← The Telepathy Tapes
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Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges and unexpected truths from the Telepathy tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like psi abilities. If you haven't yet listened to the Telepathy tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non speakers and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't for long. We've all set health goals, exercise more, eat better. But without a plan they often fade. That's where Prolon comes in.
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Its five day fasting mimicking diet gives.
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You a science backed, structured approach to stay on track. Unlike quick fix cleanses or detoxes, it resets at the cellular level, delivering benefits that stick with you long after the five days. Prolon is a plant based nutrition program featuring soups, snacks and beverages designed to nourish the body while keeping it in a fasting state, triggering cellular rejuvenation and renewal. Developed over decades with USC's Longevity Institute and backed by top US medical centers, Prolon has been shown to support biological age reduction, metabolic health, skin appearance, fat loss with muscle protection, energy and a healthier relationship with food no matter the season. When I'm craving a real reset, Prolon is the only nutritional program that works for me. It's convenient, backed by noble winning science and it works. Ready for your own reset. For a limited time, Prolon is offering Telepathy Tapes listeners 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift. When you subscribe to their five day program, just visit prolonlife.com tapes that's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F E.com tapes to claim your 15% off discount and your bonus gift prolonlife.com tapes I think we're all in the midst of some cold and also very busy days and honestly, most of us have very little time to cook. And that's why I've been loving factor. They make eating well feel doable because with fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs, I can just heat, eat and move on with my day. Lately I've been reaching for their Mediterranean bowls. Lots of protein, colorful veggies, whole food ingredients and healthy fats. And I love that there are no refined sugars, no artificial sweeteners and no refined seed oils. It just feels clean and supportive, especially in February when I'm trying to stay nourished and energized. They have over 100 rotating meals each week and meals that can check any box. High protein calorie, smart Mediterranean diet, ready to eat salads and Even a new MusclePro collection for strength and recovery. So you never get bored. Always fresh, never frozen. Ready in about two minutes. No prep, no stress. I love eating factor and you will too. Head to FactorMeals.com tapes 50 off and use code tapes 50 off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor New subscribers only. Varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active. Today we're releasing the extended interview that we recorded with Dr. Neal Theise, the pathologist and author of the book Notes on a Scientific Theory of Connection, consciousness and being. Dr. Theise was featured in both of our energy healing episodes and the Alzheimer's episode of season two of the Telepathy Tapes. Not only has Neil been an amazing resource for us because he's so deeply involved in the cross sections of science, philosophy and spirituality, but he's also just a fascinating person with so many incredible stories and life experiences. In this conversation he tells us much more about his mother's experience with Parkinson's at the end of her life, as you heard a little bit about in episode 10 of season two. And he dives deeper into his own realizations, thoughts and what he thinks the connection is between the world of non speakers, survivors of near death experiences and the thinning of the veil at the end of Life. So here's Dr. Neil Theise.
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B
So Neil, our audience will remember you from the past two episodes as the physician slash scientists who helped us understand the biology of energy healing. You broke down kind of the cellular dynamics and, and what the interstitium is and how it all points to the body that is far more interconnected than we previously understood. But you're here today for a very different reason and it's because your science mind kind of led you somewhere that maybe you weren't expecting to go into a kind of inquiry that involved not just data and, you know, microscopes and everything that you kind of, you know, walked away from but death and the end of life and what happens when the brain, when the brain begins to break down. So I guess, you know, I kind of started diving into a little bit of the book and your mother. But why don't we first just back up and explain to me your mother's diagnosis and some of the things that you started noticing about her at the.
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End of her life?
