He Was Declared Dead, Left His Body, Traveled Across States, and Later Described a Town He’d Never Visited—One of the Most Astonishing Near-Death Experiences Recorded | Doctor Raymond Moody

Is the veil between life and the afterlife finally breaking down? What could that mean for the way we live our lives? In this jaw-dropping episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Raymond A. Moody Jr., MD, PhD—the world’s leading authority on Near Death Experiences and author of the groundbreaking bestseller Life After Life—reveals the most mind-blowing NDE he has ever encountered in his 50 years of pioneering research. For decades, Dr. Moody watched NDEs go from “fringe pseudoscience” to a serious, respected field of study. In this episode, he explains exactly what changed, why he believes NDEs represent the crumbling veil between our current reality and the afterlife, and why believing these accounts has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with evidence. Dr. Moody also breaks down: - His astonishing Psychomanteum Research, reviving the ancient ritual of mirror gazing to communicate with deceased loved ones - Why he feels “forced” to believe in an afterlife - His powerful message to hardcore skeptics - Why NDEs may be humanity’s first measurable bridge to another dimension - The stunning phenomenon of Shared Death Experiences (including his own personal encounter!) - Why SDEs may offer irrefutable proof of the validity of NDEs - The spiritual exercise he uses to help skeptics open to afterlife evidence - Why we’re on the verge of a breakthrough in the rational investigation of life after death - How skeptics & parapsychologists may actually be more aligned than they think Mayim and Jonathan also unpack the different categories of NDEs, why proving the science of the afterlife is so difficult, the eerie phenomenon of multiple people having parallel dreams at the same time, the impact of family constellation work on healing and ancestral patterns, and the profound power of unconscious belief and how it shapes our reality. If you’ve ever wondered whether consciousness survives death…this episode of MBB will challenge everything you think you know! Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MAYIM at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/mayim https://incogni.com/mayim%20 Go to shopremi.com/BREAK and use code BREAK at checkout for 50% off. Try Notion, now with Notion Agent, at https://notion.com/break Learn more about Dr. Raymond Moody at https://www.lifeafterlife.com/ Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  You had an experience when your mother passed.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  The space I was in then, I heard my mother say twice, "I love you," although she wasn't moving her mouth. My wife, who was there, had experienced. My sister felt the presence of my father, who had died 18 months before. Practically everybody knows somebody who was in touch with the afterlife.

• 0:24Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Raymond Moody is the actual physician who coined the term "near-death experience."

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I had put us in a situation where we can now prove the afterlife. All the ancient Greek philosophers knew about oracles of the dead. People would go through there, and they would have experiences and converse with their dead relatives. I started this with my graduate students. And the very first person imagined my surprise when she got out of there and she said, "It wasn't my husband who showed up, it was my father."

• 0:59Mayim Bialik?

  If we're opening some portal, it doesn't mean that the person that you want to come through is going to come through.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I've heard dozens of cases like that.

• 1:07Mayim Bialik?

  What are we on the cusp of in terms of understanding about a larger consciousness?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  The first and necessary step is conceptual thinking. We are on the verge of a breakthrough.

• 1:28Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Viallick. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we have a real treat. We speak to so many people who have had near-death experiences. We speak to so many people who are helping us understand what it means to have the veil between this reality and another reality thinned. Today, we are going to speak to the actual physician.

• 1:58Mayim Bialik?

  Who coined the term "near-death experience." And we're going to be learning a little bit from him about what his perspectives are from 1975, when this term was coined, to the way that we think about it now. We're also going to be focusing a bit on what are we actually talking about, practically speaking and clinically speaking, from the perspective of a near-death experience? What can we prove? What can't we prove? And where is there wiggle room? Dr. Raymond Moody Jr., MD/PhD. He is the leading authority on near-death experiences. Something that I hadn't realized, he actually holds a PhD in philosophy.

• 2:40Mayim Bialik?

  He was originally a philosophy professor who studied Plato. And you're thinking, what does that have to do with any of this? The early Greeks were some of the first to go into depth in thinking about what it means to die before you die. There was a very specific practice, which we talked about with Brian Murarescu, where people would go into these underground dark chambers, sometimes for a month at a time, to commune with the dead. And if you're thinking like, well, that's crazy. That's just like ancient stuff. Turns out, that is really indistinguishable from the descriptions that people have of what happens when they encounter people from the other side. And it's not just in near-death experiences.

• 3:25Mayim Bialik?

  It's in shared death experiences. It's in things like parallel dreams. It comes up in precognitive dreams. There's an amazing, amazingly high percentage of people who, in particular in grief, experience not dreams, not even visions, an actual personification of someone that they've lost. What's going on? Is it just wishful thinking? Turns out, it has a long history. That's originally what Raymond Moody was studying. He then went to medical school to become a psychiatrist. He had a very strong interest in kind of the policing, right?

• 4:06Mayim Bialik?

  Of murder and how psychiatry and how medical school can help us understand better these kind of elaborate... Aspects of society. However, he ended up working in a psychiatric facility and has dedicated his life to understanding these phenomenon. He's written so many books. He's the founder of the Life After Life Institute. Every single person we've had on this show who's had an NDE has referenced Dr. Moody at one point or another. They, it's kind of like they all know each other. Um, I recently read Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe There Is an Afterlife. I actually want to touch on a couple of these points before we, um, welcome Dr. Moody.

• 4:48Jonathan Cohen?

  We only had Raymond Moody for a short period of time. So this episode, we are going to describe some of the phenomenal and unbelievable experiences that appear in his book and through his writing just before we get our moments with him.

• 5:04Mayim Bialik?

  Uh, Jonathan, what, what do you know of, of the world of NDEs? When we talk about, what are the things that actually kind of qualify that experience? What kind of things have we heard people talk about?

• 5:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, there's a lot of similarities between many of the experiences people have when they cross over or when they're, they explain their consciousness leaves their body. So one of those similarities is that they have a life review where they see each part of their life flash before their eyes. I actually think about the early Apple iTunes shuffle feature where they showed you the album art and you could skip through the album art and it was like on this, uh, display case. I kind of see it like that.

• 5:55Jonathan Cohen?

  It could also be a montage, so I'm not saying how it should appear.

• 5:58Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 5:59Jonathan Cohen?

  They also have a sense of like timelessness where they lose track of time. Um, they describe often feeling like they've gone somewhere for a very long period of time, but in actual physical time, it can be very short. Uh, some people have described 360 vision. Some people have also described the fact that words can't actually do justice.

• 6:22Mayim Bialik?

  It's ineffable.

• 6:24Jonathan Cohen?

  What they've experienced where their sensation is so great. And yet their ability to describe it, the words can't encapsulate it. There's also colors that feel overwhelming. Also, what has

• 6:38Mayim Bialik?

  Like heightened senses.

• 6:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Heightened senses, the ability to travel, move through space, not bound by the physical limit.

• 6:45Mayim Bialik?

  You've been paying attention here.

• 6:46Jonathan Cohen?

  I have been paying attention. Also, which I am fascinated by is the notion of asking a question even in your mind and having that information there instantaneous.

• 6:59Mayim Bialik?

  A download. There's a some notion of a download. So there, there are actually, there are kind of seven main categories of things that emerge from the experiences that Jonathan's talking about. People who have an NDE most commonly come out of it with a very similar set of changes. The fear of dying is gone. When is the other time we hear about that? Psilocybin assisted therapy for terminal patients, right? It is specifically to remove fear of dying, just drawing that kind of parallel before we even get too deep. So no fear of dying. They come out with no fear of dying. And understanding of the importance of love.

• 7:41Mayim Bialik?

  There's this notion, people often see a bright light, right? They're overwhelmed by some like light being, something like that. It almost always is associated with love, understanding. And so they come out of this experience like love, love's the answer, right? The third thing, a universal sense of connection. And this can come from that 360 vision. It can come from the this kind of heightened experience. But there's this notion that we are all connected.

• 8:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, in that universal connection, there

• 8:11Mayim Bialik?

  You can't enter my list. I have my list. You don't know my list.

• 8:14Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know your list. Need some additional information.

• 8:18Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 8:18Jonathan Cohen?

  The universal connection, they're often reconnected with people that they've been connected with.

• 8:24Mayim Bialik?

  True story.

• 8:25Jonathan Cohen?

  In their lives, whether that be parents, grandparents, siblings who may have passed. You actually have a sort of a question about this because You brought up that in all of these scenarios, there's never a complicated relationship in the afterlife.

• 8:42Mayim Bialik?

  Ah.

• 8:43Jonathan Cohen?

  So even-

• 8:44Mayim Bialik?

  This is like a topic I want an entire episode on. People rarely talk about this. So we have no fear of dying, understanding the importance of love, universal sense of connection, appreciation of learning. I thought this one was really, really interesting. There's this notion that you're getting downloads. There's information for you to learn. Like, I thought that was a really interesting thing. Also, a new feeling of control, meaning having control over your destiny, your decisions. Uh, number six, focusing on the little things. Elizabeth Cronin has talked about this. How small things become sources of great joy. And a notion of whatever I experienced, there's a re-entry that is necessary. Meaning, you could say, "Oh, you had this experience,"

• 9:29Mayim Bialik?

  and blabbity, blabbity, blue. But almost everyone who has a near-death experience has this, this experience of needing some sort of transition, of getting back to whatever normal is. Also, something we've spoken about, people often come back with special abilities. How can I explain this? And as, when we welcome Dr. Moody, he'll talk a little bit about really how much we have to resist trying to have an explanation for everything. But I want to know, what is happening that people are coming back with psychic abilities? With extrasensory abilities? There's a story in, um, it's in Proof of Life After Life, but it's what, what Dr. Moody describes

• 10:14Mayim Bialik?

  as the best NDE he's ever heard. Would you like to hear it?

