random. How much information does it have? Zero. That's the definition of random, is that there is no information if every bit is random. So how do you make information? Well, you order a couple bits. You may order a couple bits and this bit and stack this one on it and that one on it. Now you got something different. And that little thing you just made, you can give it a name, you can call it a function. It might be one, and you can stack them up. Now you get two stacks. Oh, two. Now you've got mathematics. You got one and two, and then you make another one and then two and one is three or one, two, three or four and three minus two is one, and you start looking at that. So you just look at patterns and the patterns of patterns. And then pretty soon you say, well, I'm going to take one of my consciousness cells. Now you got kind of multiple things going on here. And I'm just going to let it go. 010101. And I got a metronome. Now, I've created regular time. Now I can have sequences of patterns of patterns of sequences. And as it gets more complex, it's more order. The more complex it is, the more meaning and significance it can have. So the entropy gets reduced. Now, if the entropy increases, then you get more chaos, less order, more randomness. And if it keeps devolving, you get nothing, no information. A random system, all the bits are random. So what's its driving purpose? Its driving purpose is to lower entropy, because otherwise it dies as an information system. So like everything else, it's driven by its own survival and it wants to evolve because more and more complex, more and more meaningful things gives it more and more choices, you see. So if it has 50 little objects that it's made now, it can arrange those in, you know, what, 50 factorial over, you know, it's got lots of things that it can do. So the more it builds, the more it has to build from. It creates more possibilities so that it keeps evolving into the possibilities. And all evolution does that. It evolves into the possibilities. Those that work for it persist. Those that don't work for it go away. So now it's just evolution. It's evolving toward lower states of entropy. And it finally gets to a point where there is a plateau to its learning. I mean, in the beginning, it's really quick. You know, you make two or three things, and there was nothing before, and that's really amazing. But pretty soon you've got about as many patterns of patterns of sequences of patterns as you can want, and it slows down. So what's the next thing it can do besides time in a metronome? What's the next technology it can do in order to create more possibilities? And that is, it breaks a piece of itself off, sets that over here. Now they both have free will. I sort of skip that step. But free will is implicit in the choice and awareness. With a choice, if there's no free will, there is no choice. Free will is required for choice. So you take another thing. Now it has free will. It also has choice. Now you have two things with free will that can interact, and then you make a whole bunch more. So now you have 100 things with free will. Now the possibilities go way up. Whereas before it was limited to one thought, one thinker, now you got 100 thinkers. And they come to different conclusions immediately. They all kind of see the world the same way. But as time goes by, they have different, they see things differently. And pretty soon you have a social system. Okay, so that's kind of the progress of. Why is this an information system? What does entropy have to do with it? Entropy is the purpose. Because the one thing I left out of this thing that it takes in information to process whatever it has to have a purpose. Because if it doesn't have a purpose, it can't tell whether the choice it made was good or not good. But it has a purpose. The purpose is to lower centrifuge, to make more information. And the information, information is non physical. People think information is physical, it's non physical. If you have a book, the book's paper, that's physical, the ink is physical, but that's not the information. The information is the meaning, the significance of what's written, not the ink that's written. It's not all little squiggles of ink that's valuable. What's valuable is interpreting those squiggles into something meaningful. So the information is the meaning, the significance of something, and that only takes place within consciousness.
- [115:07]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I have a lot of questions about all of this. We'll do a whole separate interview where we get into the details of the evolution of consciousness, which I know is what you're pointing toward. But this was a good taste.