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C
Sure. So she had become a widow. In 1996, my father passed away. Begged my brother and I to come back to New York and not leave her in Florida where my father wanted to be living. And she came up and was very robustly engaged in New York life. She had a job working for my dentist, manning his office. Everyone loved her. She would wander the city seeing shows by herself. She read voraciously, three, four books a week and she and was quite fine and active. But she developed Parkinson's and it was very mild, it was very slow, progressive. But that really intruded on her ability to get around. But then she started falling and she had some severe hospitalization. She became afraid of getting around. She became very fragile. And because of her unsteadiness we really needed her to have home care. Eventually needing 24 hour home care because what started to happen then was she kind of lost her short term memory. It happened over like a day it seemed. I went to visit her one evening and we had dinner and I set her up to watch TV for the evening. And as I was leaving she said, oh wait, before you leave, can you help me find my glasses? And she was holding them and you know, I said, oh, I do this all the time. I'm looking for my glasses while I'm wearing them or they're on my head, but it's a different thing when they're in your hand. And within a few months it was clear she could not remember like five minutes ago. And it became dangerous for her to be at home. And we wound up getting 24 hour home care. And then she developed a skin infection. And we know with little old ladies, if they get an infection, it can really whack out their immune system. Probably cortisol, the stress hormone goes nuts. And we couldn't clear the infection. And then she sort of lost all sense of where she was, who she was. And I called up the doctor, her geriatrician. We had already decided she did not want any special measures. She never wanted to be in a hospital again, did not want to if anything happened to her, she was fine and you know, just supportive care. But she clearly needed antibiotics. But I wasn't going to put her in a hospital because we agreed not to. And the doctor suggested we take her to hospice care and Bellevue Hospice and in the ambulet to hospice. She started ignoring me and talking to Dead people who were behind me. My dead father, a couple of her dead sisters, and stopped communicating with me at all. And we put her into hospice. I was supposed to go that night to that year's science of consciousness meetings in Stockholm, and I thought I had to cancel the trip. And the hospice staff and my husband were both like, she's not going to die tomorrow. You need to go do what you were going to do. So I went home, packed, flew to Stockholm while my mother's in hospice care talking to dead people. And the first morning of the consciousness meeting, I hear Peter Fenwick talking about people having end of life visions. And I realized that's what's happening, which was remarkable because my mother's talking to deaf people. And also really disturbing. Oh, it's the end of her life. How did we suddenly get there? I came home. She was in home hospice for six or seven months. Aside from talking to dead people, she had stopped walking, talking, and eating generally. If I heard her talking to some dead people, I would try to come in, she would stop. I tried sneaking in, crawling along the floor. Even if she wasn't facing me, the dead people would tell her, neil's listening. Stop talking. And then after six or seven months, she started walking, talking, and eating again, just spontaneously. I got a call from her home attendant saying, Mr. Neal, come quick. Your mother's in the kitchen asking for a cup of tea. And she was British, so that was significant. And she continued to talk to dead people for the rest of her life, which is about six years. It started with relatives, Then some of them started bringing friends. Friends started bringing relatives. Strangers started showing up. People wanted favors from her. People wanted healings from her. This went on the entire time. And she would talk about it. The only cognitive thing going on is she couldn't remember five minutes ago, but she knew who everybody was. She could recall things very clearly. And she was happy to talk about it because we asked her and we made it okay for her to talk about it, which I think is significant to what we're going to talk about. We never embarrassed her. We never said, oh, that sounds crazy, or that can't be. Ma just explored what was happening. Eventually, she started traveling out of body, which I knew because a friend of mine is a shaman who's skilled at traveling the astral plane, and called me up one day and said, so I met your mother last night. And she had a whole life, it turned out, for the next two or three years, traveling up and about. And when I asked her about it, she was kind of pissed off that she had been found out. But. But she would talk about that spirit guides from the universe showed up. Spontaneous enlightenment experiences which from my Zen Buddhist practice I've read like Dogen, the scholar who brought Zen to Japan from China 800 years ago. What he was describing, my mother is describing.
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A
So what was she describing?
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C
This is one of my favorite experiences. I went in and she was lying on her back on her bed, wide eyed, looking at the ceiling. I said, what are you looking at? She said, space. I said, really? What's that like? She said, well, it's not at all what I expected and it's just so beautiful. I said, well, what's it like? She said, she made this gesture with her hand like she was chopping carrots. And she said, well, it's not smooth, it's like chopping carrots. It's in pieces and it's just so beautiful. And time is like that too. It's not smooth, it's in tiny little pieces. I wish you and Mark and the kids could see it the way I do. It's just so beautiful. And this is a classic Buddhist teachers talk about this, that the particulate nature of material existence. That's kind of like quantum theory. My mother's experiencing the quantum particulate nature of the universe, but she has no short term memory and she's just, you know, 78 years old.
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B
Wow, that is fascinating.
