Vinney Tolman… dead for 1 hour… near-death experience lessons… be authentic… understand your purpose… love.

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[00:00:00] Alex Tsakiris: on, this episode of Skeptiko, A show about rules and lessons,

[00:00:08] Alex Tsakiris: when to go against him, see, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve. dude, have all these rules and you think they’ll save you

[00:00:22] Alex Tsakiris: and when maybe to follow him.

[00:00:24] Vinney Tolman: it’s almost like these are lessons that we’ve already got inside of us and, , it really synchronized with what I believed even before I had my near death experience.

[00:00:34] Alex Tsakiris: First clip, of course, was from the dark night, and the second was from today’s guest, Vincent Tolman, who joined me to talk. His remarkable near death experience and what he learned as a result of it. Stick around. You’ll see that I push Vinny a little bit, but he is more than up for it. And I really appreciate what he’s bringing.

[00:00:57] Alex Tsakiris: welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality. I’m joined today by Vinny Tolman, the author of The Light After Death, which let me get, this is the stunning, true story of Vincent’s experience on the other side of death and the 10 principles he was taught while traveling to heaven and what he saw when he arrived.

[00:01:20] Alex Tsakiris: Vinny, welcome. Thanks for joining

[00:01:22] Vinney Tolman: me. Yeah, thanks so much, Alex. I’m, I’m really happy to be here. Happy to be a part of.

[00:01:28] Alex Tsakiris: Great. Well, you know, I am too, because we had this rather extensive email exchange. You know, I kind of, uh, no, it was really great. You’re very open and I really appreciate that. You know, I kind of told you initially I didn’t think this was the right fit, because I’ve been doing this for a long time and I don’t really do the near death experience, story, kind of interviews, you know?

[00:01:54] Alex Tsakiris: , because I’m more interested in the science, I’m more interested in the research. I’m more interested in how it overlaps with other things in understanding this extended consciousness. But you’re like, I’m down with all that.

[00:02:06] Vinney Tolman: Yeah. I’m, I, I come from that mindset and I’ve always been kind of the skeptic myself.

[00:02:12] Vinney Tolman: Uh, prior to my experience, I always was, I was a bit Skeptiko of all these experiences and of course, Uh, I, I got converted over with my experience. That’ll do it, won’t it? That’ll do it. Yeah, for

[00:02:26] Alex Tsakiris: sure. Well, I, I, you know, I’m not, , I found myself in this whole thing for the last, uh, 15 years not being as Skeptiko per se.

[00:02:37] Alex Tsakiris: I didn’t come into it being Skeptiko just in, I came into it as kind of a scientific kind of perspective, and I guess like, I’m gonna super put you on the spot right off the beginning. , because way back in the day when I used to do these, you know, like, uh, the first one I think I did was with, uh, Dr.

[00:02:56] Alex Tsakiris: Evan Alexander. Remember him? Proof of Heaven? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. Very, very important, important book that really broke this thing wide. It opened in 2012, had him on the show. I mean, you remember what that guy had to go through in terms of quote unquote proving. What he said was true. You know? Yeah.

[00:03:16] Alex Tsakiris: Here’s the name of my doctor, here’s the name of my caregiver, here’s the name of the person who saw me here, this whole thing. I did want to see more of that in your account. I mean, what’s the name of the paramedic who cut you out of the body bag? What are the other paramedics? Who are the nurses that saw you jump off the gurney and go running for the elevator?

[00:03:41] Alex Tsakiris: Who was your physician that said your cure was a miracle? What’s the name? The psychiatrist that said, get the fuck outta here. Which I thought was a great story. I mean, just in kind of an eeb Alexander way. , have you provided all that stuff? I, I Look for it. I didn’t

[00:03:58] Vinney Tolman: find it. So, um, essentially the, the ambulance record is public, the hospital record’s all public.

[00:04:06] Vinney Tolman: , and, and of course the. Through, through medical records search. You can get the everything, literally everything. , but yeah, so, uh, when I first started this journey and I was even sharing the initial experience with people, I used to carry this little folder and it had, uh, the folder had the medical bill, the ambulance bill, and the details on each one.

[00:04:30] Vinney Tolman: , and that was irrefutable. And, and what I noticed is I showed it for maybe three or four times, and after that I stopped needing to show it anywhere. Just people kind of accepted it. And, and I think I’m, I’m giving credit to Dr. Raymond Moody for that. He really kind of opened this space up with his experience.

[00:04:51] Vinney Tolman: And then, uh, Evan Alexander’s experience really helped substantiate it even further to have both of these highly respected doctors having their experiences substantiated with their own. Uh, proving methods. Um, it really helped kind of the industry to, to realize that hey, somebody can have a near death experience.

[00:05:14] Vinney Tolman: It’s not all quackery. Uh, now I did, uh, meet someone once that said they had an an out-of-body experience on a drug. They tried. I don’t, I don’t necessarily, uh, go at one of those experiences the same as I would somebody who has actually died and been resuscitated or almost died or flatlined for a few minutes.

[00:05:37] Vinney Tolman: To me, those are the ones where we’re gonna get the kind of the golden nuggets. The nuggets and, and the synchronicities where you’re seeing the same things coming through all these different experiences. So many, so many times, I, I get on a podcast, I get on an interview and I, the follow up is people reaching out, saying, that’s just like my experience.

[00:05:56] Vinney Tolman: I had one too. And, uh, and to me that’s where the proof is. There’s, there’s a consistent, , Almost modality happening to people in their experience. There’s consistent things you’re seeing on, on all of these now. Is it the exact same experience every time? No, not at all. But yet you’re seeing these same things come up in all of the experiences and, , it’s, it’s pretty interesting.

[00:06:21] Vinney Tolman: Very, very interesting.

[00:06:23] Alex Tsakiris: Well, let’s take a minute since we’re just kind of free form dialoguing here, and we’ll drill into that a little bit further. Like, I think there’s two different means of proof. , if you look at the history of the near death experience like Raymond Moody, like you’re saying, you know, back in what seventies, you know, and and seventies.

[00:06:42] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. And actually, you know what’s funny is he really wrote that book cause uh, Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Was really, she had found all that information by going to hospice. Cuz when you go to hospice and you see people dying, she had all that stuff, but she was like, I have too much on my plate as it is. And she kind of gifted it all to Moody and he took it, which is awesome.

[00:07:08] Alex Tsakiris: But back in the day, right, they were. There’s all these near death experiences, and then there was all this pushback because like, no, that can’t possibly happen because the whole idea is counter to science as we know it. Science as we know, it denies the existence still to this day of consciousness, right?

[00:07:27] Alex Tsakiris: So neuroscience is still hung up in this idea that you are your brain and nothing more. So even though you get to talk and tell your story, and Evelyn Alexander mm-hmm. And dozens of other people who’ve written books, and Jeff Long has the near-Death Experience Research Foundation with thousands of accounts, and we’ve had him on the show multiple times.

[00:07:47] Alex Tsakiris: He’s extremely credible, extremely believable. Even though all that stuff has happened, we sometimes lose side effect that this goes counter to science as we know it. But I’m kind of losing the point and I wanna bring it back to this. The whole shift to looking at this stuff medically was a reaction to the skeptics.

[00:08:10] Alex Tsakiris: Saying, you can’t just take somebody’s account, you know, and do it. And then they proved it medically. They said, okay, let’s take somebody after resuscitation and let’s interview ’em before resuscitation after let’s review. Let’s look at two groups. Let’s look at a group that had a near death experience and one that didn’t, and both had cardiac arrest.

[00:08:29] Alex Tsakiris: And we see, oh, the group that had the near death experience, they’re able to completely recall the resuscitation. And the other group isn’t. And these are done publishing peer review journals and give us who are scientifically minded, overwhelming evidence, highly suggestive that this is real, that consciousness survives death.

[00:08:52] Alex Tsakiris: But, and I’m gonna push on this one more time. What we don’t have, Vinny. We don’t know what to do with the individual accounts. Mm-hmm. We don’t know what to do with the guy who I told you who I interviewed, Ian McCormack who said I saw Jesus. Which there’s nothing wrong. I’ve interviewed a couple of people, uh, David Ditchfield another wrote a tremendous book and very impressive near death experience.

[00:09:17] Alex Tsakiris: He saw Jesus. The majority of people don’t see Jesus, and the majority of people certainly don’t say like Ian McCormick does that unless you see Jesus, you didn’t have a genuine near death experience. So my point is, what we’re looking for for individual accounts is different than what we’re looking for for the overall science.

[00:09:40] Alex Tsakiris: That’s why I wanna know, what’s the name of that psychiatrist who said, get the fuck outta my. Yeah. You know. Now did you publish that any, did you publish the name of the guy who cut you out of the body bag? I understand that you walked around with the folder and had it, did you

[00:09:58] Vinney Tolman: publish that anywhere?

