← New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
I suggest to my students that we can look at certain reliability of evidence so there are different degrees of evidence that you can look at to give yourself a better sense of whether that memory is reliable. And that's true for current memories in one's lifetime now, not just past life.
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Keep watching to learn more. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine and for free or order beautiful printed copies, go to newthinkingalowed.org new thinking allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu.
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A
Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon. Thinking Aloud Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
- [01:42]
B
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we will be exploring spontaneous reincarnation memories. My guest is Kelphin Chin, who is a longtime meditation teacher, executive, and author whose career bridges law, business, contemplative practice, and afterlife studies. A graduate of Dartmouth, Yale, and Boston College Law School, he worked for decades in senior corporate and legal roles before founding his two nonprofits, Turning within and the Overcoming the Fear of Death foundation, through which he has taught meditation and grief reduction in more than 70 countries. He is the author of Overcoming the Fear of Death through each of the Four main Belief Systems and After the Afterlife Memories of My Past Lives, the latter detailing spontaneous recall of multiple lifetimes across millenn. Across these diverse endeavors, Chen has focused on helping individuals reduce fear, cultivate clarity, and navigate profound questions about life, death, and consciousness. Calvin is based in Southern California, and now I'll switch over to the Internet video. Welcome, Kevin. It is a real pleasure to meet you and to be with you.
- [03:23]
A
Yeah. Good to see you, Jeff.
- [03:24]
B
One thing I didn't mention specifically in our introduction, and I think it would be an important starting point for our interview today, is that you were deeply involved in the TM movement and with Maharishi Mahesh yoga, even when you were, I believe, an undergraduate student.
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A
Yeah, I was a teenager. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you mentioned to me in a previous conversation that you actually met him at some point back then in the.
- [03:54]
B
70S, a couple times, yeah.
- [03:57]
A
I was very stressed out. That's why I learned. So we're going to get into what people refer to as spiritual stuff today. In our conversation. But that's not why I got into meditation. So I got into meditation. I was a teenager. I was really stressed out. That's why I learned. And back to the shaved head thing. I did not want to shave my head like, you know, some of the other groups, meditation groups. And I thought, oh, wow, this TM thing, oh, they're talking about cortisol, you know, going down and stress being released. That was what I needed. And oh, by the way, I didn't have to shave my head like some of these other meditation groups, so my hair was down to here. It was part in the middle.
- [04:41]
B
In other words, you were considering the Hare Krishna movement.
- [04:45]
A
Well, I didn't want to mention. But yeah, that was one of them that came through the campus and was trying to pitch us and trying to get us to get involved with them. But, yeah, that was not, you know, not in the cards for me. So I. So I learned tm. I studied personally with Maharishi a couple years later, and then a few years later, again, I studied with him personally a couple of times. Then I was became a TM teacher. Taught worldwide for about 10 years, almost 10 years with his organization. And they went off in different directions, Got into other things. Architect, Vedic architecture, this and that. I was not really interested in that other stuff. So I wanted to stay focused teaching on meditation. I left the organization, and now what I teach I call turning within meditation. I've removed all the cultural trappings from the teaching. And so I teach Muslims, I teach Buddhists. I teach people from all over the world from different religions or cultures or no religion. They don't have to have any cultural or religious beliefs or whatever. I just help everybody. So I'm in 71 countries now. But I give Maharishi credit for being the guy who finally came out of India and said meditation can and should be easy. It should not involve controlling the mind and clearing the mind of thoughts and all that stuff that you're aware of. Because I know you learned it back then, too.
- [06:19]
B
Unlike you, I never rose in the movement. I never became a TM teacher, and I certainly never became responsible for the international development of the Maharishi's organization, which you were deeply involved in that.
- [06:38]
A
Yeah, I taught in. I was the first national leader for his organization in Hong Kong. We called it a nation back then. It was a British crown colony back then, but. And I coordinated eight countries in my early 20s for his organization in Asia and taught the first meditation courses at West Point Military Academy and in the US army in Korea. Including on the dmz, the Demilitarized Zone. So, yeah, I did a lot of traveling, did a lot of teaching, taught a thousand people before I left the organization. And since then, I've taught several more thousand.
- [07:14]
B
Now, the reason I bring it up, of course, is that it's my impression that people who engage in practices such as meditation are going to be prone to having spontaneous reincarnation memories. And it was in that context that your own memories began to use the phrase bubble up.
- [07:36]
A
Yeah, that's exactly what happened. They completely spontaneous, as you say, they just bubbled up out of, obviously, my deep subconscious or something. But in my mind, I was like, where did this come? This came from nowhere. I was not into reincarnation. I did not believe in past lives or reincarnation at the time I started having these experiences. I just called them experiences. I didn't know initially that they had anything to do with past lives until other jigsaw puzzle pieces started coming together. But I did not believe in heaven. I didn't believe in an afterlife after biological death either. I mean, I went to church because my parents made us go to church, Sunday school, but didn't really. I just thought it was. I didn't really believe everything. I thought it was nice stories to make people feel good. So I thought, oh, that's fine, you know, no harm, no foul kind of thing. But I didn't really believe substantively the content, you know, when I went to Sunday school. But later, you're right. I think the meditation definitely opened me up more to, we'll call it myself, you know, my memories myself. Because I started getting rid of the stress that I initially learned meditation. That's why I learned meditation, to get rid of the stress. So I got rid of that layer, whatever layers, many layers of stress, and then started opening up energetically. I think, several years into the meditation.
