Dr. Tom Zinser, Clinical Psychologist on Difference Between Darkness and Evil |451|

Tom Zinser’s clinical psychology practice took a turn when he discovered the difference between darkness and evil.

photo by: Skeptiko

[Movie clip 00:00:00 – 00:00:23]

Nobody plays a deal-making devil better than Al Pacino and no one plays an unsuspecting dupe better than Keanu Reeves. It’s from the movie, The Devil’s Advocate and it fits perfectly with today’s controversial and just incredibly amazing and for me, paradigm changing interview with Dr. Tom Zinser. 

Tom Zinser: As souls we have the choice, and evil does not run our life, evil does not have power over us. So as souls we do have that power to deal with evil, to stop it, to refuse it. And it’s one of the reasons I said that distinction between darkness and evil is so important. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:09] So our natural state is to have likes and dislikes that inadvertently, not our fault, but it happens, we block that light in one way or another, and sometimes we connect with those blockages more than we connect with the light and it all becomes a confused state. What I hear you saying then is that we can begin talking about evil, darkness as just blockages of the light. That of course, you always have the power to remove those. It makes them a lot less scary. 

Tom Zinser: [00:01:43] And we do need that. We’ve grown up in our Western culture to be frightened of darkness and evil, to think of it as so powerful, to stay away from that topic for fear that it’s going to get us. People need to know it doesn’t have that power. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:00] I hope this came through in the interview, is this idea of the contract, because that is not only a method of deception that seems to be in play, but it’s been enshrined in our culture through books, movies, as being, don’t make that contract with the devil, you could never break it. And what Gerod says, and you prove in your work is that, no, there’s no such contract, it’s null and void, it’s unenforceable. All we have to do is say, No, I choose to go to the light,” and it’s all over.

Tom Zinser: [00:02:33] That’s right. Yes. 

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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris and today we’re joined by Tom Zinser. 

In 1987 Dr. Tom Zinser was a clinical psychologist and hypnotherapists in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and like a lot of therapists, like a lot of people, helpers, Tom wanted to see his patients get better, but they weren’t, at least they weren’t getting better as quickly or as often as he felt they should. So, Tom, as he tells, it, was almost to the point of giving up. 

Then a part-time secretary in his office named Katherine came to him with a rather remarkable proposal that we’re going to hear about, and what followed was a 15-year collaboration that changed Tom’s practice, certainly changed the lives of hundreds and hundreds of his clients, and completely changed his worldview as well. 

Now, I’m not so sure what it did for his reputation as a clinical psychologist among his colleagues, but that’s almost another story, maybe one we will get into as well. Because Tom’s 15-year collaboration turned out to be with a spirit entity named Gerod, who consulted with Tom about the problems his patients were facing and suggested specific ways to help them overcome traumas, relieve anxieties, and generally live a happier, more fulfilling life.

Dr. Zinser’s book again is titled, Soul-Centered Healing: A Psychologist’s Extraordinary Journey Into the Realms of Sub-Personalities, Spirits and Past Lives. I use the term game changer too often, but it’s an unbelievably significant piece of work and I’m super excited to have him here today.

Tom, thanks so much for joining me. 

Tom Zinser: [00:04:51] Well, you’re welcome and thanks for inviting me. I said I’m a long-time listener, so it’s a pleasure to meet you at least in video, if not person. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:05:02] Yeah, I was blown away to think that you’ve been listening to the show when I dug into your experience that you’ve had here, and the kind of clinical work that you’ve done, and we’re going to get into that in a minute. But I think that’s a big part of the story that I want to get out there right off the bat, is you’re a clinician, a highly trained professional and you’re doing all of the stuff that, kind of normal psychologists do. People come in and talk to you about their problems, and then all of this other stuff, we’re going to talk about that, is kind of layered on top of that. 

So that might even be a good place to begin. Dr. Zinser, tell people a little bit about your professional background, your training, your credentials, just so people know that part of who you are.

Tom Zinser: [00:05:50] Yeah, I think even to be clear from the start, as I practiced psychology in the early 80s, once I began working with Gerod, that crossed a whole different line in which I really was not practicing psychology as such any longer. What I was learning from Gerod was layered in a sense, on top of that, in terms of the psychic and spiritual dimensions, the energetic dimensions.

So in the beginning I worked as a hypnotherapist. Mainly focused on dissociative kind of disorders. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:31] But I just want to interject here. I just want people to understand, because when I got into your stuff, this is the process I always go through. I’m usually super excited and blown away and then a little alarm bell goes off in my head and goes, wait a minute, wait a minute, there’s a lot of kind of shady people out there. Is this guy legit in the way that normal people would just come at it? Does he have an advanced degree? I mean, did he go through the proper training? Is he legit in that way? And so I had those questions and for me, those questions were answered, but I’d like you to kind of answer them again. What are your professional credentials? 

Tom Zinser: [00:07:11] Okay. Well, I did my undergraduate work at the University of Notre Dame and that basically was called The Great Books Program, a very broad field humanities. But then I went on afterwards to get my master’s degree with emotionally disturbed children. And after I gained my master’s and teaching for a year, I went on for my doctoral studies at Texas A&M in counseling psychology. 

So I finished my dissertation and began practice as an intern here in Grand Rapids in 1975 and then worked at the psychiatric hospital for several years before entering private practice. And it’s in private practice that I really practiced hypnosis and really attempting to work with people who had been traumatized, whether in childhood or adolescence or even later. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:08:14] And then that led you, as you just mentioned a little bit ago, into this work with dissociative disorders, which is in and of itself, highly controversial. I kind of gleaned from your book that it wasn’t quite as controversial when you first started. It’s not like you were jumping into some trend, you had just kind of discovered it on your own. 

So dissociative disorder, so people know, split personality or multiple personality as it’s portrayed in the movies is how it’s been popularized. But from a kind of straight on psychological, clinical perspective, it’s now recognized that people do have different kinds of dissociative disorders that lead to stress in their life. 

So do you want to kind of help people understand that whole thing? 

Tom Zinser: [00:09:05] When I began I learned about an approach to therapy called ego-state therapy, and this is an approach that recognizes that we all have sub-personalities. The multiple personality, which was the term back then, in a sense is an extreme case of sub-personalities. So the issue was treating people through hypnosis, making contact with these sub-personalities and helping these sub-personalities to relieve the pain or hurt or distress or fear that they carry. And it’s these personalities that we were bringing back to integrate with the self. So multiple personality is an extreme, but it’s basically saying we all have sub-personalities created. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:10:01] I kind of gleaned from the book that there was this kind of continuum, we all have ego-states, we all love the gatekeeper, we all have the protector, we all have that. It just hasn’t gone to the extent that it has, or is that not really a good way to look at it? Is it really something completely different when it becomes a problem for people? 