• 10:17Jonathan Cohen?

  I would like to hear it.

• 10:18Mayim Bialik?

  This is the story of, um, a doctor, Dr. George Ritchie. This happened in December 1943. And Dr. Moody describes this as the best, the best out-of-body experience in an NDE that he's ever heard.

• 10:32Jonathan Cohen?

  And we've heard about it.

• 10:33Mayim Bialik?

  We've heard about, he's heard more than we have. So, Dr. Ritchie, um, was very sick. He had pneumonia, he had a fever of 105 degrees. He was sent to Camp Barkley in Texas. Okay, so we're in Texas, 1943. He remembers he was very sick, high fever, and he got out of bed. But when he looked back at the bed, he was still in the bed.

• 10:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Happens to me all the time.

• 10:58Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 10:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Just kidding.

• 10:59Mayim Bialik?

  So, he said he knew that something was odd. And he tried touching people and his hand went right through it. Like, think of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Like, that's the first thing I thought of. And he said, "Okay, something's going on." He then thought, where are we? Berkeley, Texas. He literally thought, "I want to go see my mother in Virginia." And he said, within that thought, he was in Virginia. Okay? This is the first case I've ever heard of someone not only leaving their body, but leaving the state where their body was. So you might think, this is all just like, it's his recount. Like, we don't have to believe him. It's his imagination.

• 11:44Mayim Bialik?

  We don't know. Long story short, he went to, not Richmond, Virginia, where his mother was. For whatever reason, he stopped at a new town, near Richmond, Virginia.

• 12:00Jonathan Cohen?

  He forgot the directions.

• 12:01Mayim Bialik?

  He walked all around the town. He familiarized himself, and then he thought, "I should go back. I'm gonna go back to Texas." All right, so he's having all these things. He comes back to Camp Berkeley, Texas. And he's then in the hospital ward. And he ends up seeing lots of things. He sees what they're doing to his body and trying to bring him back.

• 12:21Jonathan Cohen?

  Being back in Texas.

• 12:22Mayim Bialik?

  In Texas.

• 12:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Mayim Bialik?

  They covered his body with a sheet and said that he was dead, and he watched it all. And one of the techs was like, "Doctor, I think this guy's alive. He just moved. He's under a sheet. He is watching himself declared dead." A tech is like, "Doctor, I think he just twitched." The doctor comes over, he's like, "Nope, he's dead. Cover him back up." Doctor goes away. Tech again is like, "Nope, this dude just twitched. What is happening?"

• 12:57Mayim Bialik?

  He ends up, eventually, waking up. There is records declaring him dead, not once, but twice. So you might be thinking, "Why'd you tell me this whole story about Virginia?" Because...

• 13:12Mayim Bialik?

  One day, he was on a bus going back to Richmond to visit his mother for real. He's alive now. And he stops in a town

• 13:24Mayim Bialik?

  called Vicksburg, Mississippi. And he says to the person traveling with him, "There's a diner down on the next street." And the guy's like, "How do you know that?" And he said, "'Cause I've been here before." He remembered the geography of an entire town that he had never been to with his body. It is the town that he traveled to when he left his body when he was dead. It's a very, very bizarre, bizarre story.

• 13:49Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm gonna play you for a second and say, "In a town, there's probably a diner, so why, how is this so amazing that he, that he described the fact that there was a diner? And is it possible that the person recounting this story-

• 14:06Mayim Bialik?

  A hundred percent.

• 14:07Jonathan Cohen?

  -had a couple, "Oh, there's a clothing store on this, how do we know?"

• 14:11Mayim Bialik?

  We made a non-believer out of you. It only took 300-some episodes.

• 14:15Jonathan Cohen?

  One of us has to be you in each episode.

• 14:17Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:01Mayim Bialik?

  I can wear them year-round, 'cause I live in Southern California. They feel like PJs, but it looks like I put a ton of effort in, whether I'm dressing for casual workdays, lazy weekends, or vacation vibes. I'm also obsessed with their sheets, so soft. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middle people, so you pay for quality, not br-. And it's not just apparel. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make. From hotel quality bedding to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was my and Alex's breakdown.

• 15:46Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show. So these are all good questions and I can't rule out this possibility of like, everybody's remembering something wrong. Like, we're gonna, we're gonna set that aside, but what his acquaintance who he was on the bus with decided to do was test him. So acquaintance says to, so he's like, what's around that corner? And this guy was like, telling him what was around every single corner of this town that he had never been to. He had a visual map of the entire town. Also, he became psychic when he came back. What?

• 16:21Jonathan Cohen?

  You know what's more unbelievable?

• 16:23Mayim Bialik?

  He became psychic. What?

• 16:25Jonathan Cohen?

  What's more unbelievable is that he could have a map from just having gone there once. I would go somewhere many times, not even just with my consciousness, with my physical body and I wouldn't remember.

• 16:38Mayim Bialik?

  Can we also talk about what was happening? That they covered him with a sheet because they thought he was like, do they not know when people die? Twice he was declared dead. That freaked me out.

• 16:48Jonathan Cohen?

  It's a little bit of malpractice at that hospital.

• 16:49Mayim Bialik?

  Clearly. Um, the other thing I wanted to talk about before we um, get um, get Dr. Moody on here. There's something that, that he has experienced, which is called a shared death experience. And he's going to talk a little bit about it. But one of the things that, that I think is fascinating is what happens when you get a group of people who are experiencing something? And one of the things that people experience, I honestly didn't realize this until I read this book. I'm gonna just take a poll of the two people in this room. Has anyone heard that when someone dies, there's like a mist that, that hovers over their body? Have you ever heard this? No, Valerie, no.

• 17:33Mayim Bialik?

  So it's in, it is in movies. Apparently, this is like a thing that a lot of people report. And I'm thinking, is it like collective, you know, a collective thing? We have, when we do a live on Substack, this is what I want to ask. I want to ask about the mist. And I've been in the room when people die, no mist. But maybe I didn't know how to look. Maybe I wasn't looking right. Many people see a mist that rises off of someone when they pass. I literally wrote WTF in my notes. What colors is it? White or pink, of course. White or pink? Why would it be any other color? And some people hear music.

• 18:16Mayim Bialik?

  A choir of young girls singing is what some people report. I've never heard of this in my life. You know, when I look back into what we have tackled and what we have chosen to sort of, you know, post our flag in this year, it's been a huge year for us. Not just in terms of conversations about consciousness. And we've spoken to philosophers and we've spoken to quantum mechanics, physics professors about this. But it's been a huge year in trying to also give people the ability to step into their experience without fear. And also, the purpose of talking about the intersection between science and spirituality is to say, if you're having spiritual experiences, if you're having experiences that feel out of this world

• 19:01Mayim Bialik?

  or out of your consciousness, there actually is a science to it. And if you're a person who's coming from more of a scientific perspective, guess what? There's a spiritual component of that as well. It feels like this conversation is so timely as we kind of take a bit of a reckoning of like, what has this year meant for our podcast and for this community?

• 19:22Jonathan Cohen?

  We think about death. We think about near death. A lot of these episodes talking about what happens after we die are really about how are we living? How do we expand our notion of what's possible so that the lives we're living now can be filled with more joy and peace and calm? And we don't have to compartmentalize.

• 19:43Jonathan Cohen?

  It's very difficult to prove the science of the afterlife and what happens when we leave these physical bodies. But we know that there is often more going on and more available to us than has been described in the past. And these conversations for me have been such an amazing reminder to allow our creative imagination to exist, to expand our view of what's possible, and to accept some of the experiences that many of us are having and trying to better understand them through this framework.

• 20:18Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, these kind of conversations get me very, very excited. So I took a couple left turns in even just reading Dr. Moody's bio. But I do want to mention, he got his medical degree from the College of Georgia, his PhD from the University of Virginia. Everyone in the NDE world knows of Dr. Moody. We have regards from every NDE guest that we've had on. I've told, we are having Dr. Moody on. So without further ado, here are some excerpts of our conversation with Dr. Moody. And then we'll be back after to do some more breaking down of different aspects that we didn't get to cover in our conversation with him. So welcome, Dr. Raymond Moody to the Breakdown.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Break it down.

• 21:01Mayim Bialik?

