MBB [Reacts]: Explore What Science Can’t Answer: Understanding The Telepathy Tapes, Near Death Experiences, & Supernatural Abilities w/ Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal
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What we know is that people have different capabilities and it could be that that extends to people who are on the spectrum. It could be that people with trauma, with ADD, with ADHD have a different ability to sense things.

The whole history of religions is filled with special people who perceive reality in a radically different way. The reaction that we've gotten when we've tried to speak to scientists about it is vitriol that they can't be associated with something like this because the data doesn't already exist.

I think science actually prevents these things from appearing. The whole act of measurement and the whole act of a laboratory and the whole act of experimentation actually prevents the event from happening. Explain that to us. We don't know, Mayim, because we're not allowed to study this in any kind of rigorous way, right? If there's a metaphorical table, what the skeptic is doing is taking everything off the table that he or she cannot explain

And then, oh, I can explain everything on the table, but that's just because you just took everything off that you can't explain. Hi, I'm Iambialic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to a special MBB Reacts. This episode is going to touch on some topics such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychic ability, what it means to have a near-death experience. We're not simply going to talk about these things because they're fun and we want to convince you to believe things.

Jeffrey Kripal is the J. Newton Razor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He hosts the Archives of the Impossible Collection and Conference Series, and he also co-directs the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He is literally a scholar.

of why and how to have an open mind about things, how to frame things that we may not want to believe in in a cultural, historical, and religious context so that we can understand the deeper messages about what these experiences mean and the potential that they have for helping us understand our humanity.

His book, How to Think Impossibly, about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else is fantastic. I recommend this book and all of his books, including Changed in a Flash, which is the book that he wrote with Elizabeth Krohn about her experience. Jeffrey Kripal is a master of explaining the impossible in...

in a way that is accessible to those of us who do have scientific and analytical minds. And we're going to ask him to frame the telepathy tapes, which was the number one podcast in America in early 2025. And we're going to ask him to basically explain in the framework of thinking impossibly and what he calls thinking with.

how we can understand some of the phenomenon from the telepathy tapes and what it means for those of you or those of us who are afraid to even entertain what the telepathy tapes makes possible. Jeffrey Kripal, welcome back to The Breakdown for our special MBB React. Thank you. Thank you, Mayim. Thanks for having me back.

So, you know, science in general as a discipline is and has always been about kind of pushing the edges of what's possible. What can we imagine? What can we explain? What can we experience? And in many cases, what's real? And science has never been afraid of things that we don't understand. The whole purpose of the discipline is to help us better understand things that seem

either impossible or unreal. And imagining that human beings might be more complex than we might have previously thought, or that human beings might have a set of abilities that we can start to sort of codify should not be something that science is afraid of. And yet,

You operate in the world of academia and of scientific rigor, and there's a category of things that scientists, for the most part, really don't want to entertain. They really don't want to talk about it. We are most interested in talking to you about

the authenticity of mystical experiences, spiritual experiences, and paranormal experiences, which have been reported globally for millennia. And it's also a legitimate aspect of what so many want to dismiss as illegitimate. So, you know, parapsychology studies telepathy, studies things like clairvoyance, psychic abilities. These are things that are studied.

And when I've tried to talk to anyone about the telepathy tapes or any of this stuff, I've been directed to more than one magician because people think if I speak to magicians, I'll understand that it's all a ruse and here's the way that it's been set up and it's about perception and it's about being misled.

I would take it one step further and even say that the reaction that we've gotten when we've tried to speak to scientists about it is both disdain and a level of vitriol that they can't be associated with something like this out of almost a fear that they will be discredited for even opening their mind to the possibility because the data doesn't already exist.

But that kind of defeats the point of curiosity and exploration. If the data doesn't exist and we can only consider things that the data does exist around, how do we then expand the realm of what we understand? Why are we afraid, not just scientists, why are we afraid that

many of us to even go here. Why do we push this aside? What is it about the human desire for, I don't know, stability, reality? What is going on when people won't even entertain something like telepathy? I think there's a lot of reasons for our fear around this, some of which are, well, they're all understandable.

And I have tried to essentially mainstream this topic in the academy and with scientists, because I think it's really important that we start talking about this. I think we're basically afraid of it because we operate somewhere with a kind of secular physicalist or materialist worldview.

in which all that exists is matter, and matter is ultimately insentient. It has no meaning to it. And everything that exists, exists because of physical causes that are strictly linear, come from the past and into the present. And what this material suggests is that that's not the whole case, that there are...

particular kinds of people that have gone through particular kinds of usually trauma or suffering and have arrived at some other reality that they perceive that other people don't. And so I think when you get pushback, I think these are people who are just being very honest. They only perceive reality through the senses and through human reason and through whatever their science happens to be.

