Every Ancient Civilization Agreed: Your Soul Chose This Life Before You Were Born

What if your struggles, heartbreaks, illnesses, relationships, and biggest challenges were never random, but lessons your soul chose before you were born? In this very special episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Mayim and Jonathan investigate one of the most controversial spiritual ideas ever discussed: Earth School — the theory that Earth is a classroom for the soul, and that every experience in your life has a deeper purpose. Near death experiencers around the world report strikingly similar revelations: - Choosing their lives before birth - Seeing a life review after death - Discovering a hidden purpose behind suffering - Learning that consciousness may survive physical death But that's only the beginning. Ancient civilizations separated by oceans, languages, and thousands of years all appear to describe the same mysterious journey of the soul. Could Plato, Tibetan mystics, Kabbalists, Buddhists, Hindu sages, and modern NDE survivors all be pointing toward the same hidden truth? We're breaking down: - Shocking NDEs that reveal life as a "school" - Why many NDE survivors return convinced they chose their challenges - Ancient story of a man who died, returned, and described souls selecting their next lives - Forgotten biblical teachings about reincarnation that were later rejected by church authorities - Tibetan, Buddhist, Hindu, Greek, and Kabbalistic traditions that describe the soul's evolution - Mysterious phenomenon of children who remember previous lives - Scientific research investigating NDEs & consciousness beyond death - Why suffering may be a lesson, not a punishment - Theory that humanity may be part of a much larger cosmic experiment - Whether Earth School is spiritual truth...or humanity's greatest coping mechanism Whether you're a skeptic, spiritual seeker, philosopher, or simply wondering why you're here, this conversation will challenge everything you think you know about life, death, and the journey of the soul. If life isn't happening TO you—but FOR you—what lesson are you here to learn? Class is in session. Full episode with Betty Guadagno: https://art19.com/shows/mayim-bialiks-breakdown/episodes/19072ff3-528c-4247-bb6e-b90d26a58212Full episode with Dr. Raymond Moody: https://rss.art19.com/episodes/2560c428-3814-4dbf-9a10-aacc692ae0d8.mp3Full episode with Dr. Bruce Greyson: https://art19.com/shows/mayim-bialiks-breakdown/episodes/4e43ce85-fa70-4dbd-b379-3d27e4a5e4c9Full episode with Dr. Jim Tucker: https://art19.com/shows/mayim-bialiks-breakdown/episodes/51710fc8-a5df-4302-bdc9-ef2fb67ddda8 If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NOCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started: https://learn.nocd.com/BREAK Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BREAK at https://www.oneskin.co/BREAK #oneskinpod Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code BREAK at https://www.mudwtr.com/BREAK ! #mudwtrpod Go to https://tidd.ly/4uVltMe and use the code MAYIM50 to get $50 off your Elastique order. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See 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?

  What if your life is not random?

• 0:02Jonathan Cohen?

  And instead, you're here for a reason?

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  You're not a biological accident on a small planet in an ordinary galaxy. Hidden inside every ancient tradition on Earth, across cultures, across centuries, across millennia, built independently by people who never met, is the same idea, an answer to...

• 0:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Why we are here.

• 0:22Mayim Bialik?

  Some call it destiny, some call it karma. Entire civilizations have been built around this. And in more recent years, a growing number of researchers and experiencers have been calling it Earth School.

• 0:34Jonathan Cohen?

  The idea that this planet isn't just a place that you're stranded, it's a place that we have all been sent.

• 0:40Mayim Bialik?

  Struggles, the relationships, the pain, the joy we experience, all of that is the curriculum of Earth School. Your soul arrived here with something specific to learn.

• 0:51Jonathan Cohen?

  What we do here sends a ripple outwards to people we've never met, across generations, and possibly even across the cosmos.

• 0:59Mayim Bialik?

  When you start to see patterns in describing the soul's journey, the lessons we have to learn on Earth School, and you see it in ancient texts, mystical traditions, religious practices, it makes you wonder, what if that's not a coincidence? What if we could put all of these pieces together and see how it could change our lives? School is in session.

• 1:26Mayim Bialik?

  I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:27Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:28Mayim Bialik?