Tom Zinser: [00:10:22] No. We are talking about a continuum, and most of the people that I worked with as clients, they were not multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder, as we talk today, they were normal every day. But in childhood and in adolescence especially, the ego-self, the identity is not well formed and those are very vulnerable times. So when a child or an adolescent is overwhelmed by, just say they got embarrassed or humiliated at some point at eight years old, or where they’ve had an accident, just normal traumas, but if they are overwhelmed, then a part may be created to take over, until things can re-stabilize.

So, I think one of the questions you’re implying Alex, we cannot predict what sub-personality will be created for a person. It is a unique creation out of that person’s own mind. The situation, what kind of distress is involved. You just can’t predict. What you can predict, somewhat, is in trauma when overwhelmed, a sub-personality will be created.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:11:49] In a way, even that part of the book was very empowering to me in terms of understanding just general psychology, why I get angry when my Chrome doesn’t refresh as fast as I think it should, and I go, “That’s rather irrational.” Or why I think the weather should be the way that I need it to be. And I look at the irrationality of that and I step back and go, “Wow, what was that reaction?” And I think your book, and even just because I wasn’t familiar with this egocentric kind of approach, it kind of clicked for me in a very normal way that didn’t scare me or make me feel like I was strange in any way. But just that this was kind of a normal process that consciousness does to deal with things that come up.

So I don’t want to make too big of a deal out of it, but I guess we want to make kind of a big deal out of it, because I think it is the foundation for this clinical work that you do. And again folks, I can’t stress enough. Dr. Zinser is doing clinical work, he’s trying to make these patients more effective in their life. And what I love about this guy is he’s constantly looking for new protocols and he’s testing those in an appropriate way with his clients to see if it’s more efficacious than the last. So, I don’t know. I think we do need to get all that out there. 

Tom Zinser: [00:13:08] Well, I would agree with you completely. Sub-personalities, I think is an extremely important concept for understanding ourselves. But I would emphasize that sub-personalities whether, what we might call ego-states, limited all the way to multiple personality, where you have extreme alter personalities and that whole continuum, it is not necessarily accepted fully by all of psychology or psychiatry. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:42] Hold on right there. I want you to speak to that because part of what you’re saying, completely flies in the face of what a lot of people in the “psychology community, psychiatry community, mental health community”, they are not onboard with this. And you really raise this point very powerfully in your book, and that is this, what I always slam on is these guys don’t even have a meaningful understanding of consciousness. And I’m not just throwing stones, I’m saying it isn’t coherent inside of their own framework. 

So here you are doing hypnotherapy. We don’t have any model for how or why hypnotherapy should work. So we let that into the tent, and then at the same time we go, “Yeah, but it’s all brain-based biological robot, meaningless universe stuff.” It’s not really coherent.  

Tom Zinser: [00:14:36] Well, I would make the distinction first between the clinician and the academician.

There are a number of therapies that accept sub-personalities, and they call it parts therapy, they call it transactional therapy, Assagioli called it psychosynthesis. There are a number of approaches that have recognized sub-personalities, but almost all of them, or maybe all of them come out of the clinical tradition. When you’re actually working with people in the work, you see these people kind of split, the academic and the empirical scientists’ side of psychology, they can’t get a handle on this unless they want to come into the clinical. So you’re going to find less acceptance in the academic and in the empirical science schools than you’re going to find in the clinical. 

So that’s one big distinction. The clinical area of psychology, you’re going to see sub-personality be a more accepted concept.

 Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:46] I’m glad you made that distinction between the clinical and the academic. The boots on the ground folks see it, they’re not inclined to completely deny it and pretend like their experience doesn’t matter, so they’re trying to explain it. 

We see the same thing with near-death experience, where the people are really making headway, is the cardiologist says, “I can’t deny the fact that the person was dead, that their heart stopped, and I can’t deny the fact that they came back and recounted their resuscitation in a way that doesn’t make any sense. So I have to investigate that.” And then meanwhile you have the cognitive science people and the other people saying, “Well, that just doesn’t fit in our paradigm, so we don’t have to deal with it.” 

So the related question of that, and this is something I hammer on all of the time on Skeptiko, but I really wanted to get your take on it, and that is, how do they manage to hold on to such a silly, ridiculous outdated view of consciousness?

So, I hope you get what I mean there, but tell me what you think.

Tom Zinser: [00:16:55] I think I clearly get it because it’s one of the things that has really preoccupied me since I finished my last book, is what I would term this paradigm shift. And in response to your question about what it is about these folks, my sense Alex, is that when it comes to the psychic and spirit dimensions of self and reality, ourselves as soul, it leads to an all or none kind of line. You’re either all in or you’re still hedging. And the empirical scientist today, the cognitive psychologists, the people who really fight against these kinds of other dimensions. They’re facing that all or none line. Because if you cross it, if you cross it, your world is going to turn upside down. If you consider yourself to be a soul who has past lives, has lived past lives, that is going to change your way of thinking about who you are, why certain things go on for you the way they do, what you may be about, where you’re headed. All of that changes if you cross the line and say, “Yeah, I think I’ve been around for more than one lifetime.” 

I really believe that that line is implicitly known by these folks at an unconscious level, it’s known and it scares them. They resist it. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:18:33] Do you think it might be known at a conscious level and is not crossed because the implications for social engineering, social control, manipulation in either a positive or negative way?  

Tom Zinser: [00:18:52] Yes, I believe that ultimately there is the concern that if people really began to understand the power they have as conscious beings, I would believe that the powers that be would not want that to be given full freedom.

So Gerod had said a long time ago to me, thought is the most powerful force in the universe. So if you can imagine people opening their thinking to other conscious realms, I would see governments, yes, being threatened somewhat by people discovering that kind of power. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:19:30] It’s funny, I totally hear you. And I’m jumping ahead here but I can’t resist. Speak to responsibility that goes with the power.

Tom Zinser: [00:19:38] Yeah, that’s a big jump. Gerod’s message is we, every one of us, each of us is a beam of light, we are a soul, and that is in itself, powerful. That we are powerful as a soul. Gerod’s view is that we come and live our lifetimes in order to awaken as souls and by that he’s talking about awakening to one’s own power. He’s talking about the power of light, the power of knowledge. Not a power to use against others, but the power to create, to be that pure light that we are. 

So yes, there is a responsibility. I guess I have to approach it a different way and that is, each of us born, created with absolute free choice. Our responsibility is to not violate other’s free choice. We have free choice, we keep that free choice. So the issue in terms of responsibility is that we not violate other’s free choice.