And they are afraid of the people who suggest or who articulate a set of experiences that can't be fit into that box, can't be fit into that particular science or that particular physicalism. The same happens with religion, though, by the way. I mean, you know, religious believers are really good at dismissing things that don't fit into their box. Can you give us an example?

Well, it's demonic. You know, I mean, that's the answer you get a lot when you talk about these realities from religious peoples. Oh, that's demons. You know, that's a traditional kind of response or Christian response to magical experience that cannot be fit into their particular religious worldview. So the demon or the devil becomes that which the system cannot articulate or integrate. That's one example.

The scientists, you know, the physicalist tends to say, oh, it's nonsense or it's pseudoscience or it's an anecdote or, you know, they use all these words that dismiss the human being in a fairly dramatic way, but cause us not to think about what's actually going on.

You know, my joke is that the table here, if there's a metaphorical table, what the skeptic is doing is taking everything off the table that he or she, and by the way, it's usually a he, cannot explain. And then the person will say, oh, I can explain everything on the table. And I'm like, yeah, but that's just because you just took everything off that you can't explain. So you control what's on the table and that's somehow, I think that is comforting.

I think you can then explain and reduce everything to what's on the table or your particular system. But it's profoundly discomforting for some people to live in a world that they can't explain or they can't control. I find it delicious, frankly. I find it liberating to live in a world that I cannot explain and cannot control. But I think other people find that very troubling.

And this fear has become insidious in the academic world where people are at risk of potentially losing their job if they're deemed to think outside of what is

accepted. And so can you speak a little bit about that? Because you've worked in the academic institution for a very long time making a place for yourself, but many other people literally won't even entertain these because they feel like they're going to be discredited. So Jonathan, so I live and work in a department of religion in a school of humanities, and I already don't know anything.

You know, so and I say that as a joke, but but I do think there's a politics of knowledge. And I think it means something very differently for a physicist or a chemist or biologist to come out and say,

telepathy is a real thing and we need to study it because there are real costs to that coming out and not necessarily getting fired, but you're probably not going to get the grant or you're probably going to be looked down upon by your colleagues. And I totally get that. I understand that. I just happen to exist and live in a discipline that's already dismissed. And so it's easier for me to come out and say, hey, what about this? What about that? And what I've found with

intellectuals and academics and scientists is that they're actually quite sympathetic to this in private. They're in the closet, as I call it. They don't want to come out and identify with it because they're going to sound like the tabloids and they don't know how to talk about it, by the way. So what I do is I come into a university setting and I just start talking about it. But I talk about it in the terms of

literary theory or history or physics or whatever the case might be. And then they're much more comfortable because you're essentially talking their language. And I think when we try to translate this into the public, I think it becomes trickier, you know? And so something like a film or a podcast is tricky because you're translating a set of knowledges across very different groups of people.

What we know is that people have different capabilities. People have different abilities, different ways of seeing the world. And one of the things that you talk about is that there may be people who have experienced certain things that give them an extra sensitivity or an extra ability to sense things. And it could be that that extends to people who are on the spectrum.

It could be that it extends to people who are nonverbal because they're not using a lot of resources for verbal communication. It could be that people with trauma, with ADD, with ADHD have a different ability to sense things, which means you are dealing with a subset of the population and we cannot use rules that apply to the entire population to understand what's going on. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that's very accurate. I mean, I would just remove the maybe and the could be. I would just say, obviously, there are these people who experience reality differently. And the whole history of religions is filled with special people who perceive reality in a radically different way. I mean, that to me is just obvious. And so I'm not a scientist. I don't have to follow the rules of science. I think

I think science actually prevents these things from appearing, by the way. It's not just, and I think that's part of this fear element too. It's not just that some scientists are afraid of these things. It's that science itself prevents the appearance from happening. You know, the whole act of measurement and the whole act of a laboratory and the whole act of experimentation actually prevents things

The the event from happening. The example that that I like to give, which I think we heard from Dr. Amir Raz, who is a neuroscientist and a magician. And what he said was, if you've ever seen someone who knows a trick that someone's going to do, it ruins the whole thing.

the whole thing, you know? It's like if someone's about to tell a joke and someone's like, I've heard that, I know that, I know that. That kills the vibe, right? And so it's not just that we're talking about a vibe, but we're talking about the act of analysis, exploration, and skepticism, and a lack of ability to be open to

doesn't allow for this opening, right? I mean, so when I was... I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, probably before either one of you were born, and I read something called Mad Magazine. I grew up on Mad Magazine, yes. Yeah, well, there was this...