[00:09:59] Vinney Tolman: Yeah. No, no, I didn’t publish that. No. In fact, uh, to, I would have to get their written express approval to publish their name in, in any of my stuff, which we, we started to go down that path and it was so hard to track everybody down. Everybody had gone in so many different places since then. Just the medic who, who ended up pulling me outta that bag, he’s a fireman now and, and still a medic, but, but a fireman.

[00:10:23] Vinney Tolman: And, and in fact he ended up making that switch right after the fact, right after he got, got in a bit of trouble with what he did for me. , yeah. And, and here’s the thing. , with all of. Is people, people want to go and take all of these experiences and say, let’s poke holes in this, let’s poke holes in that.

[00:10:40] Vinney Tolman: To me, I’m not taking my experience and saying, this is an experience for everybody. They’ve gotta follow this. It’s gonna change your life. I’ve never ever been one to say that. , to me, I, I have felt prompted personally to share the experience with people before, and those people have come back to me and said, thank you for sharing it to me.

[00:10:59] Vinney Tolman: And that’s what it’s all about to me. But what I really love is if you get into modern day physics, uh, physics is proving quantum entanglement. It’s proving that the consciousness is much larger than what we could have ever comprehended before. There’s a study of a gentleman that, , uh, was, was reacting to World War II scenes and they were, uh, anytime he saw anything to do with World War ii.

[00:11:27] Vinney Tolman: His, his blood would start reacting into this certain way. And then there’s a, , a really good, , public study on this where they took vials of his blood, drove it 70 miles away, and had him over here 70 miles away. Look at images of World War ii. And his cellular structure reacted the exact same way in the ample or the vial of blood 70 miles away as it did local, right.

[00:11:55] Vinney Tolman: Where he was. That, that it’s through that study and through many, many studies since, , they have been able to glean and, and understand that our entanglement to each other is, is extremely finite and at the quantum level. And quantum physicists themselves are proving consciousness, , now has neurology, , uh, Caught on.

[00:12:20] Vinney Tolman: Not yet. Neurology still fights it. Neurology wants to say there’s no such thing as consciousness. There’s only electricity in the brain. And once that electricity goes out, it’s out. But neurology can’t explain. Uh, people like myself, I met a gentleman, he was working for me. I was in construction, this is in Wyoming.

[00:12:38] Vinney Tolman: He worked for me for one week and I told him about my experience and he goes, oh, I was woken up out of a morgue and, and legitimately woke up while they were performing an autopsy on him. He woke up. And, uh, you know, there’s a lot of experiences now. Are they, are they the norm? No, but they, you do see him substantially everywhere.

[00:13:01] Vinney Tolman: Every culture. Every belief system, every religion. And what’s funny is you do get one or two of these experiences in all the different cultures saying, oh, you must, you have to see Muhammad if you want to, if you want to get to heaven, you have to see Jesus. If you want to get to heaven, you have to see Buddha if you want to get to heaven.

[00:13:19] Vinney Tolman: It’s, it’s, and that’s the thing is all of these experiences are plugged into a system that’s already there that was there long before us here. And it’s our perception of that system that we’re, we’re, we’re bringing back with us. And that’s really what it is. It’s, it’s a system and of, uh, that has long been in place and, and part of the, the progress for all of us really.

[00:13:45] Vinney Tolman: And, um, that’s, I got to, to peek a little bit behind the curtain, I feel, and, and I did have a very distinct recollection of, of my experience. And even I wanted to see if maybe there was something I had forgotten about at the experience. So I’ve gone under hypnosis a couple of times now to see if there was anything extra and, and there wasn’t.

[00:14:10] Vinney Tolman: There wasn’t anything that I could perceive further than what I already knew from my experience. So, so to me, I feel good in saying I, I remember my experience to a t to a very distinct description. I remember my experience and, you know, over the 20 years it’s been since I had my experience, the details haven’t faded.

[00:14:31] Vinney Tolman: They haven’t changed. , the descriptions haven’t changed. It’s been the same experience that I’ve been sharing with people. I even had a gentleman that that heard one of the first versions that I had, I had shared with people and, and he heard the, the actual audiobook, and he loved it. He loved how all it did was give more detail essentially to him.

[00:14:53] Vinney Tolman: Than what he had heard the first time, but it was the exact same experience he had heard the first time when this was back in 2004 when I first met him. So, , yeah, it, it, it is a beautiful system that we’re existing in here, in this universe. It really is. And, uh, quantum physics is tipping into it.

[00:15:12] Vinney Tolman: They’re getting into that quantum entanglement and improving it and, uh, mathematically as well as through their, their double blind, uh, strategies and do, uh, double blind studying that they’re doing with different, , experiments on proving that our consciousness can change matter. And so thus the consciousness is larger than the physical matter.

[00:15:35] Vinney Tolman: It’s, it’s controlling.

[00:15:38] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, I’m, I’m down with all that. The, one of the things I think is terrific about the near-death experience science is, it kind of jumps way past that because people get mired in the, you know, quantum entanglement, observer effect, uh, you know, akashi records, uh, all, all, you can go a number of different ways, but in particular with quantum physics, you can, a lot of people will acknowledge entanglement or observer effect, and then we’ll find another explanation for this.

[00:16:08] Alex Tsakiris: What we really wanna know is, does consciousness survive bodily death? And that’s the importance of the near-death experience. Mm-hmm. Science is that it directly addresses that. And the answer is predominantly, the evidence is just highly suggestive. And anyone who wants to. Kind of push against that evidence, the burden of proof is on them.

[00:16:28] Alex Tsakiris: Mm-hmm. But it, it does come back to your account because the, the account that you lay out in the light after death is amazing. It’s a super enjoyable book to read. It’s, uh, written in a very conversational way. And y I totally accept that You and your author partner kind of turned it more into a dialogue versus what you said you experienced was more of a direct download.

[00:16:52] Alex Tsakiris: Mm-hmm. Makes it very readable. It’s fun to get through and all that. But I am gonna pick on that, that one point, cuz this is what I do. It’s a Skeptiko inquiry to ate down, is you can release the name of the psychiatrist. You don’t need their approval. You can release the name of the, the guy who, uh, cut you outta the body bag.

[00:17:13] Alex Tsakiris: You don’t need his approval. This is your story. You can tell it. Yeah. You can release all the names. You can release the names. I, I don’t know. You can publish on your website your. Who was your attending physician? Who was your, uh, nurses? I mean, a again, Vinny, this is what Evan Alexander went through and we did a bunch of interviews with him on the show.

[00:17:36] Alex Tsakiris: Oh yeah. And we did interviews with people that had Esquire magazine, tried to debunk ’em, and then there was a guy who came on and debunked the debunks. That shit is fucking useful. That is important. It’s, yep. It’s your account. It, and, and I don’t know where you stand on that. I mean, you’re like, Hey, you know, cuz some people are like that.

[00:17:56] Alex Tsakiris: I hear that. You know, like, Hey, if you can’t accept my account and look at, you know, what this is really saying in the message. Okay. But, uh, the other side of me says, why wouldn’t we want to go to every length to co, yours is such an important account. You were dead for an hour. So from a physiological standpoint, people should be really interested.

[00:18:21] Alex Tsakiris: This isn’t playing around with, was he, you know, a little bit out of it. Why don’t you publish all that stuff? So, so somebody who wants to go pick apart, pick it apart, wants to try and pick it apart, let him try and pick it apart, you know, it’s real.

[00:18:34] Vinney Tolman: Yeah. Yeah. Actually I could do that. Uh, I would need to go and actually get the records myself.

[00:18:42] Vinney Tolman: I have, I have all the bills. I, the bills don’t tell me. , they tell me the billable parties. So I have all that information. And, , so I would have a pH, I’d have the physician’s names and all of that stuff. So, , yeah, I, I, uh, I’m, I’m open to that for sure. Definitely open.

[00:19:00] Alex Tsakiris: Fantastic. That’s, yeah. That means a lot.

[00:19:03] Alex Tsakiris: And that you don’t have to bug them, you know, you can leave other people to go and do that. Yeah. And people are a lot, that’s, that is the positive side of what we are experiencing now with, you know, the censorship versus freedom of speech kind of thing is like, put it out there and let people, let people go.

[00:19:22] Alex Tsakiris: So, okay, so if, if you’re gonna, if you’re willing to do that, that’s, that’s a huge hurdle and I have a ton of respect for you for doing that. Let me ask you this. In the book, you lay out 10, lessons, uh, that you mm-hmm. That you took back. And I think they’re, they’re a, in so many ways, they’re awesome.

[00:19:43] Alex Tsakiris: They’re where I live on a soul level, on a spiritual level. Even though I’ve never had a near death experience. I’ve gained so much from talking to people like yourself who have, and then it resonates with other teachers I’ve had, and I go, that feels true. And I can go in that direction. for you, , what was that process like?

