Skeptiko – Science at the Tipping Point

Joy Lin didn’t go looking for spirit communication, but when they came she answered. photo by: Skeptiko Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris and on today’s episode, mediumistic, healer, channeler, communicator, and life-coach Joy Lin is joining me. Now, a quick backstory here. I originally heard about Joy through her interview about a year ago on Mysterious Universe; there’s a link in the show notes. It’s a fantastic interview. It tells the story of Joy who was a very well-educated engineer who suddenly and dramatically started having these experiences with spirits. So, she thinks she’s going crazy, goes through all the conventional kind of medical explanations and ultimately winds up with a Reiki healer who says, “No I’m sorry, it’s not that, it’s just that you’re connected now and you’ve got to deal with it.” And she has dealt with it in a pretty amazing way. Now, I know Joy because I contacted her —  and I tell the story later in the interview —   to do a healing for me, because I was going through a health issue and I decided that, while I was at the same time doing conventional therapy (which was a disaster by the way) I would also seek alternative treatments of various kinds, including Joy. While I can’t say her healing, per se, changed anything for me, the intuitive information that she brought through in the healing was dramatically profound and I said, “Wow, you’re the real deal, I have to have you on Skeptiko, because there’s all these issues that keep coming up about what’s really going on with mediumship, what’s really going on with healing, what’s really going on with good and evil and these other realms.” And she has some incredible stories about that by the way, very chilling, if you will, so all that stuff got wrapped into this interview. It was a long discussion, she was here in the studio, we just talked, conversationally, and I had to kind of try and edit it into something meaningful and I hope you enjoy it. It’s about an hour long and it was really cool having here in the studio. Here’s my dialog with Joy Lin. (MORE BELOW) Click here for forum discussion Click here for Joy’s website Click here for Joy’s interview on Mysterious Universe Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: People come to you for different reasons: some people are coming to you for spiritual development, some people are coming to you to get ahead in their career, which isn’t directly tied to spiritual development right? So we kind of have two different —  it seems like —   paths that we’re all going down all the time. More or less, we’re just trying to make it through this life and make good decisions that seem to make our life more comfortable and better, and you are not averse to helping people to do that right? If somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, I’m trying to get ahead in my job, I’m trying to get ahead in my career,” but if somebody else comes and says, “You know what is most important to me, is spiritual development and I don’t really care about the other,” I mean there are two different aspects to this. Joy Lin: Yes and no, they’re one and the same, because getting ahead in their career could help them learn...

Emma Restall Orr believes animism is more logical and coherent than scientific materialism — she may be right. photo by: Skeptiko On this episode of Skeptiko… Emma Restall Orr: …that’s the sadness about so much of science, because it’s taken us from where Christianity, and in our British culture Christianity was so thick — and it laid in the authorities, and it told everybody exactly what to think, what to feel, how to behave — and then science has taken over done exactly the same thing, and that was a problem in Christianity, and it’s a problem in science. Stay with us for Skeptiko… Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris, and I suppose I rail on and on about the absurdity of mainstream science’s position [regarding] consciousness — that is that it’s an illusion, a product of the brain… biological robot… meaningless universe — all that stuff you’ve heard a million times. But the real absurdity is that we still debate it. It’s still respectable for mainstream science, intellectual types, academia types to kick those ideas around and mull them over and really dig into them, when it’s just ridiculous. So, it’s quite refreshing when someone who’s totally on the outside, and has the dubious distinction of being a prominent member of the Neo-Druid, Neo-Pagan community, let alone the fact that she’s a woman, it’s just fascinating when someone like that can step forward and just kind of kick the shit out of materialism, very succinctly, very concisely and does so in a way that brings us back to that question that I always ask — how can this be? So, Emma Restall Orr is our guest today, she’s the author of many very interesting books, extremely articulate, an excellent writer. Of course, we didn’t agree on some things, but agreed on many more and it was certainly fun and delightful to have her on Skeptiko and to [have] her join me in this conversation.   (MORE BELOW) Click here for forum discussion Click here for Emma’s website Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Emma Restall Orr to Skeptiko. Emma is the author of several books including The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature, in which she suggests that animism, this idea that everything, even rocks, trees, stars, are alive with consciousness. Well, she dares to suggest that this radical, crazy idea is actually a coherent alternative to scientific materialism. Anyone who’s listening to this show knows that I’m saying that tongue in cheek, because we all know that scientific materialism has been shown over and over again to be many things, but at its core, just bad science. I don’t think that’s going to be surprising to you,

