Tag: past lives

222. Jean-Charles Chabot Explores Spiritual Hypnosis

Alex Tsakiris
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87
Consciousness Science
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Click here for YouTube version Click here for forum discussion Click here to post comments on AlexTsakiris.com Interview with hypnotherapist Jean-Charles Chabot examines the use of hypnotic regression for spiritual growth. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Montreal-based hypnotherapist Jean-Charles Chabot.  During the interview Chabot talks about the use of regression therapy in overcoming phobias: Alex Tsakiris:   Can you give us a quick example of a case where there was a memory from early in life, and they forgot about it, and then once they remembered it resolved some phobia for them. Jean-Charles Chabot:   I’ll give you a couple of examples, one with regression in this life, and one in a past life.  For example, a person had a fear of spiders. She said, “I don’t remember anything about what could explain this fear of spiders.” She couldn’t get close to a spider. So I brought her into an altered state of consciousness and I asked the unconscious mind to go back. So the first event the person went to was when she was young, lying beside a pool. She’d just gotten out of the water and there were drops of water dripping down her body. At some point there was some itching and there was a spider there. She just freaked at that point. Then what we usually do is we can ask the person a question, and say, “I don’t want you to think. I want you to feel. Does this emotion feel new like oh my god, what is this? Or does it feel familiar, like oh, not again?” It was familiar to her so I said, “Okay, now we’re going all the way back to the source.” What was very interesting was that she was about two years old and she was playing with a spider that was on her. When you’re one or two years old it doesn’t matter, right? It’s just a spider; there’s nothing wrong. She takes the spider and she puts it in her mouth. For a kid, no problem. But the problem was when the mother saw this and said, “No!” And then, boom, association of spider and dangerous, spider bad, mommy doesn’t like it so I shouldn’t like it. That’s where it all started. It’s very interesting when you have things like that that you understand where it comes from and you can do some techniques. One technique among others is the “informed child,” where you instruct the child what he would have needed to know to be conditioned by this and then we eradiate this knowledge. There are many things you can do. Alex Tsakiris:   Were you able to help her over her phobia, then? Jean-Charles Chabot:   Oh, yeah. It was really interesting because afterwards for me, I like to test my work. Afterwards we went into the basement looking for spiders. We found some little spiders and she could have them on her finger and she was like, “Oh my god, I never did that before.” It was really amazing. I said, “Okay, let’s take it a step higher. Let’s go to the pet shop. I had in mind like these tarantulas, those big spiders. I didn’t know they were really dangerous, so I just went to the counter and asked if it was possible to look at the tarantulas, to clear it with them. The people at the counter were like, “I’m not touching those. They can sting.  They can really hurt. They won’t kill you but they can really, really hurt.” Then the owner came and said, “Oh, they’re really nice. As long as you don’t do anything that irritates them, like blowing on them or sudden moves or stuff, it’s all fine.” So he took a spider and told her to put her hand like a bridge. The spider came and she just had this amazing feeling of oh my god, this is amazing. She could do it without any problem. Jean-Charles Chabot's Website Play It  Listen Now: Download MP3 (63 min.) Read It: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. Today, hypnosis. In fact, a very controversial area of hypnosis—past life and between life regression, where people purport to recall and recover memories of living in a previous life, or the time they spent between lives. Quite out there, if you will, so before I start with this interview I thought I’d share a little bit about the path that I’ve taken in trying to get my arms around this topic. Let’s start with reincarnation. Obviously, billions of people believe reincarnation is true. Moreover, thousands of people have reported personal experiences or memories suggesting that it’s true. Is there any scientific evidence for this? Now since I know the Skeptiko audience, I know that a lot of you know that there’s actually quite a bit of very good evidence.

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163. Physician Ian Rubenstein Encounters Spirit Communication, Becomes a Medium

Alex Tsakiris
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82
Spirituality
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Interview with London physician Dr. Ian Rubenstein reveals how one doctor's encounter with psychic phenomena led to Spiritualist Church mediumship. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Ian Rubenstein author of, CONSULTING SPIRIT: A Doctor's Experience with Practical Mediumship. During the interview Rubenstein discusses how he struggled to understand his psychic abilities: Alex Tsakiris: What you seem to be contrasting is a materialistic, medical paradigm that says there is none of this; this cannot happen. There is no way that the consciousness survives death. There is no way that spirits can influence us. That, I think, is what you’re really butting up against, and yet you seem to give that a lot more weight then I think it deserves in this case, especially given, (1) your personal experience and, (2) the research that you’ve done to see that there’s data to support it. Why do we have to stay with the materialistic paradigm? It doesn’t seem to work. Dr. Ian Rubenstein: I think you’re looking at a guy struggling with this. I don’t come from a religious background at all. I’m a non-practicing, left-wing, Jewish background. All my family was, you could say, very anti-religious. I’m not a religious guy. Spirituality is not new to me. I’m as affected by new-age stuff as much as everybody else, but it’s not native to my culture and background, and certainly not to my education. Western rationalist education is all pervading; it colors the way you see the world. It’s there, and I’m dealing with this every day. At medical school, you were taught how to think. You have to think critically. You do not trust your instinct. Every doctor knows that instinct is very important, and you get a feel for it, but you’re not trained in this. One of the things I develop in my book is that I found that training as a medium, having had all these experiences and then ending up sitting in a spiritualist circle, I actually found that you can train your intuition, that you can to some extent trust it, and it’s very useful. I now use it much more in my consultations. Of course, a skeptic would say, “You know, Ian, you’re an experienced doctor. You’ve been a family physician for 28 years. You’ve been a doctor for 34 years. Maybe this is just ordinary stuff.” I don’t know. Ian's book: Consulting Spirit Play It: Download MP3 (46:00 min.) Read It: Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Dr. Ian Rubenstein to Skeptiko. Dr. Rubenstein is a general practitioner in London who’s written a fascinating book titled, Consulting Spirit: A Doctor’s Experience with Practical Mediumship. Welcome to Skeptiko, Ian, and thanks for joining me. Dr. Ian Rubenstein: Thanks, Alex.