[00:20:01] Alex Tsakiris: Because a lot of people, and I said this in the email exchange, have weird after effects, after the near-death experience. You know, it doesn’t, it isn’t easy for everybody after they come back from a

[00:20:12] Vinney Tolman: near-death experience. It is, it’s not easy. In fact, uh, to me that’s the hardest part of the whole thing.

[00:20:19] Vinney Tolman: The easiest part is dying. Honestly. That’s the easy part. You, you just free flow into that. The hard part is coming back and trying to pick up where you left off on your life, because now you’re a completely different person. After the, uh, event than you were before the event. So you’re, you’re almost redefining who you are at that point.

[00:20:39] Vinney Tolman: But, you know, , it was weird. I didn’t even realize there was 10 principles there. I’d been sharing the, the experience and the way I would share it. I just, I, I, I almost like a speech. I just have this way of, of sharing my experience. And I, I just always shared it that way. It’s just how, how I perceived it, right.

[00:20:57] Vinney Tolman: And, uh, it was in the process of actually writing down the experience that Lynn Taylor, my writer, uh, that I worked together with him as we were writing it all down. He’s like, he said, you know, Vinny, there’s a distinct 10 principles here. If, if you wanna look, there’s 10 distinct things you’re teaching with your.

[00:21:16] Vinney Tolman: And so until that point, I didn’t even realize there was 10 principles, but, but definitely it’s very, very obvious, uh, when you, when you hear the experience now, even hear some of the pr the, the recorded, there’s a lot of people that have recorded me sharing this experience over, you know, 15, 17, almost 18 years.

[00:21:34] Vinney Tolman: I’ve been sharing it publicly in large forums. And, uh, so there’s a lot of early recordings and you get to these early recordings and it’s still giving those same 10 principles, just sometimes two of them squished together. Um, but it’s, it’s pretty amazing that, that that framework is there from the experience that I had.

[00:21:53] Vinney Tolman: But here’s what I say to all the people that have had, you know, some people have these hell experiences, some people have the heaven experience. To me, it, it depends on where they were revived. Because if I was revived right after I died, I went into this kind of downward spiral where. I was feeling and perceiving all the negative influences I’d ever been on other people in my life.

[00:22:22] Vinney Tolman: So kind of all the bad things I’d ever done. And if I got stuck there and then I was revived out of that position, I would definitely think I went to hell because that’s what it felt like for the few seconds that, or the few moments that I was in that period of reflecting on the negative things I’d ever done in my life to me, that that was, that would be like hell.

[00:22:44] Vinney Tolman: And, uh, thank goodness I didn’t, I just, shortly right after I experienced that, I felt the warmth and love of something from behind me and I, and I started embracing this energy that showed me all the good that I’d ever done and, and how much more good I’d ever done than anything bad. And that’s when and if I had stopped right.

[00:23:06] Vinney Tolman: I would have just that, that perspective, through the whole experience, I wouldn’t have even seen, uh, my guide Drake. And, uh, if I had been brought back right after I saw my guide, before he could tell me he wasn’t God, I would’ve believed I saw God because he looked what I thought would be what God looked like.

[00:23:26] Vinney Tolman: , at least what religion’s version of God had taught me that he was probably gonna look like and come to find out what he wasn’t God, he was there in God’s loving energy to help get me, to guide me, to have my experience. So yeah, it’s, uh, it is very weird though. You get a lot of people having very different experiences, but then you have around like 96, 90 7% of your near death experiencers meet some type of angelic type guide, uh, or family guide, someone who’s attached to them through their family line.

[00:24:04] Vinney Tolman: And that guide tends to lead them in their direction towards heaven, towards this, this, this home that, , we all essentially came from and are going back to. So that’s, that’s kind of interesting. And there’s some new books that are, that have come out just recently and are coming out this year even, that are a compilation of all these near-death studies.

[00:24:27] Vinney Tolman: , and how you can actually tie these all together, tie all these similarities between all these different near-death experiences and, and it’s from that material itself, you’re starting to see a science, um, an actual science grow up around just this, this collection of all the near-death experiences.

[00:24:46] Vinney Tolman: Because when you get so many people describing the same thing, just from different per pointers of view, then you know, you’re, you’re coming to something that’s real, that’s happening for them.

[00:24:57] Alex Tsakiris: Well, I always felt like, , Jeff Long. Who has 4,000 accounts on his N D E R? Yes. Website. Yeah. Dr. Jeff Long. He’s a radiation oncologist in, , Louisiana, outside of New Orleans.

[00:25:11] Alex Tsakiris: And, , you know, I’ve done for years and have told other people to do the same. It’s searchable, so it’s a searchable database, you know, through mm-hmm. Your search engine. You can go search for whatever you want, you go search for hell, devil Alien, you go search for anything, light life review, and you can read your own account.

[00:25:30] Alex Tsakiris: And they’re inspirational. , a lot of times they’re incredibly, incredibly inspirational, but they’re diverse, you know, they are very diverse. I, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with your statement about how all this science is kind of growing together. I, I think the science, as I stated before, I, I think that the science is bifurcated in a, in a good way in that, but people just need to realize that it’s two, one is.

[00:25:57] Alex Tsakiris: Does consciousness survive bodily death? And that needs to be done in a hospital where we can kind of control the physiological part of it. Like I think the best study on that is Dr. Penny Sartori and also Dr. Jan Holden at University of North Texas.

[00:26:16] Alex Tsakiris: You go into a cardiac arrest ward and you say, Hey bud, you’re, you might die. Do I have your permission to interview you after you if you have a cardiac arrest? Okay. And then a certain group of people come out afterwards and they have a cardiac arrest and they died and are resuscitated, and then you have two.

[00:26:38] Alex Tsakiris: Because some of the people say, I had a near-death experience, and some of the people say I didn’t have a near-death experience. Yeah. Which is another question that we have yet to unravel. You know, is this a memory thing? Is it, you know, we’re calling Dream kind of thing. Why do some people have ’em? Some people don’t.

[00:26:53] Alex Tsakiris: All the rest of that. But from a scientific standpoint, you have two groups now. You go ask the group that had their near death experience to recount their resuscitation and invariably boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just like you, in your book, the light after death, you are outside your body. And as other people tell it too, you don’t know that you’re outside of your body. You’re looking down. Look at that poor fool. Laying, laying on the floor of the Dairy Queen. You know, Ted, that poor guy, , When people can recount exactly in detail, that’s something we can measure scientifically, their resuscitation.

[00:27:28] Alex Tsakiris: And then they go over to the people who didn’t have the near death experience and they say, what was your resuscitation like? And they go, dude, what are you talking about? I was dead. I don’t remember any of it. But to me that’s the science. And then the other is, Jeff Long with the accounts you, with your account.

[00:27:46] Alex Tsakiris: And that’s where I think, and that’s why I said initially, Vinny, I’m, I’m, I’m telling you man, I don’t do these kind of interviews because I don’t know. You know, be authentic. Understand your purpose in life. Love everyone. Listen to your inner voice and then use technology responsibly. I don’t know what to do with this stuff.

[00:28:05] Alex Tsakiris: I got guys who are coming at me telling me that if I didn’t see Jesus, I didn’t have a real n d e. It’s, there’s so much diversity in these accounts. Why would we say, oh, you know, Vinny, luck of the draw old Drake man. He told it to him exactly the way that it is when we got other people saying the other thing, you know?

[00:28:23] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. We have that famous doctor who came back and said she was given a choice of whether she could come back or not, but if she came back, her son was gonna die in 10 years. What’s, how does that work with free will, .

[00:28:34] Vinney Tolman: Yeah. How does that work along what the Yeah, and I think here’s, here’s something, here’s a cool side of things and, and, , there’s an institute out here in Las Vegas, uh, called the Bigelow Institute.

[00:28:45] Vinney Tolman: Are you familiar with the work that they’re doing with near death studies? So they’re, they’re compiling. Uh, they essentially have a grant or an award for anybody who can prove the consciousness goes beyond mortality, be beyond life. And one of the methods that they’re working with is doing, uh, brain scans to see if there’s areas of the brain that are, have action or, or electrical movements, electrical usage, that are not necessarily active before their experience.

[00:29:16] Vinney Tolman: So they’re taking a bunch of non experiencers scanning them compared to experiencers and seeing, you know, map to map, brain to brain. Are we seeing areas of the brain that are having activity now that didn’t necessarily have activity before? That’s one of the, the methodologies that they’re working, but then they’re, they’ve, there’s a few different experiences that, or experiments that they’re doing.

[00:29:38] Vinney Tolman: And, , I’m, I’m interested to see how all that goes because I know that this is just, , you know, science and, and religion to me are two sides of one bridge. That eventually we’re able to fill in in between, and it’s through studies like this, it’s through understanding the science of the actual experience, what’s going on in the neurology when it turns off.