- [09:16]
B
I'm under the impression that meditation and related types of tools like concentration, visualization, even things like self hypnosis can be very useful for people who wish to explore these realms. I'm sure that you're not the only person who has had many spontaneous memories bubble up like that, Although there may be only a handful of people who have gone so far as to have written a book about it, as you have done.
- [09:52]
A
Yeah, no, I think you're right. I'm certainly not the only person who's had spontaneous experiences. I know for a fact, you know, many of my students who've come to me because they find me on a podcast like this, or maybe they've read my book or they've found me on the Internet, have told me about their spontaneous experiences where they, like myself, they have not never had any past life regression or anything like that to actually intentionally look for past life memories. And just spontaneously they started having similar experiences as I did, which didn't make sense other than to interpret them as perhaps past life memories. I use these words as you and I have discussed before. Perhaps, you know, past life memories and interpretation, because I think that's what they are. These are interpretations of experiences. Now these, the experience is a genuine experience. You can't question somebody's experience. It's their subjective experience. What can we say objectively about it? Well, I always say to my students, the first thing I say to my students is, first of all, don't waste your time trying to prove that your experience or your past life memory is absolutely correct because it's a subjective experience. And all subjective experiences are open to interpretation. And everybody knows that our memories are faulty. So you know, they're flawed, they're not perfect. But I suggest to my students that we can look at certain reliability of evidence, so there are different degrees of evidence that you can look at to give yourself a better sense of whether that memory is reliable. And that's true for current memories in one's lifetime now, not just past life memories. So I, I use those examples and those tips to my students so that they're not just looking at this for, for its absolute validity. Because I think that that's a waste of time. I think it's impossible because people look for proof for heaven proof of this experience, past life or whatever, and they use the word proof in the way I'm using it as reliable evidence. But they really mean is proof, proof, like a theorem, like a mathematical theorem has a proof it's a right or a wrong answer. And I think that's a waste of time because there, there's, there's no, there's no absolutes in terms of any of this. And I tell my students that, okay, here are my experiences, here's how it happened. My interpretation is that it's a past life memory, and here's why. My interpretation is that. But I'm open to another possible interpretation. If somebody comes up with something that makes sense to me, but I haven't found anything else that's made sense yet. That's how open I am to the whole thing.
- [13:05]
B
I think that's a very healthy attitude. One alternative explanation might be you're tapping into what some people call the Akashic records A database of sorts that includes all the experiences of every sentient being throughout time. So it could be that. And the mystics, of course, of every culture say we're one with everything. So there are different, many different ways to approach this. But let's talk about how it began.
- [13:37]
A
Sure, sure. So the first thing that happened to me in my mid-20s was that I had a dream. I had no idea, like I said earlier, that this had anything to do with anything past life or whatever. I just had a dream. Actually. It was a nightmare. It was a bad dream. It was a very emotional bad dream. And I just thought it was a bad dream. You know, I've had tons of bad dreams before then. You know, growing up as my first 20 something years. Every once in a while you have a nightmare. And I've always viewed that as a release of stress, of tension and whatever in my emotional some capacity as I'm getting release, releasing it during the night. We call it a nightmare. Okay. I just thought it was that. And so. But it was so powerful. That particular unpleasant experience was such a powerful thing. It obviously left an impression in my consciousness. And about six or eight months later I was on a meditation, we'll call it a meditation retreat. There's a bunch of TM teachers over in Switzerland, and I think there were 500 or a thousand of us spread out at different hotels in Switzerland and France and so forth at the time, something like that. But there were. I know there were 75 guys in my hotel in. Right outside Interlaken in Wildersfield, Switzerland. And we were at the Hotel Berghof and we were doing energetic, I'll just refer to it as energetic exercises. After our meditation or, you know, we do our regular meditation and then a few later we do these energetic exercises where we're. Mental exercises, where we're, we're, we're. We're moving energy in our bodies. And what you would see. And we were sitting around in these group meditations in the dining hall, all the furniture was gone. It was just. Furniture was stored elsewhere. But it was all foam mattresses, wall to wall. And so what you would see, if you were an observer, you'd see these guys sitting there meditating. And then after a while some of them start wiggling around and they having these energy movements, what some people refer to as Kundalini energy movements and so forth. We just called it, we called it something else. We called it Situation TM City Program or whatever. But S I D D H I But it's energy movement is what it is to the, you know, just the, the audience out there who never, you know, got involved in tm, the TM process. And most of the guys would be like hopping around. They're like hopping like frogs. That's what they're looking like. You know, they're not levitating, they're not flying, they're hopping around. Okay. And they're getting energetic movements. And at some point, maybe it was a week or two into this, it was a two month long meditation every day for two months. Okay. I had already done a six month one the year before. Six months every day. This one was two months every day. And the added difference, this two month one versus the six month one a year earlier was this energetic movement thing, this exercise. That was the new thing in the two month program. So I don't know, after a week or two or something like that, sitting in group meditations, I started getting movements and then at one point I flipped over on my back completely spontaneously. It was, it was, I'm sitting there on the phone just like everybody else is. And I was away from the wall, obviously, because when this happened, my legs flipped back behind me. So I didn't hit the wall. I was just, my legs were behind me. I'm out like this and I'm in this position like this with my arms stretched out to the side. I'm lying on the foam. Now I started sitting and now I flipped over energetically. Just pushed me onto my back and my legs are kind of up in the air. And I started experiencing being crucified upside down. And so I had all the emotions, the physical pain, the mental confusion, all of that was going on. I was reliving this experience and this went on every time we had that group meditation. So it went on for at least a couple more weeks. It turned out it went on for months after that. But after a couple of weeks of this, so I was out for a walk. We would always go for a walk, called it walk and talks after lunch and after dinner for