Reincarnation

Believing in reincarnation, I see that crises also occur internally. We carry pieces of humanity’s history within us, and the inner purification process is crucial. It’s a collective and individual need to process and transcend our historical behaviors. We have to do this for future possibilities. Psychedelics have a greater role in facilitating individual...

Thank you, Emmy. It's wonderful to be in conversation with you.

That's true. Reincarnation is part of my worldview. My first book, "Lifecycles," discusses empirical evidence for reincarnation. As a philosopher, I believe the scientific evidence, like Ian Stevenson's work with young children at the University of Virginia, overwhelmingly supports reincarnation. It shows nature retains its learning, reincarnation being evolution’s higher octave. Through history, individuals...

Well, I'm actually the last person you would have thought from the beginning of my life to end up writing a book on describing what happens on the long series of high-dose LSD sessions. I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi. I was a seminarian in the early days, studying to be...

My psychedelic journey began 45 years ago when I was a brand new academic, freshly minted out of graduate school, beginning my academic work. I was pretty much an atheistically inclined agnostic at the time—that's what seven years of graduate school in religious studies made me. Then I met Stan Grof's work. I met...

Thank you, Emmy, it's a pleasure to be here.

Yes. I received visions of the future human archetype and experienced reincarnation dynamics on a personal and species level. We've built the future human over hundreds of thousands of years. We're now at a point where soul consciousness is waking within historical life, supplanting ego existence. My experience involved former lives merging into one,...

Hi everybody. Sure, it's nice to see you. And thank you for all of your warm greetings. It really touched my heart, and I hope we have a lot of fun today. Because many of you know my work, I just want to show you something which I think you'd like to see. In...

Hi Sandy. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

Yeah, first, Stephen, thank you, buddy, for that very nice and warm introduction. I really appreciate our friendship, and I appreciate what you're doing with the conference, and Marc, you too. This is a great conference. It's my favorite psychedelic conference to participate in, and I always find it such a rich setting and...

It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

But coming out of it, we are not simply creating a new society or a better society, a new economy, or a new ecology. We are actually giving birth to a new form of the human species. The fundamental architecture of the collective psyche is pivoting, and as it pivots, we are giving birth...

I began to have experiences at this level of reincarnation as a collective process. I witnessed the entire planet and species reincarnating in a pulse that moved through history. I had written my first book on reincarnation, where I construed reincarnation classically as the soul's journey toward enlightenment, lifetime by lifetime, making progress and...

Yeah, I met this book at the same time I met Stan's book, and at the time, I was a deeply convinced agnostic with strong atheistic leanings. I encountered this book by Stevenson, which I think presents overwhelming evidence—the first of many books of his that present overwhelming evidence—that reincarnation is simply a fact...

It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

The most terrifying part in the beginning was it just wasn't my reality. It was a reality, but it wasn't my reality, and I couldn't get out of it. I was trapped within a feminine mode of experience that just wasn't me. There was nothing inherently frightening about it. Then when I let go...

Well, you're asking a lot because the universe is vast, and its mind has many complex, interwoven layers. It's all alive and intelligent, and everywhere we look, we encounter this intelligence. When you dig into the universe's mind, you find layers of intelligence. I experienced the biosphere's intelligence, the incarnational rhythms of the planet....

Beautifully put, Dan. This echoes the spiritual traditions' ancient messages, now joined by scientific voices. The finite self is limited, but the contextual self, as understood by Buddha, reveals no self as separate. To experience this interconnected wholeness—where life's boundaries dissolve into greater harmony—is to establish a foundation for a transformative culture. This is...

Well, that was my ego death experience, where the universe, after about the ninth or 10th session, just broke me like a twig. It took my identity and snapped it. I had begun the day as a white, Ivy League-educated philosopher, passionately concerned with the meaning of existence, and the universe forced me to...

That was my ego-death experience, where the universe broke me like a twig. It took my identity and snapped it. I had begun the day as a white, Ivy League-educated philosopher, passionately concerned with the meaning of existence, and the universe forced me to become the exact opposite of that. I became women, women...

Well, I had just finished graduate school. I got my PhD from Brown University in philosophy of religion. I had published my dissertation in a series of articles and was looking for where to take my work next. At that point in my life, I met the work of Ian Stevenson in reincarnation research...