- [115:25]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, I had to describe this to people. The hardest chore I had wasn't just the figuring it out, it was how to explain it to somebody else. Because I've had tens of thousands of hours exploring non physical reality, exploring consciousness. But how do you explain that to somebody else who's never done any of that? So that was the biggest challenge. And so I made up a lot of things. I made up a lot of words and terms and other things. And I started off with a U O. And then I thought it'd be really fun if I could move that into an aum, you know, the sacred silver or the sacred sound or some sort of thing in the Tibetan Hindu lexicon. So I thought that would just be fun. So I thought up of something that I could turn into an AUM acronym and show the fact that you have this system starts to evolve and the first bunch of its mechanics just starting to build itself up and creating regular time and all this. You kind of do the mechanics of it, but then you get it to the point where it splits off into lots of people, becomes a social system. Lowering entropy means love. Lowering entropy means being kindness and caring and sharing and cooperation. Because you got a social system. And that works. Better than the opposite. So, you know, I wanted to say, well, you start with this, but then you end up with that. So that's where the au and aum come from. And aum was just me being the absolute unbounded manifold. Right. The manifold is a whole lot of different stuff. And then the oneness that brings it all together. And. Yes, so those were my words. And then later, because it was so hard for people to remember those, I had a little thing in one of my sides, it said, if you're having trouble remembering these things, don't worry. Just call it Ralph or something. They're just names. And I started calling it the larger consciousness system instead of aum, because that was just easier because the definition is in the words rather than aum. Okay, that's clever because of the aum, but it's harder to remember and associate with anything. So I stopped using aum in talks and started talking about the larger consciousness system.
- [117:51]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, we will be exploring the larger consciousness system in great depth. I know some people think, well, that's just your term for God. But I know that it's not quite the same.
- [118:02]
Tom Campbell
No, it's similar, though. You know, I was surprised. I thought, you know, the religious people are not going to like this. You know, I said they. Because they have their dogma and they have their way of seeing the world, and they're not really going to like this. But I found out that mostly the contrary was true. I had any number of people who would write to me or talk to me and say, well, I had one lady in particular, she was a nurse, and she said, I'm a very religious person. I take pride in that. And everywhere I go, I take two books, the Bible and my big toe. And I thought, that's wonderful. I really appreciate you telling me that, but why? I thought people who are very religious wouldn't like this. And they said, no. They said, I got over the dogma and all that stuff a long time ago, says that's not what religion is about. Religion isn't a social club, you know, it's not about the fish fry, you know, it's not about that at all. You know. So they separated spirituality from religion. In their own minds, they were very committed to spirituality, and they did it within a religion. But when they got my big toe, suddenly they found the logical side of it. And it wasn't an illogical kind of thing that just required belief. It was actually science. This was a real thing that you could, you know, you could name, you could understand, you know, where Did God come from? Well, it evolved from that little piece of stuff that was just a, you know, one or a zero. It evolved and became this large system with lots of parts and we're the parts and we need experience. So it creates a virtual reality and part of it's configured as a computer and, you know, that gets all of this and then suddenly like, oh, I get it, I understand it. And one interesting thing that I guess will be a good ending is I was in a church because that's a very inexpensive venue. So I was giving a talk on MBT and I found this church. And so I was in this basement of this big auditorium of this church, and I had both the head pastor and his assistant pastor. And I put them on the spot. And I said, you two both have degrees in theology, right? And they said, yes. I said, you both have doctors of theology? And they said, yes. And I said, all right, I would like you to, to get together and come up with a list of the attributes of God. And I'm not looking for denominational stuff or, you know, I'm looking for just the attributes of God. If you were describing God, somebody says, well, what is God? What would you describe as its attributes? And they did that. And they came back about five, 10 minutes later with a list of maybe five or six things. And I took them one at a time and I was delighted to find out that every one of them was an attribute of the larger consciousness system. They all had the exact same attributes because they didn't say things like, it's perfect. They said something like, it's love. You know, they didn't. They were very careful in what they were saying. I guess they were very smart people. And so they all matched up very completely. And they were surprised. And I was a little surprised too, because I thought they'd have. I thought I'd match up with a lot of them, but I didn't think I'd match up with all of them. But it all matched up. And that's what like this nurse and dozens of other people have found spirituality within religion. And then this puts it on the intellectual map so that if you're a nurse, you deal with a lot of facts, things to do, things not to do, things to say, things not to say. How do you operate this machine and that test machine? They tend to be a little more left brain, you know, technology oriented people. And they have this conflict between belief and science. Science logical, that's good. This is something else. And now they find it. Oh, the two go together. It's not only good as far as spirituality goes, but it's also logical. And that then has been a biggest surprise for me. I've not run into any issues at all.