Why do you remember particular things? I mean, there was this there was this scientist. He was a botanist and he was going to study this rare flower that only bloomed like once every 20 years in the desert. And there it is. It's blooming. And he looks through it on a magnifying glass and the sun comes through and flies it, you know. And so, you know, my joke is you don't go to the North Pole to prove the existence of zebras.

You know, you go where the phenomenon actually happens and where these phenomena actually happen in the real world, in human life, is in suffering and disorder and chaos and trauma. And that's precisely what you can't do. Maim, you said something that I think is actually profound and maybe skipped over in terms of the mechanisms.

when you talk about that you can't put it in a microscope and that you can't have skepticism around it, partly what we know about quieting the left brain hemisphere and moving into the right, which has a larger ability to perceive extrasensory information,

If there is that skepticism, then you're potentially blocking the mechanism by which this person could access this information that is around us. So, you know, the notion of introducing this concept of information around us probably needs to be unpacked because we haven't talked about it yet in this podcast, but let's

throw to my aim to cover some of the topics that we are discussing here and then move into some of the mechanisms by which we want to explore. Let me throw one more thing in the hopper here, and that is agency. We presume that human beings are the only agents here. Well, what if the phenomenon itself has its own agency, its own intention and its own? What if what if it's hiding? What if it's deceiving us? What if it's acting on its own? What if we're not the top predator?

in the universe or on the earth. I think that's, again, part of the fear around this stuff is we're afraid that human beings might not be the ultimate or final agents and things. And I think that's an assumption. That's a belief system we have. It may be true, it may be probably false.

But we are now able to talk about these things. And in some cases, you know, Jonathan and I have been inspired by the work you did with Elizabeth Krohn. That really kind of opened up a lot for us in being able to talk about these things. But let's talk about some of these categories. So Elizabeth Krohn, that's a great place to start. Near-death experiences, something that, you know, finally science is starting to examine with more specificity, look at some of the

brain structures, try and understand some of the chemistry. There's this fascinating overlap between DMT and that sort of release and what happens in near-death experiences. So near-death experiences is the scientific version of what the category would be of life after death, correct? Tell us a little bit about this tidbit. - I'm not sure they're really dead though, Mayim. That's why we call it a near-death experience. We don't call it a full death experience.

What you see in the near-death experience, though, is you see this whole spectrum of accounts, the separable soul, you know, some kind of afterlife, some kind of other realm or dimension, some kind of past life review or some kind of, you know, quick review, a kind of judgment or self-judgment. You see all these kind of religious motifs that come in. And it's not that the person's making it up.

I mean, this is, again, we're going back to agency here. The thing about a near-death experience or a vision is that the person is not doing it, not at least consciously or in control. This is something that comes up throughout your books and throughout your reports, is that people are experiencing something in the way that something drops in. It is not that they are thinking of something. If you've ever had a flashback, which are not fun, it's

You're not remembering something, you are experiencing something. And that's what almost everyone describes in all variety of categories throughout your books, is that they receive information as a knowing. It's not a learning or an experiencing. It's that they're being, it's like a download. It's passive. It's passive.

You know, to use the old-fashioned philosophical language, it's passive. The download, of course, is a metaphor from the 90s and the early 2000s when we had that. And again, it's interesting how these metaphors track our technology. But this, again, goes back to this question of agency. And this is why the comparison with stage magicians is so wrong.

Because the stage magicians are the agents, and they're really trying to trick people, where these human beings, they're not trying to trick anyone. And they themselves, if anything, are the tricked. They're in shock.