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C
Yeah. And during this time, you know, I grew up with her. Obviously she was a very anxious woman. She spent her life was pervaded by anxiety and during this time there was no anxiety whatsoever. And one day I said to her, ma, you know, you're even smiling when you sleep. How do you stay so happy? And she said, well, I don't really worry about the future anymore and I can't remember the past, so all I have is the now. And when you live in the now, you're happy.
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A
Wow.
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And that was her last six years of her life. And she died at home, comfortably in bed on her own schedule. She a couple of times decided she was going to go and stopped eating. No disturbance, no discomfort at all, just stopped eating. And then she changed her mind, stuck around and then she didn't. And she departed in the middle of Hanukkah in 2016 in a Bliss state. Really? Yeah. And then she appeared to us after because she's not entirely gone. Do you want to hear that?
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Yes.
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So my husband Mark doesn't believe in any of this stuff. Okay, well, he didn't used to believe in this stuff. And If I talk about it, he's like, okay, whatever you need. But the morning we knew she was going to die, you know, any day now, we went to bed. Thursday night, Friday morning, I get a phone call. It's the home attendant telling me she's gone. And I tell him, he's lying in bed next to me, and he says, oh, my God. I said, what? Said, well, I've been lying here awake for the last 20 minutes, and all of a sudden I felt like your mother was in the room. Like, physically in the room. And in my head, I said, are you here, Sarah? And I heard her say, yes, darling, I am. And then the phone rang, and I said, this is real to you. In this moment, you actually felt like you felt her here and you heard her here. He goes, absolutely. And I said, you are so screwed, because in five minutes you're gonna deny this happened. But you told me. And he doesn't roll us up anymore, you know, and, yeah, I have a sense of her sometimes less so than I used to. She seems for me to become more of a, you know, faded into a generalized, divine feminine kind of thing. But friends and family still report hearing her voice or feeling her presence. This just happened, like, three weeks ago. Someone said they heard her talking and they told me what she said, and I was like, yeah, that was probably her. This is exactly what she would have said.
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B
So, Neil, does she.
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When.
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B
When people were coming through and other spirits were coming through, like, did they have messages that, that turned out to be true or evidential that like, you.
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Know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
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No.
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And that's kind of one of the things I loved here. So, for example, one of the people who started showing up was the rabbi. We grew up with Rabbi Bodenheimer, and they were really best buddies, but he was kind of overdoing it in these years. And I'd come over and I'd say, have any visitors? Because I always asked her and she'd go, yeah, Rabbi Bodenheimer was here. He really stayed for too long. And that was sort of getting to be a pattern. And so I went over and I said, any visitors? And she said, well, Rabbi Botunheimer was here. I said, I hope he didn't bore you. And she said, no, he couldn't stick around. He had to be going because his sister was gonna be arriving and he had to welcome her. And I thought his sister, that was Mrs. Brown, she must be over 100 and she must have died by now for sure. And then I went home and got a phone call from my hometown. Mrs. Brown had died that day at 102 years old.
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B
Wow. And your rabbi had since passed. So he was dead in these wounds?