But Gerod will say that as incarnations, as humans, we explore all kinds of things between the light and the dark. That’s what awakening is about. Responsibility is not violating others. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:12] Awesome, and we did take a big jump. So let’s back up and let’s go right back to the beginning of this story, because I kind of left a little bit of a cliffhanger there. 

So you’re a practicing clinical psychologist, hypnotherapist, and this woman who you know because she works in your office, but you don’t know her that well, comes into your office because she’s overheard, because you’re kind of an open-minded guy and you’re exploring hypnotherapy, so some of the guys in the office are talking about Robert Monroe and out-of-body experiences and you hadn’t played around with that. And she hears that and she sees an opening. So she comes in, and what does she talk to you about and what happens next? 

Tom Zinser: [00:21:59] Well, Katherine offered me an opportunity to have a session with the spirit entity that she channeled.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:09] How does that conversation go? How does somebody sit down with you and say, “I’ve been channeling this spirit and he might be willing to talk to you”? 

Tom Zinser: [00:22:19] Well, it’s something I never considered with everything I did. But she came in, said she had overheard the conversation in the lunchroom and it brought back to her that as much younger woman she had an experience where Gerod had approached her mentally and she had shut it down. And when she heard me talking about out-of-body experience and these kinds of things, she said she sat down again with her husband and went into her trance and Gerod was right there. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, so she approached me as a way to maybe validate or help her be clear on what exactly this Gerod thing was and what happened. And meanwhile, she was offering me an experience with one of these paranormal or anomalous sorts of experiences. So, I was open, I sat down, what did I have to lose? 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:23:20] You were open Tom, but let’s dive into that a little bit further. Because you’re a smart guy, you’re thinking about a lot of things, you’re reading a ton of books. So I’m sure at this point you’re also leery, skeptical, careful about channeling spirits. We’ve all heard this, it can lead to a lot of confusion. At the very least, it can lead to just misinformation and being trickstered or even worse kind of thing. 

So as you approach this, what kind of, not just safeguards, but how are you thinking you will approach this as a clinician?

Tom Zinser: [00:24:02] Well, let me give an example of my first conversation with Gerod and the case that came up. And that was a fellow I was working with, he was around 40, and in trying to identify his sub-personalities that were getting in the way here, I was getting communication from the inner world and as I tried to pin down…

Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:29] Can I interject here, I want you to clarify something for me. Is it ideo-motor signaling?

Tom Zinser: [00:24:36] Right. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:37] Would you go ahead and explain to people what this particular kind of hypnotherapy technique is?

Tom Zinser: [00:24:45] The ideo-motor response is an old, old hypnotic technique, and it is a way of communicating with the unconscious through signals rather than verbal interaction. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:58] So we want to put people in a deep trance so we can get to that deeper part of the subconscious. Even though we don’t know what any of these terms mean, we don’t really know what hypnotherapy is doing, we don’t know what deep consciousness would be, we don’t know any of that. But we’re just, as a clinician, you’re saying, “Hey, this is effective. Get to a deep trance state. Get the verbal part of the whole brain thing out of it and just see if I can get really simple kinds of signals,” right? 

Tom Zinser: [00:25:25] Yes. Asking yes or no questions, and getting signals, yes, no, stop or I don’t know. And this technique using signals, and I use finger signals, it is a very quick way to bypass the conscious mind, get the verbal self out of the way, so that the client consciously is not responsible for anything I’m asking. I am not asking them, I’m asking their unconscious mind. So the ideo-motor response is what I was using with clients back then. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:26:01] So you go to talk to Gerod and how does that go? 

Tom Zinser: [00:26:06] Well, it took a while for Gerod and I to develop a language and understanding. But in that first session I did bring up a case, this one where I kept getting contradictory answers, and he gave me information and he said that there was a spirit presence with this client who was interfering with him and confusing him. And that was a bit of a shock to me, but I did take it back in the next therapy session with this man, and I started asking questions as if Gerod’s information was correct, that there was a spirit present. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:26:50] Hold on right there Tom. This is a huge leap, and you alluded to this at the very beginning of this interview, that it almost sounded like you felt a little bit guilty that you went off reservation like this, in terms of the normal protocol that’s being used. But I love the clinician in you, in the way that you approach this ,is you’re going to take this information and with all your training, background and experience, which is very substantial at this point, you are going to test this in a real way. Did you worry at all at this point that you might be leading yourself into a state of where you might be deluding yourself when you go and talk to your clients?

 Tom Zinser: [00:27:33] As I said, I had been communicating with this client, trying to, the unconscious, getting these contradictory responses. And when Gerod gave me this information, when I went back to my client, I was already in the habit of a question and working with him. Before it was all the contradictions, I did not feel I was communicating. All of a sudden, with Gerod’s information, reframing it and asking the questions, I began to get responses that made sense to me. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:28:08] Now, let’s make sure we’re explicit about this reframing because as I understand it, and again, Tom, please correct me because I might’ve misinterpreted things. Is that the hypnotherapy technique that you’re using, the signaling, you shift now from talking to the ego part of this person to a separate spirit entity that is somehow communicating through this person, and that leads to… It leads to what? What does it lead to?

Tom Zinser: [00:28:39] Wow, we’re talking 33 years ago here. I went through a communication with this spirit when my client was in trance, but he was also consciously getting things coming to him. And so he would intermittently also be reporting things to me verbally, and he could feel this, he could feel what was happening. And he also had his own sense that this was not him. So he was shocked as well. I mean, we both were shocked by this because he wasn’t expecting it, that’s for sure. 

So it was my first attempt to engage and communicate, in a way with what appeared to be a separate entity, and I felt that I received enough confirmation, enough back and forth communication with this entity, and the information we finally had is that it was willing to leave. 

So it’s not like I came out of that 100% convinced, but it had talked to me, when for so many sessions it hadn’t and that was a step forward.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:29:54] So that begins this process, that you enter into with Gerod where you were actually consulting with him about clients. And as strange as that might sound, and for some people it might sound unprofessional, it might sound like you have crossed some boundary there that you’re not supposed to cross. Although, I would again take this back folks and say, what boundary do we think we’re creating? If this is the greater reality, and we found a way to access that greater reality and possibly apply good scientific methods to it, why would we want to hold off from doing that for just some arbitrary reasons we’ve set? But I don’t want to bury the lead here.

You, as you document in this incredible book that people need to really, really get and fully experience, what went on here, you get specific information from Gerod about clients that you’re then able to use clinically. What was that process like? I’m sure it was confirming to you, we just talked about the first case, but you have hundreds and hundreds of cases, right?