They're in some kind of ontological or metaphysical shock, and they're reaching out for help. They're not trying to fool other people or deceive someone or entertain someone. But before we get into it, I want to have you speak to and sort of frame a couple of these specific examples that...

that I am unable to even in my scientific mind, you know, try and frame around, but, you know, and want to have a framework for. But I wonder if you can tell us a little bit, I think this is a good time to ask you. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the chapter in How to Think Impossibly, specifically where you speak to Kevin.

he has a very, very interesting story. And the things about Kevin that most struck me is that Kevin has physiological experiences of mystical things that have been described for thousands of years that he should have no reason to understand. The simplest example I'll give is Kevin can explicitly describe what

what yogis call the Kundalini rising, which is something that if you've sat in a Kundalini class, which I've sat in many, there's a description of how energy is supposed to spiral from your anus through your sex organs, through your solar plexus, through your heart, your throat,

into your third eye, which we think of as the pineal gland in scientific terms, and out the top of your head. And whenever I'm asked to do this in yoga, I don't know, I like think exactly what I'm trying to about like this energy and what does that feel like? And I'll be honest, I don't necessarily feel anything. This

this individual, this is just one example, he feels it. He feels it in every part of his body and he describes it physiologically the way, quote, you're supposed to if you've studied thousands of hours of this. Talk to us a little bit about Kevin and how his experience can sort of help us understand truly special perception. Kevin wrote me, I don't know what year it was, but it was a long time ago, and

I asked him, we agreed to write this chapter together. So a lot of that chapter is actually Kevin speaking, you know. And one of the points of the book, which I'm sure you know, is this notion of thinking with, which I hyphenate. And I don't mean that Kevin is an object of research here or of my own scholarship. I mean, he's actually teaching me. Kevin is my teacher, you know. And I think he knows things and he experiences things that I certainly don't know.

But I think the beauty of the human species is that we're not all alike and that people are gifted in different ways, you know, and also hampered and suffer in different ways. Kevin has suffered a lot. And he when I when he's when I refer to him as autistic, that's his own self-reliance.

description. And, you know, I've, I've sat with Kevin and had Kevin in classes and he is autistic, but he's also brilliant. And he just knows things and experiences things that I don't know and that I can't experience. But he then relates them to the history of religions, to things like Kundalini that I find very persuasive and

And, you know, he'll say things to me like, well, you know, the history of religions is a history of autistic people who are trying to explain their experience and their perceptions of the universe to people who don't see it that way, who can't see it that way. The reigning model for, again, thousands of years, these religions all basically argue that this ain't it. Right.

you know, this physical reality that you can perceive with your senses is real, but it's not fully real. It's not the fuller reality. And to get to this fuller reality, you got to do some pretty extreme things. Unless, you know,

You're autistic, as we say today. You're just set up to perceive these things. And I think Kevin is like that. And the other thing Kevin insists on, and I just think he's right about this, is that paranormal phenomena are very much related to suffering. You don't see...

a demon or a UFO by being happy and content and drinking a cup of coffee or something early in the morning. It just doesn't happen. You see those things, you encounter those things because you're in a life context that is very traumatic and filled with suffering. And so the impossible phenomena are wrapped up in this notion of what I call the traumatic secret.

It doesn't mean they're not real. It just means to get there, you have to do something pretty severe to the person or the physical organism. Because that is the case, the skeptic justifies those experiences as psychological delusion that people are making up to cope with their reality. What I want to do a little bit is, what is that nature? If this physical reality isn't it,

and the religious texts and people's experience who have had other realities or have gleamed into other realities say that there is something beyond what most of us are experiencing, then the question for me is, well, what is that? And if people are experiencing that through trauma, what else is happening? And, you know, what are the people who have gone through this trauma teaching the rest of humanity to

the experience of those who used to only have these extrasensory perceptions is now being popularized. And so people who are sitting in suburban world drinking their coffee, wondering, is this real or not, can say, well, maybe there's something that I can learn from these people that will make my life even more interesting and connected to something greater. So everybody, I think, has some model of the mind-brain connection.

You know, we assume a whole bunch of things. And I think most of the assumptions is that mind equals brain. You know, this is the neuroscientific model that somehow the brain produces mind or consciousness as some kind of epiphenomenon, you know, as some kind of glow or essentially around this meat muscle inside the skull.

But that is not the model of most human cultures. And that's not the model of most traditions. The most common model you see is that the brain and the body translate or mediate consciousness or what they called soul in an earlier era.

but it actually doesn't produce it. And so when the body dies or when the body, and it will die, actually soul goes on, you know, consciousness goes on. So it really, that's the paradigm shift that I think Kai is in, in the telepathy tapes. She's moving from a materialist kind of secular viewpoint to

for which all of these things can't happen, by the way, you can't get there from here. You just can't to a much more human based experience based model that that the consciousness or soul is actually not not in the brain, not in the body.

And I think, you know, for Kevin, going back to Kevin here, you know, he operates with what he calls platonic surrealism. And it's a particular model of reality that is very much like the simulation theory, that physical reality, what we're seeing, what we're seeing on the screen, what we're doing here is certainly real in some sense. But deeper down, reality is actually produced more like a surrealist painting,

more by the imagination and consciousness itself. Kevin hates the word consciousness because I think he equates it with the personality.