about an hour. So we get some cardiovascular exercise because otherwise we're doing yoga and then meditating and then group meditation, yoga meditation, doing a little pranayama, alternate nostril breathing kind of stuff. That's it. So we would go out for walks. It was part of the, the required program to get some exercise. So I'm out for one of these walks after lunch with my friend George, George Hammond, and I mentioned to him about the dream that I had had six or eight months earlier. And I just started telling him the dream. I said Something simple like, you know, I had a dream. George, I haven't told you about this six, eight months ago or something, and it was really upsetting. He. He then. Then finished the dream. He told me the whole dream. He told me the rest of my dream, where I was, what I was wearing lying in a ditch on the side of the road. And. And all of this, my sandals. He told me what I was wearing. And I said, how did you know that? Because I never thought of George as a psychic. He was a. He was. Emerges in acquisitions, global lawyer and big law firms. And he said, well, I saw you there. I said, what do you mean you saw me there? He said, well, I was there with you 2,000 years ago, and I'm the person who found you that next morning. So he said, you know, you've been talking about getting crucified in these group meditations. You're reliving this experience, you know, you don't know where that's from. And I said, no. I said, so he was a. He was. He had been an altar boy from 8 years old to 12 years old at Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school, the whole thing. He paid attention, like I already told you. I didn't pay attention in Sunday school. I didn't know any of this stuff. So he said, oh, and then he explained to me. And then it just opened me up to all kinds of other memories from that lifetime a couple thousand years ago. Because I had no idea that's the first memory that happened with me. I don't talk about that one in my books. Like the first book, my first book, Overcoming the Fear of Death. I talk about one of my past lives was a Carthaginian slave. I wanted my first public mention of any of my past lives to be of somebody unknown because most of my memories, a couple of dozen memories that go back 6,000 years now of different past lives are of unknown people. But that first one that shook me in my mid-20s was of that person.
- [21:25]
B
Who was a known person talking about a known person. And I know from our previous conversation that five of the 20 some memories, 25 or so memories that you have are of famous people. And that right away is going to undoubtedly arouse the suspicions justifiably, I suppose, among our viewers that you're on some sort of an ego trip and it would be easy to be seduced by the glamour of the thought. I was once a famous person.
- [22:05]
A
Yeah, No, I agree with the suspicion. So I'm also suspicious.
- [22:09]
B
On the other hand, you had this experience and before we go into any of your famous lives, let's talk about your life as a slave during the Punic Wars.
- [22:23]
A
The reason I talk about that one first is not only because it's not a historically known person, but mainly I talk about that one first. And this is what I always say to my students. Doesn't matter who you think you are famous, not famous, doesn't matter. What do you take from it that helps you today in 2025 and 21st century planet Earth lifetime that you can use. And so that's the main reason why I talked about that Carthaginian lifetime in my first, my first of my three books. And in that lifetime it's interesting how the jigsaw puzzle pieces came together because I didn't know, like you said it was in the Punic Wars. I didn't know that. I didn't know that it was Carthaginian slave initially either. All I knew initially when I had that first memory, which was about a year, maybe six months, something like that, after the first memory that I had, the first thing was a visual, like looking down at my body. So it was as if my mind, my consciousness is, you know, 15ft above my physical biological body, looking at my biological body. Roasting, literally roasting in the sun on a piece of wreckage. And I just, you know, had like, you know, a little rag around my waist basically clothing wise, you know, didn't. It was very hot and I was pretty beat up looking and literally burnt, you know, like roasting in the sun. Literally. That was my first experience. And then later I had over, when I say later, over the next weeks, months, years, decades. So this, the jigsaw puzzle pieces for this lifetime came together probably over a 10 to 15 year at least period of time. Little pieces and. But the pieces came together at different, in different ways. For example, how did I know I was. A slave? I knew I was a slave because I had, you know, manacles, whatever they call it, you know, still I had chains around, around my wrists and my ankles that were broken off. You know, obviously they're broken off. Otherwise, you know, how could I get better? I wasn't still chained to the boat that I was in, but I could still see the marks, the scars from the chains. And I had a couple of chains still on me and, and I was very black, dark, like blue black, dark skin. And the way I figured out that I was on a warship is because at some point I saw a battle of warships with rowers. And. And so I figured out, you know, then I Had later had a vision of myself below decks rowing and being chained and so forth in a battle obviously prior to the, you know, vision that I initially had. And, and we would ram into other ships. Now at that point I still don't know who I'm rowing for but I know I'm a slave, I'm chained down. And then at some point I saw this thing come down from another ship. Now I don't, I didn't study any of this so I don't know where this came from other than, you know, I don't know if I ever saw it in a movie. Did yo maybe you saw it in a movie when you were 11 years old and you forgot. That's true. Maybe, I don't know but I don't have any recollection of it. But I saw a thing come down from another ship and hook onto another ship and it was hooking onto my ship. And then I looked that up what that was and it turns out it was called a Corvus. The Romans created it where a corvus is a word for raven. And so they had this bronze piece or whatever metal on the hook. It was a hook, it looked like a beak of a bird and it was at the end of a long gang plant plank and it would come down and hook onto the enemy's ships. I researched this and looked it up further. So this is not part of my memory and I try to distinguish in this book, my third book of past lives I try to distinguish what I'm researching and what I'm remembering for the reader. So this was not part of my memory but I found out that the Romans only did this during one of the Punic wars in order to even the playing field because the Carthaginians had ruled the Mediterranean and therefore the trade routes and therefore they were much more powerful than the Roman Empire money wise because they had better maneuverability of their warships. The Romans were behind the curve in terms of their, their, their maritime technology. So the. But then they created this thing and that evened the playing field because then you could, you could get your soldiers onto the enemy ship very easily and then just fight as if you were on land even though you're on the Mediterranean Sea. So that's how I figured out that I was in a Carthaginian ship and which Punic war it was and so forth and so on. But that's an example of how I pieced together the puzzle pieces over a 10 or 15 year period getting different pieces of information.