  We're very excited to speak to you. We bring regards from everyone that we've had the pleasure of having come on this podcast to talk about their near-death experience. And everyone speaks in such loving terms about you. Elizabeth Krone, and Anita Morjani, and Betty Gudania. Like, everybody, everybody refers to you whenever we talk about NDEs. So it's an honor to welcome you to the Breakdown.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Thank you both so much. And I tell you, my life strategy is to keep my self-esteem as low as possible. But nonetheless, I appreciate those nice thoughts from so many people. And at the same time, I'm kind of overwhelmed by them. I am kind of finished with ego. And let me explain. If I said that I've passed my ego, I climbed the mountain and I laid on the bed of nails and I burned the incense, that would be egomaniac, right? But the reason I'm finished with ego is that I almost killed myself with it.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  And my particular one was jealousy. But, you know, when I finally got over that, in the Bahamas a few years ago, I was at an ashram and I was talking and I said, "One ego trip is enough." And I saw the swamigah. When you're a kid, you hear that phrase, "The happiest life is a life of service to others." When you're a kid, you hear it as an ideal, right? Then you get into middle age and you begin to think of it as an aspiration. But by the time you're my age, it's just a fact of experience.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Because you realize whenever you're in it for yourself, you're always miserable. And it's just, life takes ego out of you, I think, in a very wonderful way.

• 23:05Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we're gonna ask you to sort of lean into your expertise for the time that we get to speak with you, because, you know, you coined a term that, you know, at the time was this very kind of fringe concept to even think about. And all these years later, you know, more and more people are reporting interactions with people who have crossed over. People are less scared to talk about, you know, I think the percentages of widows having contact with deceased husbands, in some cases, is as high as 90%. Parents who have lost a child, having an encounter with the child, you know, within a year of the child's death.

• 23:50Mayim Bialik?

  So many more people are tuning into different frequencies. They're having psychedelic experiences or transcendental experiences where the veil between this world and the next is becoming thinner and thinner and more and more accessible. I wonder if you can kind of give us a little bit of a framework. How did you first get interested in this? And what have you seen that has changed over the 50 years that you've been in this field?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for that first comment. You were saying that back in the seventies, this was a fringe phenomenon. And that is, that shows how ignorant we are in the West about our origins. Because in the, in reality, the way I found out about this was by reading Plato, who's still my favorite author. I was, my dad was a military veteran, a professional military officer, a surgeon. You can imagine that personality. He apparently had a horrific experience in World War II, which I gather because he never talked about, right? And

• 24:59Speaker 01

  so the way I experienced that as a kid was that my dad was hostile to religion. I went to UVA at the age of 18, intent on becoming an astronomer. Took a philosophy course and I was hooked. And the Republic of Plato, which was the first philosophy book I read, it starts with this guy who was about, kind of elderly, and he's been successful all his life, and like so many I know, just focused on their work, you know? And then he got to a certain age and he said, and now I, my, my mind goes back to those stories about the afterlife I heard was on when I was a kid, that I, I developed this sense of urgency.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Okay? And then the Republic culminates in this, it just sort of, if you ever read Herodotus with the story of the, the Persians marching down at Thermopylae Pass, the whole book kind of ends up like, and that focus around that pass. And, and the, the Republic is similar, and the whole thing goes right down to the story of a guy who was believed dead on the battlefield. But he, he sat up at the, at his funeral and told his, his friends about getting out of his body and going through a passageway into this other world, seeing

• 26:26Speaker 01

  his life review and so on. And I was really intrigued by that. So I asked Dr. Hammond, our professor, what was this all about? And he said, yeah, these early Greek philosophers knew of cases of people who had apparently died. And yet revived and had these experiences to tell. And Professor Hammond said that Plato wrote as he did about them, but meanwhile, or a little earlier, Democritus, the atomist, knew about these experiences. And he wrote that, yeah, what this is, it's the biological activity that's still going

• 27:09Speaker 01

  on in the body on the atomic level, even though it's not visible, right? And so that was my take on it as of September of 1962. Well, three years later, I met Dr. George Ritchie, who had actually had such an experience. And I mean, it was, George to this day is the finest human being I ever knew. And so then I started gathering cases of this. I finished my PhD in philosophy in 1969, and I started teaching philosophy. Immediately began to hear these stories from my students and from, as I started talking

• 27:50Speaker 01

  about it, faculty members told me about the experiences they had. And so very quickly, I became aware that this was a very common phenomenon. I would be invited to these civic clubs, which at that time were an all male province. And it was like the movers and shakers in town. Every one of these places I went to, they'd come up after, somebody would come up, Dr. Moody, I've never told anybody this, but. So that's how I got interested in this and began to pursue my research. Well, to go back to a very brilliant comment you made earlier.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And the way I would put it is this, the afterlife is infusing into this life. Because with the advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the 60s, something that had always been a phenomenon and yet was extraordinarily rare, because it was extremely rare for somebody who almost died to live through it. But with CPR, that changed the situation. And so suddenly, what happened is it was something that was in 1925 unheard of,

• 29:16Speaker 01

  just very rarely, in 2025, is, you know, everybody knows somebody who's been through such an experience. So what that means is that practically everybody knows somebody who is in their heart in touch with the afterlife, right? So it's what we call the afterlife is infusing itself into this life. I think you said like the veil is breaking down. That's the way of putting it too, I think.

• 29:49Mayim Bialik?

  The general, you know, kind of understanding that many of us have is that we are alive for a very short period of time. And after a certain amount of time, we die and that's it. That is what a lot of people, you know, kind of walk about, you know, experiencing. What can you tell us about how that's wrong and why it's wrong?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I was a professor of philosophy before I went to medical school. And the way I really got interested in the afterlife question was through Plato.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  And so I, I, this is not a religious thing to me. This is something that I encountered in the, in my work as a philosophy student and then later as a philosophy professor. And even now, even after I subsequently, I went to medical school and became a psychiatrist. So that's added a different dimension to my work. I am a skeptic in the sense that is the real sense. The folks who say, oh, I'm a skeptic about these near-death experiences. I think it's just the chemistry of the brain. Their kind of statement is a self-contradiction and it shows that people who use that kind of statement are ignorant.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  And, and I mean, because they ignore the definition of the word skeptic. Skepticism was a philosophical, um, um, school founded by Puro, who, who was one of the philosophers who went to India with Alexander the Great. And, and so what the skeptical movement, which was as much a spiritual process as a intellectual process was, and it came in the wake of Aristotle having codified logic. So Puro knew logic very well. And what he said was, if you think about logic, you can think of it as a machine for

• 31:53Speaker 01

  generating conclusions from premises. Right? And so what he said was, let's suppose that we use that, that system vigorously, we ask every question, we really bear down and think of it logically, but then in the end, we refrain from drawing a conclusion. And that shows why the so-called skeptics are ignorant. They don't even look up the word because when you say, I'm a skeptic and I think the near-death experience isn't just the chemistry of the brain, that's a self-contradiction. Right? What you're saying is, I'm a person who doesn't draw conclusions and my conclusion is such and such.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Those folks are just ignorant and they're not worth thinking about. Okay? What I say is, the reality is that the logic we have in 2025 is not, is not adequate for proving a life after death. Where I am in a, as, as a skeptic in the Peronian sense is, I understand all the difficulties in making an inference about life after death, and I talked about them all the time when I taught logic. Where I am now is I give up. I've always throughout my life been able to think myself out of anything.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Because if you, if you're very critical and you question everything, then what stands up most rigorously when you question everything, you can have some sort of confidence on it. So where I am now is this, that I give up. I can't think my way out of it. And so, uh, apparently, uh, there's an afterlife. Okay, I can't draw that as a conclusion, but I'm just forced into that. I give up. The pseudoskeptics tell us, oh, this is the chemistry of the brain. And they utterly fail to take into account that it is very common for bystanders at the death of someone else,

• 34:03Speaker 01

  who are not themselves ill or injured, have all of these experiences that we think of as near-death experiences. The bystanders say, as grandma died, I myself got out of my body and I rose up with her, partway toward this light. Or they say that I saw the apparitions of my grandmother's deceased relatives coming in the room to take her away, and the room fills with light. Have quite a number of cases where the bystanders empathically co-lived the dying life review of the person who passed away. You had an experience when your mother passed? As my mother was dying.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  My perception was that the space I was in bent, and it, it wound out at the top and at the bottom, and there was a very narrow Intermediate space, which was tending to rotate. None of this makes sense, I know, because the words don't fit in it. And that, but, and I, I heard my mother say twice, "I love you," although she wasn't moving her mouth. My, my, my wife, who was there, had experienced. My sister, who, who was there, felt the presence of my, my father, who had died eighteen months before.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  And, but, to me, it's immaterial that it's happened to me. You know what I mean? And this, yeah, it's happened to me, but the impressive fact to me is that it happens to so many people. Now, in 2025, the reality is that the she, the soul blockade in 2025 for, to a progress toward a rational proof of an afterlife is no longer logical, it's now entirely psychological. Which, by which I mean, that the reason why in 2025, people have not made no progress