- [122:39]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I assume you're dealing with the more liberal religious people, not the fundamentalists.
- [122:44]
Tom Campbell
Well, the fundamentalists would never go to my website to begin with, so it takes care of itself. No, if I had that among fundamentalists, it would not work, but among the people who are interested in the nature of reality. So you have to be kind of an egghead to be interested in the nature of reality. And if you are, you're probably a little more logical and a little more. But the way I crafted my book was as an on ramp for the Left Brainers. The Right Brainers have hundreds of books that they can read about, you know, seeing the world intuitively and so on. There's lots of. Lots of books. And most of the books are all what I'd call poetry. They're not technical books, they're poetry books. And you have to read between the lines. You have to understand what's being meant here. You know, that's what poetry is. But the Left Brainers, the logical process people, they don't have an on ramp. They get into it and they pick up the Bhagavad Gita and they say, okay, there's this guy in a chariot. And they get about 10 pages in and they say, I can't deal with this. It doesn't make any sense because they don't know how to interpret it. They don't have the spiritual understanding to see that these are metaphors and. And get the metaphors. So they can't read that poetry. Logical types don't do poetry. They do facts. They do logical processes. So I wanted my book to be a logical process that the Left Brainers would have an on ramp for the Left Brainers onto spirituality and the bigger picture and love that they would have a ramp that they could go. That was logic, logic, logic, logic, and here we are and get there. And so that's what kind of makes my book unique in the field, is that it's meant for logical left brain people.
- [124:43]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And we will go through it step by step.
- [124:47]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, good. I'm sorry if I got it out a little in front in places where you wanted to go. But hopefully we covered everything about the Monroe.
- [124:57]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I think we've given our viewers a good taste.
- [124:59]
Tom Campbell
It was an amazing experience hanging out with Bob that much time. I mean, people would give him their right arm to spend 20 hours a week with Bob Monroe. But he was a wonderful guy. He was a real individual. Like we were saying in the car, he did all the things that a guru is not supposed to do. He smoked, he ate junk food. He was overweight. He did all those things. But he was very positive. He was caring. He was a wonderful man, and he was very interested. And it was kind of his thing to do in this life, to start the process of turning the paranormal into the normal.
- [125:42]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And I think it was very selfless. He basically started that institute and endowed it so that it could continue after his death. And it's been going for decades.
- [125:51]
Tom Campbell
And he was very courageous because in the time he published those books, talking about out of Body and hearing voices and Seeing things was not what a smart executive would be publishing. So he had courage to publish that and not call his name Ralph Smith or something. He called his name Bob Monroe, and he wrote the books and he stood up and took the blame or the cheers for it as they came. And at that time that he published that first book, he should expect. He, I'm sure, did expect a whole lot more jeers than accolades because it was very counter to the culture that he was in. Yet he stood up and did it anyway. And I think he realized he needed to do that if he was going to start this process, legitimizing the paranormal, the things he had experienced, making them legitimate science. And he didn't know how to do it, but he knew he was the start.
- [126:52]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And he had quite a lot of influence. To my understanding, many government officials showed up at the Monroe Institute to take his courses. People from the military, people from the CIA.
- [127:06]
Tom Campbell
Right. He added credibility to the whole. He did a wonderful job. He served his purpose very well.
- [127:14]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And he was certainly a very important player in getting you set on the path that you've been on for so many years.
- [127:22]
Tom Campbell
Yeah, I kind of had an idea of what it was I was going to do, but I didn't have a clue how to go about it. But after I'd spent those years with Bob, I got oriented and focused, and it made all the difference in. I wouldn't have done what I did if it hadn't been for those years with Bob.
- [127:40]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, Tom, thank you so much for enlightening me and our viewers about this important period in your life.
- [127:49]
Tom Campbell
Thank you for having me.
- [127:51]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [128:00]
Tom Campbell
Absolutely. The future lies with many people, not just with us and others like us. Book three in the new thinking allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP are we really Alone? Now available on Amazon, New Thinking Allowed.
- [128:42]
Jeffrey Mishlove
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 a free PDF copy of issue 8 of the new Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy copy go to newthinkingallowed.org.