- [28:21]
B
An important point here Is that when you had this experience, it came with a sense that it was first person, that this was you having the experience. It wasn't as if you were third person observer looking at something that might have been a dreamlike image. It felt like this was me.
- [28:46]
A
Yeah, no, it's a good point because the way it felt like it was me was not just that it felt like first person, but I had the senses. I remembered the smells. I remembered the smell of being below decks. And, you know, it's really disgusting smell, to be honest, if you think about it, because they're not letting us go to the bathroom anywhere else and so forth. And then people throwing up during battle because they're freaking out, all of that. I remembered the feel, the sense, the heat. I remember going up on deck one. I don't know why they let a couple of. Few of us up on deck in the middle of the night ones not during a battle. And I just remember the smell of the fresh air, the contrast between the fetid odors below deck and. And where we mostly were, and then going up on. And in the peacefulness, the stillness of the night sky. Not in battle, just in a calm Mediterranean so forth. And these visceral, firsthand kind of sensory experiences. I remembered the other big takeaway from this lifetime was the experience of my separation of mind and body. That was the huge takeaway. The fact that I willed myself mentally to keep my body alive long enough for some fishermen to come rescue me when I was on the wreckage. That's the piece of information from 2,300 years ago that I've taken to this lifetime to help me through difficult times. The power of my mind to will things to happen as best as humanly possible. You can't just will anything to happen. But like, for example, willing myself to show up at a job interview after I'm laid off, again after I'm 50 years old, and to present myself as a together person who's not as freaked out as I am inside about not getting this job to support my family of four that I need. So that ability to just have the confidence to put myself in that situation again and again and come out the other side is what I drew from that 2,300-year-old experience.
- [31:14]
B
I seem to recall that you sent me an email, I think it was yesterday, where you said you come up with another memory 8,000 years ago.
- [31:24]
A
Sometimes I, I've. I've. I've spoken and blurted things out in other languages that I. That Kelvin Chin has never studied. I never Even studied anything about the culture, never mind the language. And some of them are ancient languages that, you know, they don't teach in schools or on apps. Typically, you know, this one, I started. I don't know, I don't know what language this one was, but I was blurting something out in a. In a. In an unusual language. Um, and. And this would happen sometimes, just when I'm about to go to sleep. It's. It happens typically when I'm in a more relaxed state, in other words. Um, but it's not like when I'm driving around or walking around on the street. I'm not babbling to myself, but. But it's usually when I'm in a quieter mode at home alone, and something will just kind of come out, like after my meditations or whatever. And I had a vision with this one, and it was arid and it was. I had this knowingness. Like, when I say knowingness, what do I mean? I mean, like, how do I know that I'm on a call, a video conference call with Jeff Mishlove. I just know it. I don't need to go ask my neighbors to come in and verify that. I am on a laptop right now with Jeff Mishlove in my apartment in Los Angeles. So that level of knowingness, I just knew I was seeing southwest North America. Southwest America. And I had this sense it was around 8,000 years ago, that it was really old. I don't know, was it 8? Was it 9,000 years ago? Was it 10,000 years? I don't know exactly, but I'm just saying 8 because it was a long, long time ago. And I was native, obviously I was a native person living there in this arid environment with cliffs and so forth, sort of cliff dwelling kind of places. That was my memory. Yeah.
- [33:33]
B
And I live in the Southwest. I'm in New Mexico, not far from where cliff dwellers had habitations. And the people around here do believe the natives, that they've been here for maybe 12,000 years.