Emma Restall Orr believes animism is more logical and coherent than scientific materialism — she may be right. photo by: Skeptiko On this episode of Skeptiko… Emma Restall Orr: …that’s the sadness about so much of science, because it’s taken us from where Christianity, and in our British culture Christianity was so thick — and it laid in the authorities, and it told everybody exactly what to think, what to feel, how to behave — and then science has taken over done exactly the same thing, and that was a problem in Christianity, and it’s a problem in science. Stay with us for Skeptiko… Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris, and I suppose I rail on and on about the absurdity of mainstream science’s position [regarding] consciousness — that is that it’s an illusion, a product of the brain… biological robot… meaningless universe — all that stuff you’ve heard a million times. But the real absurdity is that we still debate it. It’s still respectable for mainstream science, intellectual types, academia types to kick those ideas around and mull them over and really dig into them, when it’s just ridiculous. So, it’s quite refreshing when someone who’s totally on the outside, and has the dubious distinction of being a prominent member of the Neo-Druid, Neo-Pagan community, let alone the fact that she’s a woman, it’s just fascinating when someone like that can step forward and just kind of kick the shit out of materialism, very succinctly, very concisely and does so in a way that brings us back to that question that I always ask — how can this be? So, Emma Restall Orr is our guest today, she’s the author of many very interesting books, extremely articulate, an excellent writer. Of course, we didn’t agree on some things, but agreed on many more and it was certainly fun and delightful to have her on Skeptiko and to [have] her join me in this conversation.   (MORE BELOW) Click here for forum discussion Click here for Emma’s website Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Emma Restall Orr to Skeptiko. Emma is the author of several books including The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature, in which she suggests that animism, this idea that everything, even rocks, trees, stars, are alive with consciousness. Well, she dares to suggest that this radical, crazy idea is actually a coherent alternative to scientific materialism. Anyone who’s listening to this show knows that I’m saying that tongue in cheek, because we all know that scientific materialism has been shown over and over again to be many things, but at its core, just bad science. I don’t think that’s going to be surprising to you,

Renay Oshop, uses big data, AI and advanced statistics to challenge what science thinks it knows about astrology. photo by: Skeptiko On this episode of Skeptiko… Renay Oshop: We decided to just grab a screenshot of the top 1000 people who have [the highest] Twitter follower numbers, people like Justin Bieber… he had the most Twitter followers, Oprah Winfrey was in there, Dalai Lama was in there. Then we looked for their charts… (Later…) Alex Tsakiris: So the chance of these celebrities having that [particular] alignment of those planets is over 90%, and then of the control group, it’s 45%… the odds of that just being chance is far less than 1 out of a hundred right? Renay Oshop: That’s a good summary, so that was step one and then step two on that paper was to show a correlation… (Later…) Alex Tsakiris: So of your list of 86, those are spread across the top 1,000 ranking, so you might have somebody and they might be down [around 900], but the the real stunner is that any one of those 86 who happened to rank in the top 100 had a 100% correlation between that and having this certain position of the planets. Renay Oshop: That’s absolutely right, that’s what we found. Alex Tsakiris: Wow, that is pretty incredible. Stay with us for Skeptiko… Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and this introduction’s going to be a little bit of a long one, because this story today is a long one, an interesting one. It’s about astrology. It starts with me getting an email — the kind of emails I love to get from a Skeptiko listener who’s well-informed, is science orientated, and is digging for more. The email is from a guy named Jonathan and he writes… Dear Alex, I write you as a huge fan of your show, out of all your guests it is Dr. Julie Beischel and her rigorous methodology that has impressed me the most. She clearly has a love of science and uses the scientific method to discover knowledge once thought undiscoverable. In that vein, I wanted to introduce you to the work of Renay Oshop, she’s using her genius level mind and mathematical skills to investigate astrology and getting results like Dr. Beishel’s. Now Jonathan goes on, but you get the gist of the email. It Catches my attention. I love Julie’s work, exactly as he said, using scientific methods to unmask bullshit scientific paradigms, he doesn’t say that, I do, and give us a better sense of what’s really going on in these kind of fringe areas that we think may be somewhat true, but we can’t really put our hands on. Astrology? Hey great, [it] fits into that category. We all know it’s bullshit, right? Well, we all kind of think it’s bullshit, but we kind of think maybe there’s something to it. We know the Ancient Chinese were into Astrology, and we have Vedic astrology from India, and then of course we have Ancient Egypt and Babylon, and a lot of history that somehow rolls into the astrology that we see today and gives us this sense that — while this daily reading stuff that we read might not be true — I think a lot of us have a sense that, maybe there’s something there that all these great traditions,