  And on this very special episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, we're not claiming to have all the answers, but we're gonna follow the clues. We're gonna explore the evidence, some of it rooted in ancient texts, some coming from experiences today, and we'll see what happens when we start connecting all these pieces. Join us on this journey, because if there is something more going on here, something bigger than we've been told, wouldn't you want to be the first to know?

• 1:54Jonathan Cohen?

  In 2003, Amy Call was 26 years old and living with chronic pain from fibromyalgia. Her doctors prescribed her new medication and she had an allergic reaction. Her nasal passages swelled shut, she couldn't breathe, and she couldn't call for help. And then the struggle was over.

• 2:12Mayim Bialik?

  She felt herself pulled upward and out of the top of her head. What happened next, Amy spent years trying to explain. She found herself, all of a sudden, in a place of complete clarity. And in that place, she was given a very specific understanding. She wasn't told, she wasn't lectured. She was shown something that restructured everything she thought she knew about her life. She was having a near-death experience. And when she returned, she said, "I came to understand that most of us have lived much, much longer than we can even fathom." She wasn't talking about living a long life. She was talking about many lives. She was talking about some sort of system, a design, something that looked, from where

• 2:56Mayim Bialik?

  she stood, remarkably like a school. And here's what was strange. Amy had never heard the phrase "earth school." She wasn't particularly religious. She wasn't looking for a spiritual explanation or experience. But she got one, and she's not alone.

• 3:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Amy's experience was actually very similar to stories that we've heard on this podcast. Fantastic and almost unbelievable tales from people who have had near-death experiences at different times, who didn't know each other. They had them at times where the internet couldn't share that amount of information. And yet, the similarities of people who pass over, have their consciousness changed, are so strikingly similar.

• 3:37Mayim Bialik?

  Betty Guadagno, better known as Buddha Betty. In her NDE, what she described was being shown, "This literally is an earth school with a set of lessons that your soul chooses before you are born to have in this lifetime." She literally said that it was explicitly laid out for her. And many people who have NDEs describe, you know, some combination of a life review and a... Delivery of a message that this is what happened in this incarnation that your soul chose. These are the lessons your soul, before you were even born, decided that you were going to experience in this lifetime. All the painful ones, the trauma, all of it.

• 4:21Mayim Bialik?

  Those things are things that your soul chooses as your lessons for this incarnation in Earth School.

• 4:27Jonathan Cohen?

  And what is it about choosing, knowing that you've had a choice in selecting these lessons that change how we experience the troubles, the challenges, the hardship that we may experience in life, if we know that it isn't random? How does that change how we experience it? And we're going to look at those ancient texts that may indicate and help prove that that is actually true?

• 4:54Mayim Bialik?

  Well, first, let's talk about Earth School. You know, is this something that we just talk about now, since people are reporting NDEs? No, it's actually an ancient idea. And it didn't originate in kind of one religion, or even one cultural context, or even on one continent. So what we have is this common idea that emerged independently and repeatedly across seemingly thousands of years of human history. So we can find it in Greece, ancient Greece, we can find it in Jerusalem, we can find it in Tibet, we can find it also in the Vedas, and in the oral traditions of indigenous communities on every single continent.

• 5:36Mayim Bialik?

  So these are completely separate civilizations with essentially no contact with each other in the formation of these ideas. Different languages, different expressions, different incarnations of God. Everything's different, but they're essentially describing the same Earth School.

• 5:54Jonathan Cohen?

  So what is Earth School? The idea is actually deceptively simple. What if this planet, this place that we all call home, we're not just stranded here, but it's a place that we've been sent to, or we've chosen to come to? So many NDEs describe that the other side is actually our home, that we are souls that have come to have a physical experience, and that we have come here to incarnate, to have relationships, to have loss, to have failure, to have moments that feel like they're gonna break us as part of this curriculum. So what is it that we're enrolled in?

• 6:33Mayim Bialik?

  It's not just people who have experienced near-death experiences that have insight into what this Earth School is about. People who drop in to deep, meditative places where they have access to information that seems to be on some sort of download mechanism. They also indicate, "This is school. We're all in session, learning a set of lessons that have been given to us for a very specific reason." This has the potential to transform the way you see suffering, the way you see illness, the way you see pain, tragedy. This is a complete reframe. So I think it's important to realize that we don't have to rely on people who have died and returned

• 7:18Mayim Bialik?

  to give us an education in the education we're receiving. There are many, many people who resonate with this notion that everything you experience is part of what your soul needs to experience. There's a larger purpose for it, and we can find a freedom in understanding that everything that is placed before you is a lesson waiting to be learned.