- [33:51]
A
So that's my oldest memory. The Sumerian one is around 6,000 years ago. That one. I did remember something in Sumerian, which is. So I had this experience and I don't know who I was in Sumerian. I was a businessman of some sort, and I was fairly successful because I could tell because of the structure that I lived in, that the memory, you know, came to me where I was. And I was talking to a spiritual teacher, but I was a businessman, but I was obviously probably spiritually oriented and. And I was talking to a spiritual teacher. All night. And it was about. We stayed up all night talking about different ideas. And the memory that I have is standing on my. I don't know what you call it. It's like an outside sitting area. It was bigger than a balcony, you know, like 30.
- [34:51]
B
Patio.
- [34:52]
A
Yeah, big patio on the second floor. Yeah. So it was two story buildings and. But I had a view. I had like an unobstructed view. That's what makes me think I was probably a successful businessman. And I had an unobstructed view of the city. And I remember he and I were standing there talking with each other and I saw the bird, a flock of birds, you know, rising up and the sun had just risen maybe a half an hour earlier, hour earlier or something like that. It was very early in the morning. And what I remember is his. His nickname that I used to call him. I used to call him Asha. And this came to me in my. I was either meditating or I was right after my meditation, I was just sitting quietly and I thought you called him Asha. That was. You called him. A nickname for him was Asha. And this was in Sumeria. And I thought Sumeria. So I finished my meditation, I got up and I looked up. Is there a word called Asha in Sumerian? And there is, and it means cosmic order. So that kind of made sense with this, you know, there's a spiritual teacher and whatever. And my nickname for him was cosmic order or whatever. Asha, as they called him that. So again, back to your original point. You know, could this be Kelvin's imagination? Sure, it could be. But you know, where does this come from? How did I know this? I don't know. Could I have tapped into the Akashic records? This what I call the superhighway of data that exists of all experience energetically out there? Sure, that's possible too. I think the distinguishing feature that I point to is the. Is what you said, Jeff, which is it? There's an I ness to it. There's a. Like a. There's something about that. It, it's. It's. I'm having a first person experience and, and I point to sometimes, as I did earlier, the sensory experiences that this first person me seems to be having along with it. Like being in battle in the Middle east, in the Crusades, and feeling that the grit of the sand, the little teeny rocks in my teeth, you know, during the battle, because you get these 1400 pound war horses and you know, I was huge back then, you know, and I'm probably about 300, 350 pounds on, on top of a 1400 pound warhorse and you get all of these hundreds of war horses on the desert kicking up all this dust. So you naturally would get, you know, stuff stuck in your teeth. You know, the. Just the rocks, dust and the sand and everything. So that kind of to me gives me a little bit, to use the term I used earlier, a little bit more reliable evidence that maybe the meanness of it, the me, the first personness of it, maybe there's some reality to it.
- [38:02]
B
As I recall, Calvin, most of your memories are of being a male in your past lives, but not all of them, right?
- [38:13]
A
Yeah, not all of them. And not all of them being human either. So yeah, no, I remember being a female. I don't have a lot of memories of that, but I have a very. We'll just leave it at this. I have a very explicit memory from that lifetime of being a female. And I also have memories of being on another planet. And I didn't see myself, but I could see my friends, what they looked like on the other planet. So. And I couldn't see my vehicle that was behind me. But I noticed in that other planetary experience that when I was walking out from my ship, which I'd landed in a shallow section of an inland sea, for some reason I just again, the knowingness thing, I don't know. How do I know it was an inland sea? I don't know it was, but I was walking towards my friends who were on the shoreline near the. Closer to the shoreline, and I felt I could feel the water on my skin and it felt different from water that I experience on planet Earth against my skin as a human being. So there's something different about the feel of the water on my body. Again, I didn't see my body, but that's as close as I can get to.
- [39:40]
B
Well, you indicated that you saw your friends. Were they human?
- [39:44]
A
No. So they were not human looking? No. They had no hair. Well, they were like us with no hair. I just catapulted you and me into the non human catastrophe. No, but they had no hair, big eyes, mental telepathy. They had mouth and lips that could move, but they didn't need to. And we were just communicating with each other. Mental telepathy. And they had long robes, the bottom of which were getting wet because they were walking out in the shallow water to greet me. And it was like old friends, like seeing old friends. I hadn't seen you in a long time. It was that kind of communication, how have you been? And so forth. And it was a Judaismic dome set back from the beach in the. In the woods. There was trees and so forth, like our planet. I mean, if I had this. If I had to describe the planet just again, I only saw this little. This short little window of vision of the planet. It looked very much like Earth. Although the water on my. Assuming it was water, I don't know if it was water, but assuming it was felt differently on my skin than it does it because I swim twice a week, so I know what water feels like. I don't just bathe in the shower, but, you know, I'm in the water a lot as this lifetime. And it just felt really, really different. It was an interesting experience, but it was a short experience. And then I have that animal experience too. Describe that, the animal experience. And. And it's interesting that this animal experience happened between human lifetimes. So a lot of times people think that, you know, we were animals before maybe, and then we became humans later. And I think that may be generally true for most people. But, you know, I'm a little bit of an outlier, so I kind of do things a little bit outside, outside the box, so to speak. And this lifetime I had a memory of being an eagle. And it was after. I'm not exactly sure when it was, but I think I put. Placed it in my book after my Buddhist monk lifetimes. I was several Buddhist monks. I'm not sure who I was as a Buddhist monk, but Tibet, China, and in another experience, Southeast Asia. But I remember thinking in my eagle lifetime, I was consciously aware and I remember thinking that I really enjoyed the solitude of being an eagle. Soaring. I was just soaring at hundreds of feet up or maybe a thousand feet. I don't know how way up above this landscape of wooded, no buildings, no human structures, felt like Pacific Northwest, Alaska maybe, I don't know, but that kind of huge expanse of wooded evergreens. But I remember thinking I enjoyed the solitude. And it reminded me of when I was a Buddhist monk. That's why I think it was after my Buddhist monk lifetimes. And I remember seeing. I was holding it at one point in that lifetime, I was holding an animal, some sort of, you know, I don't know, squirrel, rodent, some animal. I was about to eat him, but I was. I was holding him and it was belly up to me and we were eye to eye looking. I was looking at him and of course he knew that I was going to kill him or he or she, right? And I took my talent and I swiped down and I saw his spirit leave. So I remember that from my eagle lifetime, seeing the spirit of the animal that I killed that I was going to eat leave its body right before I killed it. So it left the body, you know, So I don't know if that happens all the time, but I know that can. I've heard about that happening with humans sometimes who will come back and talk about it from an NDE experience, near death experience.