And I think deep down, you know, he'll talk about mind or awareness that's much deeper than the social ego, than Jonathan or Mayim or Chao. And so that's approaching very much a more traditional kind of philosophical or mystical view of things that, again, I find very familiar and very interesting.

I won't say ordinary, but very, very familiar. Can you just clarify, you said very plainly that when the body dies, the soul lives on. Of course, I don't know that personally. I can't. I'm not Elizabeth Crone. I have not had a near-death experience that I remember. But certainly that is the model of most of these religious traditions that I'm aware of. The neuroscientific model that mind equals brain is, in fact, the anomaly.

And it doesn't work, actually. It can't explain consciousness. It can't. You can't get from this meat organ to this 3D world that you and I are in right now. You just can't get there. And so a lot of philosophers of mind have just abandoned materialism or physicalism, and they've moved to something that's much more panpsychic or much more idealist in orientation. In other words, that...

That basically says that mind or consciousness is primary. It cannot be reduced or explained by something else. And it exists everywhere in the universe, in the cosmos. It's not unique to a human body and a human brain. And that, by the way, instantly makes sense of a lot of these phenomena.

In that model, we're interpreting. The brain becomes the interpreter of a larger consciousness or reality, and the information exists not in the mind generated from the brain, but

out in the ethers and anyone is able then to connect to that. So, you know, you can think about it like an internet, the internet waves exist all around and you, the body or mind is able to tap into that and I can meet you or my aim in some other, you know, non-physical space and we can interact.

I mean, the image I use, Jonathan, is the cell phone. You know, I can hold up my cell phone and I can throw it against the wall and destroy it. Well, guess what? That doesn't do anything to the Internet. It doesn't affect it at all. And I think where we're at with our science and our neuroscience is we equate the Internet with the cell phone.

Essentially, that's the equation, because it makes a lot of sense. You change the mechanisms or the applications on the cell phone, and then you therefore change the behavior of the internet and what you're perceiving. It makes total sense, but it doesn't make any sense at all of these other experiences. And so we take them off the table.

And I'm like, don't do that. Just don't do that. In the telepathy tapes, there is one individual who passes away, John Paul. He dies. Yeah, John Paul. And several of his friends who he would communicate with in this other realm, the hill, they all seem to, by their parents' report,

fall into some sort of sleep or slumber at the time that he dies. And they report to their parents with, you know, the way that they communicate with their parents. They report that he died, to which the parents say, I don't know what you're talking about. And then they later find out that he indeed had died. Now, I think there's two or three examples in the telepathy tapes. Now, the easy explanation is...

Everybody's lying. All the parents are lying and they don't really know what time it was. And it's just like wishful thinking that they were all sleeping at the same time because they were meeting in this fake space that they've all created. What is the thinking impossibly explanation for this in the simplest terms? So before I tell you what the answer is, thinking impossibly is not reducing something to your particular worldview.

And that might be religion, that might be science, but just don't do that. Think with the experiencers. And I think where this example goes is to this model of consciousness that I described earlier. These individual autistic children are simply nodes

You know, they're picking up the signal from this broader consciousness or mind. And when one of those nodes dies, they know right away that that and because they're emotionally entangled with that node. You know, to go back to my cell phone, I get emails all the time saying, well, somebody tried just to get into your into your system. You know, somebody did something on your TV or on your your Amazon account. So the Internet knows instantly what has happened to another node.

And so I think what's happening in this situation is you have to, you are led down the path of presuming there's some kind of shared mind or shared consciousness and that they're interacting and that they just know this. They don't even know how they know it. They just know it. I think one of the strongest categories of phenomena is actually precognition.

In other words, somebody knowing in perfect detail what's going to happen 24 hours or three weeks or three years out, and often down to banal details like who's in the office and where they're standing and etc. Thinking impossibly basically asks the question, well, what does time have to be like? What does space time have to be like to make that experience possible? Because obviously the experience happens all the time.