• 7:44Jonathan Cohen?

  And it seems now, more than ever, with the internet and the ability to share these stories, that we're getting peaks beyond the veil to what might be on the other side. But let's go backwards and explore the clues that have been hidden and passed down through generations from cultures all over the world.

• 8:05Mayim Bialik?

  One of the earliest instances of a reference to this notion that this is not all there is for our soul actually comes from Plato's Republic. And in case you don't remember your last class in Classics, this is around 4th century BCE. And...

• 8:26Mayim Bialik?

  It's actually Socrates telling a story about a soldier named Er. So Er was this guy who died in battle. But his body is actually found on the battlefield about 10 days later, and it still has not decomposed. Hmm. Two days after that, they're placing him on the funeral pyre, and he revives. He's back, and he's got a message. What Er describes is watching souls in the afterlife being reviewed, judged. The just rise upwards and the unjust fall below. But here's what stopped Plato's readers cold.

• 9:08Mayim Bialik?

  The souls then had the opportunity to choose their next life. He saw Odysseus drawing the last lot and selecting the life of an ordinary citizen. Odysseus had had enough glory, and he wanted to learn something different. So these souls were then given a drink from the river of Leth, the river of forgetfulness, so that when they arrived in their new lives, they would have no memory of previous lives or the fact that they had chosen. Now, you might say Plato was writing a fantasy, but he wasn't a fantasy writer. He was a philosopher, and he was making a claim that the choices that we make in this life are reflecting what our souls have come here to learn, and the universe is organized around that learning.

• 9:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Plato was great. He was on to something clearly.

• 9:56Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, he's a pretty smart guy.

• 9:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Pretty smart guy.

• 9:59Mayim Bialik?

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• 10:43Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:27Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 11:29Jonathan Cohen?

  What's fascinating is the idea of forgetting, right? That is a theme that comes up over and over. Because people ask, well, if we've been here before, why can't we remember between lifetimes? And what happens is that as some people change their consciousness, begin to meditate, they can start to remember. And we wonder, are we creatively imagining it? Or are we actually getting information from the past?

• 11:58Mayim Bialik?

  This notion of forgetfulness calls to mind something in the oral tradition, in the Jewish tradition, that when you're a baby in your mother's womb, you are taught all the languages of all of the animals, and all of the trees, and all of the plants. You learn the languages of the entire universe. And right before you're born, the angel Lila touches your mouth, and you are made to forget. So one of these is the explanation, we've talked about this before, for the little angel's bow between your nose and your top lip. That that is where the angel touches you to make you forget. But the notion is, you have the rest of your life to figure out all of the languages of the animals,

• 12:43Mayim Bialik?

  and the plants, and the trees, that... You know it somewhere in your soul, and you are deliberately instructed to forget it so that you can learn it again in this incarnation. There's another Kabbalistic tradition from 16th century in a hilltop town called Sfat. There was an exceptional Jewish mystic, Isaac Luria, and he was known as the Ari, the lion. He developed a system that Jewish scholars still consider one of the most comprehensive maps of reality ever assembled. At the center was a concept called Gilgul, the cycling of souls, as well as Tikun, the ability to repair and rectify in other incarnations. What the Ari taught was that every soul arrives in this world with, for lack of a better expression,

• 13:28Mayim Bialik?

  unfinished spiritual business. It's work that couldn't or wouldn't be completed in a previous life, and the specific circumstances of your birth, who you were born to, the challenges you have, your particular gifts, your particular wounds. They're not random. They were designed for you because that's what your soul needs to learn. Each incarnation is a deliberate episode in the soul's extensive curriculum, designed to confront it with various life challenges tailored to its spiritual need. Your most difficult experiences, the ones that seem like they're going to bring you to your knees, that's not proof that the system is cruel. It's proof that the system is incredibly specific.

• 14:09Jonathan Cohen?

  And this was 1,000 years after Plato wrote the example we just gave.

• 14:16Mayim Bialik?