Renay Oshop, uses big data, AI and advanced statistics to challenge what science thinks it knows about astrology. photo by: Skeptiko On this episode of Skeptiko… Renay Oshop: We decided to just grab a screenshot of the top 1000 people who have [the highest] Twitter follower numbers, people like Justin Bieber… he had the most Twitter followers, Oprah Winfrey was in there, Dalai Lama was in there. Then we looked for their charts… (Later…) Alex Tsakiris: So the chance of these celebrities having that [particular] alignment of those planets is over 90%, and then of the control group, it’s 45%… the odds of that just being chance is far less than 1 out of a hundred right? Renay Oshop: That’s a good summary, so that was step one and then step two on that paper was to show a correlation… (Later…) Alex Tsakiris: So of your list of 86, those are spread across the top 1,000 ranking, so you might have somebody and they might be down [around 900], but the the real stunner is that any one of those 86 who happened to rank in the top 100 had a 100% correlation between that and having this certain position of the planets. Renay Oshop: That’s absolutely right, that’s what we found. Alex Tsakiris: Wow, that is pretty incredible. Stay with us for Skeptiko… Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and this introduction’s going to be a little bit of a long one, because this story today is a long one, an interesting one. It’s about astrology. It starts with me getting an email — the kind of emails I love to get from a Skeptiko listener who’s well-informed, is science orientated, and is digging for more. The email is from a guy named Jonathan and he writes… Dear Alex, I write you as a huge fan of your show, out of all your guests it is Dr. Julie Beischel and her rigorous methodology that has impressed me the most. She clearly has a love of science and uses the scientific method to discover knowledge once thought undiscoverable. In that vein, I wanted to introduce you to the work of Renay Oshop, she’s using her genius level mind and mathematical skills to investigate astrology and getting results like Dr. Beishel’s. Now Jonathan goes on, but you get the gist of the email. It Catches my attention. I love Julie’s work, exactly as he said, using scientific methods to unmask bullshit scientific paradigms, he doesn’t say that, I do, and give us a better sense of what’s really going on in these kind of fringe areas that we think may be somewhat true, but we can’t really put our hands on. Astrology? Hey great, [it] fits into that category. We all know it’s bullshit, right? Well, we all kind of think it’s bullshit, but we kind of think maybe there’s something to it. We know the Ancient Chinese were into Astrology, and we have Vedic astrology from India, and then of course we have Ancient Egypt and Babylon, and a lot of history that somehow rolls into the astrology that we see today and gives us this sense that — while this daily reading stuff that we read might not be true — I think a lot of us have a sense that, maybe there’s something there that all these great traditions,

Michael Cocks, has been an Anglican Priest for 60 years, so what’s he doing talking to channeled spirits? photo by: Skeptiko Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’ve been wanting to do a show about channeling for quite some time because between this crazy scientific atheism, “I wouldn’t believe it even it was true” mindset, and the gullible, “I’ll believe anything as long as I don’t have to think too hard and it doesn’t conflict with my existing beliefs”… between those two, there’s a huge amount of stuff that claims to be channeled material from ascended beings — whatever that means — that purports to communicate the real truth. So when Michael Cocks, an 88-year-old Anglican priest from New Zealand, contacted me about his book, Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr, I thought, “Wow, here’s a great opportunity, I’m not sure that Stephen the Martyr is even a real being let alone that he’s channeled this book for this guy, great stuff.” So I did, and I have to tell you, I hit Michael with everything: why we should believe it, what he did to verify whether he was really having communication with this historical figure from 2,000 years ago, how he went about verifying that —  which turns out to be quite amazing, I mean he really did the kind of research that you would expect a historian or a biblical scholar to do to find out if there’s anything to it — so [I’ve] got to give him kudos for that. I also asked him about a bunch of other strange things, synchronicities and other pretty amazing things that happened surrounding this whole experience that he had, for 40 years…. Alex Tsakiris: There’s all these idiosyncrasies to the tradition [the channeler] has this deep knowledge of that it is just impossible to believe that this guy from Kent, just, you know, rolls out of bed… Michael Cocks: He couldn’t have known it, it took me 30 years of research before I finally got it right and a lot of coincidences. I considered the Dead Sea Scrolls, everything. It couldn’t have come out of his head. Alex Tsakiris: I think that’s one of the things that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around is — what the heck is Stephen doing coming back and writing books? Michael Cocks: Stephen’s message is very similar to that of the Franciscans: the higher we go, the more we are each other, the lower we go, the more separate we are… Michael Cocks: It starts off [with] a Catholic lady called Olive Ashman, in bed with her husband Tom. Tom, who’s not previously been a medium, but he starts to talk in his sleep and Olive hears a voice say, “Sic Ecclesia, Spiritus, Sanctus,” “thus in the church is the Holy Spirit,” and she found that Tom was able to go into trance and the spirit continued to talk and then identified him with Stephen. The Ashmans were living in Sevenoaks in Kent. I, here in New Zealand, although about that same day received a book of prophecies —  from a lady I didn’t know called Mrs. Cropinger in North Island —  about me and what was about to happen to me. Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so let me get this straight, first of all, what year is this about? Michael Cocks: 1973. Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so this is 1973, so now that’s what 44 years ago and later you discover… you just get the book of prophecies, you don’t know anything about this other experience going on in Kent, but later you find that it happened at exactly the same time?