- [44:10]
B
Another feature of your spontaneous memories involves people you know in your present lifetime who you apparently interacted with in previous lives. And in your book, you mention a few examples of that.
- [44:27]
A
Several people who I know now, there, there's some people who I have been friends with before we had our memories, like George. There's other people like Sheba I have not met. I did not mention her in my book because I just met her a year ago. One of my. Somebody found me. She has an interesting story. So she found me because she was on a flight listening to a podcast that she often listened to, evidently. And I was being interviewed and I was talking about my past lives. And she kept having this dissociating experience during her flight while she was listening to the podcast. She thought that's unusual. And she's a trauma therapist, so she understands about dissociation and so forth. And she's had her own spiritual experiences since childhood, off and on. I guess I don't know all the details of those experiences, but she, she, that's. That was how she first quote, unquote, met me via that podcast. She contacted me. She just, she said she doesn't usually do that when she contacted me. Says I never do this, but she contacted me. She felt the need to contact me. She contacted me and she connected, she said, with my lifetime 2000 years ago. Like you're saying, it's like she felt she had some connection with 2000 years ago with me. But the interesting thing is, so she lives in San Diego, I live in Los Angeles. So she talked to her husband about it and she said, I want to go meet this guy. So he said, yeah, yeah, you should go meet this guy. So we had lunch together and she had all of this trepidation, which was very unusual, she said, for her personality. Again, I'd never met her before, although she had by then had taken my meditation class. And so she knew me somewhat personality wise, at least through my meditation class, how I come across and all of that. She didn't know a lot about my past lives and stuff. But so several months later, she comes up to have lunch or whatever. And she has all this trepidation, and she couldn't figure out why she was so nervous to meet me. And then some later, months later, she actually wrote me a. She wrote me a letter about this that describes this. And. But she realized later that she had shared a lifetime with me when I was in the 1100s, around 800 years ago or 900, you know, a thousand years ago, whatever, that she had shared a lifetime with me from then. So. And then you got my kids. I talk about my kids and my daughter and myself corroborating something, like, really weirdly that. Where she would call me her brother, and I called her my sister. But we didn't know we each were doing that with our respective friend groups or. You know, I used to work in law firms, so I used to do a lot of networking. So I would call up a lawyer and say, hey, it was great to meet you at the reception. You know, let's talk. You know, how, you know, you have any kids? We were just kind of networking, and, you know, I'd find out about their family. And when I talked to him about my daughter, who was then at San Francisco State, you know, as a student, I would say, oh, yeah, my. My. My sister is a dancer. She's in the dance program. I mean, my daughter. I would just keep doing that repeatedly. And so finally, I mentioned that to her. After years of doing that, just catching myself, I didn't think anything of it. And then she said. I mentioned it to her. I said, you know, I just got off this phone with this guy and blah, blah, blah. And I said this, da, da, da. And she said, oh, Daddy, I've been doing that with you for years, through all of high school. I call you my brother by mistake. Oh, my brother teaches meditation. I mean, my dad teaches meditation. So that's when something started rising up in me, because I knew it. I had a connection with her from a couple of lifetimes. But I wasn't sure what our relationship was. And I knew in one lifetime from a couple thousand years ago, she was my daughter. But there was another lifetime. I'd had this feeling about her a couple of hundred years ago. And that's when I realized about Frederick. His favorite sister, older sister had died very young, about 49 years old. And he died when he was 73 or 74 years old, something like that. Much later, his older sister died much younger, and he went into a depression for a month or whatever. Historically, they talk about this. Built this temple for her and so forth and so on. In the 1750s or whenever it was.
- [49:47]
B
We're talking about the King of Prussia.
- [49:50]
A
Yeah. Frederick. Frederick, yeah. Frederick ii. Yeah, yeah. His, Frederick the Great is what his, his citizenry called him Frederick the Great. So some of these, some of these kings and emperors and whatever call themselves great. That's a little bit, a little, little hubris there, a little bit ego issues. But Frederick ii, his citizenry loved him so much because he set up an economy and so forth and was so successful in expanding Prussia that they called him Frederick the Great.