So it does not begin with the skeptical answer of people are wishing this or it's coincidence, because that stops the conversation. It stops it right there. And you land on a kind of materialist or physicalist answer where future hasn't yet happened. I think where we go with precognition is that the future has already happened.

and that there's some kind of retrocausal or some kind of influence from the future back into the present that these people are picking up on, usually in dreams, by the way. So that was going to be my next question. So one of the other episodes has a mother whose son is nonverbal, and she claims that when—I shouldn't say she claims. She reports that when she is in a certain—

calm state, meaning when she hasn't had a busy or crazy day, she will be interrupted in her dream by essentially communication from her child. She is not asleep, she's not awake, but she is receiving information in this episode. She is receiving instructions about music, music that her son wants to write and communicate as well as lyrics.

And when I first heard this, I thought, well, maybe that's just like her writing the music and thinking that it's from him. Like, that's sweet. But she then takes this music, writes it, and goes into a music studio with her child. And he doesn't say to her, what the fuck am I doing here? He's like, yeah, these are my lyrics and my music, and I want to tweak this, and I want that. And he's then communicating all the things about this music

in a way that indicates that he was the agent of the music and the lyrics that she is only receiving when she is sleeping. What's going on here? Sleep is an altered state, right? To use Jonathan's language, the left hemisphere is shut down.

You know, it's literally asleep, as we say. And so the person is open to access to other information, other parts of the universe through, let's say, the right hemisphere. And so what you get in the history of religions is this really common notion that the divine communicates to the human through dreaming. Right.

That's like, that's as old as it gets. I mean, literally like Jewish prophecy. They were all dreaming and having visions. They were all asleep. They weren't wide awake dreaming of griffins and chariots through the sky. They were sleeping. Right. And people to this day have dreams that they know they didn't come up with. They know, they know it's some kind of reception that goes on, but it only goes on in a dream. And often it's often coded.

You know, it's often coded in narratives and symbols that have to be interpreted. And this is the origins of psychoanalysis and Freud and, you know, all kinds of things. We recognize for a long time that dreams are a very special place where things come into the human. And, of course, if you're a materialist or a physicalist, again, dreaming is just the brain doing something, doing its own thing at night. But if you're not a materialist or a physicalist,

dreaming is a really good place. It's a very common altered state in which other kinds of cognition and other kinds of information can come in. And we also know about the brain waves that are involved with like the theta waves and all the waves that are involved in terms of when you are most

receptive, when you are most susceptible, when you are most able to sort of gather and take in information that you can experience. So we actually know a bit about what the brain is doing in those states. Right. And those are all correlations, right? Those are all third person descriptions of something that's going on in the brain. Those aren't actually records of the dream itself.

And we need the subject, we need the form of consciousness to tell us what the dream involves. But the theta waves or the beta waves or however the neuroscience talks about the brain, it's an external view of what's actually going on. The one other example I want you to sort of help us understand and frame is what was most touching to me about the telepathy tapes is in these later episodes when teachers

and individuals who work with these students start talking about what feels like the phenomenon is often described as feeling like someone's staring at you. And these teachers are reporting that they are receiving communication unwanted, meaning they're not seeking it out. They are feeling almost an intrusive feeling.

set of communications from their nonverbal students. And what struck me about that was that if you talk to, you know, any teacher at my yoga studio, right, they'll talk about like being able to hear other people's thoughts and like feeling into other people's experience. And what was interesting about these teachers is these individuals don't, they're not coming from a framework of

of a Los Angeles yoga studio. These are not people who have trained in energy. They don't know about EMF frequencies as being sensitive. These are people who literally have noticed that when they are in a relaxed state, information seems to be coming in from these individuals. What's happening here?

Well, they're good teachers, right? They've connected with these people on some other level. I hear the same thing from therapists, by the way. The hour of therapy is a place of privacy and secrecy where anything can be said. And often the person who's being psychoanalyzed or is in the therapy is talking about dreams again.

And sometimes it involves a therapist in a way exactly like what we're seeing with the children and the teachers. So that, again, doesn't surprise me at all, you know, because these people are deeply entangled.

And I know that's a quantum word. I don't mean it in a quantum way necessarily. But I think what we, you know, to go back to your original question, and this is Jonathan's question too, we all live in a Newtonian world. In other words, we think that we're material objects in some kind of neutral space. But actually our bodies are also quantum. We know that. That's a fact. Right.

We know that matter is quantum deep down, and it's all connected, and it's all one, and it does things that make absolutely no sense to this Newtonian up here frame of reference. And so we have science. We have physics to tell us that there are these two levels of reality, but we haven't integrated that into our worldview. I mean, my God.

We still talk about the sunset and the sunrise. The sun doesn't set. It doesn't rise. That's stupid. But that's what it looks like. And so we keep saying this ridiculous thing. So we haven't even organized a Copernican revolution. It's a lot more cumbersome to say, well, we're rotating and the proportion and the degree is not allowing us to have access to the rays of the... It's like...