[00:30:02] Vinney Tolman: Cuz there’s gotta be chemical processes continuing to happen, uh, inside that brain, even when the lights are out. And why he say that? And because to me, there’s, there’s no explanation how I could be dead for an hour and still be alive. I was told I was, my, my brother was given a stack of palliative care pamphlets because all the doctors had convinced him that I was never gonna come out of this in any normal way.

[00:30:29] Vinney Tolman: , but yet I just woke up. I woke up. There was no explanation of how I could go from, from, hey, shop a good hospice to take care of your brother to, oh, where’s your brother? He’s jogging. That’s literally the step of 24 hours for my brother. So, so, There’s gotta be an explanation to that. It’s just something we don’t fully understand, I think.

[00:30:56] Alex Tsakiris: Well, I would definitely agree with that. I just, what I’m resistant to is, see, now I’m gonna jump over on the other side. Uh, God’s in charge of this stuff. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. It like, it doesn’t have to make sense in our puny little understanding. And when guys get into this, you know, well, cellular, these cells must still, no, all we have from that says that this should not happen.

[00:31:20] Alex Tsakiris: What? The neuro, I guess your, your primary physician or the neurosurgeon, you’re a miracle man. This should not happen. It defies our understanding. Well, shit, we’ve got a ton of stuff that defies explanation. We don’t need to do the backdoor materialism and say that’s true. Oh, one day, we’ll, we’ll explain

[00:31:37] Vinney Tolman: it.

[00:31:38] Vinney Tolman: If anything, I still feel, I still feel there’s an explanation even to the God influence. I really do. I feel there’s a physics a, a scientific. Mathematic explanation to life and all of it. And I, and I think that’s just an equation we’ve yet to understand. I really do. I think that the, the power that, that God has just to allow some to come back and some not for whatever reason, that that’s, that’s an understanding we we’ve just yet to understand

[00:32:08] Alex Tsakiris: perhaps.

[00:32:09] Alex Tsakiris: And maybe that brings us to, , some of the lessons that you did right. In which really, really nicely done. You cannot help but feel uplifted and inspired by this book. , it’s a read that kind of hits you with a lot of information. You probably knew, but there’s an authenticity to it, which is number one,

[00:32:33] Vinney Tolman: right.

[00:32:34] Vinney Tolman: That’s right there. That’s the most important principle for me, was authenticity. Yep. Do you wanna speak to that a little bit? Yeah. I, I think the. These are all lessons that are, it’s almost like these are lessons that we’ve already got inside of us and, and when they’re put in front of us and we read ’em, I mean, even when I first read the 10 lessons in the book itself as it was published, um, it really synchronized with what I believed even before I had my dear near death experience.

[00:33:04] Vinney Tolman: And, and I actually call my experience an after death experience cuz I would, I did truly get clinically pronounced dead. And, um, so a, you know, my a d e I after this and before this, they, the, the 10 principles completely made sense, but it was almost as if I wasn’t getting the 10 principles correctly through my religions, through my theologies, through my psychologies, that, that of, of, you know, university that I had lived and, and worked before.

[00:33:37] Vinney Tolman: But yet here it was put so plainly and so simply. It’s almost like someone giving you the instructions on how to operate a machine or a tool that you’ve been using your whole life and you didn’t realize you were kind of using it a little wrong. And that now that you have the instructions, you’re like, oh, I, I could fix this really easy for me.

[00:33:58] Vinney Tolman: And, uh, cuz I, you know, one of the, the principles in there is, is, you know, exercising, um, the power of creation and avoiding negative influences. It, one of the, the fundamental things I learned from that was honoring what I call the hour of power, which is the first 30 minutes as soon as we wake up the last 30 minutes before we go to bed.

[00:34:22] Vinney Tolman: And this time it’s a sacred, precious time that what we allow in this time, we end up framing our night and framing our. With these two, two little windows of time. But yet we tend to just let anything get in there sometimes. But if we’re, if we’re very succinct with what we allow inside our hour of power, we can very much control the, the energy of how we’re feeling about our day, about our life.

[00:34:55] Vinney Tolman: If we can really put something strong in a good way, in our hour of power, we can actually start feeling a lot better about our lives. But if we put something very negative in our hour of power, we’re gonna be waking up depressed without energy, feeling like we don’t want to get up and deal with our day.

[00:35:14] Vinney Tolman: And if that’s how we’re feeling, put something good in your hour of power. It’s something so simple. But yet nobody really teaches us that. Not, not in a general way,

[00:35:26] Alex Tsakiris: you know, I. I mean, I think that’s, that’s cool. I mean, that didn’t, that didn’t hit me where I live as much because man, I’ve been doing self-development for a long time and have tried a lot of different things and yoga things.

[00:35:41] Alex Tsakiris: Not that it’s not great and the, uh, gratitude thing and the journaling first thing in the morning and waking up and, you know, I’m doing ice bath and I’m doing breathing and I’m doing yoga and I’m doing meditation, I’m doing all this stuff. Uh, I’m not against it. But some of that advice did come through as not being like, like useful for you on a very kind of ordinary level.

[00:36:06] Alex Tsakiris: It didn’t seem to be extraordinary in the way that it’s kind of framed as, you know, this is what the creator God kind of told me kind of thing. Because I can go listen to Karoli and be incredibly inspired by some very simple things he says about or, , Mickey Singer is another guy. I really admire the untethered soul.

[00:36:29] Alex Tsakiris: I think he, he speaks about, you know, these things coming more from a yoga standpoint. And again, it’s like, we don’t need to think, we don’t need to do, we don’t need, you know, we need to just get in touch with that flow of love and energy that’s always there. You are a Christian, you were a Christian before.

[00:36:46] Alex Tsakiris: You’re a Christian after, uh, I want you to speak to that because the book, as I think I was just saying there, where I was really getting is there’s a certain Christian, , sensibility to it. Not, not bad. I mean it’s, but it’s not, it’s funny that you were a Christian. You are a Christian and some of these things come across as

[00:37:09] Vinney Tolman: churchy.

[00:37:10] Vinney Tolman: Yeah. And that, that’s gotta be, , that’s part of, of who I am. I mean, I was a, an avid church goer before my experience and. And, , I, I took a few years away from church in the party life, and then when I worked, uh, TV and entertainment and working in mo in, in movies. But I’ll tell you the, the big thing for me was after the experience, oh, I was, I was so about church.

[00:37:35] Vinney Tolman: I wanted to be, I wanted, it was like I couldn’t get enough church. Some Sundays, like I wanted to go to different churches all the time, see different churches, see how they, they worship at, uh, at, uh, you know, different monasteries and different, um, temples and churches. I just really wanted to get, I wanted to see God, I wanted to see that, that God energy that I saw and experienced in heaven.

[00:37:58] Vinney Tolman: I wanted to see if I could find it in all these different places here, and it’s funny, the places I found it the most is in the people around me, in the eyes of the people around me. That’s where I’ve seen that heaven energy, that God energy the most is in the people, not the places, but the people. And, um, Yeah.

[00:38:19] Vinney Tolman: You know, and it, I’m, I’m sure it does come across as churchy cuz I was raised in a very church, uh, centered home, or God-centered home. Uh, but, you know, for instance, one of the principles I actually really struggled with at the time was, uh, understanding how to have a, a, , a, a good relationship with technology because I had my experience back 2003.

[00:38:43] Vinney Tolman: In 2003, there wasn’t a lot of technology to me that was like, okay, so you turn off the satellite tv. I mean, I mean, back then we, some of us were diving into email every day. That was about the, the, some of us, maybe a, my MySpace page, but most of that was all PC centered, you know, at home, on your pc, not on the cell phones yet.

[00:39:04] Vinney Tolman: And so I didn’t really understand the threat of how technology is a threat now. Because, uh, I see it now, I see people completely addicted to technology. I see that I go around and I’ll, I’ll see a family at a restaurant that every single person in that family stares at a phone, including the baby. Uh, and nobody’s having any interactions.

[00:39:28] Vinney Tolman: And, and what’s funny is a, a laughter will start at one end of the table and then they’ll message each other, whatever joke or thing that they’re laughing about, and they’re all laughing one at a time as they see it and open it. And it’s like, that’s, that to me is, is missing the human experience, is missing the beauty of, of this life.

[00:39:50] Vinney Tolman: And, and that’s where I think the, that that principle of understanding a responsible relationship with technology comes in. And, you know, the, again, I learned that back in 2003, long before this was any type of threat to me or to, to the humanity. You know, technology was very, And it’s infant stages, I think, uh, compared to where it is now and where it’s going next.