Well, I have to go back to 1978 when I had just started my university position at YSU. That first year, I encountered the work of Ian Stevenson, whose research on reincarnation turned my worldview upside down. I also encountered the work of Stanislav Grof, who turned me upside down even more because he...

First, Marc, I want to affirm everything that Steven and Belinda have said. One of the advantages of going last is I get to play off what's already been said, and I certainly agree. We are living in a different time in history; we're experiencing a collective migration and integration at a deep level....

I think Stevenson's evidence is really strong for some type of continuity of awareness from lifetime to lifetime, especially his last two-volume book on the philosophy of reincarnation and biology. In it, he studied 187 cases of children who not only had psychological recall from their previous lifetimes but also bore marks on their...

Yeah. And in that context, I want to put on the table one fundamental axiom of my thought. I know Duane shares this axiom, and I suspect everyone in this group does too: the concept of reincarnation. My first book was on reincarnation, starting with the empirical evidence, which I believe is overwhelming. I...

Those premises are absolutely foundational to my lived reality these days. The worldview that I was educated in during graduate school is the scientific worldview of the early 20th century—that the world is basically a fantastic machine. It has no innate intelligence. Intelligence is a lucky accident that sprung up somewhere along the way....

It all began right after I finished graduate school in 1978. I started my career as a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, and I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and I knew immediately that this was critically important work to my discipline, which was...

In the 70th session, my last visionary experience, I was shown humanity was in the process of giving birth to its next evolutionary form—the future human. Understanding reincarnation was the key to this. My sessions showed not an escape from Samsara but continuous growth and change. Souls wake up inside individual historical consciousness. During...

My understanding is that the Diamond Luminosity is an extra-Samsaric reality that lies outside the Bardo, outside of Samsara, outside all the cycles of physical reality, and the Bardo realities of psychic reality. It is the pure light from which the universe arises and returns. It is Dharmakāya, the clear light of absolute reality....

Well, as a philosopher, I think reincarnation is a fundamental and important concept to examine, because philosophical traditions diverge. If you believe that there is no reincarnation, and if you believe there is reincarnation, you end up with two different understandings of reality. So one of the early things I did in my academic...

My visions did not give me any details about how or when this would take place, except that we were entering a profound global systems crisis that was being triggered by a series of ecological crises around the planet, and this was of a scale and magnitude that was historically unprecedented. I was also...

Okay, you bet that's a good place to start. In my understanding, in my experience, psychedelics in general, and in particular LSD, which was my primary medicine in this journey, is an amplifier of consciousness. When consciousness is amplified, signals which are quiet become large, become loud, and you have the sensation of becoming...

You're asking a lot, because the universe is so vast, and the mind of the universe has so many layers to it, which are all complexly interwoven. It's all alive, and it's all intelligent. Everywhere we dig into the universe, we discover aliveness and intelligence. We can't dig in anywhere and not encounter this...

Well, I know it's a radical book, and I think we are at a pivot point in history, and I think that psychedelics represent a major transition point, a true historical before-and-after point with respect to philosophy, not just psychology. It generates not only a new therapeutic protocol for healing the personal psyche, but...

I'd go farther and say life gives birth to individuality—not an ego, but individuality matures as the soul matures. Many spiritual traditions believe the individual is an illusion, that the goal is to dissolve into oneness. I understand that cosmology, but it doesn't jive with my experience. My experience is that the universe intensely...

Over and over again, I was shown these visions that this is what's happening. Nature is taking us through this. We are going through a tremendous pressure cooker. We're going through a transformation that will result in the birth, not simply of a higher civilization or a more ecologically in tune economy, but literally...

I'm glad to be here.

Thank you, Donna, my pleasure, and thank you everyone for spending part of your Sunday with me. It's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to talk about these things, and I'm really looking forward to our discussion that follows my comments here. So let me first shift us into share screen so I...

It is frightening, which is why it's crucial to understand what's happening. Some look at it apocalyptically, but really, it's a birth. Gestation is long, but labor is short and intense. Humanity has been gestating the future human for thousands of years, but giving birth is convulsive. Like labor, it might look terrible, but...

If psychedelics have taught me one thing, it's that fear is destructive. When you've dissolved fear and experienced pure truth, love, and understanding, you perceive life differently. Much of the world is fear-driven, afraid of dying or losing their existence. But if we can overcome that fear, our perspective changes. My work, reflected in...