But look at the resistance to evolution. Look at the resistance to the Big Bang. We have not integrated these scientific discoveries and conceptions in a way that is really practical and powerful and poetic, by the way. We could do this poetically. And by the way, I don't mean to... The early quantum physicists, they all turned to one place.

for the best place to understand what quantum physics was about. And that one place was mystical literature. They all turned there. That was not an invention in 1975. They were doing that in 1935 and they knew darn well where to go.

And that's where that's essentially what I'm trying to say. We have the resources. We have the cultural texts and the memory to do this quantum Newtonian thing. But we won't do it because we just think we're Newtonian. We just we just want to pretend, you know, that we're we're up here and that's all there is. Well, that's not all there is. And the practical application for anyone who's listening that says, hmm, maybe I've had that sense.

Maybe when I'm thinking about someone, it may be because there's information available or we're entangled in some way. We can start to...

access that information and see what it's like to receive and connect in outside of our rational brain and see what's available to us. I think that, you know, the people that we're connected to, we, that information is available to us if we start to pay attention to it and we start to open our minds that we are not merely this material collection of

People are ready for this. You know, they really want this. They know that the skeptical, materialist answer doesn't really work, but they also know that the believer or the religious answer doesn't really work either. And they want something smart.

in the middle of those two things. They want a beyond, and that's what I mean by impossible thinking. It's like you're thinking after religion and science. It doesn't mean you're dismissing religion or you're dismissing science, but you're also thinking after them. You're thinking in categories that don't actually fit in to those particular worldviews. I love the elephant example. Him with the elephants. Okay.

So the elephant example is about animal, you know, kind of awareness. And they talk about this in the telepathy tapes, but I have heard this elsewhere. There was a group of elephants that were, I believe, saved, rescued by a gentleman. And they lived on this happy elephant place. And when he died... It was a nature preserve. It was a nature preserve. Happy elephant place. And when he died, these elephants on that day...

They came back. They, from all around. Two days of travel. They traveled for days to come back to the place that he was. And as the story goes, every year, the exact same day, they do this.

They're not getting ICAL notifications to say that it's that time of year again. We better make the trek. However, animals do, just in science's defense, animals do know about seasons. Birds migrate. Whales migrate. We haven't believed that they know the day of the week and the day of the year.

I mean, what the elephant story suggests is that consciousness is not restricted to the human being. But that's where we're taking this. We're taking this that this could also happen to humans, that people can sense. Again, I'm trying to have you frame it for me. Yes, and it's suggesting that not only can that happen, but then...

for years forward, they have a sense of time and that these markers of these significant events maintain and that the energy is available and they're tracking that. That, to me, is the most magical part of it. Well, I hear you, and I think you're right. I mean, pet owners...

Let's not go to elephants, which most of us don't have any connection to. Let's go to dogs. You know, I mean, if you talk to most people who live with a dog, they know darn well that there's some kind of communication that goes on that is not explicable.

you know, in ordinary terms. You know, and Rupert Sheldrake, to kind of refer to one of the scientists in the telepathy tapes, I mean, he wrote a whole study on dogs who knew when their owners, as we call them, you know, was going to return. And they would do so randomly. And he had a camera placed in the house and he knew he was telling the person what to do. And so, you know,

Again, I think these abilities are not just human. And I don't think that's a surprise. I mean, it doesn't have to be a surprise to something like evolutionary biology that animals have capacities that humans don't.

And maybe humans also, maybe we once had these telepathic capacities in a pretty obvious and unproblematic way. And then we developed language and books and podcasts and, you know, these things withered away because we don't need them anymore. You know, I can definitely see a worldview or an anthropology where something like telepathy is really common. Yeah.

Jeffrey, what you said is that potentially it's not needed anymore. And my position is that by reintroducing it, we actually have the capacity and capability for a much more engaged, magical experience here on Earth, potentially being guided by intuition,

with an increase in synchronicity and that the paths of our lives both financially and socially and from a physical health perspective can be dramatically increased by re-accessing these parts of ourselves that very well may be inherent to us as human beings. Obviously, I think that's correct. I mean, I'm just trying to articulate

modern secular scientific culture and why this is rejected for understandable reasons and why these abilities might have become less. I'll give you a simple example. You know, in the humanities, we talk a lot about the buffered self. And one of the assumptions is that the self is way more buffered in 2025 than it was in 1425. What does buffered mean? Well,

Thick, you know protected we're more shut off from the from the environment today than we were 600 years ago and so our ancestors might very well have been much more porous and Much more capable of these kind of communications and but also more haunted and more a lot more entities a lot more deities a lot more demons in the environment, you know, I mean we might have shut those off for for good reason is what I'm trying to say and

It's not that I'm suggesting we go back to 1425. I don't want to go back to 1425. But I think we did lose. And you're a white male. But I still don't want to go back. I mean, it's not pretty. Maybe we have lost something and gained something at the same time is what I'm trying to say. I like this idea, though, that you bring up.