[00:40:14] Alex Tsakiris: , it’s hard to disagree with that on one hand, and I, you know, we all get that, ? Yeah. I don’t get it from an n d E perspective because I don’t get it from a God perspective. I mean, god is asleep at the switch. This is 2003. , why do we have ai, why do we have artificial intelligence with robots who are, you know, like doing your, doing your trading, shooting drone bombs, you know, probably gonna be in the next war.

[00:40:40] Alex Tsakiris: Why do we have genetic engineering? Why do we have transhumanism? Why is it being jammed down our throat? Not to mention the TikTok dopamine as I go through my reel, you know? Mm-hmm. , like one of the things you say in, in the book is, Hey, it’s the timeline. Forget the timeline, the past, the present, the future. It’s all one. Well, then I, , I don’t get the advice. , this is back to the commandments, chiseled on the stone. That does never work out. Yeah. What does it

mean?

[00:41:04] Vinney Tolman: You know, I think for, you know, and, and it goes back to my experience itself. I’ve never, I’ve never ever professed that this experience was anybody, for anybody, but for me, really, and it’s just, I’ve had a lot of people say they’ve wanted to hear it, they’ve wanted me to share it with their friends.

[00:41:22] Vinney Tolman: Share it with their church group, share it with their group of, of, of people, whatever group this is. And, and so that’s why I published it. I, I don’t, uh, profess that it’s, it’s an answer to anybody’s problems. But what I do, uh, profess it to be is something that really helped me, you know, to have that experience and to have it the way that it did happen for me.

[00:41:44] Vinney Tolman: And I think that those 10 principles aren’t necessarily 10 principles for the world. Those were the 10 principles for me. Cuz that’s what I needed to hear. And not only did I need to hear it, I needed to get some of those principles really deeply planted in me, who I am. So that later as technology developed and as it became, becomes a, a true psychological threat where every single day, the more you allow yourself to pour your consciousness into technology, the sadder you feel, the less happiness you feel because you are so addicted to those dopamine hits.

[00:42:18] Vinney Tolman: And you’d rather have the little tiny hit of dopamine than, than the good injection of serotonin, of going on a walk or going on a run or being, you know, moving, moving your body. And, , and I think that’s why those, those 10 principles really connect for me. I don’t, I, again, I don’t profess it’s for anybody else.

[00:42:37] Vinney Tolman: I, I appreciate that they do speak to other people, but, um, to me all it was about was sharing my experience and how it, it had an impact on me. The, the biggest aha for me though, was these certain things that would come through spirit that were undeniable to the skeptic inside of me. I mean, just like with that psychotherapist where I, I bring through some personal information about him and his childhood, that that was irrefutable, that he had even forgotten had happened to him.

[00:43:09] Vinney Tolman: T tell that. So I’m, I, I really, I think that I’m, I’m crazy at this time. I had my experience and I had a neurologist who was telling me that, that it was my imagination making things up. And so I, I really did. I’m sitting there, I have a very strong, , sense of science in my brain. I always have. And so I’m sitting there thinking, wow, this is dangerous to have this guy who thinks he perceives spirit.

[00:43:38] Vinney Tolman: He thinks he hears spirit everywhere he goes. And, and yet that guy is me. ,

[00:43:44] Alex Tsakiris: just to clarify in case it wasn’t clear, you have this in, in incredible near death experience.

[00:43:49] Alex Tsakiris: Like you said, after you’re dead, I mean, you are completely dead cold rigor mortis is setting in Yeah. Literally in, in a locked bathroom of a dairy queen because you drank some, uh, some supplement. Then you took the wrong dose accidentally.

[00:44:06] Alex Tsakiris: Understandable. Anyways, now you recover and your recovery is unbelievable because no one can get over. It’s instantaneous. You come out and like you said, you’re ready to jog and do this stuff and the first guy comes in, the first doc comes in and says, yeah, you know what it is. Uh, I can tell you, Vinny, you know, all those things you, you’re telling me.

[00:44:25] Alex Tsakiris: oxygen deprivation to the brain, you know? Yeah. And then you go, ah, now you’re hearing stuff and you’re like, man, I don’t know what’s going on. Hearing stuff. I better go see a real psychiatrist to get, cuz psychiatrists can gimme meds. And maybe that’s what I need is meds to stops hallucinating and having these delusions.

[00:44:46] Alex Tsakiris: And you go see the psychiatrist,

[00:44:47] Vinney Tolman: right? Mm-hmm. Well, actually I saw a psychologist and he referred me to the psychiatrist. So he, he’s like, you know what, you’re beyond my skill level and my capability. You need to go see this guy. So I went to his friend, who is the, the, the, the real g you know, professional.

[00:45:03] Vinney Tolman: And as I’m seeing him, he, I have a guide, I have a spirit guide, and he’s sitting there telling me, don’t you take these medicines he is gonna try to give you? And I’m like, that sounds crazy to have a voice sitting here saying don’t take these medicines. But yet I’m like, okay, if that’s a real voice. Then, then what am I supposed to tell him to make him believe he shouldn’t give them to me?

[00:45:26] Vinney Tolman: And that’s when all of a sudden this gra this like grandmother type figure shows up for him and literally shows up for him, not from me, came from his, his side of things. And she says, you need to tell, remind him about this, that this happened to him. This is why he went into the medical field, into the mental and psychol and the the actual chemistry side of things.

[00:45:48] Vinney Tolman: This is why he went into this. You need to remind him of this cuz he’s forgotten about it. And so it was gonna be a dual purpose thing for him. It was going to be kind of a, a ruler of, oh, here’s a guy who was bringing forth truth. He’s not so crazy. , but also it was gonna be a nice reminder. Oh yeah, that’s why you’ve gotten this whole field to begin.

[00:46:10] Alex Tsakiris: I take it that this is a not so nice reminder. I mean, this triggers something very, uh, deep and potentially dark with this guy. I don’t know cuz you don’t reveal it. But it’s not like a nice reminder

[00:46:22] Vinney Tolman: cuz the way he, it was a trauma. It was, it was definitely early life trauma.

[00:46:25] Vinney Tolman: But what I was bringing forth was how this grandmother figure had stopped the trauma for him and that, that’s why she was the one bringing it forward, saying, Hey, I was the one to nip that in the butt and, and help you realize you didn’t need to be a victim anymore. And that’s why she was coming forward.

[00:46:45] Vinney Tolman: And then she was using so much love to share that with me. And then I’m, I’m sitting there, this 25 year old e everyone calls the miracle boy, who I think I’m mentally crazy and, and I’m supposed to now tell him somehow. So I just told him the best way possible, which I’m, I guarantee I didn’t sugarcoat it.

[00:47:03] Vinney Tolman: Um, I just, I almost, I just slammed it out there on the desk. And, and I, I wasn’t gonna say anything but my own guide told me that I had to share that with him before I picked up the prescription, before I actually picked up the paper cuz he was done writing. He wrote two and he was writing a third one and he was writing that third one when I just kind of casually brought this up.

[00:47:29] Vinney Tolman: And I do remember saying, um, solo, there’s an older woman here, she’s related to you and she’s saying this. And I just laid it out there. That’s when he dropped his prescription pad cuz this is back when, you know, at least in his field, he was handwriting prescriptions. He dropped the prescription pad, he dropped the pen and he pointed his finger about an inch away from my nose and said, you get the f outta here.

[00:47:54] Vinney Tolman: And I didn’t know what to do. And his, his little, uh, secretary heard that. And when I was on my way out the door, she was like, what happened? What did you say to him? And and I go, I don’t know. I don’t know. I just, I just said What came to me?

[00:48:10] Alex Tsakiris: And he calls you after that, Vinny, to

[00:48:12] Vinney Tolman: tell that part of the story.

[00:48:13] Vinney Tolman: So I, I left in a little bit of a, a tough, I was pretty pissed at him, like how unprofessional of him to, to act like that. But I didn’t know that what I had just told him was a hundred percent true. O obviously later I figured it out. But he called me about 15 minutes down the road and I was on my cell phone, picked up, and he, and he said, you know, this is, this is your doctor.

[00:48:36] Vinney Tolman: I want you to know that whatever happened to you must have happened to you. Because the fact that you brought up something that I had completely forgotten even happened to me, that somehow he had actually blocked it himself, but me bringing it up, actually it was such a truth bomb for him that there was no way for him to.

[00:48:55] Vinney Tolman: Believe he needed to give me any prescriptions. And, and mainly that’s what it was for. And so I did go away without taking any prescriptions for that.

[00:49:04] Alex Tsakiris: So Vinny, one other, , lesson from the light after death that I thought was particularly well done on your part. And, and I love the way that you just referenced this before, and let me just kind of put an explanation point on this.

[00:49:20] Alex Tsakiris: This was your experience and what I hear you saying, and tell me if I’m wrong, but you kind of feeling this is tailored for you, for your journey and what you need,

[00:49:31] Vinney Tolman: absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve never, , I’ve had people even say, Hey, can I use these 10 principles to build like a, a religious group or build this or build that?