Tom Zinser: [00:31:04] Yes. Basically, after my first session with Gerod and taking it back to my clients, I was so intrigued with this possibility, I asked Katherine a month later for another session, which you agreed to, and I talked with Gerod again. This was really done in automatic writing. It wasn’t done verbally talking with Gerod.

Well, after that second session with Gerod, a month later I asked Katherine if she would have another one, because this information, it just was right on. So about four months after I met Gerod, Kathy and I agreed on forming this collaboration with Gerod. 

So I began meeting with Katherine once a week. During the week with clients I kept a list of questions on my legal pad, so I would write down questions about where we got stuck with the client, what was happening. I also wrote down metaphysical questions on that legal pad. And then at the end of the week, I would meet with Gerod with my questions there, go over all of those. I would go home and during the week I would transcribe that session and take that information back to the sessions with my clients, using that information with each of those individual clients. Then I would take that communication that hypnotherapy work and see if I could engage, see if I could get a communication. And it happened over and over. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:32:41] And that leads to, as we learn in the book, it leads to you developing more of a, I don’t want to just say intuitive, but an intuitive sense of what might be going on. So your questions to Gerod, as we’re reading the book, are more pointed. You kind of know, “Hey, I think this is going on. Can you confirm that?” Rather than, “What the heck is going on.” Let’s just stop there.

Tom Zinser: [00:33:03] Well, it was kind of the process of Gerod identifying something and I going and testing it out. You’ve got people with past life stuff, you’ve got people with spirit attachment, you’ve got people with just their own sub-personalities. All of these different clients I would follow up with him. And then take that information back and all the different situations and see if I could have ongoing communication. But he would identify something at first.

And I feel a need to bring in here that one of the things he identified was that part of us, ourselves, that he called the higher self . And that higher self, according to Gerod, knew so much of the person’s inner world, was aware of their soul history, was able to be a conduit of light for each of us in our present life. This higher self became more and more a central figure that I worked with with each client, that I would establish communication with their higher show.

Now, Gerod had said, and I explored this deeply with him about higher self, he pictured the higher self is though the soul projected a piece of itself into the present life when the person is born. And in projecting that piece of itself, that higher self knew it was part of the light. It knew it was part of the soul, and it was for this person’s lifetime. In a sense a beacon of light, an inner guide. And I began to work with that higher self to be a part that could explore and identify parts of the self that were in trouble or had problems.

To make it to me even more impressive, the higher self could communicate directly to the ego-states, the sub-personality. It’s as if the higher self could go to where the sub-personality was and communicate to it directly. And the higher self could also bring that sub-personality the divine light from the soul and from the creator, could bring the light to that sub-personality. 

And this is another one of those confirmation things, and I will tell you it’s one of the most powerful. I have worked with thousands and thousands of sub-personalities. 99% of the time, once higher self brought the light to a sub-personality, it changed its attitude and its perception almost immediately. It became agreeable with the healing process. It became agreeable with heal, sharing it’s trauma, even though that was painful. 

When you see something like that happen 99% of the time, to me that’s a scientific finding. It’s a consistent finding, the significance is out of the ballpark but that still happens today. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:36:13] Now we have a bunch of Skeptiko questions, you’ve just kind of raised the Skeptiko drill here, so nothing to be surprised about.

But one thing is, you’re going to trigger a lot of people, I hate that word, but it’s the right word. You’re going to trigger a lot of people with, certainly with divine, with God, with creator, with even higher self. These are all words that are highly charged in our society and our culture, particularly because of the religious connotations to them.

So as part of a way to dive into that, talk to me about religion and how you understand religion fitting into what became your larger worldview, your larger understanding of the extended consciousness realms. 

Tom Zinser: [00:37:06] I basically think in terms of spirituality and spiritual realms, I look at religions, plural as forms attempting to help humans come to know and understand their divinity, their own divine light, their soul . 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:37:25] Okay but let me interject a question here because I just talked to a guy maybe two weeks ago, a terrific guy, his name is David Ditchfield. He’s from the UK. He had this had this incredible near-death experience where he was dragged under a train and left his body, and he met God and he saw Jesus and he came back and he was meeting with a with a person at a spiritualist church who had abilities to see and understand these extended realms. And she said, “You met Jesus, didn’t you?” And he goes, “Yeah, I met Jesus.” And I was talking to David, and I said, “What do you think about that? How do you understand that idea that you’ve met “Jesus”? Because if we look for Jesus historically, we don’t always find Jesus, and if we look at what some people have done with their Jesus, we don’t really feel so great about that. 

And yet, he felt very confident that this was his experience in this extended realm, and that experience was mediated by a higher spirit guide that was interested in his good. And it sounded all good, he didn’t come back and do a bunch of evil stuff. To the contrary, he came back and seemed to be changed for the positive. 

How are we to understand, for example, that guy’s experience or millions of other people’s experience with a Jesus that may or may not be historical in the sense that we think about?

Tom Zinser: [00:38:57] You’re asking big questions Alex. In the spirit realm of light where souls exist there are spirit guides. There are those departed loved ones that all of us have who have passed on. Those souls in the light can also be aware of us. And Gerod had said from the beginning the promise, and he used the term light or God, that the promise was made that each of us who incarnated, every soul reincarnated would have a spirit guide. 

So my view is we all have at least one spirit guide. We may have different guides during our lifetime, and at times we may have more than one guide involved with us. 

So when we talk about, in the near-death experience, when we talk about people who are close to death in hospice, who are getting ready to make transition, they will see departed family members come to them. That is so common. And the thing is, in spirit realm and at our unconscious soul level, there’s more that’s known than we know consciously. The person who sees Jesus, as opposed to the person who sees Muhammed, as opposed to the person who sees another kind of being of light, that presentation is for the person who’s having the experience.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:40:32] Hold on. Pause right there and tell me… We’ve heard that. We’ve heard that so many times. Tell me specifically how that fits into what you learned working with your clients. Because there does seem to be a little bit of a disconnect for me, in terms of, if this Jesus figure is… Because I’ve talked to, again, a number of well-meaning spiritual people who have a direct experience with Jesus, which I’m always okay with, but when I try and say, “Well, as I understand it, you had an experience with Christ consciousness,” they’re like, “No, Alex, you don’t get it. I had an experience with Jesus. and it is Jesus of the Bible, and that’s just it, and don’t tell me otherwise.”

Tom Zinser: [00:41:25] I would say that these beings who come to meet us in different situations are conditioned by the person who’s having the encounter. If you grew up with Jesus and in your own mind and heart, Jesus becomes a symbolic figure, and by that I mean a sacred, symbolic figure for this person. That figure is imbued with energy also, and it makes connection to the spirit realm. And when that person, whatever the situation happens that calls for that kind of encounter, especially near-death or death itself, or an out-of-body trauma, Jesus may be the one, and I’m not even sure that this figure comes forward and says, “I’m Jesus,” but it may come forward and appear to the person what their symbol is calling for.