  Somewhere in between, you have the Tibetan Book of the Dead, right? That's the 8th century in Tibet. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is essentially a guidebook for dying, for the soul that is in that space between lives. And what the Tibetan Book of the Dead does is it describes states of consciousness that the soul is passing through after death, what it encounters, and then the choices that it will face before returning to a new body. So the text treats this transition as something that you can navigate, and you can learn, and you can also prepare for it, right? Is there some part of your soul that can maintain some wisdom? Wisdom from this incarnation so that when you choose next, not all is lost, right?

• 15:01Mayim Bialik?

  Can your consciousness in some way hold these different incarnations you have? And the assumptions that are baked into these kind of notions is you've done this before and you're gonna do it again. And what you learn this time is gonna shape what you're gonna then be ready to learn next time. Like every soul has a journey. We're just one stop. This name, this identity, this face, this is what my soul's doing now. But it's learning lessons through all of time and will continue to do so.

• 15:32Jonathan Cohen?

  And that's what each of us hope, that we're not just simply cycling through and repeating the same lessons. That there is an evolution of some kind, that life may not be perfect, but at least it's not the exact same as the last incarnation. And a lot of meditation or getting your intuition back talks about this notion of remembering to reconnect with something that we once had at some point. And some people will say, oh, I had it as a child. And other people will say, I don't even remember if I connected to it as a child, but it feels familiar when that message is received. That we have information beyond what we've experienced only in this lifetime and how do we access more of it?

• 16:18Jonathan Cohen?

  So we talked about Plato, we talked about Kabbalah, we talked about the Tibetan tradition. But it shows up other places as well.

• 16:27Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I mean nearby places. If you've thought about karma in this conversation, that's absolutely, you know, kind of the next dot that we can connect. You know, in the Vedic traditions, in the Buddhist traditions, karma, you know, we kind of misunderstand it in the West as, you know, like cosmic scorekeeping. Like, oh, if I do good things, good things will happen. And if I do bad things, I'll be punished. But that's actually not what the original concept is of karma. In Hindu and Buddhist frameworks, karma, it's not so much about reward and punishment. It's about learning through consequence, which is also, you know, when you think of parenting and what a lot of. Parenting manuals encourage you to do. Don't use reward and punishment. Use learning through consequence, right?

• 17:12Mayim Bialik?

  Every action causes an impression on the soul. And those impressions shape the conditions of what will be your next life. Not as punishment, but again, as part of this continuing curriculum. That cycle is samsara. The goal is not to win samsara. It's to learn so completely that you don't need to keep returning. In Zen Buddhism, it's this notion of you're going around a circle, but at some point you will break free of that circle. And you will no longer be on that circle. You know, muksha, this kind of concept, which in many yogic traditions we talk about. It's a graduation that is liberating.

• 17:47Jonathan Cohen?

  And that is the case both in the evolution of the soul and our lifetime, but also a mirrored system to what many of us go through with specific lessons in our life. Do we repeat the same patterns? Do we have compulsion? Do we try and make it right by having slight alterations? Or do we break free of the cycle entirely and create something new?

• 18:11Mayim Bialik?

  You know, we think about all of these ancient traditions and many of us are then kind of drawn to wonder, well, where does Christianity fit into this? You know, where does Islam fit into this? Of the Judeo-Christian, you know, kind of structure, was this anywhere hidden in there? You know, we've spoken to Brian Murrescu, who has an entire canon about what early Christianity was keeping from the Greeks, from the Romans, and what it was leaving behind. The early Christian church, there were significant communities that believed in reincarnation. It's a feature of many texts that came out of the Old Testament tradition of the Jews and that continued into many of those early Christian communities. The agnostic Christians described the soul

• 18:56Mayim Bialik?

  as older than the body, that it traveled through multiple lifetimes toward a reunion ultimately with the divine.

• 19:05Mayim Bialik?

  One of the most influential theologians in Christian history wrote extensively about the preexistence of souls, the soul's journey, learning across multiple lives. And in 553, Emperor Justinian convened what was known as the Second Council of Constantinople. And among the propositions that they decided to condemn, it was voted out, was the preexistence of souls. So reincarnation got a gigantic thumbs down from Christian orthodoxy at that time. So it wasn't discovered that it wasn't true. It's not like somebody had a better idea. It was voted out. But the teaching didn't disappear. It just went underground, as most teachings do when they're voted out.