- [50:31]
B
It's probably for the best not to elaborate too much on these famous lifetimes. People can read your book and I hope they do. I highly recommend your book. Also talk about the interval between lives. I'm under the impression you've also had experiences of what the Tibetans would call the Bardo Plains.
- [50:57]
A
Yeah, I have, I've had experiences between lives. So what's it like and what are we doing and so forth. First of all, what's heaven like? Heaven is like here in a lot of ways, but it's more, it's mental. Our minds are experiencing, are in creating whatever we want to create on the other side. And I tell my students it's like being on vacation. But what can you do between lives also to prepare yourself for if you want to come back into another lifetime on planet Earth or another planet, whatever. But I think most people tend to come back here because of the familiarity factor. And I suggest to my students to be conscious and strategic about when they come back and don't just willy nilly come back into any family that will take you because I think a lot of people do do that and then some people will be a little bit more strategic and they're attracted to certain soul and so forth, personality type and so forth. And so there's a little bit more thought in the process. I, I, I encourage my students to put a lot of thought into the process as much as possible. Now you can't control everything, but I, I always, I've been saying this for thousands of years. Control what we can, can control and let go what you cannot control. So it's just a simple thing, a statement, maxim, but not always easy to, to, to effectuate. But I remember for example, so this happened to me when I was swimming and I swim laps as I briefly mentioned, and I swim about thousand 1100 laps a couple times a week. And so I'm doing in a lap lane and I'm just swimming. And so I've been doing this for years. So it's not like I got to remember. Oh, I got to remember to do this. I got to remember that, you know, the technique is down. So I'm just kind of in a. You could call a quasi meditative mode. I'm a kind of free flowing thinking mode, basically right till I get to the end and I got to turn and come back. Well, okay, I'm in one of those modes. And this was while I was writing my past life book. Actually it was February of February of whatever year I think it was 2023. I was writing the book and I was in the middle of writing the book and this came to me where I knew that I had been Frederick the Great. I was also knew that I had been a World War II fighter pilot in the US Navy flying off aircraft carriers. And I flew off the USS Enterprise a number of times. And then in one of the battles in the Second World War in the Pacific, which I talk about in the book, one of the elevators. There were three elevators in the aircraft carrier in the bow, one in the stern and one in the midship. And it would take the planes up and down, so forth. And you'd land and they'd take it down and they'd refuel and rearm it and then you'd come up at the other end and then, you know, you take off. Well, one of the elevators got severely damaged so that it was unusable. And I get stuck, I think on Guadalcanal, I think I got stuck on the island and so forth because couldn't land back there on the aircraft carrier. So I had that whole memory. But back to the swimming experience. I had a memory in between lifetimes. I just had this. I saw myself while I'm swimming now. I'm just in this kind of free flowing mental mode. And I see myself looking down at planet Earth at World War I is going on. So I'm watching World War I in Europe happening and I had this feeling about it. This is in between lifetimes. I'm having a memory of in between lifetimes. So I had. I had this feeling in this memory that something was going to happen again and things were going to blow up and be a mess on planet Earth again. So I had this sense based on what I think it was based on. So this was around 20, I mean, I mean, 1917, 1918 or something like that. I'm having this. I'm up in planet Earth time. I'm in heaven, we'll say observing planet Earth. What is that sense that I. That something bad's going to happen in several In a few more decades or whatever, a couple more decades is that I think it was based on my experience of being a king of Prussia fighting the Russians. And I knew the Russian mentality and how the Russians felt about the Germans and those people. So I. So that's the sense that I had. Now. Then I went back, and after I finished swimming, I went and looked up stuff. Okay, so this is the part that's not my memory, but then I looked up, based on this, this jigsaw puzzle couple pieces here, I went and looked some stuff up. So I call that following the breadcrumbs and my tips to my students. So I looked this up, and I found out that, in fact, Russia had surrendered to Germany in World War I. Now, people know the history. Germany lost World War I, but before Germany surrendered to, you know, the British and so forth In World War I, Russia had already surrendered to Germany and had given up a huge amount of their population had died and so forth. They gave up a huge amount of money. All kinds of stuff they gave up to Germany. And I thought that that was going to blow up in Germany's face a couple of decades later because I knew the Russian mentality, having fought them in the 1700s. Hopefully that's not too confusing to people, but tried to lay that out as clearly as possible. That's that. And that's why I decided to come back. And I thought. And I was right about. Because you're not always right about these predictions. Right. But I had a sense, and I signed up and I learned how to fly planes, obviously. And then I flew fighter planes off of the. In World War II in the Pacific, U.S. navy.
- [57:59]
B
Well, I know there are a number of instances in your book where in one lifetime you benefited from lessons that you remembered from an earlier lifetime.