I don’t myself working with people, I don’t need to answer the question whether this being of light is in fact Jesus personally, because they’re all kinds of beings of light who’ve come to meet the people I’ve worked with, and there are all kinds of beings of light who came to meet these people with near-death experience.

so I guess I would say it’s more conditioned by what the person is ready for, or the way they perceive things, or the way they need to see things in order to make the contact. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:42:59] What I think, taking from your work, and again, I want to emphasize this because this is like, kind of one of my main things. I put up on the screen something that you wrote from the book. So you’re saying, past lives, as with near-death experiences, there are too many reports from too many sources and too many reputable studies to just be flukes or fantasies. We’re talking for example, about children who possess very specific past life memories and details of people in places and events from previous lifetimes that were investigated and corroborated in ways that left no room for doubt. 

Now, I shared that earlier on the screen, but I wanted to read that into the show because here’s where I go with that. The level one discussion is, is that true? Can we rely on the University of Virginia and Jim Tucker who did the follow-up work from Ian Stevenson and compiled thousands of these past life accounts and published them in an organized systematic way and were totally open to review and criticism and withstood all that.

That’s level one and you just stand up to anyone go, “Well, if you don’t understand that, there’s nothing I can do. There’s the data. You going to have to deal with it or not.”

And then level two is, why are we conditioned and kind of led to look away from that if it is that solid, as we said in level one?

 But level three is what really gets me excited and it’s the reason why your book and the possibilities of your work get me so excited. Because level three says, “Okay, I’m really not going to worry about just proving whether there’s an extended realm, which in your case is like, you read Robert Monroe, you did your own out-of-of body experience, you worked with all of these clients. It’s like, okay, that’s really an answered question. I don’t need to spend all of my time just trying to debate with someone. 

And then question two, you kind of said, “Well, I don’t really worry about what other people in the community are kind of thinking or what academicians are publishing.” What you did is said, “How can I develop a protocol that might be efficacious for helping my clients move forward?” I think that is so awesome and so important and so unique. 

So I want to move into talking about your protocol because you have some very specific things that you’ve developed over time, in terms of how to deal with people who are experiencing this trauma, how to deal with these different entities, however we want to understand them or identify them. And then in particular, how to deal with the evil darkness thing, which is the original reason I contacted you. And you have a very, very important distinction that you make between darkness an evil, and that’s what I want to get to next. But I want to start out by talking about your protocol that you developed and why you developed it the way that you did . 

Tom Zinser: [00:46:08] Well, I have to go back again and emphasize the clinical nature because all of these start with the client’s own story.

My work, and with Gerod, is basically identifying those things within or about a person that blocks the light from them, and ego-states, sub-personalities are often blocking the light because they carry pain or hurt or fear or distress. If you bring them light, they can refuse it because they are part of the soul and therefore they have some level of choice. Well, they often refuse this light love energy because it brings up their pain, and if you’re going to bring up their pain, you’re going to have to be able to offer them relief or else forget it. Don’t bring up their pain just to have them be in pain.

So the protocol developed for the ego-stages is, make the contact, communicate with them, make it safe for them to receive this light love energy. Once they receive it, as I said, 99% say, “Whippy, I love this. I don’t want to be without it.” And then they will move through the sharing and release of what happened to them.

For spirit attachment, outside entity, it’s a different protocol. They don’t belong with the person, they need to leave. And so again, working with Gerod it was understanding how to approach these spirits to gain their cooperation to leave my client. And in the worst cases, protocols designed to get it to a point where they could be removed forcibly. So that’s a different protocol. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:05] Hey Tom, can you help me and help folks link those two? Because I think those two are also related in some important ways that you talk about in the book, in terms of trauma, frustration, anxiety, and this separation that we feel can be an entry point for some of these other entities that come in and hang around and disrupt people. Do you want to speak to that at all? 

Tom Zinser: [00:48:34] Well, there are a number of ways people might be vulnerable to external intrusion or attachment or interference, but one of the primary ways is through sub- personalities. Because some personalities carry pain and stay away from the light, these outside entities can connect with them through their pain. As I said, guides, the higher self can communicate to sub-personalities. Well, these spirits can communicate to them also. And if they fall into sub-personality that they can threaten or intimidate or trick, offer them something, that is an entree into this person’s energy through the sub-personality.

I had one, I think I wrote about in the book, one young kid, maybe 12 years old, was offered a knife, a pocket-knife by a spirit. He took that knife and felt now he could protect himself, and he was kind of stronger now with this knife. But it turned out that the knife was a device used to keep the door open. As long as that child kept the knife, he had connection to the external one. 

So we had to convince him to give up the knife before we could break the connection with that spirit. Because as long as the kid kept the knife, he was given permission for the spirit to stay connected. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:13] Wow. I mean, we could go into a full discussion on that for at least an hour, because one, it launches us right into a Netflix streaming horror series that we all hear about, and that’s okay because it suggests that fiction is imitating reality in ways that are even more real than we dare to even think about.

You have to read the book folks to understand the process that Dr. Zinser went through here, but it was kind of painstakingly step by step as he talked about. Meeting with a client, taking notes, transcribing, thinking about it deeply, then “channeling this spirit”, however you want to feel about that, and then going back and doing the hard work with the client. 

One of the things that really came through in this book that made me feel more confident of what you’re talking about, is you emphasize over and over again that this is not a quick fix, 30-minute exorcism, walk out like a new person. It’s more about the journey that you are on. Your soul journey, if you want to use that corny phrase and it’s a process and you engage in it and you keep moving forward and you realize decisions that you’ve made and you remake decisions.

Talk about the work, if you would, that is involved in this process, both on your part and on the part of your client.

Tom Zinser: [00:51:47] I’d have to say, in terms of the healing method itself, it begins with basically hearing from the client what their difficulties are, what the symptoms are, what the struggles are. The first thing I do, and I learned this from Gerod, is to contact what I called the protective part of the mind. The protective part of the mind is a part of ourselves that is conscious in the present. We think of our conscious self as able to think forward and back, past, future. The protective part of ourselves is a consciousness, but its consciousness is limited to the present. It’s not thinking about what we’re going to do tonight or what we did yesterday. It’s focus is in the present. That’s where it’s consciousness is.

When I work with somebody, I learn to contact to protective part first to get permission to go forward and work with trauma. I found out that the protective part was often the part blocking me before I met Gerod, because the protective parts saw me as a bull in a China shop. Bringing up trauma, bringing up pain. 