Michael Cocks, has been an Anglican Priest for 60 years, so what’s he doing talking to channeled spirits? photo by: Skeptiko Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’ve been wanting to do a show about channeling for quite some time because between this crazy scientific atheism, “I wouldn’t believe it even it was true” mindset, and the gullible, “I’ll believe anything as long as I don’t have to think too hard and it doesn’t conflict with my existing beliefs”… between those two, there’s a huge amount of stuff that claims to be channeled material from ascended beings — whatever that means — that purports to communicate the real truth. So when Michael Cocks, an 88-year-old Anglican priest from New Zealand, contacted me about his book, Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr, I thought, “Wow, here’s a great opportunity, I’m not sure that Stephen the Martyr is even a real being let alone that he’s channeled this book for this guy, great stuff.” So I did, and I have to tell you, I hit Michael with everything: why we should believe it, what he did to verify whether he was really having communication with this historical figure from 2,000 years ago, how he went about verifying that —  which turns out to be quite amazing, I mean he really did the kind of research that you would expect a historian or a biblical scholar to do to find out if there’s anything to it — so [I’ve] got to give him kudos for that. I also asked him about a bunch of other strange things, synchronicities and other pretty amazing things that happened surrounding this whole experience that he had, for 40 years…. Alex Tsakiris: There’s all these idiosyncrasies to the tradition [the channeler] has this deep knowledge of that it is just impossible to believe that this guy from Kent, just, you know, rolls out of bed… Michael Cocks: He couldn’t have known it, it took me 30 years of research before I finally got it right and a lot of coincidences. I considered the Dead Sea Scrolls, everything. It couldn’t have come out of his head. Alex Tsakiris: I think that’s one of the things that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around is — what the heck is Stephen doing coming back and writing books? Michael Cocks: Stephen’s message is very similar to that of the Franciscans: the higher we go, the more we are each other, the lower we go, the more separate we are… Michael Cocks: It starts off [with] a Catholic lady called Olive Ashman, in bed with her husband Tom. Tom, who’s not previously been a medium, but he starts to talk in his sleep and Olive hears a voice say, “Sic Ecclesia, Spiritus, Sanctus,” “thus in the church is the Holy Spirit,” and she found that Tom was able to go into trance and the spirit continued to talk and then identified him with Stephen. The Ashmans were living in Sevenoaks in Kent. I, here in New Zealand, although about that same day received a book of prophecies —  from a lady I didn’t know called Mrs. Cropinger in North Island —  about me and what was about to happen to me. Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so let me get this straight, first of all, what year is this about? Michael Cocks: 1973. Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so this is 1973, so now that’s what 44 years ago and later you discover… you just get the book of prophecies, you don’t know anything about this other experience going on in Kent, but later you find that it happened at exactly the same time?

Daniel Pinchbeck, was a pioneer in exploring consciousness, but now he’s sure the world will end if we don’t trade carbon credits. photo by: Climate change collage Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Today’s guest definitely fits in that category. Daniel Pinchbeck is a leading thinker about consciousness and he has a lot to say about science in his new book, How Soon Is Now. So why did we wind up having a conversation that sounds like some kind of frick’n political debate? I don’t know, but I think I have some ideas and I need to talk about them, because this crap has been going on for too long now. Ever since this crazy election in the United States, a lot of people in the parapsychology, near-death experience, extended consciousness, whatever you want to call this realm, have been on tilt: Alex Tsakiris: Well earlier on you were kind of defending the mainstream media as saying, “Hey, they don’t get everything wrong.” Certainly they don’t get everything wrong… Daniel Pinchbeck: There is no inconsistency in my perspective, it’s highly coherent. I’ve spent years developing it. I feel that you’re not… like I don’t know, maybe we need to spend six hours haranguing this out, I don’t think it’s going to happen in one podcast. It’s highly coherent and it’s systemic. We have a systemic illness going on. People are lost, people are confused, people are scared, the whole system is designed to make them that way. We can put this thing back into balance, but first we have to have the imagination that it’s possible, and that’s what great thinkers like Oscar Wilde and Buckminster Fuller and Hannah Arendt, to help us to have that imagination, so we have to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we could actually create a harmonic system that works in resonance, in harmony with the ecology of the earth as a whole system. We could do that, okay? Just in the same way we figure out how to fly, just in the same way we figure out how to make smartphones and extract all these rare minerals and fossil fuels from the environment. We could not turn our attention to how do we make this thing work for all human beings, for our entire human family? We have the technical capacity to do that, as Buckminster Fuller said, it’s a design problem and it’s an imagination problem. Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I think it’s okay to disagree, so I don’t have a problem that you don’t see my ideas as coherent or even sensible or anything like that, or that I don’t see yours as coherent, I mean that’s really not the issue. Daniel Pinchbeck: I’m going to meet you at the same level of force that you’re meeting me, because otherwise I feel that I’m not even getting a listening here. I’m sorry, you know? Alex Tsakiris: That’s why I paused before, to make sure you had a chance to talk. So let me kind of respond to what you’re saying, in really a new way, okay, that I think relates to your book in an important way and a way that is synergistic with my approach, because is it possible that the material world, that we’re talking about right, because there’s this spiritual, extended consciousness world, that we were talking about earlier on, that may exist and may have a totally different set of rules than this material “end justifies the means” [world we’re talking about], those two worlds could be different in some important ways, that we don’t realize. I’m just throwing that out as a possibility. So, isn’t it possible that it’s true what a lot of spiritual teachers tell us,