[00:49:40] Vinney Tolman: And, and I’ve always said, no, this is, this is for all religions. This is for, this is primarily for me, but if someone can help themselves get more connected to their God through these 10 principles, awesome. But I’m not gonna go and put these 10 principles up anywhere and say they’re anybody’s gospel cuz they’re not.

[00:49:59] Vinney Tolman: They’re, they’re just, uh, 10 principles that were given to me in my experience and, and man have they helped me since. And, and what’s weird is they’re getting more and more important as my own life has progressing further and further on my, my journey of life. You know, as a father, these 10 principles are, are just invaluable.

[00:50:19] Vinney Tolman: And, and I’ve taught it to my 13 year old and I’m now teaching it to my, my two-year-old that he’ll, he’ll have a good embodiment of the 10 principles.

[00:50:27] Alex Tsakiris: Four kids, good luck. So, you know, your children are your children, you know? Yep. They’re so, they come through you, but not from you. And, uh, exactly. So, uh, I liked listen to your inner voice because there was some subtlety and nuance to that that really resonated with me.

[00:50:49] Alex Tsakiris: Talk to folks about what it means to listen to your inner

[00:50:52] Vinney Tolman: voice. So, you know, sometimes we’ll be going about our day and, and one of our friends, one of our relatives, they’ll, they’ll get stuck in our consciousness. We can’t get ’em out of our mind. And the reason that’s happening is that’s part of that quantum entanglement that they need us, or we need to hear from them somehow.

[00:51:14] Vinney Tolman: And if we would follow that, uh, that perception, that intuition, we would actually see our, our own life. Be blessed and their life. Be blessed by whatever takes place. Um, one of the, the coolest exercises I like to give people is, is ask yourself, who needs me today? And ask yourself that every single morning.

[00:51:37] Vinney Tolman: And if you can have a piece of paper there so you could write down the name that comes to you, and you’d be, uh, very impressed at how often when you ask who needs me today, uh, how often a name actually comes to you or a face of someone comes to you and you might not even recognize the face. And then later in your day, you recognize the face as one of the faces you’ve seen.

[00:51:59] Vinney Tolman: And, and, and this is the beautiful part, some people are seeing someone’s face, someone they’ve never seen in their life. And then two hours later they see that person at the gas station and they’re like, oh, that’s the person that needs me today. And I know exactly what, what God’s talking about when, when God says they need me is because now the scene has played itself out.

[00:52:22] Vinney Tolman: They recognize the player and it’s, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. You can watch your life come alive with this single exercise,

[00:52:32] Alex Tsakiris: you know? That’s, that’s awesome. And it’s, it’s so wonderful cuz I kind of took it in a completely, , different direction and that, you know, one of the things that, , I kind of focus on is I’ve created the mess that is that inner voice that kind of goes all over for all of us and is scattered and isn’t always as compassionate and connected to my wife and my children and everyone else I should be.

[00:52:55] Alex Tsakiris: And the first thing I need to do is seek. And to, the first thing I need to do is do no harm today. You know, do no harm, don’t let my mouth or my actions, , make things worse, if you will. And just release into, , not trying to pass, not trying to get ahead and stuff like that. So what I really took away from your chapter on listen to your inner voice was that it’s there and we can train ourselves to become more in touch with it.

[00:53:27] Alex Tsakiris: So it’s funny, I, I kind of stop there. My life experience tells me that I don’t want to get into that game of, , trying to be God’s soldier and, , God needs my help. I think God’s got everything, you know? Yeah. If I can get the hell out of the way, that’s probably what God wants me to do.

[00:53:46] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. But it, it’s cool. It’s cool that, that you take it. You take it one way and you shared it with me and I found it important and took it a a different way.

[00:53:56] Vinney Tolman: Well, I love, I love that way that you take it too, because that, that adds a whole nother dynamic to that, that principal alone. I mean, the, the other, this is about a year ago, my wife was driving down the street and she, she hears me telling these 10 principles constantly.

[00:54:13] Vinney Tolman: So she’s always trying to embody her own tent principles, her own version, and she feels this feeling you need to pull over right now. And she’s right in front of a V F W of Veterans of Foreign Wars Lodge or Foreign Wars Lodge. And she’s like, I’ve never been there. Why would I pull in there? Her ego, her brain is saying, why would you pull in there?

[00:54:33] Vinney Tolman: She did it anyway, and just seconds later, uh, a car running from the police came and rammed through all the cars that she was next to in traffic. Ram through all of ’em and then made its way through that intersection and took off. But they, you know how many countless cars, there’s at least six or seven that she saw that they’re now going to have to claim something on their insurance of a, a hit and run as a guy runs from the police.

[00:55:00] Vinney Tolman: So, , as simple, simple little thing, it wasn’t gonna kill anybody, but it would be extra hardship for her to go through. And, and so she followed that simple prompting. It was an awesome opportunity for her. Um, another time where I was, you know, me, me and her, we, we, we tend to try to do good things that we come to us and we are on one of these little, um, escapades of trying to help somebody out.

[00:55:25] Vinney Tolman: We got, finally got done with it and we’re going to this gas station and there’s these two nicely Dr. Dressed, uh, boys. They’re, they’re early two, early twenties. They’re, they’re dressed real nice, driving a brand new car, and my wife says they need help. And here’s the weird thing. Here’s the the craziest thing.

[00:55:46] Vinney Tolman: Alex, my own intuition said yes, they need help. But my ego was so strong. My ego is seeing that brand new car and seeing, uh, one of ’em was wearing brand new Jordans. And I’m like, that these guys don’t need help. They look financially, I think in finances is the only help that you would need for, so someone at a gas station.

[00:56:06] Vinney Tolman: But yet here they were, they didn’t look like they needed help. And my ego was so strong to say, Nope, they’re fine. I went in, I paid for my gas, I was leaving the gas station, and my wife says to me, don’t you dare not honor the principles you’ve been teaching me. And I’m like, I had to be authentic. And I’d say, you know what?

[00:56:28] Vinney Tolman: You’re right. I’m, I’m not honoring that because I do, I am feeling something there, but I’m, I’m disregarding it. So I e I reversed out of the exit. Reversed all the way back to, to where their car and where they were standing. And I go, this is gon, I rolled down the window and I go, this is gonna sound weird guys, but uh, my wife thinks you guys need help.

[00:56:51] Vinney Tolman: I laid, laid her right under the bus and, and one of ’em said, oh, thank God we’ve been praying for some help. And what it was is they, they had this special at t m card that once they went to go get groceries, they now couldn’t use it for 24 hours. And they had both used that a their own a t m card. Now they had no cash for gas and so they only needed, you know, 20, 30 bucks worth of gas.

[00:57:17] Vinney Tolman: , gas was a lot cheaper back then. And so we were able to fill ’em up for about 30 bucks worth of gas and, and move ’em on their way. But they had called somebody, this was up in the Reno Sparks area, they called somebody in elk. Which is four hours away and someone was coming from four hours away to help them and they didn’t need that.

[00:57:36] Vinney Tolman: They had somebody right there that was listening to, to their intuition. And so I’ve learned from many, many times like this, that follow that intuition, it, I’m only out of out of pocket 30 bucks to help these guys. But man was I amplified for days. I was just so on, on top of life for days. And I felt like I was honoring my wife too, cuz I, I did what she took, asked me to do.

[00:57:59] Vinney Tolman: And, and I also learned that a lot of times when I’m not listening to my intuition, she’s gonna listen to it better. And when she’s not listening, I listen to it better. And so, even as a couple, we help each other through these experiences and we can, we can be there for people when they need us. It’s, it’s a cool thing.

[00:58:18] Vinney Tolman: I love it. I really, really love it. It helps you live at a, at a, at a completely different experience than most people are experiencing in their daily lives in a beautiful way. And so if we can, if we can get that intuition going and follow it, it gets stronger and stronger and stronger the more we follow it.

[00:58:36] Alex Tsakiris: That’s awesome. Absolutely Awesome. And inspiring. , , that’s not me. You know? I know it’s not everybody. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not me in the, in the sense that, and I wanna get this out there, you know, because I’m open, you know, like one of my spiritual practices every day is before I go in the, the ice bath.

[00:58:56] Alex Tsakiris: I knock, let me in, let me in. You know, let me in God to what you need to teach me today what I need to be aware of today. Mm-hmm. But if it doesn’t come, I’m okay with that. And yeah, I understand myself as being. Spiritually dense. Not intentionally, but I don’t experience these things the way some other people do, and I need to be okay with that.

[00:59:27] Alex Tsakiris: And I think I’ve, I’ve run across other people, you know, in doing this work who are the same way. They’re just like, you know, and they sometimes feel left outta the party. You know, why isn’t this happening to me? Well, cuz it’s not supposed to happen to you. Yeah, yeah. What you’re supposed to do, because that’s what I think is, is is, if I was gonna kind of take what you’re saying, the beauty of it is, these are Vinny’s lessons.