So the protective part finally agrees, then I will make contact with higher self. When I make contact with higher self, there’s a number of things in the protocol to make sure the communication is with higher self and that it is free, higher self is free to communicate.

When I’m convinced of that, when I’m assured of that, then I will start with higher self, looking inside and start to review these issues or problems or symptoms that the client has talked about. And it’s through higher self then that we will identify and see if higher self can identify a source. 

So if a person, let’s say, has intense anxiety, panic attacks, we will ask higher self to look inside and see if it is able to locate the source of the panic attacks. You may find, by the time it’s done, six or seven sub-personalities that are involved in an anxiety pattern, but from different experiences. You might find that there is also a spirit present who kind of gets all these sub-personalities afraid and upset. You just don’t know. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:54:17] This is going to freak people out a little bit, right. I’m sure you go to conferences and meet with colleagues and they think it sounds flaky, I’m sure. 

Tom Zinser: [00:54:25] Well, I’m afraid this is part of that issue. If you cross the line, you’re looking at a whole different kind of reality. And this goes back to sub-personalities also.

I came to the point in my work with Gerod, where I came to understand the sub-personalities, at least in my mind, I best understand them as psychic beings. They’re not just memories, they’re not just kind of associated states, they are actually psychic beings. They are able to communicate, they are able to receive light, they are able to make a choice when you tell them they have a choice. They do have feelings. They are beings. And the issue is helping this being be relieved of whatever pain or distress it has so that it can join and integrate with the conscious self. 

I know this challenges people because, I mean, talking about the protective part is a different consciousness. Talking about sub-personalities, there are different consciousnesses of ourselves. The higher self is a different consciousness of ourselves. These are all different levels of consciousness, and our modern psychology wants a unified identity. It is an egocentric paradigm. And when you get past the ego, they just want to reject that.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:55:49] So with that, let’s talk about something really controversial because we haven’t talked about anything controversial yet. Let’s talk about evil and the darkness. And this is a huge topic to explore. Your book is very systematic. You methodically go through the protocol. You go through your experiences and how one leads to another.

But one of the things that comes up in your work is that there are some spirit attachments that are basically based with confusion. The spirit is attached and is harassing this person, but it isn’t malevolent in the way that, like you’re saying, if you were able to connect with that spirit and communicate with that spirit and offer them a better option, which is to go for the light, which is always shining and willing to accept that spirit, they go, “Wow, that really is better. I’m sorry, I was confused and stuck here. I’m ready to move on.”

But then you experienced some that were not. You say, “Go to the light,” and they go, “No, I know the light’s there, I’m not going there.”

Tom Zinser: [00:57:04] Where to start about darkness. The reason I sent you the email I did originally, was about the distinction between darkness and evil, and we all have to deal with darkness. And Gerod’s information to me was that this physical reality, created by the light, by the creator, whatever you want to call it, made a level playing field between the light and the dark and that level playing field is what gives souls free choice..

Alex Tsakiris: [00:57:37] Your understanding of evil though is truly unique and for me was truly revolutionary, in terms of understanding some of the subtle ways that evil comes into play and interacts with that darkness.

Tom Zinser: [00:57:53] Going from darkness to these spirits who have entered darkness and operate from darkness and have become evil in the sense that it is their intention to violate souls, and they can violate souls here in the physical, who have incarnated. And as Gerod pointed out, every soul in darkness is a soul of light. That light may have become very covered over, very buried, but every soul is a soul of light. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:58:28] Let’s really try and think of a case. Because when you talk about the case of the boy with the knife, the 12-year-old boy with the knife, we get that, we’re like, “That’s terrible. Why would you do that? Why would you create this false contract with someone?” Which we’ve heard over and over again. People are convinced that they’ve made some deal with Satan, which again, historically there is no Satan, but it’s real on some level. “I’ve made some deal. I’ve sold my soul, “and what Gerod tells us, very importantly, and this is a very important part, he says, “No, you can’t sell your soul, it’s just another form of deception that a being that is attracted to the darkness likes deception, likes to screw with people, likes to drag people down. So they will create these ideas that you have this obligation, but you don’t have this obligation.” That’s a very important point from your work. 

So, speak to that but then also speak more broadly to, why there is this connection to the darkness?

Tom Zinser: [00:59:29] Well, first of all, as souls of light, even when they’re in darkness, these souls need light. They need the light, and they do not want to go to the spirit realm of light to receive it for a number of different reasons.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:59:44] Explain some of those reasons because I think that’ll help people lock in what you’re talking about.

Tom Zinser: [00:59:48] Well, there are souls that have died with tremendous feelings of guilt, whether it’s because they’ve murdered people, whether they’ve laid waste to people, betrayed loved ones. There are different reasons like that. They were in war and became enraged and violent. And when they die in that state, they may be afraid of being judged, afraid of being condemned by this God they believe in. They may be angry at this God for what God allowed to happen. So there’s something that originally separates them from the light, their anger, their hurt, their confusion.

But the issue here is that there are souls in a hierarchy of darkness. They’ve been in darkness a long time and they’ve learned to operate that way. And in that operation they gather to themselves these souls that have gotten into the dark and kind of confused or kind of floating around or not sure what’s going on, these dark souls that know more will, in one way or another, attempt to entangle them. And this is where, what we would call the higher level dark ones, are able to almost, it is like a mafia, the mafia is a very, very good analogy. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:01:11] As below, so above.

Tom Zinser: [01:01:14] Yes. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:01:15] I mean, as above, so below, but as below, so above. I struggle with people who are, like in the occult community, the esoteric community and have a problem with this or want to explain it away or minimize it. It’s like, are you kidding? Just look on our planet. Look in the worst parts of our existence as it is. We see the same thing. We see hierarchies of evil. We see people that do horrible things and that grow comfortable with that, so that they don’t feel comfortable being normal and ordinary. So to me, you’re incredible exploration just was confirming that, yeah, that’s what I see here. That makes total sense that that would be what’s going on in these extended realms. 

Tom Zinser: [01:02:03] Well, I would say in working with clients where these kinds of dark spirits were present, it was in trying to remove them or get their cooperation to leave that we found that as they got closer to maybe agreeing to take the light, they were starting to be threatened. And that’s when I would ask them, “Are you being threatened?” I would get a yes. And what turns out is they’re being threatened by those up above who want them to stay in line. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:02:33] Or further below.