Daniel Pinchbeck, was a pioneer in exploring consciousness, but now he’s sure the world will end if we don’t trade carbon credits. photo by: Climate change collage Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Today’s guest definitely fits in that category. Daniel Pinchbeck is a leading thinker about consciousness and he has a lot to say about science in his new book, How Soon Is Now. So why did we wind up having a conversation that sounds like some kind of frick’n political debate? I don’t know, but I think I have some ideas and I need to talk about them, because this crap has been going on for too long now. Ever since this crazy election in the United States, a lot of people in the parapsychology, near-death experience, extended consciousness, whatever you want to call this realm, have been on tilt: Alex Tsakiris: Well earlier on you were kind of defending the mainstream media as saying, “Hey, they don’t get everything wrong.” Certainly they don’t get everything wrong… Daniel Pinchbeck: There is no inconsistency in my perspective, it’s highly coherent. I’ve spent years developing it. I feel that you’re not… like I don’t know, maybe we need to spend six hours haranguing this out, I don’t think it’s going to happen in one podcast. It’s highly coherent and it’s systemic. We have a systemic illness going on. People are lost, people are confused, people are scared, the whole system is designed to make them that way. We can put this thing back into balance, but first we have to have the imagination that it’s possible, and that’s what great thinkers like Oscar Wilde and Buckminster Fuller and Hannah Arendt, to help us to have that imagination, so we have to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we could actually create a harmonic system that works in resonance, in harmony with the ecology of the earth as a whole system. We could do that, okay? Just in the same way we figure out how to fly, just in the same way we figure out how to make smartphones and extract all these rare minerals and fossil fuels from the environment. We could not turn our attention to how do we make this thing work for all human beings, for our entire human family? We have the technical capacity to do that, as Buckminster Fuller said, it’s a design problem and it’s an imagination problem. Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I think it’s okay to disagree, so I don’t have a problem that you don’t see my ideas as coherent or even sensible or anything like that, or that I don’t see yours as coherent, I mean that’s really not the issue. Daniel Pinchbeck: I’m going to meet you at the same level of force that you’re meeting me, because otherwise I feel that I’m not even getting a listening here. I’m sorry, you know? Alex Tsakiris: That’s why I paused before, to make sure you had a chance to talk. So let me kind of respond to what you’re saying, in really a new way, okay, that I think relates to your book in an important way and a way that is synergistic with my approach, because is it possible that the material world, that we’re talking about right, because there’s this spiritual, extended consciousness world, that we were talking about earlier on, that may exist and may have a totally different set of rules than this material “end justifies the means” [world we’re talking about], those two worlds could be different in some important ways, that we don’t realize. I’m just throwing that out as a possibility. So, isn’t it possible that it’s true what a lot of spiritual teachers tell us,

Leslie Kean made headlines investigating UFOs, now she taking on NDEs, mediums, and after death communication. photo by: Tatiana Daubek Today we welcome Leslie Kean to Skeptiko. Leslie is an investigative journalist with a long long list of credits from many major news outlets, but you may also know her from 2010 NYT bestseller, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. Well, she’s back with another thumb to the eye of conventional paradigms with her new book: Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence of an Afterlife. Leslie, welcome to Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me… Alex Tsakiris: You’ve looked at these people square in the eye, you sat in the séance session, and not that you’re infallible or can’t be fooled at all, but you’re bringing something there that, I think, adds a certain degree of credibility for people like me… I think the journalist, in that position, is somebody I trust. Leslie Kean: Well, I hope that’s the case and I’m glad you feel that way, I hope it came through that way in the book, because I certainly, even though I did have my own personal experiences, which really affected me, at the same time I remained in the role of a journalist and I even analysed my own experiences that way. Click here for forum discussion Click here for Leslie’s website Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: Those are two topics that you talk about in this book and you draw these connections together, one is the physical mediumship that was demonstrated in the Scole Experiments and the other is, Jim Tucker does contribute to this book in terms of reincarnations. So, however you want to pick that up in terms of what’s in the book or how long that interest was there before you and those topics. Leslie Kean: Yeah, I mean all those topics have interested me for a long time and when I did… I think it was in the early 2000s, I was working on my UFO stuff but I knew these two colleagues who were also involved with the UFO subject but I sort of helped them develop a proposal for a documentary on this topic, and they ended up doing a film and I ended up assisting with that film, so I got to meet a lot of the players in the field, but I wasn’t able to fully participate because my priority was UFOs and I was working on the book for that and everything and doing a lot. But this subject matter has always really interested me, it’s always been sort of in the background of my work and I’ve poked around with different things involving it. The reincarnation cases, the physical mediumship, both fascinating to me. One thing that happened was in 2011, I was present when a very close friend of mine died and at the very moment that that person took their last breath, and that was something I’d never experienced before and it really was very profound for me to be there for that moment, and it brought up a lot of deeper questions in me; it sort of hit me over the head, like this personal experience that made me want to understand more about how… it’s just so…