• 19:48Mayim Bialik?

  The Rosicrucians are ones who continue this line of thinking that survived this rejection from the Second Council. But for most of Western history, right? For most of Western history, this classroom notion, this earth school notion has really been kind of segregated from any dominant tradition. But it didn't really go away, you know? It really didn't go away.

• 20:11Jonathan Cohen?

  So here's the part that for me is maybe the most interesting, that these ideas sprung up in disparate places throughout time with a very hard chance, a small chance, that they could have been shared in these pockets of the world, that these communities wouldn't have been able to know that each one of them were circling these same ideas.

• 20:42Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, it would take a very long time for this kind of information to travel. You gotta get on your camel and you gotta like stop 86 times along the way. There was some interaction among communities. But what you're talking about is it seems to be that there is some sort of independent philosophical evolution of this notion. If I can just sort of lead the witness, it seems that you're indicating that there's something about our experience, our consciousness, I mean, we don't know. But there's something about our experience that seems to, no matter where we find ourselves across the globe, be leaning towards an explanation of why we're here as one of, there's a curriculum that your soul has to learn. It's going to keep learning different things in each of these incarnations,

• 21:27Mayim Bialik?

  and you're not going to remember that connection.

• 21:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, absolutely. And the explanation can either be that there is some form of universal truth that all of these societies across human history have come to, that they know somehow that that information is available to them, whether it be in dream or consciousness of some kind that they become aware of. Or that human suffering is so great that we all need a way to cope with it in some form. And this continues to be the best story that we've been able to come up with. And it's somewhat miraculous that the story has so much similarity to it across all of these cultures.

• 22:08Mayim Bialik?

  The extreme example is if you give, what is it, 500 monkeys, typewriters, eventually they'll come up with the Old Testament, right? If you think about the different kinds of poetry that exist in the world, there are certain kinds of poetry that they're known to different communities. So Japan has haiku, right? Haiku didn't independently evolve all over the world at other times, right? That's something that's specific to that kind of poetic culture of Japan. And there's examples of different kinds of poetry and prose all over the world. So those are all different variations on ways that we express ourselves creatively. What you're talking about is we have something that seems to be independently repeating itself, no matter the culture. No matter if there's one God or thousands,

• 22:53Mayim Bialik?

  no matter if you're in poverty or if you're in a palace, there's something about either the magicalness of whatever higher power or the kind of magicalness of our need to understand and create a structure that is somehow hardwired into the human brain. Because that's the only way that you would have this kind of independent sprouting of the same kind of idea unless it was being shared another way.

• 23:24Jonathan Cohen?

  It could be that the thing that we continue to remember across all of our lives is the fact that we have had other lives and that there is a larger purpose for us being here. The thing that also emerges, especially in modern day time, is that the accounts of people who have these near-death experiences start to increase and the stories begin to be shared over and over again.

• 23:51Mayim Bialik?

  For most of recorded human history, these things were passed down through oral tradition or they were written down in documents. But an amazing thing started happening in the last few hundred years. Researchers began showing interest in accumulating data to try and understand what are we actually talking about. And in 1975, Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life. And we've spoken to him here on the podcast. He was the first physician to coin the term "near-death experience." He had interviewed at that time over 100 people who had been clinically dead and then came back. The accounts were almost identical. There was some sort of tunnel or a narrow place that they went through.

• 24:35Mayim Bialik?

  There was a blinding and powerful light. They interacted with people who had died before. They felt a tremendous sense of peace and love. And they consistently reported a review session of their life that was a series of instructions for their soul so that they would know what to do next.

• 24:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Imagine that, getting instructions like how many of us feel lost on a regular basis and are wondering, "What direction should I take? Does it mean anything? What's my purpose?" And these people, through extreme circumstances, are coming back with a knowing and a clarity that so many of us would benefit from.

• 25:20Mayim Bialik?

  We have thousands of years of mystical traditions where people were arguably much more in tune with mysticism, spirituality in general, their inner world. You know, imagine a world where you're not distracted by your phone, the building that you're in, you know, needing to have people clocking in and out, right? Think about what life might have been like, right? For thousands of years in terms of spiritual development. Very, very different. But what we're seeing is that... When people experience transcendental things, when people die, they're having experiences quite similar to what people for thousands of years considered part of the mystical religious and spiritual canon.