Tom Zinser: [01:02:34] Yeah. And so they’re threatening them to keep them in line. And I have to work with those spirits to let them know that that’s all a ruse. They don’t have the power to keep them in mind. If these ones I’m working with want to go to the light, they have every power and right to do that. So you’re kind of breaking the chain there. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:02:57] Could you think of a case when that came came about? I think we want to know what it was like that that process of encountering someone was a nasty monovalent, was completely destroying someone’s life or trying to destroy someone’s life, but then you were able to move through the process of moving them to the light and maybe even in ways that that wasn’t easy. Because again, your protocols first say, “Do you see the light?” And then the next part of your protocol is you say, “Well, if you can’t see the light, okay. Do you see the light within you?” And sometimes that works. And then sometimes you bring spirit guides or loved ones and say, “Here, would you be willing to talk to one of your loved ones, and they’ll help you see the light?” And then you keep going down the protocol, which just gets awesome. Give us a case that kind of brings that to life. 

Tom Zinser: [01:03:49] Well, I mean, the clearest examples for me Alex, have been my work with cult victims, cult victims who have been intentionally and in an organized way abused, for specific purposes. And that abuse is the intentional creation of a dissociative personality.

When I worked with cult victims, many of these personalities were created and many of these personalities were entangled with dark spirits, and I could basically understand exactly cult activity to damage these children, to create trauma for these children, to dissociate them, create a fragment so that these spirits, these dark spirits would have an open door into these children and their souls.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:04:49] So you’re saying what I’ve heard over and over again, both on this show and in reading that some people in these cult groups and in these satanic cult groups where they label themselves as satanic, again, whatever that means, because it’s kind of a tricky word historically, but they’ve actually have a systematic way where they say, “Gee, if we can create this disassociation that is going to serve our goals at this extended consciousness level.”

Now, I had never made that connection. I had heard about it, but I had never made that connection until I read your book. And you’re offering confirmation about that, that there would be a reason for them to do that. 

Tom Zinser: [01:05:35] Absolutely, and some of them do know consciously what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and their kind of allegiance to these dark souls. There are others who don’t know, they carry out this kind of dissociative trauma for the child in the belief, and for the purpose, of bringing that child under their control, so that in the future these abusers can control a sub-personality. And they have these techniques and methods developed to control people in that way, through their sub-personalities. They’re not necessarily aware of the other level where there are dark souls very involved, but some people are, some of these abusers are aware of that level. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:06:26] . What has the process been like, in terms of working with these people? And again, I really appreciate that you can look at this from a broader perspective. Everyone is of the light. Everyone has the ability to return to the light. People can get off the path. We have the whole past life thing to work into, sometimes children are entering into this because of some stuff they’re bringing from the past life. I’m again, complicating things. I can’t ask a straightforward, simple question. 

But I’ll go back to that first question then. How effective have you been able to be in terms of helping people overcome this kind of really severe spiritual interference, spiritual disruption? 

Tom Zinser: [01:07:09] I would say it’s been very successful, it is very methodical and it’s been very successful. Because basically what you’re doing is working with higher self to find any obstructions or interference of the light. That’s the process. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:07:27] . Have you had clients, in particular cult victims who you’ve been able to effectively treat and have told you, “Gee, I’ve been trying to work with this, with therapists that aren’t looking at this from a deeper extended consciousness realm, and I haven’t had any luck,” is that your understanding or what do you think about that?

Tom Zinser: [01:07:52] Yes. Again, learning from Gerod and going through this with Gerod, I was able to learn the kind of ins and outs of dealing with this kind of trauma and entanglement. So yes, I believe very successful, helping these cult victims basically break the ties, break the chains and connections to these dark souls.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:08:17] . One of the things you have to say about the darkness that I think is very important is that it is there for a reason, it is a part of our growth. And the way you describe it in the book is that all of your clients, regardless of the level of trauma they’ve experienced, are moving into and out of the darkness. And the trick, I guess, is to maybe not get too drawn into it? Or what would you say with regard to that?

Tom Zinser: [01:08:45] I would and this is again, one of these things about the distinction between darkness and evil. Souls that are evil do intend to violate us. The darkness itself would like to destroy the light, it would like to do that. But the darkness has to, in a sense, obey the boundaries, and it will not violate those boundaries or else the light will have recourse.

So the darkness, in some sense, it might want to seduce you, or convince you ,or draw you in, or you may want to make a deal with darkness, which will cost you, but it won’t come in and violate because if it tries to violate the light, which is also a soul, it will have repercussions, and it is aware of that. Unlike souls who do intend to violate, they are trying to take other soul’s energies and harness other souls and use them. So, the darkness won’t do that, it will shelter the evil ones, and it will draw those evil ones, and this is probably part of the problem, it will draw those evil ones in darker, deeper and deeper, until those dark ones really have no sense of themselves as the light, as a soul. They’ve forgotten who they are. The darkness is more than happy to do that. But the darkness is not an angry, violent, kind of force, it just is what it is. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:10:26] Here’s what Gerod had to say from your book. So this is communicated to you about the dark spot in all of us, and he’s talking about suicide. He said, “People who are prone to suicide or contemplating suicide are usually locked into that dark side. They’re not moving well enough towards the light. They have stopped so much in that dark place that they can’t get out. It doesn’t mean they are evil. It doesn’t mean that they are bad. It oftentimes means they have abandoned hope and they’ve let go of the idea that they are purposeful and that they have meaning.”

Do you want to speak to that at all? 

Tom Zinser: [01:11:09] I think when we look today, just as somebody who has suffered a long-term depression, when you live in depression, you’re living in darkness. And Gerod defined darkness as the place that lacks light, love, and knowledge. He said in the darkness there is no trust. These dark spirits don’t trust each other. It’s a network based on power. 

So living in depression can be living in darkness. It’s not that you’re bad and evil, but you’ve lacked that feeling of love maybe, or that lack of connection, or that lack of connection to a higher power, or you’ve lost hope about things.

You take a young kid who has grown up in a family where one of the parents or both are abusive, and that child every day has to be afraid was it’s going to come at him. That’s living in a dark place. So darkness is that place where you don’t have love and light and knowledge.

Living in ignorance, living in ignorance, there’s a darkness there. When we learn, we’re gaining light. So darkness understood is the place that lacks light, love and knowledge. We know there are a lot of people who live in such a place for different reasons, but a lot of it is trauma, the result of trauma. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:12:39] Tom, as we talked about earlier before we first started recording, you’ve retired from clinical practice. You obviously put everything you had into it. You worked really hard at it. You were very, it just sounds like a great therapist for your clients doing everything you can to help them, but that can be draining. I don’t know. I know it’s there’s a high dropout rate and I think you went longer than a lot of people can, in terms of helping that many people. What do you want to do in the future with what you’ve learned?