- [18:51]
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He was long dead. Yeah, he was long dead. There were other things that happened, but it wasn't necessarily dead people. And this to me was more surprising. So I have a friend and teacher who's a shaman, who's very skillful at traveling the astral plane. I am not, though. I've done it a few times and it's been very vivid and I've seen things I couldn't have seen otherwise. But he's an adult. And there was this situation where my mom had some kind of nightmare, we think, and she suddenly got this idea in her head that I was going to be killed by somebody. And she got very frightened and I got a call from her home attendant telling me to come over. My mother was almost inconsolable, wide eyed with terror. I gave her a little anti Anxiety pill that we kept in the house. She got a little bit better. I went to work, got a call in the afternoon, it's worn off, she's terrified, have to go back. Gave her another half of a pill to get her through the night. And this went on for two weeks. And it was extremely stressful that I had to be visiting her twice a week. Mark offered to go over but she wouldn't accept it. She had to see me with her own eyes that I was okay. And then after two weeks I went over and at this point I was not being very kind. I was very upset and tense and anxious and I walked in sort of sternly and she had a completely different expression on her face, just bright eyed and bushy tailed. Honey, you've come to see me? I was like, yeah. She goes, are you upset about something? I said, well, and I told her why I was upset. She goes, oh, I don't worry about that anymore. I talked to your friend last night and if you trust him, I trust him. I'm not going to worry about that anymore. I had no idea what she was talking about and I thought, okay, she had another dream, fine, this isn't going to be going on longer. A few hours later I got a phone call from this shaman friend of mine who told me that he was hanging out in his habitual place that he likes to hang out at when he gets away from things on the astral plane and said that he heard someone coming towards him. He's in the military, he's a soldier. And he sort of got up into warrior stance, wondering who's coming through, what kind of astral bad guy. And this young woman with red hair and a sundress comes through singing with a British accent. He didn't know my mother was British. He didn't know she had red hair back when she had hair color. He didn't know that she was a beautiful singer when she was younger. And she sees him, charges over to him, fingered into the shoulder, poking him, going, what are you doing to take care of Neil? And he said, I already promised him, I'm watching over him, I'm protecting him. Well, you didn't promise me, promise me. And so he said, okay, okay, I promise. And he called me up and he said, so I met your mother last night and he related this story to me and I realized, oh, that's the friend she's been talking to. A little while later he told me, you know, she's got this little English cop and she's set up for herself Here. And my mother, as I mentioned, was British and she grew up during the war years. They were very well to do and they lived in this country house in Northampton, 18 room mansion, covered with wisteria. Very well known for just being covered in purple wisteria with a little rose garden to the side. And I said, really? She's got some sort of English. She goes, yeah, it's very nice. It's covered with purple wisteria and there's this rose garden to the side. It wasn't a big country house, it was just a little cottage. But. And he could not have known that stuff during this time she had started displaying a little bit of an altered state that was new. Not awake, not asleep. She'd be sitting in a chair, eyes half closed, but not nodding off, not snoring. And so after he told me this, I sat down next to her and leaned in and watched her for a while. And then finally I said, so, are you visiting your little English cottage? And her eyes opened and she said, who told you about that? And she was very upset that the story had gotten out. And from then on, whenever I saw her there, I said, are you visiting your little college and she cottage? And she'd just smile and nod and as long as I didn't ask her questions about it, she was fine.
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B
And Neil, just for audience members who don't know, can you explain what you mean when you say astral travel or astral plane?
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C
What generally people mean by that is there are non material planes of existence that are related to our material plane of existence made of solid stuff, matter and energy, space and time, and yet there are other planes that are not made of the same stuff. And some aspect of us, whether it's our consciousness or whether it's something people refer to as an energy body, and I don't have definitive ideas about what these are, can move between this plane and that plane plane or many other planes potentially, and have experiences there. What I do know, both from what I've been taught by this guy and from my own experience, the experiences which are less extravagant than hers or his, but I've still had some, is that those places and the beings you meet there appear very dreamlike. So they're hard to make solid. You know, it's like, how do you describe a dream? Sometimes it's not easy, but for them in their world, their world is solid and we're the ones who are dreaming. And what I think now I'm going to put my science cap on, I'm one of those people who thinks that brains do not make our minds. Our minds are like transmitters or radios that sample the big C consciousness, big M mind that underlies everything. Some people might refer to that as God. Some people might refer to it as the absolute. Some people like me and my collaborators call it fundamental non dual awareness that there's some aspect of a universal mind that emanates what eventually becomes material reality as we experience it, as well as these other non material realms. And you don't expect to open up a brain if you're listening to the Beatles and find a little Beatles band inside. The radio is sampling the infinite radio waves. And if it's finely tuned, then you'll find the station that's playing Beatles music. Tune it a little different, you might get Beethoven. If you can't tune the radio, what do you get? Static. Static doesn't mean less information. Static means more information. And so I wonder, in the mind of someone like my mom or someone who has some form of dementia, the broken brain that can't be fine tuned, are they in fact having greater access to what lies beyond this material reality, to sampling what's going on in that more fundamental