- [58:11]
A
Exactly. That to me is the takeaway. To me, everything else is just cocktail party talk. Who cares who Kelvin Chin claims that he may have been in some other lifetime? Whether he was an eagle, a Buddhist monk, or whether he was Frederick the Great, or whether he was this person or that person, who cares? I agree with that. It doesn't matter. And I never thought I would be talking about this. I started having these experiences, as I mentioned, in my mid-20s. I never wrote down a journal or anything. I never thought I'd be talking about it except with my friend George, who had started adding memories two years before I did so. But now here I am teaching classes and helping people with their fears about death and dying and so forth. But it's. It's all about how does it help me today? How, what can I use about this knowledge about myself that seems to be coming from somewhere now? Okay, Kelvin's saying it comes from past life memories. Maybe it's not coming from there, maybe it's coming from someplace else. Who cares what, what matters is how is it helping me today to live my life in 21st century Earth? I'm a pragmatist and that's one of the personality traits. We talk all about personality traits in the last half of the book, right? And to me that's one of my personality traits, being a pragmatist and so forth that's carried throughout all my different lifetimes. How it's manifested is manifested in different ways, you know, in different lifetimes. But there are certain personality traits I think, that continue with us over the millennia.
- [59:49]
B
For one thing, I know that in our conversations you've been very clear with me that you don't want your work having to do with the afterlife or reincarnation to be thought of as part of a religion, right?
- [60:06]
A
No, no, no. To me these are experiences. I help people from all religions or no religion, I mean people who are not religious, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm here to help. Human beings, last I checked were all on earth, human beings. And however I can help them reduce their suffering, increase their contentment in inner peace. To me that's my goal. But no, the continuation of the mind to me is a normal experience. It's not a religious thing. So you know, I was just interestingly last night watching a zoom of a funeral service, a kind of celebration of life service of somebody I knew many, many decades ago. I didn't know her really that well, but I knew her husband better. And people were saying, yeah, well, we don't know what happens after we die. And I think that's true for a lot of people. They don't know what happens after they biologically die. I have been fortunate to have a lot of experiences, including my near death experience, almost drowning and in addition to all the stuff that we've talked about today and communicating with dead loved ones and so forth and people, and also dead people, I don't know people on the other side and beings who on the other side also who I don't, I didn't know before I started communicating with them. When I say beings, I mean not never been human beings, but angelic beings is what I call them. But all of that has just happened very naturally to me. So to me it's not mystical stuff. I Don't even think of it as paranormal. I mean, I understand the term because it's not normal for most people. But to me, I try to demystify this, all of this stuff. And, and it's, and it's not religious in the sense that based purely on belief. So yeah, it's an interpretation of my experience, as we said earlier, of my experiences, interpretation. So I'm, again, I'm not here to foist my interpretations on other people either. But yeah, it, to me it's logical. You know, if we talk about the, you know, the first law of thermodynamics, you know, energy cannot be created nor destroyed. You know, it can take on different forms. And if we're talking about energy, we're talking about the mind is continuing, obviously the biological body is not continuing. It's interesting. I used to just call it the physical and the non physical. Now I talk about it differently because I, I, I inserted the word biological body. I didn't say fit. I used to say physical body, but now I say biological body because something physical does continue after we biologically die. And people may think, what are you talking about? Nothing physical continues. No, our mind continues. Now most people don't consider their mind physical. I do. Because from a physics standpoint, mind, energy, light is a physical thing. It's measurable, it's identifiable and measurable. And so from a physics standpoint, it is physical. Now I understand that from most people's standpoint, they're not going to think of the mind as physical. But I think that that's an important point as we go forward together as humanity. When I say together, and you and me together, Jeff as well, because we have an interest in this stuff figuring out, I think it's important going forward to help us figure out this whole continuation, this whole NDE thing, this whole consciousness thing, this whole past life thing. I think it's a very important point to acknowledge that the mind is physical in the sense that I just described. It's energetic, it's light, it can be measurable. From a physics physicist standpoint, it's a physical thing. And so heaven is also physical in that sense. It's not the way most people think of heaven, but I think of heaven. And my experience of heaven is that there is identifiability there. This individuality. I mean, who's the medium talking to if they, you know, if they, if they're not talking to some individual on the other side? It's not cosmic soup. I call it. Heaven is not just a big Mix of cosmic soupness. No, there's individuality and there's identifiability of this and that and so forth. On the other side, to me, that's physical. Yes, it's energetic, yes, it's a field of light. But it's not just a cosmic soup of light. It's not my experience.
- [65:11]
B
I'm glad you brought that up personally. From a metaphysical perspective, I like the idea expressed by many guests on our channel that reality is basically mental in nature rather than physical. But I'm perfectly open to the idea that the afterlife can be explained in physical terms. I know of several efforts to do it. As I told you earlier and I've mentioned many times to our viewers, New Thinking Allowed. My mentor, Arthur M. Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter, the author of the Reflexive Universe, agreed very much with the idea that the photon, the light itself, is very crucial in understanding who we are. Because in his model, light is an expression of, I guess you could even say cosmic purpose. It's as if light knows where it's going.
- [66:15]
A
It's interesting. Yeah, yeah. I think it's a crucial point to identify light as physical. And heaven is physical in that.
- [66:28]
B
Well, Kevin, it's been a real pleasure to connect with you, to have this conversation, to share your experiences with the New Thinking Allowed audience. Once again, I want to encourage people to take a look at your book after the Afterlife. I can tell you I will be following your work very closely and hope to have many more conversations with you.
- [66:53]
A
Terrific. Thanks so much, Jeff.
- [66:56]
B
My pleasure. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [67:18]
A
Foreign. Book four in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
- [67:42]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org for early access to our videos and livestream events. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org.