Tom Zinser: [01:13:11] Well, for me, the main issue and learning all of this and developing this method, is that it’s the clinical method. So I would like to see it able to be practiced. But at the same time, it is complex, it does go very, very deep, depending on where the client is, but I what I would like to do some training and it would be, kind of an in-depth training. 

I’d also probably like to do more speaking. I do believe this issue of accepting the spiritual dimension is of the utmost importance today. .

Alex Tsakiris: [01:13:52] Tom, one final question, and it may take a little while to sort this out. I hadn’t really thought of it, but I think it’s really important to my project, to the Skeptiko kind of thing, and that’s, where do you see clinical psychology fitting into this transformation that people might go through in connecting with extended consciousness? Because when we step back, we say, this has always been the domain of churches, very cultish churches are mainly what we experienced, that are more interested in controlling people and manipulating people than doing much else. But it’s always been in their domain or now we have a kind of a shamanistic kind of thing, or the magic and occult realm. They’ll tell you how to deal with these extended consciousness realms.

Do you think there’s something unique that clinical psychology can bring to that? 

Tom Zinser: [01:14:46] My feeling is clinical psychology is in the same dilemma we talked about with others, and that is they’re facing this line also and crossing this line. As I said earlier, we have a very egocentric psychology and psychiatry, and we’re talking about something that transcends the ego. And when you started threatening the ego like that, with the loss of power, that it’s not the end all and be all, the ego gets pretty threatened. So the soul centered approach is saying to the ego, “You’ve got a place, you’ve got a very important place in this incarnation, but from a soul level, you are playing a part.” 

And when we cross over, if I were to say one of the most important things today is for people to understand there is no death, that when the body dies, we basically walk through a door into another level of consciousness. 

Now the crossing over, you’re going to cross over with the mindset or the psychology you have when you cross over. There are people who will see the gates of St. Peter. There will be people who have a heavenly kind of abode to be in. But I would suggest that that’s going to be limited while that soul awakens to who it really is. 

There are other souls who are ready. When they cross over, they’re going to move right into their soul consciousness. They’re going to understand what just happened. They’re going to understand that lifetime in relation to the other lifetimes which it carries. So even crossing over has all the individual differences. But, there is a soul consciousness, I think, that we move into once we cross over and we’re ready to let go of this lifetime, this body.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:16:55] You know buddy, I think that’s a perfect place to wrap it up. I love what you said, particularly at the beginning there.

Our guest again has been Dr. Tom Zinser, his book is titled, Soul-Centered Healing: A Psychologist’s Extraordinary (it truly is extraordinary) Journey Into the Realms of Sub-Personalities, Spirits and Past Lives. It’s a book you can easily get on Amazon, very readable, very well written. He also has other books up there for clinicians, people who are hypnotherapists or clinicians trying to help these people.

Tom, it’s been great. Two hours, I could talk for another two. Will you come back and join me some time in the future?

Tom Zinser: [01:17:37] I’d be happy to. I’m very happy to have the time with you, a good hour to talk about strange things and big things. So, thanks again for having me.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:17:54 Awesome. Very, very good. Truly, truly remarkable work. These things are never accidental. Your email coming at the time that it does, publishing a book and the title of the book is, Why Evil Matters: How Science and Religion Fumbled the Big One. So this has gone right in the book. 

Tom Zinser: [01:18:15] Well, I do think that is probably the bottom-line issue, is as souls we have the choice and evil does not run our life, evil does not have power over us. Evil cannot just waltz into our life without an access. And so as souls, we do have that power to deal with evil, to stop it, to refuse it. And it’s one of the reasons I said that distinction between darkness and evil is so important because people don’t make the distinction and then it gets all confused.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:18:51] I love that, and I love the way in the book, it really comes across as not a kind of a macho, aggressive way of saying that. Because what I hear you say that I think is so central and so important is, okay folks, here’s the basic structure. It’s light. We’re all part of the divine spark. It’s within all of us. So our natural state is to have likes and dislikes that inadvertently, not our fault, but it happens, we block that light in one way or another, and sometimes we connect with those blockages more than we connect with the light and it all becomes a confused state. But it’s an addition by subtraction thing. Removing the blockages releases the light and that’s all we really want. 

So what I hear you saying then is that now we can begin talking about evil, darkness as just blockages of the light. That of course you have the power, you always had the power to remove those. It makes them a lot less scary, puts them in proportion. Not that we shouldn’t be concerned, but just puts them in their proper perspective. 

Tom Zinser: [01:20:07] And we do need that. We’ve grown up in our Western culture to be frightened of darkness and evil, to think of it as so powerful, to stay away from that topic for fear that it’s going to get us, and that only gives it power more, that kind of thinking. And people need to know it doesn’t have that power. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:20:29] And I think what’s particularly powerful, and I hope this came through in the interview, is this idea of the contract, because that is not only a method of deception here that seems to be in play, but it’s been enshrined in our culture through books, movies, as being, don’t make that contract with the devil, you could never break it. And what Gerod says and you prove in your work is that there’s no such contract, it’s null and void, it’s unenforceable. All we have to do is say, “No, I choose to go to the light,” and it’s all over.

Tom Zinser: [01:21:05] That’s right, yes.  

Alex Tsakiris: [01:21:06] Thanks again to Tom Zinser for joining me today on Skeptiko. You know, I could talk for a long, long time on this interview. And if you listen further to these shows, I’m sure I will. I’m going to be playing clips from this guy for the next hundred shows. This is everything that I’m about. Everything that I’m after right now is some kind of reasonably complete model for how these extended consciousness realms might work and a suggestion, a hint for how we might actually, I don’t know, test some of those ideas out. 

Now, don’t get me started but do get me started with one question that I hope you’ll join me in trying to wrestle to the ground and that is, what are we to do with channeled material that’s used in this way? Highly controversial, right? I mean, here’s a guy, a professionally trained psychologist completely goes off reservation says, “Hey, I’m getting such amazing information from this channeled spirit that I’m going to start using it in a methodical way, just as I would talking to some colleague. I’m going to use that in these clinical sessions.”

What are your feelings about that, is that’s so out of bounds? I mean, what are we to make of that? What do you make of that? . And I’m saying how I think that’s a tremendous leap forward in maybe trying to understand this thing. Is it a tremendous leap backwards? I don’t know, you tell me.

Join me in the Skeptiko Form or otherwise drop me an email and let me know your thoughts because I really do like when you come over there and I like hanging out with you all. So please do so and if you haven’t responded, check out the Skeptiko Forum, we’re over there, we’re having some good conversations about all of this deep, deep, big, big pictures stuff. So join us over there.

I have a lot of shows coming up, I think some of them are really good. Please stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.   -=-=- . [box]