Episode 8: Extra Ordinary Claims

Episode 8 – Extraordinary Claims > Uncut conversations > Uncut conversations

• I had this out-of-body experience, mystical experience.
• What is this? There you-you know, I can see you, but this is my experience.
• Can you tell us a bit about that experience that you had back when-that kind of started you down that path? I can tell you a little about it.
• You know, I’ve never heard of tunnel experiences.
• The term near-death experience hadn’t been invented.
• I tried to get bigger, so I got bigger and bigger and bigger, and that led me to the classic experience, mystical experience of oneness, where everything was me and not me.
• Obviously, moving from that amazing out-of-body experience to studying paranormal psychology and ultimately becoming a skeptic didn’t happen overnight.
• No. Can you give us a sense for how that path happened from moving to that experience to where you are, I suppose, now? Yes.
• I believed in those, and I’d had this extraordinary experience.
• There I was sat in a bath one day in my house in Guildford, and I thought, “What if none of it’s true?” It was awful to then have to go through all I knew over the next weeks, really, and think, “Is it possible that I was completely wrong?” That experience happened.
• They could be a bit distorted and I’ve selected bits and so on, but I cannot deny the experience.
• I met loads of other people who had extraordinary experiences, too.
• Those experiences have to be valid, meaningful, life-changing experiences without there being telepathy, clairvoyance, other worlds, all of that stuff which after experiment after experiment, I’d found just isn’t there.
• Now I’d become a competent, not brilliant, but a competent tarot reader, and people said things: “How did you know that? That’s amazing,” you know, all that stuff.
• He said, “If you put a five-digit number in your house, I will come and visit.” And he said, “I have out-of-the-body experiences spontaneously at night. I can’t say when they’re going to happen, but if you have that there all the time, when I have one, I will come and visit.” And he said, “Cook me an apple crumble every so often. That will bring me back. That’s my favorite thing,” so I would do that, too.
• Every time I met someone else who had spontaneous out-of-the-body experiences, I would explain that to them and say, “Anytime you come…” In all those years when those targets were there, I had three people who wrote to me and said, “I’ve been to your house, and I’ve seen it,” and none of them got it right.
• You see, when you have an out-of-body experience, it looks so vivid that you can’t help but believe that you’re actually seeing something physically there, but you’re not.
• We tried and we approached you and tried to convince you that this out-of-body experience could be explained using natural means.
• I think there even were during the experience those things going on, on the one hand would have been: “But I know. You don’t understand. You don’t understand how real it was. How could you possibly-this is so important to me, and it means so much to me,” and simultaneously would have been going on: “But there has to be an explanation. What’s going on?” I’ve always been a scientist in the broader sense since I was a kid.
• In a way, when people have these very dramatic experiences, and I’ve met lots and lots of people who have, you feel threatened if somebody tells you it’s not what you thought.
• If you were a sort of rigid, close-minded kind of thinker, and when you’ve had this extraordinary experience, you snap on to your own explanation, then it’s very, very, very hard.
• The paranormal stuff out there and the new age and the Age of Aquarius and all that stuff, the end of the ’60s was like a world apart, and that’s why it’s taken me a lifetime, I would say, to bring together extraordinary experiences and neuroscience.
• A lot of people who are going to be watching these videos and taking this course would have had something similar, some vivid experience that they can’t really explain.
• Given what you know now about opinion change and changing your own opinion, what would be the best way to approach somebody and change their mind or at least get them to consider the alternatives that it might not be what they think? I’m glad you made that switch.
• I don’t go at anyone who’s had an extraordinary experience, “I want to change their mind,” unless they are just so rigid, I’d despair and I don’t want to have anything to do with it.
• For most of the people I’ve met, so many have had an experience they can’t understand, and they don’t know what to do with it.
• Some people will be very rigid, particularly, I think, of near death experiences where it has so much of religious connotations.
• Could you see anything else?” Get them to loosen up because if what they’ve done is had this extraordinary experience, typically in a near-death experience, if it’s a long one, they will typically start with a tunnel, like I did, and go into the light.
• They’ll have an out-of-the-body experience, and they’ll watch what’s physically happening or seem to.
• So if they are a religious person, Muslim or Hindu or whatever it might be, or a Christian, they kind of know where they are and they’ve set their own experience in that box.
• The point is I’m grounding it in what really happened because I want to know, because I’m always thinking what’s going on in their brain? Where is this relating to what’s happening in the temporal lobe? What’s happening in their visual cortex where we know the tunnels are generated? What kind of tunnel was it? What emotional state were they in when it started? Because very often, these experiences have a most wonderful profound sense of, “It’s all alright,” which is probably endorphin-based but it’s-saying that doesn’t put it down.
• It’s got to have a physical basis somehow, but that can be quite an important thing also for people to know it possible as a human being on this earth without god’s spirits and everything else to know that it’s alright and you’re alright.
• I sort of like to help people just to talk about their experiences.
• I’d rather people use their experience as basis to go on and try to understand themselves and the world, than I would try to change their mind to the truth.
• We know as much as we can know-that nothing leaves the body in these experiences, and that there is no spirit and no soul and so on-but so much more to find out.
• It also makes me think more about the kind of paranormal things that we’re thinking about and the strange experiences that people have.
• Now I’ve had a lot of experience in my life of that anguish.
• I’ve been training in Zen for 30 years, and that is also training in flexibility, letting go, openness to experience, openness to different explanations.
• I’m personally fascinated by the whole mystery of consciousness-how on earth can this brain be responsible for-I don’t even know the words-should I say give rise to? No, that’s wrong-is someway related to this experience.
• I know it’s an old cliché, but the more we know, the more there is to know.