• 36:12Speaker 01

  toward a rational understanding of the afterlife is that they are intellectually lazy. And I can prove it, but I can't prove it to people who are intellectually lazy. Right? Now, now, what I have developed over a long, long period of time is a, is a, what I call a logico-spiritual exercise, where I take people through the facts of ancient Greek philosophy and facts about the, the language that we use.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  And it culminates in the closest we have ever gotten to a rational proof of an afterlife. And I, there's no way I can explain this in a, in a brief period of time, but I will explain to you guys how you can get access to the work, okay? But, but.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  The classical criticism about life after death is that the very notion is unknowable. That's the reality. Now, but I say, as a philosophy professor, so have all kinds of things been regarded as unknowable. For example, clouds until the early 19th century were regarded as the epitome of the unknowable and the unintelligible and the ephemeral. But a single man, Luke Howard, in the early 1800s, who just happened to observe this over a period of time, wrote a paper saying, "Well, there's four types of what you learned in grammar school, right?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  The cumulus, the stratus, and nimbus, and so on." Well, when Luke Howard published that paper, anybody who was energetic enough to waddle outside and look up at the sky could prove it. We could see it for themselves, right? So it was a transformation. If you go up before, about before about the mid 1880s, everybody knew, quote, "That the distance to the fixed stars is unknowable." All right? Then by 1838, the measurements got close enough where they realized that knowing that

• 38:36Speaker 01

  it's 186 million miles across the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, that if you took the measurement here and then waited exactly six months, you could take it again, there would be a difference, and that's called parallax. I have used those two kinds of moves to put us in a situation where we can now prove the afterlife. However, this is the difficulty, which Plato pointed out very well, and I'm sure you guys have observed too. What draws people to this is stories. The magnetic feature of near-death experiences is that it's a narrative that grips people.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And as Plato knew about these experiences too, and about other kinds of experiences which create narratives. But what he pointed out was, even if you had a billion experiential narratives, wouldn't add up to a proof of an afterlife. What do you think the reaction will be to the people whose sole focus on this is hearing charming stories? What will their reaction be when you say, "Well, to really get an handle on this, you've got to go through a rational process of following a long and remote train." They're turned off.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  But for that reason, there's a blockade. And the sole reason now, while we can't make real advance in rational inquiry into the afterlife, is this narrative concept. Well, as I say, people just don't, they're too lazy in America anymore to think. That's the reality. People just don't like to think. However, for those who still do, there's a way out. And we can actually reformat our mind in such a way that when we subsequently have a near-death experience, we will be able to put it in an entirely new way. We already have thousands and thousands

• 40:51Speaker 01

  of reports of near-death experiences that are verbalized through the form of a travel narrative. And we have thousands and thousands of those, "I got out of my body, I went through a tunnel," and so on. In the not-too-distant future, we will have a new set of verbalizations of it, where people realize that the travel narrative format of it is unintelligible, and this is why. Because...

• 41:26Speaker 01

  What people say within your death experiences, they say, "There are no words for this." Right. And it did not take place in time, and it did not take place in space. But the only way I have to say it is, "I got out of my body, I went through a tunnel into a light. I met my deceased relatives, I saw my life pass in review. I returned to my body and I came back to life." That is a travel narrative, isn't it? Well, now, just a minute here. What is the meaning of travel narrative, that there are no time and space and no words?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Now, I have intervened in that situation. So that, and at least once to my knowledge, I had a man years ago who took my course on how to think about unintelligible things, subsequently had a near-death experience, and has reported to me, he said, "Ray, while I was over there, my mind went back to your seminar and I realized, you can't comprehend how that world is connected to this world unless you take the unintelligibility axis into it again." I am happy to say that we are on the verge of a breakthrough in the rational investigation of the afterlife,

• 42:46Speaker 01

  but it's not going to be acceptable to the folks who are now in what I call the afterlife establishment.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Parapsychology is full of wonderful, sweet, kind-hearted people, whom I love dearly, and who are just not good analytical thinkers, you know? And, I mean, I know a lot of people who are not good analytical thinkers, and I love them anyway. Okay, but, um, parapsychology and its alter ego, the so-called skeptical movement, which is actually a movement of the humanist society, that what the people who call themselves skeptics are actually humanists, is their religion. It's a, humanism is a religion for people who are not religious, basically.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  We're on the verge here of a breakthrough, folks, but it's going to leave a lot of the folks who are in the afterlife movement now behind, because what they want to do is just listen to wonderful stories. I've heard thousands of these stories, and I can't wait to hear the next one. Right? But... Listening to stories is not gonna hack it. If your genuine object is to get rational enlightenment on the afterlife, you can easily do it. But it's just gonna have to be. What it requires is people having to think through some things that are normally boring to them, and they just won't want to listen to it. And the United States now is in totally grist and engrossed in wishfulness,

• 44:22Speaker 01

  or instant gratification, right? If you subscribe to the instant gratification model of life, you're never gonna get a rational insight into the afterlife. However, if you're really, if you are willing to really sit down and, and think through this, you can get to a place which, aha, there is a whole new way of looking at this.

• 44:45Mayim Bialik?

  What is this breakthrough? What, what could it look like for us to have access to a totally different way of understanding what happens when we die?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Well, as I said here, this is, it takes time. But just today, actually, as it happened, I, my son Sam, who's a PhD in Spanish linguistics, finished typing the manuscript. So I have a manuscript called Swan Song, and it's out. And for those who want to donate a little so I can, I can send you a manuscript, then you can read it for yourself, and I'm, I'm looking for refutation. See, it's like, I'm not trying to start a new religion or a new ideology. The funniest experience that's happened to me in my entire career

• 45:40Speaker 01

  is that the intelligence folks heard about this through a friend of mine who worked with them. It was Roy Scruggs, was the guy who designed the Saturn V release mechanism. And they had me back three times. I don't think they would make the same mistake again and again. So what I'm saying is, this is real.

• 46:02Mayim Bialik?

  So many of us are willing to entertain the possibility that the soul is not contained in the physical body, right? The soul has the ability to travel. I mean, many people are reporting these things in the NDEs that we've learned about, and we spoke to Jeffrey Long, and so we know those stories. But I think what we're curious about is, what are we on the cusp of in terms of our understanding about a larger consciousness?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, to put it clearly, David Hume, the great skeptic, said, "By the mere light of reason, it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul." And that was an ironic understatement, right? And Hume went on to say, "Some new species of logic is requisite for that purpose, and some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us to comprehend that logic." And he implied that that was an impossibility. Now, flash forward a couple hundred years, around the first of the 20th century, you guys probably have heard of the logical positivist movement, and A.J.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Ayer and such. And A.J. Ayer pointed out in his brilliant book on this, that, he said, "You know, it makes sense in our language to say that a man survived the total change of personality, or survived a whole, like a total loss of memory." But he said, "It makes no sense to say that a man survived the annihilation of his body." And so, you know, the classical difficulty, once then people start thinking about it, they realize that there are conceptual difficulties here. What I say is, that I have worked out a logic which you can...

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Go through yourself and you can see at the end of it that in fact that Hume was correct, but in his statement that the mind as we have it doesn't work for it. But he was incorrect in the implication that it's therefore impossible. So what I would say is I've solved Hume's problem and I've worked out a new logic. And by the way, it's not predicated on the afterlife. It's this new logic has been received very powerfully by people who are, number one, in the advertising business, people who are in the literary studies division, people

• 48:42Speaker 01

  who are in business and people in intelligence work. But the work I have presented has caught on in that world. But in a world where the object is to hear more wonderful, inspiring stories, that's not going to catch on. But for those who do, it will work.

• 49:09Mayim Bialik?

  Well, here's something I wonder if you can talk to us about. Am I pronouncing it right, the psychomantium?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:17Mayim Bialik?

  I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the design of this experiment, which really sought to kind of echo what we've actually, you know, spoken to Brian Murerescu, who did a lot of study into the classics and the relationship with the afterlife. You know, if you die before you die, then you'll live forever, right? Which, you know, was fascinating for many reasons. But I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about the design of that experiment and what it means to try and put people into a state where they're more susceptible, right, to being able to break through that veil?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, and again, the only way I can get at this is by prefacing it by saying that the only way you can understand this is by looking at Greek philosophy because, look, the reality is that the system of reasoning that we're using right now as we're conversing came to us from the Greek philosophers, that is reality. It's something that, you know, Americans of the 21st century are not interested in. And because of that fact, they've totally excluded themselves from comprehending the afterlife. Let me explain.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  The Greek philosophers developed in an environment where a common institution of ancient Greece, which all the ancient Greek philosophers knew about, were called oracles of the dead. Okay? And in fact, the man who you can think of as the founder of deductive logic, Parmenides, was the person who came up with the notion of truth, right? That sounds very counterintuitive, but what truth means is, truth is that which is the case independently of what anybody thinks about it, or perceives, or believes.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  And that notion cannot be comprehended by people in a pre-literate society. And the reason is that the first inkling that people will have, that there are some things that are the case independently of what anybody perceives, is in connection with what we think of as deduction. Okay? And deduction is, the first premise, Andy is taller than Bill. Second premise, Bill is taller than Charlie. Conclusion, Andy is taller than Charlie. And it doesn't make any difference what anybody thinks, perceives, or believes. If one and two are true, then three is necessarily true. How, where did that come from?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  It came from the other side through the oracle of the dead. And it's so counterintuitive, but anybody who wants to look into ancient Greek philosophy will see it. Okay? Now, what these oracles of the dead were places... They were subterranean institutions and there were five main ones. The most famous one was on the Akaron River in the northwest corner of Greece, sort of below modern day Albania. And another one was, the famous one was on the end of the Peloponnese there, on Cape Matta Plan. Others were on Sicily, on the slopes of Mount Etna.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  But these places were places where you can read this ancient stuff and it says, people would go through there and they would have experiences during which they seemed to see and converse with their dead relatives. And so that's why we have logic. Now, and I had been fascinated by these oracles of the dead since I was my first year in college. And then in 1985, I think it was, I read in a classical journal, a report of the most famous of these places had been excavated. And what they found there in the subterranean chamber

• 53:25Speaker 01

  was an enormous bronze cauldron surrounded by a balustrade. When people would go down there, they would be down there 29 days and then they would be escorted into this apparition chamber about maybe 50 feet long, 15 feet wide. And at the end of it was this big cauldron. You could see torch marks on the wall, which is, this was illuminated in antiquity by torchlight. And so Professor Thakuris, who dug this up, was, he thought that this was fraud. He said, "Well, they had these folks down there long enough that what they did was that they hid in the cauldron and act out the roles of the spirit."