mind or awareness? And so it sounds like static to those of us here who are still stuck on our little human stories of I'm me and you're you. But to someone like my mom, she's actually having greater perceptive capacity. And this sort of where I started thinking about this was in relationship to those end of life visions that she had at the very beginning of this journey of hers. We everyone's heard of people at the end of their life seeing dead people that they knew from the past. It turns out it's way more common than people generally think about it. There's a prospective study done by a doctor, a hospice doctor named Christopher Kerr, who's the medical director of Hospice Buffalo in New York, has written a book called Death Is But a Dream, reporting a prospective study of nearly 1200 patients who came into hospice to die, where they were asked by him and his team specific question as to whether they were having end of life visions or not. And it turned out that nearly 90% of them reported very detailed end of life visions. They're not haphazard, occasional things that lucky people get to have. They seem to be part of the normal experience of dying if you're gifted the chance to die in bed, not by violence, and be aware. And those experiences seem to invariably, according to his data, lead to a transforming moment. So that the patient, the person who's dying, who Might be facing death with fear, anxiety, loneliness, regrets, all the complex stuff humans bring to their lives and deaths. Understand that everything is just as it should be, just as it is, including their death. And they're profound experiences that are utterly transformative. Not like an insight you get in a therapy session. But go from great terror at the end of your life or great regret or great sadness into something of acceptance and lack of fear, et cetera. And what I think is happening there is that in the dying brain, the filtering of the greater consciousness that underlies everything, the filtering is diminished. You're getting more pure reflection of what underlies everything. And this will touch on spiritual stuff that I think about and practice and engage in from Jewish mystical traditions. I'm related to, Zen Buddhism. I'm related to. But I think the fundamental nature of one aspect of the fundamental nature of that underlying reality is compassion or love, whatever word you want to give it. And if that's what the dying brain is perceiving, it may be a dying brain, but it's still a human brain trying to make stories. And so it will perceive that compassion, that love that's filtering through, and have to name it. That's my mother. That's the child I lost. That's the father I missed. That's my husband. And so we tell ourselves in those last days or hours, in reflecting that compassionate underpinning of existence, that we name it because human minds make human stories. That's what we do. So people with my mom say, why did your mom have these experiences? And for years I've been thinking, I don't know, is it her spiritual practice? Is it part of her heritage? Is it what kind of person she was? She was such a good person. But what I've started to wonder is people whose minds or brains are broken in the way they might be in advanced Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, Lewy body disease, et cetera, are they really perceiving less or are they perceiving more? My mother maybe wasn't different than all these people. Maybe it was simply that she was in a safe environment where we asked her and made it safe for her to tell us. I wonder if my mother wasn't uncommon, but maybe more common than not the way the end of life experiences turned out to be more common. And that if we made it safe and were interested and curious about what our elders were experiencing, maybe some of those people who we say have dementia, in other words, their brains are filled with meaningless static. Maybe some of them are really profound psychonauts. And if they're not functioning well in this world. Maybe it's because they're busy exploring other worlds. And when you're doing that, the idea of feeding yourself or cleaning yourself may not just be on your mind.
- [31:05]
A
It's officially the month of love and let's be honest, no one shows up for us quite like our dogs do. The unconditional love, the loyalty, the way they're just there through everything. And if they're giving us that much, the least we can do is make dinner really good. And that's why I feed my dogs Ollie. Ollie is real fresh food made with human grade ingredients, crafted by culinary experts and backed by vet nutritionists. And you can tell the difference immediately. Our dogs are thrilled at mealtime, even the super picky one, Remy. What I love is how easy it is. Ollie creates a personalized meal plan for your dog's specific needs, sends perfectly portioned meals in mess free packaging and it even comes with a scoop and storage container so your fridge doesn't smell like dog food. And there's also an Ollie app where you can tap real experts for on demand health screenings, which brings a lot of peace of mind since switching to Ollie. I feel like my dogs itch less, their hair feels thicker, even their breath smells better. Celebrate your number one Valentine, your greatest love, your dog. Head to ollie.com tapes and tell them about your dog and use code tapes to get 60% off your welcome kit when you subscribe today. Plus they offer Happiness Guarantee on the first box, so if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back. That's O L L I e.com tapes and enter code tapes to get 60% off your first box is all about elevated essentials that feel effortless. Designed for layering and mixing, each piece helps build a timeless wardrobe made to last with versatile silhouettes and thoughtful details. They're the kind of styles you wear again and again. They've got the wardrobe staples with quality that's made to last 100%. Organic cotton sweaters, premium denim made with stretch for all day comfort luxe cotton cashmere blends perfect for the changing of the seasons. Everything you need for a wardrobe that actually lasts. Quince works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen so you're not paying for brand markup, just high quality clothing. And Quince uses the highest quality materials like 100% European linen and organic cotton. Everything is built to hold up season after season. The stitching, the fit, the fabrics. These are pieces you'll reach for over and over. Again, I love the Mongolian cashmere crewneck sweater and bought it in four colors because it can be dressed up or down. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com tapes for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com tapes to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com tapes wow.