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157. Spirit Medium August Goforth Skeptical of Reincarnation

Alex Tsakiris
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96
Parapsychology
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Psychotherapist and Medium claims communication with spirits reveals no reincarnation. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with August Goforth, author of The Risen.  During the interview Goforth discusses his beliefs about reincarnation: Alex Tsakiris: You said that through your communication with on the other side that reincarnation isn’t a core part of the overall spiritual plan. Could you be wrong? August Goforth: I have a huge library of books written by mediums and spiritualists that go back almost a couple hundred years. I noticed not a single one mentioned reincarnation. Alex Tsakiris: I’ve spoken to plenty of mediums and many of them have talked matter-of-factly about reincarnation as being a reality.  And I’m a little bit familiar with some of the medium literature out there, and I think the idea of reincarnation comes up quite a bit. August Goforth: It does now. It’s only been maybe in the past 10 years. I would also suggest that it’s a function of the ego-mind that invents these ideas about reincarnation because of its fear of losing its own consciousness. I may have these dreams or these feelings about an experience of being someone from the 14th Century and I get names and I get all kinds of facts and dates and rather than separating myself from it, there’s something about me--the ego-mind will do this, it will grab onto it and sort of put it on like a costume and say, “Okay, this is me. I’m having a past-life experience.” Me not realizing consciously that I just experienced someone else’s life and they told me about their life in a dream or an astral experience. When I woke up, somehow it became very blurred and I had this desire because I don’t want to die, I want to live on, that if I can convince myself that I had these past lives that gives me a sense of continuity. It gives me a sense of feeling alive and grounded. I feel more expanded. Alex Tsakiris: For reincarnation the best scientific work—and I’m sure you’re familiar with it—is the work of Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia and now Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia has followed up on this work. They have thousands at this point of cases of well-documented reincarnation accounts. It’s quite a body of research; it’s very impressive to anyone who looks at it. So I can listen to what you’re saying and I can be open to hearing it, but how do we resolve that? How do we resolve that when it brushes against what I think is some good, down-to-earth science that I can really lay my hands on? August Goforth: I don’t know. These are just suggestions of how I’m interpreting what information has come to me as best as I can. My bias, if any, is that I’m not interested myself in reincarnation and God – no – I don’t want to come back to this place. But there are people who do or have a belief. It’s a core belief in some way or it’s necessary. But it seems more and more to me that everyone’s experience, whatever it is, is ultimately their own final test of what’s true for them. The Risen Website Play It: Download MP3 (29:00 min.) Read It: Alex Tsakiris: What Skeptiko is about is really three things. First, it’s about understanding the overwhelming scientific evidence that consciousness survives death. So if you just, from a science standpoint, if you look medically people die. They are brought back to life. And they have these incredible encounters with what happened when they had no brain, which means they were dead. August Goforth: About the survival of consciousness, yeah.

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126. Andy Paquette Claims 20 Year History of Precognitive Dreams

Alex Tsakiris
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86
Parapsychology
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The author of, Dreamer: 20 Years of Psychic Dreams and How They Changed My Life, discusses his psychic and precognitive experiences. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview discussing precognition and the psychic dreams of author Andy Paquette. During the interview Mr. Paquette discusses the differences between real life precognition expereinces and labratorty experiments on ESP like those of Dr. Daryl Bem, "Well, the funny thing about asking me a question like that is that while I am aware of some of those things, I became aware of them after I already knew that precognition happens because it happened to me in much more dramatic ways than was ever recorded in the lab. On the other hand, the reason he is studying it in the first place is because there are people like me who've had more dramatic examples of precognition. We've recorded them or passed them on to other people and this eventually makes researchers curious." Paquette continues, "Now the problem with testing in the lab as I see it, is that you're trying to duplicate an effect that has a very specific reason for coming into being without knowing what that reason is and without having any way to recreate those conditions because you don't understand the reason to begin with. This, in my mind, is the reason why laboratory results tend to be very weak. It's because they're not really duplicating the right circumstances that cause these kinds of things to happen. So what happens is they kind of nick the edge of this thing that they're researching, and even that little tiny slice they get is enough to support a hypothesis of precognition. However, it's not as dramatic as the kind of real-life, spontaneous examples such as the ones that occurred with me." Visit Andy's website Help pilot Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's telepathyexperiment.com Play it: Download MP3 (31:00 min.) Read it: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Tsakiris. Before we get started with today's interview I just want to make a quick little announcement here. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, whom many of you know through his work, his many books, his very interesting website, and his appearance on the Skeptiko show, is launching a telephone telepathy experiment here, available in the U.S. and Canada. He's looking for some folks to help him pilot this study.

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