• 54:09Speaker 01

  But I, you know, that's irrational. By the way, I'm not contradicting Dr. Thakuris. After I did my work, I went to him and I explained my result and he had, I saw the "ah-ha." And he realized that I was right. Then he gave me some other pictures which indicated that. And I want to emphasize, in connection with helping me understand Greek philosophy better, I set this up. There's a dark room with a mirror in it, and it's a comfort room, close, comfortable enough that people don't get claustrophobia. It's a darkened room with

• 54:49Speaker 01

  a mirror on the wall, placed such that the person sitting in a comfortable, easy chair in front of it does not hear his or was not see his or her own reflection. It's just like you're looking out into infinity. And a small light source behind the chair, so that it brings the light in the room, and diffusely, diffusely fills the room. Okay? Person sitting in that situation, to them, it looks like they're gazing into infinite space. Ed Mitchell, who was the lunar landing module pilot on Apollo 14, came to my place

• 55:29Speaker 01

  and he said, he said, Ray, it's like people think when they think about space, they think of it as like flat black. And he said, but it's not that way. He said, when you look out at it, it's like it has a sheen over it, like you're looking at a tabletop covered with glass or something. And so that's the effect that you want. Now, the preparation involves really thinking about the deceased loved one and bringing up all your pleasant memories and addressing the difficulties in the relationship, what was the unfinished business and so on. So I started this with my graduate students of psychology. And as

• 56:13Speaker 01

  word spread about it, by the way,

• 56:17Speaker 01

  These were graduate students and a number of them were already counselors. And as word spread about it, a sociology professor, an anesthesiologist, a psychiatrist, like other professional colleagues joined in. And what we wanted to know was just what happens, right?

• 56:35Mayim Bialik?

  And you didn't make people go for 29 days, correct?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  No, we boiled it down to a day, right? But it was one by one. It was the students would come out to my place and would spend the whole day with them, right? And it was like, tell me about this person who died and what were they like? What are all your good memories? What are the things that, you know, the unfinished business and so on? So you go through this process and people reach a point where they just, you can kind of sense they're ready. So I put them in this room and just say, relax, gaze into the mirror. Just, I'm gonna be back in about an hour, hour and a half. And so I was expecting that if I did 50 of these, I'd probably get five, right?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Because I was thinking probably about one out of 10. And certainly I thought, since these people were sophisticated about the human mind, if they did see something, I was anticipating they'd say, yeah, I saw an image in the mirror. It looked like my grandma, but was it real or was it a figment? I don't know. Instead, it was the very first person who was in there was a very seasoned drug and alcohol recap counselor. If you know about that subculture, those are very grounded people. And she came to see her husband who had died 18 months before.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Imagine when she, my surprise when she got out of there and she said, yeah, but it wasn't my husband who showed up, it was my father. And not only did he appear in the mirror, he stepped out of the mirror. Into the room. I've heard dozens of cases like that.

• 58:23Mayim Bialik?

  What are you creating that allows that to happen?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I don't know. I was just going by what the, you know, what the Greeks set up was. I mean, there's a lot of stuff about this I don't understand. And the most astonishing part to me was that my very sophisticated students took it to be a real event, not as a dream like, and so this is borne out very well. Lots of people have replicated my psychomantion study and they get the same results. And so, so what I'm saying is that

• 59:06Speaker 01

  for somebody to rush into this to have some kind of wacky sensation, that's not gonna work. You've got to think of this reflectively and realize that this procedure has a lot to do with the way you think and that these Greek philosophers are, they founded the whole Western way of thought. This works, but to really bring it alive in yourself, you've got to read about some stuff that most people are just bored by. And, and you know, as you guys know, I am not a parapsychologist. As sweet and kind, as wonderful and blissful as these wonderful people are,

• 59:50Speaker 01

  what they do is they make these assumptions and they can't absorb anything that challenges these basic assumptions. The most troublesome, to the most troublesome is, number one, what I call the afterlife establishment, psychical research and parapsychology.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Those are

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  A-historical, right? In reality, the rational inquiry into the afterlife begins with the Greek philosophers. That is Sunday night. But in the parapsychology and psychical research do not begin with the Greeks. They begin in 1848 with two little girls cracking their toes. That's the realism. That's the reality. And you can look that for yourself. It was the parapsychology and psychical research came from a religious craze of the 19th century. And they know nothing about the theta and the foundations of Western thought about

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  the afterlife. And then the second most troublesome assumption they make is scientists. By the time that mediums came into vogue and these people began to think, well, we want to investigate it, they had to put the word scientific into it because by that time the people had gotten say, oh, scientism is the, science is the ideal and knowledge and so on. So they had to use that word scientific. So what we have in parapsychology and psychical research is just pseudoscience. And it's, and I've proved that definitively in my new book.

• 1:01:38Mayim Bialik?

  So what is the way that we should be approaching these things? Because you can't blame people, right? Everyone is fascinated. I mean, the story, you know, of Dr. Ritchie and Viola Horton, like, that's an amazing story. And for many people, we need the stories and those details.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  And I'm not, not questioning that. I'm saying, yes, the narratives are fascinating. They've changed my life. They've just changed my whole interior world. And you can't. Gain any insight into them and trying to provide into trying to impose the scientific method of this. The first and necessary step is conceptual thinking. And scientism is the doctrine that science is the only rational means of securing knowledge. Right? That is so ingrained in Western, which you don't even think it's be people just assume it without thinking. When I taught philosophy and I taught of histology.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  And so I would say first couple of classes, I'd say, what do you guys think knowledge is right? Couple of, you know, take a couple of classes and what they'd come up with is science is knowledge and any pack unpack this is scientific method is the only rational means of securing knowledge. Right? So I would say, I would write that up on the board. Scientific method is the only rational means of securing knowledge. And I say, is that what you guys think? Yeah, yeah. So then I draw a rectangle around that statement and I say, well, how do you know that? If you say scientific method is the only rational means of securing knowledge and I

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  know that by the scientific method, that's called reasoning in a circle, praticio principi. It's assuming what you set out to believe to prove. Okay. The other option is to say, scientific method is the only rational means of securing knowledge and I know that by philosophy or literary theory or history or the law. That is a self contradiction. Scientism is a social movement. It has nothing to do with rational thought. It's just a way of it's touting science as the savior of society. The way to solve the afterlife problem is not science.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  And 2025 question of life after death is the most important question of existence and it is also not yet a scientific question. That is the reality. But do you think that parapsychologists and psychical researchers are going to move out of that position? No, but I have moved out of that position and I'm going to challenge you guys. All right, so I say I've made a major breakthrough in the afterlife question and I want you guys to test it. And I don't mean to agree with you.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  I'm saying, read through this and please, if you find any error, please report it to me because if I put this out and my colleagues find an error in it, then I am moved closer to the truth by seeing my mistake. On the other hand, if I put it out to my colleagues and they cannot find an error with it, it gives me some encouragement that I'm on the right track. Plus, this opens entirely new ways to investigate the afterlife question.

• 1:05:19Jonathan Cohen?

  I'd like to go back in your life a little bit. You were a professor of philosophy. You got your PhD. What drove you to pursue medicine?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's very interesting. I am from a law enforcement family. My uncle Farley was the chief of police in this little town in Georgia. And he, when Farley retired after 30 years, a local judge told us that they had to hire three officers to take Farley's place again. And so when I was a kid, I drove around, my uncle ferried me around in the cop car and I knew a lot of cops. My brother was a cop for 20 years, a sheriff. And so I just, that's, and my son is a, is a medical doctor and he's a correctional medicine doctor in a prison.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  And so it's, and my dad worked for what's now the FDA in their sting operations. He was a surgeon and he helped them in the stinging of the, the people in drugstores who were giving things to folks and all. So, you know, law enforcement is in my blood and I'm, I've always been fascinated by homicide. And so.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  When I had been in, in teaching philosophy, I really loved it and still do. But I was 23 years old, I think, when I got my PhD in philosophy. And what's driven me my whole life is trying to get knowledge. So I just, I wanted to, to go that route. And so I went to, to medical college and I, from the, one of my first days, I went down to the sub-basement and, and asked Dr. Chandler, who was the forensic pathologist down there, like. And so I would go to murder scenes and such. So, I mean, I just really am fascinated by homicide. And so that was the reason for the change into, plus also, it gives you a more in-depth

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  range of thought about the mind than just philosophy. But I still love philosophy. It wasn't any kind of discouragement. And subsequently, I've taught philosophy again. I mean, it's just, and I still, you know, I just, I love teaching philosophy.