- [33:23]
B
Oh my gosh. Okay, so then, you know, looking over your book this morning, I read a line where you were talking about people at the end of the life often saying their, their experiences felt more real than here, more real than real. Which really struck me. Cause we talked about that in our season premiere this year about near death experiences. Can you just touch on that, how people are describing these? Do they feel more real than their lives here on Earth?
- [33:47]
C
From my perspective, I think deathbed visions are the brain opening itself up to a more fundamental reality. It wouldn't surprise me that the more fundamental reality is gonna feel more fundamental and real than this one we construct for ourselves where we walk around thinking we're separate from each other. I think, you know, people's walking around on planet Earth as these lonely, anxious creatures thinking we live on this rock. Well, I get that because I'm one of those people. But I also know both scientifically and from my various meditation practices, that the other way to think about it is that we are the substance of the Earth that in three and a half billion years has self organized itself into beings that think of themselves as separate. Those two things are both true. They don't contradict each other. You just have to select which view are you going to take. If you only see yourself and in our culture we only pretty much see ourselves this way as separate and lonely, then this is what you've got. And if you experience a reality that says something richer, deeper, more connected, more vivid, it's going to feel more real. Maybe because it's a better reflection of reality, not conditioned by our culture's views about what we should think of as real and what we should think of as not real.
- [35:16]
B
So I think you mentioned in your book the Reverend Harper, and you know, he talks about a truer, pure self being what remains. Like, do you, do you think dementia can, you know, sometimes just strip away the ego then and leave something closer to our real essence?
- [35:31]
A
It's just so.
- [35:32]
B
It's not just, maybe it's not erasing a person, it's erasing the ego and leaving us with our essence. Like, is that a stretch or how do you feel about that?
- [35:39]
C
That's exactly how I think about it. The most fundamental essence isn't about what you worry about or hope for for the future. It's not what you long for from the past or regret from the past. It's what's in this present moment. And for some people, the broken brain in quotes is actually a refined way of perceiving what your true nature is. And what our true natures are, are seamless expressions of the entire living, conscious universe in this moment, absolutely perfect and pure. That's real. That's true. And I can argue that from a deeply Western, scientific and mathematical perspective. At the same time, it's utterly true that we are tiny, infinitesimal pieces of this vast universe. And it's very easy to fall into that and go, nothing has meaning. I'm unimportant. It's terrifying. That's also true. To me, the aim of spiritual practice is being able to move back and forth between those and understand that both realities are true. And a complete understanding needs both of them. You need the combined view. And I think some people with dementia, some people on their deathbeds, some people just through spiritual practice of various kinds, can reach the state where their own personal stories aren't that important. They just fade into the larger truth that everything is a seamless, miraculous whole. My mother. If you saw the look on my mother's face in her last days, and actually a couple of times Mark and I each visited, we thought, oh, she's dead. We got in really close. It's like, nope, she's still here. And she gave me a kiss. She was in a bliss bubble. There was no distress whatsoever. It was one of the most beautiful things. And I've been gifted the experience of seeing that a few times.
- [37:42]
A
So I think what's fascinating, you know, when you're talking about this is that it reminds me a lot of the exploration we've done with non speakers who have apraxia, who feel less connected to their body, less connected maybe even to their past, present, or often unable to, you know, engage due to something different about their neurology. And does that surprise you? Because currently we're, you know, talking about telepathy and those who experienced it, whether they were caregivers or medical professionals or loved ones or even mediums, saying that they were able to connect with people with dementia from a telepathic state. And is that something you've come across with your mother? And if not, does it surprise you or I guess, you know, how do you make sense of any of it?