Leslie Kean made headlines investigating UFOs, now she taking on NDEs, mediums, and after death communication. photo by: Tatiana Daubek Today we welcome Leslie Kean to Skeptiko. Leslie is an investigative journalist with a long long list of credits from many major news outlets, but you may also know her from 2010 NYT bestseller, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. Well, she’s back with another thumb to the eye of conventional paradigms with her new book: Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence of an Afterlife. Leslie, welcome to Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me… Alex Tsakiris: You’ve looked at these people square in the eye, you sat in the séance session, and not that you’re infallible or can’t be fooled at all, but you’re bringing something there that, I think, adds a certain degree of credibility for people like me… I think the journalist, in that position, is somebody I trust. Leslie Kean: Well, I hope that’s the case and I’m glad you feel that way, I hope it came through that way in the book, because I certainly, even though I did have my own personal experiences, which really affected me, at the same time I remained in the role of a journalist and I even analysed my own experiences that way. Click here for forum discussion Click here for Leslie’s website Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: Those are two topics that you talk about in this book and you draw these connections together, one is the physical mediumship that was demonstrated in the Scole Experiments and the other is, Jim Tucker does contribute to this book in terms of reincarnations. So, however you want to pick that up in terms of what’s in the book or how long that interest was there before you and those topics. Leslie Kean: Yeah, I mean all those topics have interested me for a long time and when I did… I think it was in the early 2000s, I was working on my UFO stuff but I knew these two colleagues who were also involved with the UFO subject but I sort of helped them develop a proposal for a documentary on this topic, and they ended up doing a film and I ended up assisting with that film, so I got to meet a lot of the players in the field, but I wasn’t able to fully participate because my priority was UFOs and I was working on the book for that and everything and doing a lot. But this subject matter has always really interested me, it’s always been sort of in the background of my work and I’ve poked around with different things involving it. The reincarnation cases, the physical mediumship, both fascinating to me. One thing that happened was in 2011, I was present when a very close friend of mine died and at the very moment that that person took their last breath, and that was something I’d never experienced before and it really was very profound for me to be there for that moment, and it brought up a lot of deeper questions in me; it sort of hit me over the head, like this personal experience that made me want to understand more about how… it’s just so…

Dr. Ed May ran the U.S. Stargate psychic spying program for 10 years, but as a materialist, rejects psychic woo. photo by: Skeptiko On this episode of Skeptiko… Alex Tsakiris:  [Dr. Dean Radin] was the first guy to say, “…let’s see if a meditator can affect that photon beam within a double-slit experiment,” and again, an astounding result. I mean, statistically an overwhelming result showing that, yes, human consciousness collapses the wave function. Dr. Ed May: Dean Radin’s a good friend of mine, he is simply one of the most creative people we have in our field, but I’m sad to report, his idea of consciousness and wave functions are just demonstrably inconsistent with 80 years’ worth of experiment and theory, it’s just simply not the case. (later) Alex Tsakiris: …but take the near-death experience science, I mean, there it’s kind of game over, because now we have the brain out of the equation, the brain doesn’t… Dr. Ed May: No, no, no, no, no, no, no absolutely not. I’ve just been engaged in a huge debate over this issue of near-death experiences, arguing with my colleagues that that is hard evidence for survival of bodily death. First off, there’s nobody that has had a near-death experience, who’s in fact dead. It’s a different category… Alex Tsakiris: Not true… not true, if we were going to answer that question… Dr. Ed May: I’ve read the literature in detail, just finished reading a book about it by one of the biggest proponents sir…  Alex Tsakiris: Nope… nope…   ———————————— Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Of course, as you know, I always say the same thing at the beginning, I say controversial science, but primarily what this show has dealt with is consciousness science and this battle of the idea of whether consciousness, your minute by minute experience, is more than just your brain, and of course that’s important, because if it is, and it is — because we’ve shown it over and over again — but if it is, then it more or less overturns science in some pretty important ways. Now, for a long time it was always assumed that psi effects; ESP, telepathy precognition, that kind of stuff, that if that was proven true, then the materialists, the mind=brain folks, would have to admit they’re wrong, because the assumption being made — and I always point to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who was famous back in the day when the atheists were kind of running the world and saying “consciousness is an illusion” and along with that was this idea that “consciousness can do no work,” consciousness being this non-physical thing that’s going on up there that can’t really “do” anything, that can’t really impact our physical world. So if psi was shown to be happening it was assumed that it would be game over, the non-physical affecting the physical, we can no longer rely on this scientific materialism.  This is why there was this tremendous pushback on psi. For example, the James Randi folks and all the very materialistic people would just rail against parapsychology and all the psi stuff as hard as they could. And of course this led to them making up a bunch of crap that we’ve gone over again and again and again on this show. Their debunking of psi was really a shame. Now, in that long list of things that got the strong pushback from the “skeptics,” was remote viewing. So, if you go back 20 years ago skeptics were saying, “Oh, that never really happened… it never really worked.” Then you had a bunch of people come out of the Stargate program ...