• 1:07:40Jonathan Cohen?

  And I heard you mention that you were focused on psychiatry.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Psychiatry, right.

• 1:07:45Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you believe in the biochemical approach to psychiatry? Or do you believe in a spiritual?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  The two ways of investigating near-death experiences these days, which they've come up with, are the, some are trying to find sections in the brain, which they say generate these near-death experiences, right? And, and, and that, the other method is the, um, method of putting something on the ledge above where people are being resuscitated, right? And these two are the allegedly scientific methods now. The idea is, yeah, if they said, yeah, the people get out of the body during the resuscitation, they see the little object on the shelf and stuff. Does that prove there's an afterlife? Absolutely not.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  It doesn't get us one bit closer. Because it's just like, it's perfectly conceivable that, that, you know, when the, that's, that's before the body is annihilled. It doesn't give us any insight as to what might happen after the body. So what I'm saying is, the ignorance that permeates the afterlife establishment, they have no idea about all of these objections that were posed in antiquity. They don't think like that. And so I'm just saying, there's a new way to do it. And it's not going to be

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  pleasant to the folks who are focused on these methods, like parapsychologists, what they're interested in is their method. They're not, you know, when you, and the folks in parapsychology and psychical research, their notion of the afterlife is internally generated. Their notion of the afterlife is a projection of their own methods. And I wouldn't say methods, but rather methodological presuppositions. But there's a way out of this. And we're on the verge of it, but it won't go down well with the parapsychologists and the psychical researchers.

• 1:09:59Mayim Bialik?

  Before we let you go, I wonder if you could just tell us what you kind of see as your legacy. You've already made such an incredible impact on the world, not just of near-death experiences, but really a conversation about consciousness in general and the soul. What do you think your legacy is?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  If I project it ahead, I think that my legacy will be that Raymond Moody will just, as the person who discovered that unintelligibility is an intelligible phenomenon. In other words, that Raymond Moody will be the person who figured out nonsense logic.

• 1:10:40Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we're really so grateful we got to speak with you, and we can't wait to tell all of our NDE friends about it.

• 1:10:49Mayim Bialik?

  In the time that we had with Dr. Moody, I didn't get to ask him about something called a parallel dream. Do you know what a parallel dream is?

• 1:10:59Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, I can imagine.

• 1:11:00Mayim Bialik?

  Have you and I ever had the same dream? And both woken up and been like, hey, we just dreamed the same thing?

• 1:11:05Jonathan Cohen?

  That's what's happening right now.

• 1:11:07Mayim Bialik?

  Stop it. But I'm gonna ask.

• 1:11:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Pinch yourself. Pinch yourself right now.

• 1:11:11Mayim Bialik?

  Stop.

• 1:11:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Wait. You... Wake up.

• 1:11:14Mayim Bialik?

  I've heard of people having simultaneous bad dreams. I've heard of people having simultaneously good dreams. He talks about, in this book, he was married previously, and his ex-wife, now they're divorced, his wife at the time was, I believe, seven months pregnant. And he had a horrible, horrible nightmare. A very graphic nightmare. And he saw their baby being born, and it was stillborn. It was a horrible, horrible dream to have. She was very pregnant. He remembered seeing the doctor and like seeing everything happen, you know, like terrible.

• 1:11:59Mayim Bialik?

  He wakes up. From his report, his then-wife woke up. She had just had, at the same time, people, parallel dream, she had had a dream, and wait for it. Not only did she describe the exact same thing, she described it from her pericenium, meaning it was as if there was a moment in time that existed, which each of them had access to from their particular perspective, right? I mean, like, I have chills. And in her dream, she was giving birth, right? So he was watching her giving birth in his dream. She was giving birth in her dream. And they ended up, they did lose the baby. Now, it's a very tragic story,

• 1:12:43Mayim Bialik?

  but what's interesting and what he kind of talks about, and what I think we would think about, right? What's real? What's reality?

• 1:12:53Mayim Bialik?

  Were they going to lose the baby? Was that already decided? And then they each dreamed it? Was that not going to happen until they dreamed it? Like, talk about dreams creating reality. He also talks a lot about precognitive dreams. And I thought about your dream where you dreamed the place in Ashland. There are qualities that he says are necessary to determine if something is a precognitive dream, right? So I was thinking, was this parallel dream they had precognitive? Has to be real or hyper-real? Like, it's not like, "Oh, I dreamt this." It's like, "I experienced it." "I lived it." "I was in it." So it's not so much like a memory. It's like a remembering, right?

• 1:13:37Mayim Bialik?

  Often sights and sounds are superimposed over ordinary reality. So there's often like other sensory stuff that's going on. There has to be a unique feeling to the dream. Where usually you would say, "I've never experienced anything like this before." "I've never felt anything like this before," right? "It's special and spooky." Often a mystical white light or a spiritual being made of light. These are the things. So this parallel dream thing, though, freaked me out. Freaked me out.

• 1:14:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Almost all of the characteristics you described were in my Ashland dream.

• 1:14:12Mayim Bialik?

  That's what I was thinking. That's what I was thinking. So I'm also curious, another thing that we talk about, and also curious from, you know, our audience, right? Are there people who are more open, susceptible, to receiving information that is not of this plane? I think that's really part of the larger question, right? And you could say, "Oh, well, this person, you know, they're a hippie. They're always meditating." But that shouldn't be a condemnation. The notion is if you continuously place yourself in a place, right? In a theta state, in that space, yeah, you're gonna be, in theory, more open to it. I also love these stories of people who are just like walking down the street

• 1:14:57Mayim Bialik?

  and then all of a sudden they're channeling, right? What is that? How does that work? Different, you know, fascinating thing. But this notion that... He, he himself, like, is it from the studying of it? Is it from his deeper understanding? Is it because he studied Plato? And he understands what this actual structure is? Of trying to, to thin this veil, to pierce this veil, you know?

• 1:15:23Jonathan Cohen?

  What comes to mind is the conversations we hear about spiritual awakening. And they've changed for a long time. He goes back and talks about Plato and how we change our thinking. But a lot of the spiritual teachers, for as long as there's been written texts, talk about this evolution of knowledge where people are waking up to their higher selves or their true nature. And the fact that, you know, we're caught in illusion or we're caught in ego, as Jung described it. Or we are caught in a distraction. That can be in modern day society with the trappings of commercialism. Or it can be the distraction of social media.

• 1:16:06Jonathan Cohen?

  But there is some essence that we are here to discover as human beings that is core to our existence. And how do we access that? How do we feel something on this earth? That is more than the pursuit of consumption. And so much of the NDEs come back and talk about love, talk about connection, talk about feeling a larger sense of oneness. And so, how do we start to experience the veil thinning? It is starting, for some, by having the notion that it's possible. Where others are just shot through the veil. And then they come back as the guides to say, wait a second, there is something here.

• 1:16:50Jonathan Cohen?

  The nature of reality from the materialist perspective is quite limited. And you're missing this whole internal world that you could be experiencing.

• 1:17:00Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think one of the things that's so interesting about Dr. Moody's path was that it began from a philosophical perspective, which normally you would think like, "That has nothing to do with what we're talking about." It actually has everything to do with what we're talking about, because in ancient times, intellectually, that's where conversations about spirituality lived. They lived in these realms. It's what led me to ask Dr. Moody about his psychomantium experiment that he devised. He started doing it with graduate students, and, you know, the Greeks knew that there was life after death, right? Or that there was a way to contact ancestors, right? Which plenty of healers and energy workers, right,

• 1:17:45Mayim Bialik?

  will do past life regressions and get you in touch with ancestors, right? But he thought, "What's a modern way to create this in an experimental format?" So what he did is he devised not an underground chamber, which is what the Greeks used to do, but he tried to create a dark, very simple space where people would sit, and he basically was creating a forced gaze into nothingness. For him, that was done in a dark room. He would place a mirror so that you couldn't see yourself, but you could see basically the mirror reflecting just blackness. And you would gaze into the mirror, and I think Joan Rivers went in there.

• 1:18:29Mayim Bialik?

  There was like celebrities that were attracted to this experiment that he was doing. And his hope, you know, was that maybe he'd get something. He got a lot of people to have very profound experiences. And what's interesting is he set them up with kind of a miniature review of their relationship with this person. So if you think about these stats that we were talking about, widows reporting that they're interacting with husbands at like 90% in certain surveys and things, what does it mean to have a deep a deep emotional connection with someone and then to lose them, right? You're losing them from this physical space. How are you connected to them? We've talked about this in terms of a plane of consciousness, in terms of even like,

• 1:19:13Mayim Bialik?

  your microbiome is mixing with that of the person that you spend the most time with. You are kind of part of the same organism if we pull way back. Of course, you might be more susceptible to receiving information, or... As some might say, imagining it. So the actual statistics from the first study I wanted to touch on, eight out of 16 people, so 50%, saw the dead person that they wanted to see.

• 1:19:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Wow.

• 1:19:40Mayim Bialik?

  And that's big. He thought he'd see maybe like, not even one out of 16.

• 1:19:44Jonathan Cohen?