- [38:26]
C
I think that people who have brains that filter the larger underlying consciousness of existence in different ways than are typical, sometimes they get less information, sometimes there might not be much there, but we would be making a mistake to assume that's the case. I think sometimes their brains, their minds are actually having greater access to things that the rest of us who function easily in the world label the clothe and dress ourselves, feed ourselves, et cetera. It takes a lot of energy, time and focus to be able to take care of ourselves in the world. If you don't have a mind that's focused in that kind of detail, telling yourself human stories about who you are as a person and how you have to behave in the world, then you might have the opportunity to experience other things. It might be that people who experience that kind of stuff are less able to take care of themselves. And so in our society where we don't value people who have different experiences of the world and treat them as beings that need to be warehoused or seen as burdens, but they may in fact have greater access than any of us can imagine. Some of us are like that for a lifetime. Some of us have glimpses of it, maybe through some practice that develops trance work or the use of psychedelics. Some of us may have openings because you've had a near death experience and you survive it, and yet part of your mind remains open to what you saw. Some of us only, it seems most of us get a chance to experience in the last hours or days of life, if you're gifted the chance to die in bed, not by violence. And I think all of these things are potential for every human. It's just how much do you value them, yearn for them, cultivate them? How much do you honor them in yourselves and how much do you honor it in others?
- [40:44]
B
Yeah. And then if consciousness continues to open and connect even when the brain is failing, how do you think that might change the story we tell ourselves about what it means to die or even quote, unquote, disappear, which is, I think, is most people's fear around death.
- [40:58]
A
Right.
- [40:59]
C
One of the things in Christopher Kerr's book that he mentions over and over again, that I think is one of the more profound lessons of his research, is that in those final moments, these deathbed visions, even when they're scary ones or disturbing ones, which can also happen, it seems as though the universe is giving you the vision that you need to, in a moment, understand that it's all just fine. The universe, that underlying consciousness meets you precisely where you are. With all your psychosis, with all your crazy worries, with all your beliefs and conditionings that you carry into those last moments so that you're lying there in whatever state you're in, the universe shows up and presents you exactly the right medicine for you to understand in a transforming moment or a series of moments, that it's all just fine.
- [42:01]
A
Yeah, it's beautiful.
- [42:02]
B
As far as what you witnessed and, you know, what seems like Kerr witnessed as well, I mean, do you think that validates this idea of a soul, that we have a soul that continues?
- [42:14]
A
Or.
- [42:14]
B
Or. Or what would you. What. What would you say about that? And what do you think your mother would say?
- [42:18]
C
My mother would speak in terms of a soul if you. You asked her, because she comes from a Jewish tradition that talks about souls, so she'd be easy with that. Or she might have looked at you in her later years and said, what? And pretend not to have a clue. I don't know what the soul is. What I think I understand is that the universe actually arises from your consciousness, your awareness, and is nothing but pure consciousness. Pure awareness. And the appearance of solidity to our material world is merely an appearance. It's a misapprehension that comes about from conditioning, cultural conditioning, but also the conditioning of, I'm a human baby and I have to survive to adulthood. And the best way to do that is to think the world is real. But fundamentally, if the universe is entirely consciousness, then what's the difference between me and an angel and a demon and a God or a goddess? They're all just constructs of consciousness. In the larger consciousness, they're just the dreams the universe is having when it contemplates itself. And so there's not soul or not soul. It's just, what's the perspective through which you're experiencing the universe in this moment, and what's the perspective of the universe experiencing you in this moment?
- [43:56]
A
That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks, but new episodes will be released every Wednesday, so stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veil ones that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. Thank you to my amazing collaborators, our executive producer, Jill Pichesnik, our producer, Kathryn Ellis, and associate producer, Selena Kennedy. Original music by Rachel Cantu. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth PW. Original logo and cover art by Ben Condor. Design, the audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma and I'M Kai Dickens, you your writer, creator and host. Thank you again for joining us. Why choose a Sleep number Smart Bed?
- [44:37]
B
Can I make my site softer?
- [44:39]
C
Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler?
- [44:43]
A
Sleep Number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your Sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's day sale, take 1550% off our limited edition bed plus free premium delivery with any bed and base ends Monday only at a Sleep number store or sleepnumber.com.