Because for me, it speaks to that there's a skill set that we don't have. Meaning if you go back into these realms and you say, I want more intuitive capability, that it can come with being pulled in certain ways or not knowing how to manage that information and that we haven't been taught as we've become buffered from these senses. We haven't really been taught how to manage them. There's a moral...

impulse here as well. And that is when people experience these realms or these dimensions, they feel shut down. They feel silenced. They feel shamed. And so someone in my position is simply authorizing people to speak what actually happened to them. And there's a kind of healing component to this that I really want to emphasize. I think people are just

People have these experiences and they want to talk about them as you keep saying. That's about healing. And if these experiences are largely because of trauma and suffering, there's a healing component built into them. They want to be healthier. They want to be better as it were. I was going to ask just as we come to the end of our time with you, you talk about trauma as a potential opening place.

And you talk about even those on the spectrum, you know, having access to other things. Is there a component of these kinds of challenges that we can see as a sort of superpower and an opening into not just thinking impossibly, but to experiencing things impossibly? I mean, obviously, I think that. Obviously. I mean, look, there's a superhero right there. I...

I love the superheroes because they're one of the few models we have in this culture in which the human is something more than human.

And I'm like, finally, you know, and I know that's fiction and fantasy, but it's actually not fiction or fantasy. I guess that's the message. The superpowers are real. Well, and the superpowers, the superheroes that we think of is it's the Ubermensch. It's the, you know, much of this came out of post-Holocaust. You know, it's the liturgy of a world turned upside down when...

people were powerless, right? Like, how do we surpass that? So how do we push out of that? And how do we tell a different story in which these abilities and these powers are actually really central? Because they are. We're so appreciative for your writing and your scholarship and for helping us

you know, learn a new way to think. It's very helpful because when I say to people like, but people are reporting it, that means it's true and it exists. I don't really know how to respond. And I feel like you've given us a really good way to sort of frame it and to continue to be curious and to continue to give value to people's experience so that we can learn more about it and not less.

Yeah, that's the keep it on the table. That's the goal, you know, in a single phrase. Keep it on the table. Don't shove it off. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it too. I mean, we didn't get to ask him about the parrot.

We didn't get to ask him about the parrot. We didn't get to ask him about a lot of things. We didn't get to ask him about how we only die into our imagination, which is something that he talks about. His books are phenomenal. They're very, very dense reads, but I recommend them highly. And what I think is most compelling is

how he really wasn't deeply affected, blown away or terrified by anything in the telepathy tapes. You know, I was kind of like goosebumps the whole time and what's happening and what's going on. And this is literally just like a day at the office. And the stories that he tells in his books are absolutely unbelievable. The detail, the authenticity, especially of the precognitive experiences that people describe to him. They're phenomenal. And just so grateful that he came to talk to us today.

I like one point that you made, which was, could all these people just be making it up? And what I appreciate about Jeffrey's perspective is he's looking back at history for thousands of years and saying, what has the human narrative been? Is it really possible that all of these are outliers? Or is there some pattern here that we really need to take

account of and help integrate into our modern view of reality. Account of and help integrate into our modern view of reality and the human experience. And what Jeffrey also talks about is that once you're questioning sort of the nature of reality itself, you are able then to open up a lot more understanding into experiences that we cannot measure.

And it is that ability to think impossibly that allows us to learn a lot more rather than to be able to say, I'm not going to entertain this. I'm not going to go there. It's fake, which, as he said, is it's a distancing.

from what a lot of us are afraid of. So. Couldn't be said better. If people like this episode and they like the topic that we're covering, check out our episode with Lou Elizondo. Check out our episode, the first episode with Jeffrey Kripal and Elizabeth Krohn. Go into the back catalog, check out our episode with Corey Taylor, who has a lot of experiences with intelligent entities, as he calls them. Yeah.

Yeah. We're exploring. We're keeping an open mind. From our impossible breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.