  What I'm wondering is, do you see a dead person that you didn't expect to see?

• 1:19:48Mayim Bialik?

  I'll give you that stat too. Also, people might be saying like, well, maybe these are crazy people. No, these were mentally stable people who were seekers, interested, interested in consciousness. He was using graduate students, right? Some people didn't see that person that they thought they would see, but think of all the associations your brain can make. They saw other people who had passed. So, let's just keep this in mind. If we're opening some portal, right? It doesn't mean that the person that you want to come through is gonna come through. You may be thinking about that, but this one woman that he talked, right? She wanted to see her husband, instead, her father came through, right?

• 1:20:23Jonathan Cohen?

  That might be the most profound sentence you've ever said on this podcast. When you open a portal, you don't know who's gonna come through. You have to be aware of the portal you're opening.

• 1:20:36Mayim Bialik?

  Be careful, take caution the portal you open.

• 1:20:40Jonathan Cohen?

  But you like a plan, so I can imagine you

• 1:20:43Mayim Bialik?

  Wait for it.

• 1:20:44Jonathan Cohen?

  Sitting, opening a portal, being like, no, excuse me, you were not who I invited.

• 1:20:48Mayim Bialik?

  Some people, in this study, I can't remember if it was like 10%, saw no one in that moment. Imagine you go, you spend the day, like the protocol for this experiment, you sit with him, you drink tea, you have a little breakfast.

• 1:21:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Not hallucinogenic tea.

• 1:21:03Mayim Bialik?

  Not hallucinogenic tea. You're talking about this person, you know, there's a whole protocol. He's a psychology professor, he does all these things, right? So you're sitting with him, you're having, like you have a light breakfast, and then you talk, and there's a whole protocol. Like, according to sort of the psychology department, right? Of like, how this study is being designed. Imagine you go in there after a whole day, talking about your dead person that you wanna see, and the issues, and this, that. Imagine not seeing anything. I would be majorly bummed out. However, a certain proportion of people, I think it was 10%, saw that person later in the day at their home.

• 1:21:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Just hanging out.

• 1:21:41Mayim Bialik?

  Well, people had not dreams, not visions, but like they had an experience. And it could be like, what if you're not comfortable in that weird little room?

• 1:21:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Dr. Tara Swart talked about her husband.

• 1:21:54Mayim Bialik?

  Right there.

• 1:21:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Appearing.

• 1:21:55Mayim Bialik?

  Clear as day.

• 1:21:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Bedside.

• 1:21:57Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. That's actually, in the shared death experience that he talked about with his sister, when they were seeing their mother die, he said it wasn't like, oh, we're seeing a vision. He said it was as if his father came down from heaven and they were looking at him in the room. And his father was like, come on, honey.

• 1:22:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Tell us a little bit about shared death vision for, if we haven't heard about it before.

• 1:22:19Mayim Bialik?

  So a shared death experience is something that actually Martha Jo Atkins talked about. Because when you witness transitions, right? This is something that apparently happens. And I love this notion, you know, Dr. Moody has talked about, this stuff happens a lot. People don't know where to put it. They don't know what to say. They don't know how to articulate it. They're worried they'll be called crazy, right? This stuff is happening and since the invention of CPR, to think that's why we're seeing it so much more because we're having this new data set of people who literally died and are brought back.

• 1:22:59Jonathan Cohen?

  We never used to be able to bring them back.

• 1:23:01Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 1:23:02Jonathan Cohen?

  They were going off having their visions and then off they went.

• 1:23:05Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 1:23:06Jonathan Cohen?

  And we're like, no, don't go.

• 1:23:07Mayim Bialik?

  Well, okay, so if I'm gonna like, if I'm gonna do this thought experiment, if this is happening, right? Our shared death experience is things that we all have access to. You're all around someone's bed.

• 1:23:22Jonathan Cohen?

  Who's passing. And so the portal is opening because they're opening the portal.

• 1:23:26Mayim Bialik?

  Who opens the portal to the next life? That's the question.

• 1:23:30Jonathan Cohen?

  I asked this to Martha Jo Atkins in our episode with her. Just as a reminder, Martha Jo is a death duelist. She's been with more than a thousand people as they've transitioned.

• 1:23:40Mayim Bialik?

  It's a weird flex, but yes.

• 1:23:41Jonathan Cohen?

  And she's described many of the patterns that happen while people are transitioning. And I equate those patterns. To the fact that there may be an underlying code that we can identify to understand there are systems at play in life that we are mostly a part of and so we can see those patterns as indicators. Okay, so people are passing and

• 1:24:09Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:24:10Jonathan Cohen?

  People see visions. Sometimes they see a loved one coming.

• 1:24:15Mayim Bialik?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:16Jonathan Cohen?

  And she talked about this too, that there are shared visions where someone in the room, a child, an adult child of the person who's dying. So imagine a parent is passing and their adult children are there. And they see the deceased partner.

• 1:24:31Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 1:24:32Jonathan Cohen?

  Another parent.

• 1:24:33Mayim Bialik?

  Who has also passed.

• 1:24:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Who has passed previously coming to help guide the person on their deathbed across. And I asked her.

• 1:24:40Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:24:42Jonathan Cohen?

  If a portal is opening, it's like a bus is, you know, like a spiritual bus. Okay, guys, we're picking this one up. We have to stop at this hospital or this transition home. And I say if the portal is opening, do you ever have to be careful what else might come because if there are all these entities on the other side of the veil and the veil is so thin and this moment of someone in physical form is the point at which they're crossing over and you can think about the Marvel movie when the thing opens. Every time that circle opens, someone comes through that you're not expecting. It's, it opens for one person and then like the bad guy comes through.

• 1:25:21Mayim Bialik?

  Any other sci fi fans out there? First of all, this happens in Thor Ragnarok, I'm pretty sure. This happens in um several, there's a few Avengers movies where like something like this totally happening. Also like anomaly, like it's a, right? That was a British sci fi show. Sorry, I'm just thinking like the thing opens and who knows? It's also Land of the Lost. There's a really old school reference to what we're talking about. The question that I originally framed to you though was is the portal opening, don't laugh. Is the portal opening of its own accord?

• 1:25:54Jonathan Cohen?

  No.

• 1:25:54Mayim Bialik?

  Is it? I didn't even let me finish the question.

• 1:25:57Jonathan Cohen?

  I have an answer.

• 1:25:58Mayim Bialik?

  Okay. So the notion is not so much to me that let's say the person is passing that they're like, "I'm opening the portal." No, they're having an experience. And it's not other people opening the portal unless there are people on the other side being like, "Come." To me, it's like a moment, it's an energetic moment in time where this person's time in their meat suit is ending. And that is the opening that then is allowing other things to come through.

• 1:26:30Jonathan Cohen?

  So you get there, right?

• 1:26:32Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:26:33Jonathan Cohen?

  You start the analogy of, is this person opening it? No, they are part of a dance that is this interconnected relationship between the meat suit, the field of consciousness, the other side of the veil whereby it is known that the meat suit transition is ending and therefore their soul needs to go on the school bus. The school bus knows where the stops are. It has its schedule. There's someone on the other side programming the route that the school bus is asked to take.

• 1:27:03Mayim Bialik?

  That's the simulation version of life, but yes.

• 1:27:05Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, it could be, what are the angels doing if they're not programming the school bus?

• 1:27:10Mayim Bialik?

  Here's the challenge that I often have. Everything's so hunky dory. What about families where people are fighting? The couple didn't like each other. Nobody's happy to be there. Do those families, like, is that...

• 1:27:22Jonathan Cohen?

  This is the great moment, right? The mom is transitioning and the dad shows up to help her across. You're like, "I don't want to see you. I'll go with anyone else. Where's your cousin Jerry?"

• 1:27:31Mayim Bialik?

  That's my Czechoslovakia joke. That's the punchline.

• 1:27:35Jonathan Cohen?

  The one thing that Martha Joe said when I asked her about, "Does anything else come through?" She said one time in the birth center, something happened. The lights were flickering, the doors blew open and like some weird energy and everyone in the center felt it and they had to go and smudge and, you know, have...

• 1:27:56Mayim Bialik?

  Of course, gotta go smudge.

• 1:27:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, something came through that wasn't supposed to.

• 1:28:00Mayim Bialik?

  You know, we're speaking very freely about all of this and I want to drill down for a second. Can we drill down for a second?

• 1:28:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and we're speaking so freely because I do believe there's a change, not only in our community who is interested in this, in these conversations, not only in, you know, you and I ourselves who have been able to speak to so many people who have gathered these stories and normalized it, but what we're finding is that so many, almost, almost most people have some kind of story like this somewhere in their family, where maybe it's not them, but it's someone else. And there's just these extra otherworldly experiences that people are having and aren't afraid anymore to, to bring up and talk about.

• 1:28:52Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm not saying that we have figured out the mechanism.

• 1:28:55Mayim Bialik?

  I feel left out. I feel like everybody's doing it but me.

• 1:28:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Sometimes you do have these things and then you're like-

• 1:29:01Mayim Bialik?

  No, I'm not talking about like a shared death. I mean, I've been in the room when people die. Bubkis, just crying. Just weirdness, just sadness. I mean, my dad, my dad did talk about, at one point, he did talk about his, I think his parents. And he also talked about seeing my mother the age when he first met her.