• 26:05Mayim Bialik?

  So this is not a reward and punishment system like Judeo-Christianity in many cases. It's kind of manipulated these stories to be. This is a diagnostic, meaning you're being given the opportunity for your soul to be assessed, to see where you caused harm, to feel the harm that you may have caused, and to see how that can be transformed in this light, right? Of love, of safety, and of healing. More recently, the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, we've had many of the psychiatrists on Bruce Greyson, Jim Tucker. You know, Bruce Greyson spent 40 years interviewing NDE survivors, and this is what he said

• 26:50Mayim Bialik?

  his subjects consistently told him. They realized that there is a meaning and a purpose to everything that happens to them, even the things that feel like they're bad. There are lessons for us to grapple with and learn from and not just run away from. So that kind of language, this is a lesson to grapple with, that's not wishful thinking. That's not, oh, all these people out there just wanting you to like feel good about dying. No, we're literally getting messages from people all over the world who have died and come back and have a different way that they operate in the world because of what they learned about Earth School. If we are to believe that the information that people might be getting in NDEs is linked

• 27:34Mayim Bialik?

  to thousands of years of mystical tradition and possibly some universal truth, this is where people might jump in and say, wait a second, we can't use NDEs as evidence. It's just like a dying brain, right? It's a brain that's in some sort of like freakout session that then somehow, I don't know, nobody knows really, they're coming back and they're reporting all these things. Well, the fact is, the brain And it is in those states. There's actually some really incredible research out of the University of Michigan, showing that what actually is happening in a near-death experience is a blunting of a lot of interference that we normally have to interact with.

• 28:13Mayim Bialik?

  That the brain is actually in a level of conscious processing that has some sort of truth to it. Meaning, we don't get to just dismiss NDEs as, "Oh, well, that's just craziness." It can't possibly connect to thousands of years of tradition, talking about Earth School. Well, this kind of research points to the fact that what's going on in the brain is actually, it's a real experience. It's not simply a hallucination. It's not something we get to just write off as, "Well, that's crazy and I can't explain it." What if the information that we're getting from NDEs is modern proof

• 28:53Mayim Bialik?

  that these thousands of years of conversations about the soul choosing lessons in Earth School are actually legitimate?

• 29:00Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a fascinating area of exploration with children who remember past lives. This also happened from the University of Virginia's Perceptual Studies Department. And we spoke with Dr. Jim Tucker, who is one of the leading researchers collecting evidence and examples of children who have memories that seemingly can't be explained.

• 29:23Mayim Bialik?

  And the way this ties into Earth School, right? If souls are arriving with this curriculum, we're supposed to not remember, but what if some of them do? What if there are souls that refuse to forget? That's where Jim Tucker comes in.

• 29:39Jonathan Cohen?

  And his predecessor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, spent 40 years collecting over 3,000 cases that explore this very thing.

• 29:48Mayim Bialik?

  Jim Tucker's book about this is one that you should absolutely read to see what a scientific exploration of this kind of remembering looks like. That book is called "Life Before Life," so highly recommend that. This typically happens with children when they're little, like between The ages of two and five. And what Jim Tucker studied, he's a psychiatrist. What he studied was there were children who had a very elaborate description of a life that their soul had previously led in ways that sounded like it made no sense. They knew acquaintances of the person they claimed they were incarnated from.

• 30:32Mayim Bialik?

  They described how that person died. Some had birthmarks or injuries corresponding to the wounds that killed their previous self. Some had phobias related to tragedies that befell the people they claimed that they were embodying. One child accurately described a dead relative that they believed they were in a previous life down to a specific scar on his left hand. She had never met him. She had never seen a photograph of him. It's unreal and cultural expectations cannot explain this. Memory reconstruction can't explain this. In many cases, this was before kids could look things up on the internet,

• 31:12Mayim Bialik?

  before the parents even had information about these deceased people or relatives. These are not kids who were reading Plato and re-remembering.

• 31:22Jonathan Cohen?

  This shocking detail of their memory, when they couldn't have had exposure to those details, brings into question the very nature of reality. What does it mean when a child has that type of remembering?

• 31:40Mayim Bialik?