[00:59:53] Alex Tsakiris: Exactly. Chose this life to develop in the, along his spiritual path. Alex chose his life to develop along his spiritual path. Uh, uh, again, back to listen to the inner voice says, okay, I get it. I’m on a path. I’m on a journey. Tell me what’s next, but if it doesn’t come through as pull over at the vfw.

[01:00:16] Alex Tsakiris: Awesome.

[01:00:17] Vinney Tolman: That’s okay. Exactly. I think that for you too, a lot of your intuition is, is getting guests how to get ’em, when to get ’em, where to get ’em onto your show and, and, and which ones not to have. And that’s where your intuition is really. ,, and yours has probably told you like three times, why the hell did you have this crazy guy, Vinny, on my show now?

[01:00:36] Vinney Tolman: Just kidding.

[01:00:39] Alex Tsakiris: No, I mean, I, one, I, I, I don’t, I don’t process it quite that way, but what I do lean into more is that I need to do this just the way that I did it. Mm-hmm. And I need to, at the beginning say, I don’t need to believe your story Exactly. And you need to hear that somebody doesn’t need to hear this churchy crap and just kind of roll over and do it.

[01:01:05] Alex Tsakiris: Somebody needs to be able to come at it. In a different perspective. And your message still needs to be able to penetrate that. Yes. And I You’re saying it can. Mm-hmm. And you’re saying you’re willing to do that and you’re willing to listen to somebody who’s saying, I want to, I want to, uh, but come, come a little bit this way.

[01:01:25] Alex Tsakiris: And I think it’s awesome that at least at this point in this interview, you’re authentic. You’re like, oh, you want me to step a little bit in that direction? I can do that.

[01:01:33] Alex Tsakiris: But for sure, let’s go on to, uh, the purpose. Another point from the 10 lessons, from the light after death, and again, folks, you get this book, you’ll not be disappointed. It’s, uh, very inspirational. The story is, like I say, drop dead amazing. Not to be

[01:01:54] Vinney Tolman: you or anything literal, literally.

[01:01:57] Alex Tsakiris: I mean, the guy dies for an hour.

[01:01:59] Alex Tsakiris: You know, you need to understand this n d e and, and the paramedic is a rookie paramedic that goes outside of total protocol and literally cuts him out of the body bag to resuscitate him. But here’s the, the the last point on your things that I’m gonna understand. The purpose of evil. So I wrote a book a couple years ago called Why Evil Matters.

[01:02:25] Alex Tsakiris: And the premise of the book was, we live in this kind of schizophrenic, , culture in terms of dealing with evil. And we watch the Super Bowl halftime show and. You do it with a group of people and you’re like, everyone’s jaws dropping and they don’t know how to say it. And I go, you’re seeing what I’m, it’s satanic.

[01:02:48] Alex Tsakiris: It’s completely satanic. What’s, which we gotta be careful that’s a very bibley kind of thing that doesn’t translate well when you really look at the history of the Bible, but we get the

[01:02:58] Vinney Tolman: darkness thing, right?

[01:02:59] Vinney Tolman: Yep. There’s darkness there. Yeah. It’s, and the Grammy’s the same, the Grammy? Absolutely. Oh yeah. Crazy

[01:03:04] Alex Tsakiris: bad. So the schizophrenia is on one hand, they’re so pulling it in one direction that it’s just drop jaw obvious. And at the same time, the whole underpinning of our culture is we’re atheistic, we’re secular.

[01:03:17] Alex Tsakiris: We’re like, there’s no such thing as evil. Evil is a social construct. You know, it’s not. Mm-hmm. Really, we can’t point to anyone and say that’s evil. So we have that on one hand. And then on the other hand, we have, , People who are religious and say, oh evil, I got that. I’ll tell you right here. Let me pull out my book and I’ll tell you chapter in verse what evil is.

[01:03:40] Alex Tsakiris: I, I think for most thinking people, and I think my interpretation of your book would fall in this category of, with here, I think you’d be aligned with me, is that’s an inadequate starting point, you know, is to say there’s no such thing as evil. It’s just a social construct. There’s nothing real to it. And saying it can all, it can be nailed down in this very specific way,

[01:04:04] Vinney Tolman: , and I agree that the evil Israel, , that for us to say that there is no evil, then we’re on evil’s side.

[01:04:12] Vinney Tolman: I I really believe that it, it’s almost like, , I’m on the side of the threat. I don’t want you to think that this threat exists. That, that to me is what evil wants. Evil wants us to believe it doesn’t exist. But, , I also want to, you know, I used to study about World War II and Germany and the Weimar Republic and what, what happened to Germany to put, , Hitler and to put the Nazis in power.

[01:04:37] Vinney Tolman: And I thought, never in my life will I ever see, , that much. Freedom being given away to one fascist leader. And, and yet I watched so many freedoms disappear under covid, under the guise of fear. I watched everybody lining up to give away their freedoms because they, they, they were so afraid of the outcome.

[01:05:03] Vinney Tolman: And it was almost like the boogeyman syndrome, where as long as you could keep in control of the new boogeyman, you were in control of the people. And, and that’s what I, I saw in, in, uh, that cycle repeating of what I saw happen in, in studying what happened in Germany. Cuz that’s exactly what happened with Germany.

[01:05:22] Vinney Tolman: That, that once they decided the boogie man was this, they could go and start taking that out. And , and that happened to be a whole class of, and culture and religion of people. And, and that’s not the reality, that’s not any type of reality. But, but where re evil is real is. To have life and not have evil would be like having a gym with no equipment.

[01:05:46] Alex Tsakiris: . I see that slightly differently. And let me tie it back to the point we just talked about, and that is listen to your inner voice. What I think is my experience and so many people I’ve talked to is you think, I don’t know evil.

[01:06:01] Alex Tsakiris: I know evil every day, multiple times a day. When that thought comes in my head to be, to be angry, to be vengeful mm-hmm. To be it, it, it’s there every day. Alls I have to do is scratch that itch. You know, you go listen to, , serial killers and their true confessions and a lot of ’em will. Hey.

[01:06:21] Alex Tsakiris: It started out when I was a little kid and I, you know, went down this path of, I had this kind of sexual thing that I wasn’t cut and I did it, and then I did this, and then the next thing, I did this. And then it becomes an obsession, which we all can relate to. Go look at, you know, people who are obsessed with eating or porn or all it’s drugs, you know?

[01:06:41] Alex Tsakiris: I get it. You don’t think we get it? We all get it. That’s why we’re, that’s why you’re meditating. That’s why you’re doing all this other stuff. I think it’s so common that we, we lose sight of it. And that feeling of needing control, wanting, like you’re just saying, wanting control from that crazy voice. I, I totally think that that is the road to the, to the whole thing.

[01:07:04] Alex Tsakiris: What, what do

you

[01:07:05] Vinney Tolman: think about that? I think that that definitely, that, , where all of us, all, every single one of us are, are a yin and yang in ourselves. That we, we have the propensity for good and bad. Every single one of us do. For evil and for good. You know, I’m gonna call it evil and love. To me, those are the two opposite forces.

[01:07:22] Vinney Tolman: Love, force and evil, or fear voice, fear force. The, that’s what causes us typically to, to lash out and do evil things, is that some type of fear, some type of reaction. It’s definitely not a love thing. But sometimes what will happen is people will get addicted to the adrenaline they feel when they’re in that fearful state, and that’s what causes them to take these crazy steps of becoming serial killers.

[01:07:47] Vinney Tolman: But, you know, the, the hard part for us to understand is we are living in a microcosm of, of existence in our world and in the macrocosm of life, stepping back and realizing that our entire existence here is very finite and very, very minuscule compared to our real existence of eternity. And, you know, understanding that and understanding we can put.

[01:08:13] Vinney Tolman: A theme on what we spend our time with here. We can choose that theme of love or fear. It’s totally up to us and we can do good and bad out of both energies. Uh, but, but you can only get so much good out of the fear. Energy then ends up laing into a very bad, dark energy. And, and the love energy you can do, , a lot of good.

[01:08:38] Vinney Tolman: And as long as you stay love centered, you can continue to do a lot of good and, and bring forth a lot of energy in a good way. Now the whole thing is why are we here? Is we’re here so that we can learn how to choose between the two. But to, to, to have the two choices, you have to have the evil, you have to, it has to be the other, the option, but to, to take evil off the table and to only have good options.

[01:09:05] Vinney Tolman: Is again, like walking into a gym where there’s no equipment, there’s no resistance, there’s nothing exercising that agency muscle, that ability to make the choice. And that’s what this is. We’re here at Earth School, I have a, I call it Earth School. We’re, we’re here at Earth School so we can learn how to, to make choices, make decisions, and, and choose between the, the love and the fear.