Dr. Ed May ran the U.S. Stargate psychic spying program for 10 years, but as a materialist, rejects psychic woo. photo by: Skeptiko On this episode of Skeptiko… Alex Tsakiris:  [Dr. Dean Radin] was the first guy to say, “…let’s see if a meditator can affect that photon beam within a double-slit experiment,” and again, an astounding result. I mean, statistically an overwhelming result showing that, yes, human consciousness collapses the wave function. Dr. Ed May: Dean Radin’s a good friend of mine, he is simply one of the most creative people we have in our field, but I’m sad to report, his idea of consciousness and wave functions are just demonstrably inconsistent with 80 years’ worth of experiment and theory, it’s just simply not the case. (later) Alex Tsakiris: …but take the near-death experience science, I mean, there it’s kind of game over, because now we have the brain out of the equation, the brain doesn’t… Dr. Ed May: No, no, no, no, no, no, no absolutely not. I’ve just been engaged in a huge debate over this issue of near-death experiences, arguing with my colleagues that that is hard evidence for survival of bodily death. First off, there’s nobody that has had a near-death experience, who’s in fact dead. It’s a different category… Alex Tsakiris: Not true… not true, if we were going to answer that question… Dr. Ed May: I’ve read the literature in detail, just finished reading a book about it by one of the biggest proponents sir…  Alex Tsakiris: Nope… nope…   ———————————— Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Of course, as you know, I always say the same thing at the beginning, I say controversial science, but primarily what this show has dealt with is consciousness science and this battle of the idea of whether consciousness, your minute by minute experience, is more than just your brain, and of course that’s important, because if it is, and it is — because we’ve shown it over and over again — but if it is, then it more or less overturns science in some pretty important ways. Now, for a long time it was always assumed that psi effects; ESP, telepathy precognition, that kind of stuff, that if that was proven true, then the materialists, the mind=brain folks, would have to admit they’re wrong, because the assumption being made — and I always point to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who was famous back in the day when the atheists were kind of running the world and saying “consciousness is an illusion” and along with that was this idea that “consciousness can do no work,” consciousness being this non-physical thing that’s going on up there that can’t really “do” anything, that can’t really impact our physical world. So if psi was shown to be happening it was assumed that it would be game over, the non-physical affecting the physical, we can no longer rely on this scientific materialism.  This is why there was this tremendous pushback on psi. For example, the James Randi folks and all the very materialistic people would just rail against parapsychology and all the psi stuff as hard as they could. And of course this led to them making up a bunch of crap that we’ve gone over again and again and again on this show. Their debunking of psi was really a shame. Now, in that long list of things that got the strong pushback from the “skeptics,” was remote viewing. So, if you go back 20 years ago skeptics were saying, “Oh, that never really happened… it never really worked.” Then you had a bunch of people come out of the Stargate program ...