  I do want to give a little bit of a nod to what might be kind of a skeptical view of this kind of notion of earth school lessons, souls coming back. Let's talk a little bit about terror management theory. And no, that's not the theory we teach for anyone who wants to come work with us at Miami Alex Breakdown. It is a theory developed by a social psychologist, Ernest Becker. And what Becker argues is that human civilization is organized around the fact that we're going to die and it freaks us out. So we build all these systems. We build religion. We create meaning and structure and legacy and explanations.

• 32:24Mayim Bialik?

  And it's so that our own mortality is somehow bearable.

• 32:30Mayim Bialik?

  So if we look at that very skeptical, you know, potential explanation for our existence here and how we think about death, Earth School is kind of an elaborate and sophisticated example of that. You know, it's a story that's comforting. And it's possible that when we are suffering, when we are having a near-death experience, the brain is calling on this, this kind of management system, right? Under the stress of dying, like, you're dying and so there's a reason and your soul chose this. It's a very elaborate thing that I don't even know, you know, kind of from a neuroscience perspective, how to test that, how to verify it,

• 33:13Mayim Bialik?

  or how to really wrap my head around it.

• 33:17Jonathan Cohen?

  And it's true that the convergence across cultures of these ideas to a strict materialist, they would say that's not evidence of a shared metaphysical reality. It's evidence of shared human psychology. It's evidence of humans facing death. It's evidence of us all needing meaning. But it is not necessarily evidence of the code of reality being stored in these pages. I don't know that I believe that, but that's what a strict materialist would say.

• 33:51Mayim Bialik?

  While there are many things that cannot easily be explained, you know, children knowing details about, you know, a person from generations before that no one even knew about, you know, these kind of fascinating verified details from NDE accounts, being able to say what people are wearing in rooms that they're not even in, hearing conversations buildings away, this sort of recurring theme that there's a curriculum, not just be a better person, but if you're struggling to be a better person, you're not alone. There's a lesson that you're supposed to learn surrounding this, that, and the other. And also this kind of cross-cultural, you know, convergence in all of these different accounts.

• 34:36Mayim Bialik?

  There's something there. And just because we can't explain it, it doesn't mean there's not something there. It means that we don't yet understand the entirety of it.

• 34:44Jonathan Cohen?

  For me, it also expands on the notion of what we're doing here on Earth. All of human civilization, what is the point? Is there a larger intergalactic meaning for the processes happening here? And if, for example, like many of the N D E R S explain, we are souls here to incarnate in Earth and to have these experiences, that we have chosen to come here, that when we leave, that is our home on the other side, that it is actually a real privilege to be here. How does that change my mentality?

• 35:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Do I believe that I'm a part of something, a collective, that is all experiencing and trying to uplift this place? There's a little-known section of Earth School, which talks about the Earth Experiment, that we're all here to learn and to grow, but that there is some stakes in how the Earth unfolds, and it isn't arbitrary, and it isn't about whether or not humanity will not destroy itself, but in fact, that message is being watched further than simply from the vantage point of Earth, that it has cosmic importance to what happens.

• 36:07Mayim Bialik?

  And I don't know that we've convinced all the skeptics out there, but I think what's important, you know, for us, as sort of like a take-home message, is that what if you operated in such a way that you didn't believe that the universe was indifferent to you? Or you didn't believe that God was out to get you? Or that you were constantly in this cycle of reward and punishment? We have evidence from a variety of civilizations, or thousands of people across thousands and thousands of years. What if you were to approach life as if it wasn't an accident? You're not an accident. There is randomness, but your struggles and your journey are not random. Somewhere, there is a soul that knows what lessons we needed to learn. In this lifetime, that's the journey that you're on.

• 36:50Jonathan Cohen?

  And we're glad that each one of you is on a journey with us. As things are difficult, we hope that our explorations can offer some hope in your particular path.

• 37:01Mayim Bialik?

  And the notion of "Why is this happening to me?" "How can we shift this is happening to me to this is happening for me?" That is a place of spiritual comfort. And it doesn't mean that you don't have a role. It doesn't mean that you don't have to do the legwork and work to better yourself and work on healing all of your past traumas. But just know that there is some wisdom to this journey you're on. There is some purpose to you showing up in Earth School. So remember the old days when they would call "role" in class? Maybe now you'll have a different meaning to "I'm here." Thanks for being here from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.