• 1:29:36Mayim Bialik?

  And I thought, well, that's interesting, but no mist, no music, nothing like that. Like, when you hear Dr. Moody talk about it, it's like, whoa, it's happening to everybody. Does it happen in your family?

• 1:29:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Your, well, hold on one second. Your mom, your mom-

• 1:29:52Mayim Bialik?

  Spooky, there's spooky stuff.

• 1:29:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Believes that she interacts with your, your dad all the time.

• 1:29:58Mayim Bialik?

  Routinely. He may as well just be here.

• 1:30:00Jonathan Cohen?

  Through hummingbirds, through-

• 1:30:02Mayim Bialik?

  Butterflies, all the things.

• 1:30:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Because I'm a catalog of all the episodes that we have. Uh, I think about Teresa Caputo.

• 1:30:11Jonathan Cohen?

  And I think about

• 1:30:13Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Jonathan Cohen?

  The story of after my brother's accident that she taps into where she talks about how my dad's father helped shepherd

• 1:30:22Mayim Bialik?

  That was amazing.

• 1:30:23Jonathan Cohen?

  My brother back from the brink of death because my dad wouldn't have been able to handle it. And in that moment.

• 1:30:30Mayim Bialik?

  That was intense.

• 1:30:31Jonathan Cohen?

  I had thought about that dynamic for decades.

• 1:30:36Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 1:30:36Jonathan Cohen?

  From every different angle and I never occurred to me what could have been happening. The support that could have been available for my father so he could get through that scenario.

• 1:30:47Mayim Bialik?

  I have no idea.

• 1:30:48Jonathan Cohen?

  And just recently, a couple of weeks ago, my sister said to me, I just had a dream last night about Zady. He came to me in a dream and was like this pillar of support. And I had just had someone revisit that episode with Teresa Caputo. And they had just told me about, you know, we call them Zady.

• 1:31:09Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Jonathan Cohen?

  My dad's dad. And my sister was like, has he ever come to you in a dream? And I told her about that episode and she's like, that was the first time he's come to me in a dream like that.

• 1:31:19Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 1:31:20Jonathan Cohen?

  So.

• 1:31:22Mayim Bialik?

  I mean.

• 1:31:22Jonathan Cohen?

  This, so let me, one more thing.

• 1:31:26Jonathan Cohen?

  I first started experiencing the notion of

• 1:31:32Jonathan Cohen?

  ancestral support through family constellation work, which is an extension of the Burt Hellinger methodology. I don't know. It was founded by Burt Hellinger and it's been expanded, but the notion is that type of therapy, which is a group non-talk based therapy.

• 1:31:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Makes the veil seem so, so thin. So what does that mean in everyday life if the veil is so thin? Right? Like we can ask for that type of support, whether or not we can receive it and interpret it is another thing.

• 1:32:07Mayim Bialik?

  It would be a total revolution in the way we interact. If we can actually. Drill down into what this actually is. Yeah, it would be a revolution in how we interact, in how we hope for things, in what we seek. I mean, I guess this is for people who feel that they're in touch with these entities all the time. That's what they're guided by. Think about Lee Harris. He's in touch with this set of entities that he feels is kind of guiding things. Like, what is it like? And is there a place? And I think this is sort of the strength of what Dr. Moody has brought to this field. Is there a place where these things can coexist? Or do we have to be siloed and say, oh, there's the people who believe? And then there's the rationalists, right? No, there's actually a place where all of this can, you know, mix.

• 1:32:52Jonathan Cohen?

  How I got introduced to family constellation therapy was actually through a body worker chiropractor who believed that you needed a certain type of spiritual healing or reattunement in order for the body to keep its physical structure. So you could adjust and adjust and adjust. But if you didn't deal with it at a soul level, then the body would never actually hold an adjustment. So she was like, she incorporated that into her practice.

• 1:33:23Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 1:33:24Jonathan Cohen?

  And you and I did this exercise once where we looked in a mirror and we did a muscle testing exercise. I don't know if you, you'll remember it when I tell you. And I did a muscle testing exercise with you where I asked you, say in the mirror that I have the right, I believe I have the right to heal.

• 1:33:42Mayim Bialik?

  Can we not?

• 1:33:44Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you remember this?

• 1:33:45Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 1:33:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Why are you so?

• 1:33:48Mayim Bialik?

  Go ahead.

• 1:33:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Because it's a little out there, right? And you're a little bit of afraid to let your out there side fly. But in 2026, as we approach this new year, as we're in the new year, we're coming out of the spiritual closet, you and I. You know, we talk about it with Bruce Lipton. We talk about it in many other episodes. If you have a subconscious belief or even a conscious belief that you don't deserve to heal.

• 1:34:12Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:34:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Then the healing practices aren't going to hold. Tell us a little bit about that as, as a, an understanding because it connects to this idea of the support outside of the veil. So I'm going to tell you how it connects and then you can sort of, sort of support that idea.

• 1:34:32Jonathan Cohen?

  If physiologically, I don't believe I can heal. I don't believe I should be able to heal. I have the right to heal from shame, or guilt, or baggage, or whatever I'm holding.

• 1:34:43Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:34:43Jonathan Cohen?

  Then it can prevent the physical change. And in family constellation, what you're doing is drawing on the support of ancestors, of people who know you outside of this limited framework to help you push forward and say, whatever you're holding is likely actually not yours, that you're a part of a larger family system, and you've inherited these belief patterns as a coping mechanism. And you can give them back, and that you can honor your family by living better. You don't have to martyr yourself by being in a state of stress, anxiousness, or other afflictions.

• 1:35:21Mayim Bialik?

  I think you did a great job describing that. I think it's important to be clear that we actually don't know. We don't know a lot about what we're articulating here. We really don't.

• 1:35:32Jonathan Cohen?

  You are very cautious, and I believe it's important to be cautious about what we know and what we don't. The last thing I'll add, though, is that I have seen for myself and in others that there is a physiological change in muscle strength when people adjust that core belief, or feel more supportive.

• 1:35:54Mayim Bialik?

  I appreciate that. I think it's beyond the scope of what I can sort of understand for the purposes of this episode. I do think that this does tie into this notion of, I mean, Ellen Langer talks about this, you know, this notion of sort of what do we believe? What are we anchoring towards?

• 1:36:15Mayim Bialik?

  You know, I do. I fall a little bit on the rationalist side, or whatever you want to call it, of a lot of this, you know, whatever story people want to construct also. It doesn't mean that it's not true. It can just be their own kind of story and framework. But yeah, I think that there's, I think that there is space.

• 1:36:38Mayim Bialik?

  For us to allow this kind of framework, I don't know if it's mine. I just don't. So I think we should probably leave that there for now. I think we're probably pretty good. I feel like we've talked a lot and it's almost time to go.

• 1:36:53Jonathan Cohen?

  You believe that the unconscious can hold beliefs and systems that affect us psychologically.

• 1:37:00Mayim Bialik?

  Of course.

• 1:37:01Jonathan Cohen?

  It can affect our decision making. It can affect how we analyze a situation.

• 1:37:05Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:37:05Jonathan Cohen?

  It colors our perceptions.

• 1:37:07Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 1:37:07Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'll take it one step further, that these unconscious beliefs, feelings, thoughts about ourselves can have a physical influence.

• 1:37:17Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, that is true.

• 1:37:19Jonathan Cohen?

  We're bridging here. We're not so divided.

• 1:37:22Mayim Bialik?

  We can start our own religion right now with those things as the basis. It was such a thrill to get to spend some time with Dr. Moody. And, you know, as we spoke to him, I kept thinking of all the lives that he has touched, all the people who have been able to use him as a cornerstone of their experience to say, "I'm not crazy. This is happening. There are people who have studied it. There are people who continue to study it." And especially in the framework of what we spoke about with Dr. Moody, there's a framework for this that spans back thousands of years. The conversation about what can we access?

• 1:38:05Mayim Bialik?

  Where does our intention get placed so that we can access other things? It's just, it's tremendous to get to speak to him about this.

• 1:38:12Jonathan Cohen?

  I totally agree.

• 1:38:13Mayim Bialik?

  You know, Jonathan, as we round out 2025, I'm reflecting back thoughtfully on all of the NDE episodes we've done, all of the episodes we've done about consciousness, about collective consciousness, all the physicists we've spoken to, all of the, you know, individual stories we've heard. This feels like such a beautiful way to get to round out the year by talking to literally the person who put so much of this on the map in so many different fields. It's almost Christmas Eve. I think we also want to wish everyone a happy holiday, a happy holiday season, a safe new year. We'll be back in 2026 with so much more.

• 1:38:50Jonathan Cohen?

  There's so many more topics that we, like I have lists and lists of topics that we didn't even get to this year. We're gonna dive deeper in. Until then, come join us on Substack, my MB Alex Breakdown on Substack, growing breaker community with content. We release

• 1:39:05Jonathan Cohen?

  Nowhere else but there.

• 1:39:06Mayim Bialik?

  Happy New Year, everyone. Happy holidays and we will, uh, yeah. From our, from our 2025 breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you in 2026 next time.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  It's my Mbi Alex breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's gonna break down. It's a breakdown. She's gonna break it down.