[01:09:29] Vinney Tolman: And the more we choose the love it e, the easier it is to love. The more we choose the fear, the easier it is for easier it is for us to hate to, uh, ostracize, push away and damage others. , so it’s, it’s important for us. It’s important for us to choose, choose what we feel is, is our best path, and that’s what we’re here to do.

[01:09:49] Vinney Tolman: It’s just, it is sad when some people, and this is no judgment, but some people, they will, they will continue down that fear path and never leave. They love the power of fear. They really do. And whether it’s an outward power or inward power, doesn’t matter. They really love that power. And, and I think those are the real evil people because on, you know, they go out in public and they live this, you know, normal looking life, but yet behind drawn curtains and behind closed doors, they’re a very different person.

[01:10:22] Vinney Tolman: But I think in the authentic moment of today, we’re starting to see these dark people come out from their closets, come out from their dark rooms, come out from their, their drawn curtains, and be their evil self in front of everyone. And we’re in a, in a more authentic nature. Now, maybe it might be an artistic nature.

[01:10:43] Vinney Tolman: It’s still authentic. It is for them to show that

[01:10:48] Alex Tsakiris: I’m with you to a certain extent. One of the things I like to kind of poke people with is, , slavery in the United States. Frederick Douglass tells a story about, , , being in slavery and all those good church people coming back on Sunday and sitting down while the slaves come in, serve him, and, you know, then taking that woman out in the back and doing what they do, all that stuff.

[01:11:10] Alex Tsakiris: And it’s like, that’s not satanic slavery for hundreds of years. Or on our recent Abu grave, are, are those images chiseled in your brain? , how many babies did we kill in Iraq in mm-hmm. Afghanistan. Really, this is what we’re gonna focus on is our little gripe with, uh, Hollywood or whatever.

[01:11:34] Alex Tsakiris: No, no. That’s a little gripe. I just think it’s at a different, it’s at a whole different level. And when we kind of wanna chunk it down and say, this is it, or this is happening now, it’s like,

[01:11:46] Vinney Tolman: I think as our, as our culture, the, specifically the American West culture itself, , the westernized culture on, on the surface, we’ve been doing quote unquote good things, but we’ve also been getting in good wars.

[01:11:58] Vinney Tolman: There’s no such thing. There’s no such thing as a good war. That’s a, that’s a dark check. That’s a evil check being cashed out the front door to, to go to war over, over objects, over oil, over. And we’re gonna call it freedom, defending freedom somehow and say, no, that’s not the case. Yeah, but you

know

[01:12:16] Alex Tsakiris: what, those coms, I mean, that’s why I use the example cuz a lot of leftist people, they wanna forget about that, that do comedy atheist stuff.

[01:12:24] Alex Tsakiris: That does not work on so

[01:12:26] Vinney Tolman: many levels. No. In fact, you have fascism, you have socialism, both to me, either one is evil because you’ve got mankind choosing who eats and who survives and, and that’s where you have problem. Because we’re, we’re suscept to fear. All of us are. All of us are. If you study, you know, Stalin, what he did, he, he essentially didn’t like, uh, an entire part of his own country and decided I’m gonna not even allow these potatoe farmers to eat their own potatoes.

[01:12:56] Vinney Tolman: They starved with, with bags of potatoes in their own possession, but it was illegal for them to eat one. And they knew that not only would they be killed, but their entire family be killed if they were caught eating one potato. So whole entire segment of the Russian population died while holding food, but was not allowed to cook it or eat it.

[01:13:19] Alex Tsakiris: , is it okay to do whatever we have to, to stop that? It’s tricky. Is it okay to do Project Paperclip? Really? So it’s okay to bring Verner Van Bra over here, you know, to the United States. Verner Van Bran, who, you know, by the way, hung the Jewish workers who didn’t work fast enough in front of the factory.

[01:13:39] Alex Tsakiris: He was a Nazis Nazi friend with Hitler, you know, early on in the game. So, it’s okay, you know, Hey, we have to fight the bad guys. You know, I, I don’t see how we, how we sort that out on any kind of logical level. Those are God problems. That’s why I’m saying, you know, the, yeah. I’m always leery of the God is on our side.

[01:14:00] Alex Tsakiris: God wants us, you know, to fight just this one time, you know, God needs our help. Just this once, you know, just needs a little push.

[01:14:08] Vinney Tolman: Yeah. And, and you look even back to the Holy Inquisition when, when supposedly that was God’s army taking out all the, all the heretics and the witches and, and all sorts of non-believers because, They were saying the Earth was round.

[01:14:23] Vinney Tolman: Oh heaven forbid. You know? So, uh, there, there is, there’s a lot of time where people are misinterpreting. God really misinterpreting God, cuz I, I fully don’t believe that God would be out there wanting us to in war. The, the God that I experienced, that I experienced on the other side is not a God of war.

[01:14:45] Vinney Tolman: It’s not the only God of war is fear. A hundred percent. And if we keep ourself in a state of fear, we’ll always be at war. We’ll always be at war. I don’t know. I I get you. I, I do believe, I do believe that we have to, we have to stop wrongdoing when we know it’s going on. Absolutely. We have to do our best.

[01:15:03] Vinney Tolman: But, but to me, there’s also stuff that is, is handled beyond this life. A lot of things that are handled beyond this life. And that’s where the justice comes in with God. Um, because to, to start creating justice here. You’re removing people’s agency and that’s the whole reason we’re here. We’re here to have the agencies to grow, to learn how to use it.

[01:15:25] Vinney Tolman: Because when we’re near God, when we’re near God, we are in such synchronicity with each other as far as anything God wants. We want. Cuz that’s so much that love that is there between us, that anything God wants, we want, we love God so much and we even to come here, we have to forget that love because it’s so strong that if we could remember how much we love each other, we would start doing everything we would we’re supposed to do without any agency.

[01:15:51] Vinney Tolman: We just do it cuz we love God so much. We love our creator so much. That’s the whole reason we’re here Earth School is, is to forget how much we love our father. Love our our, our. Come here, make decisions, learn how to make decisions, and go back. At least that’s one man’s perspective, my perspective.

[01:16:10] Alex Tsakiris: I got you.

[01:16:12] Alex Tsakiris: This stuff has been hashed around for hundreds of

[01:16:15] Vinney Tolman: years. Oh yeah. Thousands of years. Yep.

[01:16:18] Alex Tsakiris: So, so Vinny, if people visit the light after death.com or living god’s light.com, what are they gonna find and what should they do

[01:16:29] Vinney Tolman: over there? So if they go to the light after death.com, they’ll see the book.

[01:16:33] Vinney Tolman: They can actually purchase it there. They can also purchase it Amazon Audible. But the light, uh, the Light After Death is just the book. Um, a movement that I’ve started with my author buddy who we’ve written this together, is we’ve started a nonprofit called Living God’s Light. And what it is, it’s an organization to help people of all faiths.

[01:16:52] Vinney Tolman: It is mostly Christian, but, but it is all faiths to help them. Better embody the 10 principles that I learned and help them, uh, start building that their own inner intuition and get it to be stronger if they want it stronger, and how to get it stronger so that they can build a stronger relationship with their creator no matter what name they’re giving that creator.

[01:17:15] Alex Tsakiris: Well, it’s been absolutely terrific having you on the show and, , really appreciate it. You, you’re bringing the light, man. We can feel it, feel it all the way over here in California.

[01:17:25] Vinney Tolman: I, I appreciate it that you can feel it through the People’s Republic over there, just of California. Right on. I love every, all of my California family.

[01:17:35] Vinney Tolman: I love my, my United States family, and thanks for having me on Alex. I really appreciate you, man, and, and, and thanks for coming and, and being open to just chat. You know, a lot of people, some people are open to us, some people aren’t. I, I, I love that we got to have this chat today. It’s cool. Cool.

[01:17:52] Alex Tsakiris: Next time we’ll talk about et.

[01:17:54] Vinney Tolman: Okay. That would be fun. See you, man. All right. Thanks Alex. Bye.

[01:17:58] Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Vincent Tolman for joining me today on Skeptiko.

[01:18:02] Alex Tsakiris: I’d like to tee up this question, and I’d like to ask you to come and talk to me about it. Come over to this Skeptiko form. Write me an email connect. I don’t know why more people don’t do that. I would love that opportunity to connect with all the people I listen to when I listen to podcast, but I don’t know, whatever.

[01:18:20] Alex Tsakiris: There’s a barrier there that a lot of people don’t wanna step past, so that’s fine too. But the question is,

[01:18:27] Alex Tsakiris: how do we figure out whether those lessons, those rules we’re getting? Are meant for us or they’re meant for us and everybody else too. I think we’re all tempted to interpret them both ways, and I know I do a lot of times . So how do you do it? , let me know, and until next time, take care and bye for now.

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