Jim Marrs is a top-notch investigative journalist, so what’s he doing promoting L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth? photo by: Galaxy Press On this episode of Skeptiko… Alex Tsakiris: There are a lot of people scratching their heads saying, “What the heck is Jim Marrs doing getting in bed with those Scientologists?” Jim Marrs: I am not a Scientologist, and I’m not going to be a Scientologist. (re: Jim’s still evolving investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination) Jim Marrs: I get people all the time that say, “Will we ever know the truth about the Kennedy assassination?” and I try to explain to them that that’s not really what they’re asking. What they’re truly asking is, “Will there come a day when some government official will get up at a press conference, before all of the mass media, and say, “Okay, okay, alright, here, we’ve lied to you for 70 years but here’s the real truth, and we’re going to lay it all out here,” and no, that ain’t going to happen. (re: Jim’s investigation of the U.S. psychic spying program) Alex Tsakiris: One thing that kind of irks me is, the narrative that gets played out is, “Oh, this was all just kind of normal defense intelligence stuff… we had to do it because them darn Russkies were doing it, and we had to have a leg-up on them,” which there is some truth to. I mean, clearly the Russians were involved in this, but it does seem also like we were using that as an excuse. Jim Marrs: Yeah absolutely, that’s a lot of facile rationalization. I think the reality of it was, it was the people who actually knew what was going on and saw the positive results from the remote viewing. I mean, who doesn’t want somebody around who can tell them what’s happening on the other side of the world? Click here for forum discussion Click here for the JimMarrs.com website Call Skeptiko (858) 876-4505 Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: No one looks at those pictures and says, “Oh gee, that darn Lee Harvey Oswald fellow, I’m still so mad about that.” Jim Marrs: That’s right. Alex Tsakiris: What they think about is, “Something went on there that is totally against our values, is totally against everything America stands for.” Do you think we as a country, are ready to accept that history, that alternative history that you’ve been so much a part of documenting? Jim Marrs: Yes, I think so and I think we’ve all matured and we’re more sophisticated and we understand. You know, you go back to John Jay McCloy who goes all the way back. In 1936 he sat with Hitler in his box at the 1936 Olympics and was CEO of City National Bank, which is now City Corp and was the largest lender of money to Hitler and the Nazis, okay? Then at the end of the war somehow, he becomes the High Commissioner of Germany and was instrumental in bringing all of these Nazis over here to the United States where his protégé, Allen Dulles, had become head of the CIA and whitewashed their pro-Nazi backgrounds and called them anti-Nazis and rolled them into our military industrial complex. Then he sits on the Warren Commission to determine what happened to Kennedy and then one of the very early meetings, before they have really even gotten into a real investigation,

Jim Marrs is a top-notch investigative journalist, so what’s he doing promoting L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth? photo by: Galaxy Press On this episode of Skeptiko… Alex Tsakiris: There are a lot of people scratching their heads saying, “What the heck is Jim Marrs doing getting in bed with those Scientologists?” Jim Marrs: I am not a Scientologist, and I’m not going to be a Scientologist. (re: Jim’s still evolving investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination) Jim Marrs: I get people all the time that say, “Will we ever know the truth about the Kennedy assassination?” and I try to explain to them that that’s not really what they’re asking. What they’re truly asking is, “Will there come a day when some government official will get up at a press conference, before all of the mass media, and say, “Okay, okay, alright, here, we’ve lied to you for 70 years but here’s the real truth, and we’re going to lay it all out here,” and no, that ain’t going to happen. (re: Jim’s investigation of the U.S. psychic spying program) Alex Tsakiris: One thing that kind of irks me is, the narrative that gets played out is, “Oh, this was all just kind of normal defense intelligence stuff… we had to do it because them darn Russkies were doing it, and we had to have a leg-up on them,” which there is some truth to. I mean, clearly the Russians were involved in this, but it does seem also like we were using that as an excuse. Jim Marrs: Yeah absolutely, that’s a lot of facile rationalization. I think the reality of it was, it was the people who actually knew what was going on and saw the positive results from the remote viewing. I mean, who doesn’t want somebody around who can tell them what’s happening on the other side of the world? Click here for forum discussion Click here for the JimMarrs.com website Call Skeptiko (858) 876-4505 Read Excerpts: Alex Tsakiris: No one looks at those pictures and says, “Oh gee, that darn Lee Harvey Oswald fellow, I’m still so mad about that.” Jim Marrs: That’s right. Alex Tsakiris: What they think about is, “Something went on there that is totally against our values, is totally against everything America stands for.” Do you think we as a country, are ready to accept that history, that alternative history that you’ve been so much a part of documenting? Jim Marrs: Yes, I think so and I think we’ve all matured and we’re more sophisticated and we understand. You know, you go back to John Jay McCloy who goes all the way back. In 1936 he sat with Hitler in his box at the 1936 Olympics and was CEO of City National Bank, which is now City Corp and was the largest lender of money to Hitler and the Nazis, okay? Then at the end of the war somehow, he becomes the High Commissioner of Germany and was instrumental in bringing all of these Nazis over here to the United States where his protégé, Allen Dulles, had become head of the CIA and whitewashed their pro-Nazi backgrounds and called them anti-Nazis and rolled them into our military industrial complex. Then he sits on the Warren Commission to determine what happened to Kennedy and then one of the very early meetings, before they have really even gotten into a real investigation,